freshly shaven, with well-tended nails, dressed meticulously in black from head to toe, with even a black necktie: that’s how he first appeared to Bohdan Lepkyi, the Ukrainian studies professor at Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
“Are you from Russia?” he asked by way of greeting. Lypynskyi confirmed. His family was Polish but from Zaturtsi, in the Volyn region of the Russian Empire.
Lypynskyi was actually studying agronomy and had wandered into Lepkyi’s lecture on Ukrainian language by chance, but the class had proven very interesting. It was clear Lypynskyi spoke better Ukrainian than his peers of Ukrainian descent. The astounded Professor Lepkyi immediately invited him and another student to his home for tea.
“Thank you for the invitation. I’ll come with great pleasure, Professor,” he replied. “Only, please, call me Viacheslav, not Wacław.”
“He’s a marvel,” the professor would tell everyone. “A complete marvel!”
Lepkyi had a reputation for being an exceptionally generous and upstanding person and was renowned for his hospitality. His compliant wife would wordlessly offer food and drink to their frequent guests at their apartment on Zielona Street. Many a time this apartment served as a refuge for Ukrainian “artists and litterateurs,” who would arrive in Kraków without a krone in their pockets. “Suspicious Ukrainian-speaking characters” were perpetually milling around their home in hopes of, at best, a roof over their heads or, at the very least, three meals a day. Professor Lepkyi’s wife took them all for vagrants. “I can’t refuse a man in need of a lump of bread,” Lepkyi would say to her with a proudly raised chin, all the while running deeper and deeper into debt. Such naïve generosity and such a romantic faith in selfless toil, all for the good of the idea of Ukrainianness, always repaid him a hundredfold. People instinctively clung to Lepkyi, even if they rarely listened to him. This gave him a feeling of fulfillment. Of his considerable artistic oeuvre—he wrote historical novels, composed poetry, assembled calendars, painted, published, and edited—his thankless progeny would remember only a single doleful poem: a poem about cranes that fly off to foreign lands, knowing that they’ll perish on their journey back. The professor did in fact die in a foreign land, but of old age and natural causes, which for a Ukrainian of his generation and profession could be considered a great fortune.
Lepkyi’s financial situation had drastically improved after he was invited to Jagiellonian University to teach Ukrainian—though the inauguration of the department became an anti-academic sensation amid the Slavists, the overwhelming majority of whom considered the Ukrainian language to be a dialect of either Russian or Polish, or both concurrently. Studying a dialect at the university level seemed nonsensical. A prohibition on the use of Ukrainian in print—or Little Ukraine’s “Malorossiian regiolects,” as the language as a whole was dismissively referred to—was in effect in the Russian Empire, and the concealment of a lone Ukrainian dictionary was deemed comparable to revolutionary activity and punishable by imprisonment or exile. Routine searches had taught the custodians of Ukrainian dictionaries to pass them from hand to hand at the slightest suspicion of yet another shakedown. Aristocratic families could lose privileges for the use of Ukrainian in the home. Only a few such families, notwithstanding, spoke “the peasant tongue” despite the dangers.
The Ukrainian language wasn’t prohibited here in Austria-Hungary, but even in cities like Kraków, its instruction at the university level was virtually an impossible affair because, for teaching materials, there existed only one grammar book, published ten years earlier, in 1893, and even that book was intended for high school students. Nonetheless, Professor Lepkyi managed a brilliant work-around to this situation: when he was short a grammar book, he would recite Ukrainian poetry, and when he was short on Ukrainian poetry, he would sing Ukrainian songs. Folklore and a love of everyday traditions—that was all the Ukrainian society of 1903 could boast of. Divided between two empires—the Austro-Hungarian and the Russian—the stateless Ukrainian society increasingly resembled a dust-coated stage set that someone had simply forgotten to strike. The antiquated world of Ukrainians had diminished to a shallow but warm pond in which there was no room for big fish, though frogs and tiny fry felt wonderful there. Wacław Lipiński, the young Polish agriculture student, was just such a fry. But even then it was clear to many, and in particular to Professor Lepkyi, that he was evolving into an anomaly—something completely different than Ukrainian society was prepared for.
Before long, Lypynskyi had become the professor’s pet, often lingering on Zielona Street late into the night. Lepkyi’s wife didn’t mind at all because, in contrast to the rest of the vagrants, Lypynskyi came from a wealthy family and distinguished himself with the utmost pedantry in matters of money. He preferred to overpay rather than eat on someone else’s dime. He always kissed the lady of the house’s hand politely, apologizing for the late (or early, or Sunday, or long, or short) visit. Mrs. Lepka would flush. “How droll he is,” she would say to her husband. “But better droll than hungry.”
Typically, Kraków’s Ukrainian community, which was informally headed by Professor Lepkyi, would rendezvous at the Mroziński Café in the city’s Main Square. Every day the owner of the coffee shop would reserve a little table—next to the window to the right of the entrance—for the occasion; he had even agreed to order the Ukrainian-language newspaper Dilo from Lviv. The same discussions always took place at the table: about the lethargy of the Ukrainian community, the hopelessness of the Ukrainian situation, the illiteracy of the Ukrainian peasant, and the unscrupulousness of the Ukrainian disposition. Mroziński himself, while unobtrusively topping off his guests’ cups with coffee or glasses with wine, would carefully memorize what he had heard, afterward transcribing it all verbatim onto paper and passing neat little envelopes to the agents of the secret police every week. His informant letters were nevertheless rarely read in full. A certain measured dose of underground revolutionary activity suited Kraków as it did no other town in Halychyna. It’s no wonder that it was precisely here—in what was seemingly the heart of Polish pomposity—that Lipiński the student, in full view of many witnesses, transformed into Lypynskyi the activist and entered the ranks of Ukrainian community leaders. No one had summoned him there or even extended their welcome; he came of his own accord. “He’s a marvel,” Professor Lepkyi would repeat.
the monument to ivan kotliarevskyi, the pioneer of Ukrainian literature and the father of Ukrainian light vaudeville, was to blame for everything.
It was finally erected that September 1903 in the Russian Empire, on Protopopivskyi Boulevard in Poltava, and the event had enormous and hitherto unprecedented resonance. The funds for the bust had been collected swiftly among the Ukrainian community, and the design of the bust had been executed just as swiftly, but the dedication ceremony had been postponed for many years on account of the tsarist government’s categorical disapprobation of the inscription on the pedestal: “From the homeland, to its first poet Ivan Kotliarevskyi.” Tsarist censorship wouldn’t approve the inscription, obviously fearing that in the first poet’s wake, monuments to other Ukrainians would ensue. The compound word “homeland” also sounded suspect. Well before the monument’s erection, Mykola Mikhnovskyi, a Ukrainian lawyer from Kharkiv—a rash and unusually obdurate man, and author of the inflammatory pamphlet Independent Ukraine (who would commit suicide in 1924)—had even sent an angry letter defending the right to the ill-starred inscription to Dmitry Sipyagin, the minister of the interior of the Russian Empire. The closing words of this letter could have easily been interpreted as a threat: “The Ukrainian nation must secure independence for itself, even if all of Russia teeters! Even if rivers of blood spill! And that blood, if it spills, will fall on Your head, Mr. Minister, like a national curse, and on the heads of all our oppressors.” Fortunately for Mikhnovskyi, Sipyagin didn’t have a chance to provide an adequate response because he was opportunely assassinated in April 1902 by a member of the Russian militant Socialist Revolutionaries.
Despite Mikhnovskyi’s daring letter, in the end it proved necessary to abandon sentimentality all the same, and the bust was underwritten with the laconic “Ivan Kotliarevskyi, 1769–1838.”
finally, the tsarist censorship approved the opening of the monument, and a date was set. In September 1903, virtually every well-known Ukrainian, including politically active university students from Kyiv, the editor-in-chief of the Lviv-based Dilo, composers, historians, activists from Halychyna, and representatives of the Viennese Parliament, all converged on Poltava. The monument had become a symbol of protest against the oppression of the Ukrainian people, and making the trip to Poltava was viewed as a matter of honor. Never before had the Ukrainians of both empires, the Austro-Hungarian and the Russian, declared their presence so loudly. For greater potency, Ivan Kotliarevskyi’s maid was even tracked down, the 111-year-old Varvara Lelechykh, the one person still alive to have seen the poet with her own eyes.
At a loss in the face of such eager excitement, the tsarist censorship unexpectedly forbade the use of the Ukrainian language during the festivities. People were scandalized.
The evening before the celebratory gathering, in an oak forest near Poltava, the university students held a secret meeting to work out a plan of action in response to this prohibition. In a conspiratorial spirit, they sailed to the meeting in boats, and the boats were so numerous that the local Vorskla River appeared covered by a toy fleet. The hotheads called for armed action, but the majority didn’t support the idea, as they were well aware that government troops across the entire Poltava Governorate had been brought into the city. Armed action would end in blood, arrests, and even greater repressions. They settled on a silent protest, which they then implemented the following day during the official reception in the city’s Building of Education.
The Austro-Hungarian delegation from Halychyna was presenting first; as foreign guests subject to different censorship rules, they were permitted to speak in Ukrainian. “Honor to you, oh glorious city!” a representative of the Viennese Parliament from this delegation addressed the audience, and the jam-packed hall erupted in applause. After that the stage was occupied by a subject of the Russian Empire, who also—albeit very quietly—began speaking in Ukrainian. Mayor Trehubov of Poltava sprang up in alarm and, pale as death, voiced a reminder that any and all remarks in Ukrainian were prohibited for Russian subjects. The audience let out a roar. The prominent Ukrainian writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi, then living in Chernihiv, approached Trehubov and handed him the cover page of his speech (not the speech itself, because it was written in the prohibited language), after which he left the hall in a show of defiance: if he wasn’t allowed to speak in Ukrainian, he just wouldn’t speak. The rest of the speakers did the same. The spectators joined in the protest, and within a matter of minutes the hall had emptied.
Vyacheslav Plehve, the new minister of the interior of the Russian Empire and the person behind the language ban for the duration of the Poltava activities, would be killed by Russian terrorists in July 1904, less than a year after the described events—assassinated, just as his predecessor had been. Within a few months, in the fall of 1904, another terrorist group, Defense of Ukraine, would attempt to blow up a monument to the Russian author Alexander Pushkin in the nearby city of Kharkiv, but for some reason no one would interpret this crime as a precise and subtle act of retaliation for Pushkin’s Ukrainian literary colleague in Poltava, Ivan Kotliarevskyi.
As news of the events in Poltava spread, the entirety of the Ukrainian world was gripped by agitation. Newspapers teemed with the recollections of eyewitnesses. Everyone who had been in Poltava talked about how unforgettable the experience was, the unprecedented solidarity they witnessed, and the feeling of tremendous inspiration with which they returned home.
on the occasion of such momentous events, Professor Lepkyi hosted a celebratory dinner at his home in late November, to which he invited his closest friends and some local Poles loyal to Ukrainians. It was with these pro-Ukrainian Poles that an unpleasant argument arose after midnight, long after the professor’s wife had gone off to bed, which the previously taciturn and placid student Lypynskyi initiated.
“This is an incredible triumph over despotism on the part of the Ukrainian community,” he commented with passion, to which someone less romantic remarked that the events were likely a fluke and not the beginning of a victorious pattern.
“The Ukrainian community is a flock of naïve sheep ruled by wolves. It’s feeble and helpless because it doesn’t have its own leaders.”
“New leaders are rising,” Lypynskyi exclaimed. “We must become these leaders!”
“Don’t be silly, Mr. Lypynskyi. You, as a Pole, will get handed over to the wolves first by the Ukrainian community. Or they’ll eat you up themselves. Ukrainian sheep are a carnivorous lot.”
Lypynskyi fell silent for a while, but when the room had grown quiet again, he unexpectedly proclaimed, “The Polish intelligentsia of Ukraine has no other alternative but to support the inevitable formation of a Ukrainian state.”
The Poles present—all of ripe old age—were dumbstruck. They would have silently smiled and nodded their heads in response to similar assertions from their Ukrainian brethren, but pride didn’t permit them to tolerate such a thing from the lips of one of their own.
“Young man,” one began, “you’re talking rubbish. May the esteemed master of this home forgive me, but for there to be a Ukrainian state, it’s not enough to have one monument in a provincial town, don’t you think?”
Lypynskyi seemed to be expecting this. “The monument is just the beginning. The rebirth of the Ukrainian nation is inevitable.”
“So, you’re a clairvoyant?”
“One need not be a clairvoyant to foresee the obvious course of events, corroborated long ago by history. Ukrainians, split between the Austro-Hungarian Kaiser and the Russian Tsar, have ended up in a situation where they must either surrender and perish as a nation or revolt. In all of history, there is no example of a nation surrendering of its own volition. The Ukrainian people are no exception and won’t surrender without a fight. They lived through a similar period in the mid–seventeenth century and found the strength for a war of national liberation. That war was, incidentally, led by none other than Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, a Ukrainian Pole.”
“A Ukrainian Pole? Ha! Such a concept doesn’t exist.”
“Then take a look at me,” Lypynskyi parried. “Do I exist? Because I am a Ukrainian Pole. My language is Polish and my faith Catholic. I have renounced neither my language nor my faith, nor will I renounce them. Yet right now, in the midst of the Ukrainian nation’s uprising, I feel compelled to take its side. These aren’t romantic convictions, as many might think, but a matter of logic and political expediency.”
“In Poland, people like you, Mr. Lypynskyi, are called renegades.”
Lypynskyi jumped from his seat in vexation.
“A renegade betrays his own people, but I’m not betraying my own people, and you won’t manage to convince me that I am. Was Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, the son of a Polish courtier, a renegade for initiating a political revolution of unprecedented scale against the Polish crown? Was he a renegade for serving as a catalyst for the collapse of the Polish state and the rise of the Ukrainian Cossack state in the seventeenth century? Khmelnytskyi understood, as I do now as well, the historical necessity of this. Your own people are those who live alongside you. Common land creates common goals—not language or religion.”
The affronted Poles left without so much as a good-night. A bit of kerosene remained at the very bottom of the lamps, and an icy wind pushed its way in through the cracks in the window frames.
“You’re a valiant man,” said the professor in an effort to dilute the dense silence.
Lypynskyi, who had taken refuge in an armchair, remained very still, as if fearing that the world he had just constructed for himself out of nothing might turn out stillborn. For a fleeting moment it seemed he was already regretting every word he had uttered, and that he wanted nothing more than to clear off this thin, fragile ice he was standing on. He had never ventured this far before.
“I’ve never heard a Pole voice anything to this effect,” Lepkyi said as he filled their crystal goblets with a fragrant transparent liquid. “Marille—an apricot liqueur. A gift from friends in Vienna. It’s just what we need right now.”
Lypynskyi pushed the goblet away. “Thank you ever so much, Professor, but I avoid strong drinks. I’m short of breath all night after them.” He rose, making clear he was ready to leave. The momentary weakness had passed. Lypynskyi’s face now emanated a stony coolness—a dissociation, like that of a military volunteer who, by definition, is not entitled to desertion. Putting on his coat, he said, “Thank you very much for the evening. I’ll likely remember it my entire life.”
“Don’t resort to drastic measures, my dear friend. That’s my advice to you.”
Lepkyi also rose. They stood facing one another, almost equal in height, then embraced.
“You know, Professor, this ‘don’t resort to drastic measures’ has always been rather off-putting to me. I don’t doubt that you wish only the best for me, and by no means do I want to offend you with harsh words. But I speak as I think. It’s not just the wicked and cowardly who resort to drastic measures. A worthy man devotes himself to a cause for whose sake he lives completely, sparing neither himself nor others.”
“You’re right, Mr. Lypynskyi. I beg your pardon and withdraw my advice. I wanted to ease the tension, but I see that it’s necessary to closely monitor one’s tongue around you. At the first sound of a falsehood, you lunge for the throat like a tiger.”
Lypynskyi pulled on an astrakhan half coat, bade the professor farewell, and walked out into the frosty night. He moved like a stray who didn’t belong, oblivious to the world around him.
During his three academic years in Kraków, he lived in the fairly expensive Hotel Polski next to the city arsenal that the Polish princely Czartoryski family had acquired not long before as a museum for its prodigious archives. Wherever he found himself, Lypynskyi always rented accommodations as close as possible to sources of information. His suite consisted of three rooms, one of which he requested to be lined with bookcases, to give him somewhere to stack the books he purchased.
Back at the small but luxuriant hotel, Lypynskyi sat down at his writing desk, hoping to record his impressions of the evening in a pocket notebook, but quickly abandoned this idea, jotting down only the date and, as was his custom in such instances, “I feel ill.” The practice of pinning down his thoughts was something akin to an indispensable daily hygiene of the soul for him; when, for one reason or another, no thoughts arrived, he would mark the date in the little notebook and place a small black cross alongside it. This absence of thoughts Lypynskyi attributed to the advance of a disease still unknown to science. One of the many he was destined to suffer from.
He heaved a deep sigh. He didn’t undress. He didn’t lie down. For the first time, Kraków had bared its teeth at him. It had shoved him out into incertitude, where it was cold and lonely, and where one had to decide for oneself what was good and what was evil. No one would counsel or hearten him; on the contrary, they would ridicule and frighten him just to thwart him from finding his true self. But who was he truly? A renegade. A traitor. Kindred. Foreign. A Pole. A Ukrainian. Wacław. Viacheslav. Who was he?
Though the answer hid in the thickets of his mind, Lypynskyi already suspected that it was irrelevant. Who he was didn’t matter; what mattered was who he wanted to become. He had to choose someone’s side, but no matter what side he might choose, he would be a traitor all the same. Traitor—that was his new name. And the entirety of his life force would henceforth go to bearing this name with pride.