in 1905, working-class and peasant revolutionary demonstrations directed against the Tsar, the nobility, and the ruling class rocked the entire Russian Empire. Lypynskyi barely noticed them. Emotionally, he was living through other times—specifically, the Cossack revolution of 1648 under the leadership of Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, which he considered the most significant event in the history of the Ukrainian people. Everything he read and researched pertained somehow to Khmelnytskyi.
Rational enthusiasm metamorphosed into mystical revelation when Lypynskyi, by complete happenstance, stumbled upon a posthumous portrait of the wealthy Polish nobleman Mykhailo Krzyczewski—hitherto unknown, but one of the central participants of the Cossack uprising in the eastern territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—in the archives of the Princes Czartoryski. Krzyczewski, a colonel of the commonwealth assigned to Kyiv, switched to the side of the Ukrainian rebels at a pivotal moment and, in doing so, saved the young Cossack republic from premature vanquishment. Some two hundred and fifty years earlier, an unknown court artist had painted the portrait from his corpse, after he had died from fatal wounds in the captivity of a Lithuanian prince. In a euphoric stupor, Lypynskyi espied parallels with his own life and interpreted the discovered portrait as none other than a sign from above. Lypynskyi painted a replica of it himself and hung it in his office above his desk, alongside a photograph of his family and a likeness of Bohdan Khmelnytskyi. Now this was his personal iconostasis.
He could spend hours studying the dead face. A linen shirt peeking out from under the sheepskin coat, an ample Cossack-style oseledets of hair sprouting out of the crown of the smooth-shaven round skull, a contented face, and even though the eyes should have underscored his premature death, it seemed as though Krzyczewski was as alive as life itself. He was just playing blind man’s bluff, and as soon as your gaze drifted away, he would break into playful laughter. Lypynskyi could have sworn that the colonel had winked at him a few times.
The Pole’s sacrifice for the benefit of Ukrainian statehood moved him exceedingly. Lypynskyi found more significance in the life and death of Mykhailo Krzyczewski than anyone had or would have before or after him.
in the midst of his growing fascination, a new historical lecture series, open to the general public, was announced at the university. Still an enrolled student, Lypynskyi was one of the first to submit his name to be a speaker. History enthused him above all else. Lypynskyi saw nothing in this passion that would have contradicted his chosen profession. History and agriculture had, so he believed, a common object of study—roots. History was the theoretical preparation for the practical utilization of the earth. In order to understand the earth’s properties and nature, it was necessary to know who had walked upon it and what they had yearned for. The end goal of history was to trace the earth’s roots to their smallest offshoots and to investigate the particularities of their growth, the causes of their decay, and the miracle of their rebirth. The dying off of one root and the triumph of another. Lypynskyi hoped to get a quick overview of the theory, so that he could move on to the daily working of the land with a calm heart. To pay tribute to the land, in order to then be able to utilize that land.
The lectures were being held for just a few days in the main hall of the Collegium Novum and proved rather popular in the spring social program of Kraków’s fashionable elite. The audience that gathered was diverse—from university students and instructors, to doctors and city officials accompanied by their dolled-up wives. For the best lecture, the presenter would receive a monetary award and the opportunity to speak at the annual history conference in Vienna, which was considered a great honor in and of itself.
Backstage, Lypynskyi was quite nervous. He felt light-headed, his eyes were clouded over, his ears were plugged, and he had lost his voice. When he panicked right before walking out to the podium, overwhelmed by the urge to flee, Mykola Shemet, his university friend, clutched him by the vest and said, “Imagine that all these people in the hall are naked. Completely stark-naked. Recent studies by British doctors have shown that this approach helps alleviate stage fright. The audience is naked, so it can’t be scary.”
Whether moved by these words or his own reserves of inner strength, he set off toward the podium, where he pronounced: “The participation of the Polish gentry in the Ukrainian–Polish War of 1648–49. . . .”
The audience let out a contented murmur at the mention of Poland’s noble class, the szlachta. It didn’t yet suspect what was to come.
Lypynskyi continued, unrushed: “For us citizens of the twentieth century, who blindly believe in the creative omnipotence of parliamentary speeches and reverently bow our heads before the potency of journalistic pens, who view the development of society through the prism of literary moods or construct the future of the state on an increase in, say, the output of dairy products—to us, the Ukrainian nation’s voluntary blood sacrifice in the seventeenth century to secure its own freedom may seem incomprehensible. In strength and scale, the Ukrainian uprising of 1648–49 surpassed anything Europe had previously seen. The might demonstrated by the Ukrainian people in their rebellion against Polish and Lithuanian rule had a subsequent radical influence on the fates of two neighboring states, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Tsardom of Muscovy, being the beginning of the end for Poland and the beginning of intensified development and growth for Moscow. Contemporary historians, who are subservient in their ideology to Poland or Moscow, forget about objective judgment in their assessment of this period of, above all”—and here Lypynskyi paused briefly—“Ukrainian history.”
The listeners fell silent, perplexed. The coupling of the words “Ukrainian” and “history” had never been heard in these walls.
“The participation of the szlachta in the Cossack Uprising can no longer be subject to doubt,” Lypynskyi said from the podium. “The noble-born Polish insurgents, who supported the Cossacks and Ukrainian peasantry against Poland, their own hereditary homeland, included families with recognizable names, such as the Vyhovski, the Krekhovetski, the Hulianytski, the Iskrytski, and the Fedkovychi. Mykhailo Krzyczewski, previously a loyal son of the Polish crown, indeed switched to Khmelnytskyi’s side and converted from Catholicism to Orthodoxy. It was then that he renounced his Catholic name, Stanisław, and took the Orthodox Mykhailo. This was an exceptional event for those times. That’s why the Khmelnytskyi period can no longer be treated as an uprising of the poor against the rich, as Polish historiography likes to do in order to devalue it and mask its true essence. The participation of the ruling class transformed a ‘revolt of the underlings’ from a social phenomenon into a political one, from a Rusyn rebellion into a liberation movement for the creation of an independent Ukrainian state. Therein lies its greatest value.”
Lypynskyi took a gulp of air and read on eagerly, like a witness who only has a few minutes to tell the whole truth on the stand. “Was Krzyczewski a Judas and a renegade, as he was still depicted by Polish masters on court tapestries multiple centuries later? At a time when the szlachta was creating the Polish state and, conversely, the Polish state was creating the szlachta, for the Ukrainian people, not having their own statehood meant the loss of their own aristocracy for the benefit of another state. The old Ukrainian family line of the Krychevski—namely, Mykhailo Krzyczewski’s—is the best example of this. Contemporaries considered Mykhailo Krzyczewski a Pole and marveled at how he could sacrifice royal favor and his material fortune, which flowed from this favor, on a quest for an impalpable idea—that of Ukrainian statehood. But that entire generation of szlachta members, which rediscovered its true roots in Ukrainian soil and stood up in battle for the opportunity at independence, proved that sometimes impalpable ideas are more important than royal material fortune. Their actions merit not condemnation, but praise and the highest respect. It’s plain to see what happened to their children after so many years of Ukrainian statelessness: the szlachta in the eastern Ukrainian lands, on the left bank of the Dnipro, is almost completely Russified, and the szlachta in the western Ukrainian lands, on the right bank, is Polonized. The class from which a state of Ukraine could have grown was instead coopted for the building up of Ukraine’s neighbors. But be that as it may, this sacrifice didn’t prove to be in vain. Because if Ukrainians do in fact exist as a nation now, as I believe they do, it is only owing to the Khmelnytskyi period. There hasn’t been a more important moment in the life of the Ukrainian people than the great Revolution of 1648–49.”
When Lypynskyi concluded, the audience sat in stunned silence. The speaker dug his fingers into the sheets of paper on the podium, which were already crumpled and spattered with drops of sweat, while his entire body trembled.
A young woman rose in one of the back rows. It was so quiet that Lypynskyi could hear the menacing rustle of her skirts.
“Shame!” exclaimed the woman, and at that moment their eyes met.
The woman was looking at him with majesty and scorn simultaneously; Lypynskyi had received similar looks from his mother.
“Shame! Shame!” the woman exclaimed again and again, until the audience came back to its senses and joined in as well.
“Take this buffoon away!”
“Who gave him the right to present?”
“Traitor! Shame!”
An unbelievable racket erupted in the hall. Lypynskyi abandoned the podium in a rush, running out into the street, feeling barely alive. A spring downpour pelted him, and the air smelled of something sweet and seductive, something still unknown.
“Don’t worry about it,” his university friend comforted him later as they strolled through the meadows of Błonia Park. “With that kind of a lecture, you weren’t expecting to receive applause, were you?”
“I did as you told me to, my friend,” Lypynskyi replied, distracted and flushed. “I pictured them all naked.”
rumors about the shaming of Wacław Lipiński, the son of Klara and Kazimierz, bearers of Poland’s noble Brodzic coat of arms, spread with lightning speed. His mother wrote him an incensed letter ordering him to come home immediately. Lypynskyi obeyed and was back in Zaturtsi by Easter.
The family estate now reminded him of a prison, whose guards had stocked up on whips and couldn’t wait for the public flogging. His brothers taunted him. His father attempted to make light of the situation. Klara Lipińska initially burst into a tirade, then burst into tears. Having released herself of these principal emotions, she devoted the entire ensuing period to lecturing Lypynskyi as he sulked in silence.
When it came time for Lypynskyi to leave, his younger brother, Stanisław, with whom he had a close relationship, simply nodded his head sorrowfully in farewell. He was finishing his preparatory studies at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute and was supposed to move to Kraków as well the following year. But at the final moment, as Lypynskyi awaited his driver on the porch, Stanisław said in passing that he actually preferred the university in Leipzig and would enroll there instead.
“Did Mother decide that? So that you don’t fall under my bad influence in Kraków?”
Stanisław hesitated.
“Mother has nothing to do with it. It’s my decision. I want to learn German.”
Lypynskyi left without another word to his brother. Klara Lipińska, warming her feet next to the fireplace, exuded such dramatic sighs that everyone in the house could hear: “I don’t know what will become of all this.”
Lypynskyi didn’t know either. The impertinent face of that woman in the audience surfaced in his mind again and again, thin and sharp, as if a painter had forgotten to round the lines in the frenzy of creation. “Shame, shame!” the woman cried unceasingly. She was a fiend, nothing more. Since their public exchange, she hadn’t left Lypynskyi in peace for more than a moment. Green-eyed, her hair dark blond and straight, her voice ruthless.
Kazimiera Szumińska—that was her name. A student in the agriculture department, two years his junior, which is why their paths hadn’t crossed till then. Though there were so few women in the university that only a bookworm like him could have not noticed one of them.
now, however, everything was different. Kazimiera began to appear to Lypynskyi constantly, wherever he was: the university hallways were filled with Kazimiera, the streets of Kraków were filled with Kazimiera, his thoughts were filled with Kazimiera. Kazimiera was everywhere.
Lypynskyi couldn’t last more than a minute in the library archives because he knew he had no chance of seeing her there. He studied her class schedule and would hover near the lecture hall from which she might exit. And when she did exit, like some medieval Polish princess under the escort of frivolous suitors, Lypynskyi would freeze, accepting her crushing glance with gratitude, like a mercifully tossed bone. After that, he would remain in that very spot for a long time, not having the strength to take even a step, until the university janitors would ask him to move aside in order to sweep up his dignity, splattered against the wooden floor.
The Szumiński family were impoverished aristocrats. A widow and two daughters of marriageable age, all three famous for their sharp tongues and petulant dispositions. They owned a building not far from the train station, occupying a spacious apartment on the second floor and renting out the rest. The building had long needed repair, but Mrs. Szumińska didn’t have the funds because her husband, before his sudden death at age forty-two, had come up with the wise idea of investing the family savings in some senseless invention that was supposed to register earthquakes. This gadget looked like a plain old vase with incomprehensible hooks that stuck out every which way. Mrs. Szumińska received one such vase by mail following her husband’s death, accompanied by a confidential letter informing her that the inventor had unfortunately been mistaken in his calculations and was now enthusiastically working on a new project, namely, glasses that would shine at night, and should Mrs. Szumińska be interested in an investment, he was ready to name the fantastical glasses in her honor. Mrs. Szumińska proved uninterested. She placed the “earthquake vase” in a prominent spot in the living room as a memento of her husband’s stupidity.
A disdain toward the opposite sex was hereditary in this home—something Lypynskyi couldn’t have known.
Kazimiera Szumińska quickly intuited his feelings and began resorting to cruel mockery in public. Every biting word of hers found its way to Lypynskyi.
“Lypynskyi has fallen head over heels in love with an Erinys,” his classmates would assess and recommend various salons with attractive Kraków prostitutes, hinting that his love was merely a consequence of a dearth of female warmth. Lypynskyi had never experienced anything like this, so he wasn’t sure if what he was feeling was love. If love was fear, devastating longing, nausea, obsession, then yes, he was in love. But why then was love so exalted? Why was it imbued with the meaning of life and treated like a cult, when, instead, it should be treated as a disease? In Lypynskyi’s view, that’s what it was, a disease filled with suffering. An extremely dangerous one. An incurable one.
Difficult times befell him. He barely slept, completely stopped eating, and wasted away to beyond recognition. Professor Lepkyi invited him over for tea a few times, but he spent the entire visits silently examining the cup in his hands and the little Hutsul rug from the Carpathian Mountains beneath his feet. Professor Lepkyi’s wife tried to feed him borshch, but Lypynskyi declined, saying that he digested beets poorly.
With the passage of time, the unbearable desire to cross paths with Kazimiera transformed into an aching wound that just wouldn’t heal. He was tormented when he didn’t see her, but was even more tormented when their gazes would meet and she would swiftly walk past, projecting disdain with the entirety of her elegant being. That’s why he no longer sought her out, trying instead to console himself with the little things—with just the simple thought that she was somewhere close by, possibly in the next hall over, sitting at a desk, cheekily correcting the aging professors. She was intelligent; no one doubted it. Her large green eyes radiated a lively interest in everything they saw before them. Other than Lypynskyi, of course. When he was standing before her, her eyes blazed like two red-hot coal embers, promising to turn into ash at the slightest approach.
Lypynskyi was convinced that this was damnation. He prayed often. When someone would try to cheer him up, he would listen in silence. “Viacheslav, this girl isn’t worth such torment,” they’d tell him. “Go back to the libraries, that’s where you belong, you’re going to become a great man.”
alarming news from russia was reaching Kraków. The peasants and workers were revolting and, where they could, burning the estates of landowners; high school students were striking; soldiers were refusing to carry out orders. A premonition of freedom tinged with chaos hung in the air. The Russian government finally lifted the ban on the Ukrainian language, and in November 1905, in the city of Lubny in the Poltava region, Mykola Shemet, who had briefly studied with Lypynskyi at Jagiellonian University, began to publish the first Ukrainian newspaper in the Russian-controlled part of Ukraine with his brothers Serhii and Volodymyr. Lypynskyi suggested the name Khliborob, or Grain Farmer, and Shemet agreed.
lypynskyi’s customary style of dressing in all black now suited him as never before. He was wearing his mourning dress. Some part of him was dying in grave torment, and no one could do anything to help other than send for the clergy to sing a funeral service when the time arrived.
And at last, the time arrived.
Lypynskyi had worked out which of Kraków’s myriad churches the Szumiński family likely attended and began going there on occasion. After the conclusion of one Sunday mass, when people had begun to slowly file out, he hesitated at the exit, searching for her with his eyes. Kazimiera suddenly appeared right before him but didn’t walk past him as usual. She stopped and deftly blocked his escape. The trap had closed: Lypynskyi had nowhere to run. Kazimiera sneered, “Take a look at the Pole who cares more about the Rusyns than his own state!”
Lypynskyi ignored her actual words, just watched her mouth move. He knew what Kazimiera was capable of.
“Why, Mr. Lypynskyi, are you in a Catholic church? Go pray to the God of the Orthodox serfs.”
Her face, so harsh and merciless, seemed to him the dearest in the entire world; despite its angular severity, hers was the gentlest and most alluring of all faces. Lypynskyi teetered, losing his balance for a moment. He understood that one more step, and the boundary would be crossed beyond which any and all love between them would become impossible. He whispered, dropping his defenses, “Ms. Szumińska has forgotten that there is but one God, for everyone.”
A crowd of gaping mouths had already gathered around—cold-blooded extras who would serve as witnesses to the long-awaited execution of the convict.
“Not at all, Mr. Lypynskyi! The people who talk about one God are those who don’t believe in any! And we already heard about the particulars of your ungodly faith at the spring lectures at the university. Such talk is blasphemy.”
“What did I say there that was so ungodly? That every nation, including the Ukrainian one, will fight for the right to self-determination? As it has already done on more than one occasion? Is that not what I said?”
“The Ukrainian nation has no past because there is no such nation. And you, Mr. Lypynskyi, are now, whether consciously or unconsciously, playing into the hands of the enemies of the Polish state.”
“I will remind you, miss, that Poland was partitioned among its neighbors a long time ago. There is no Polish state, just as there is no Ukrainian nation.”
Kazimiera gave a snort and Lypynskyi lapsed into a strange, almost paralytic calm. This calm spilled through his body, demanding the termination of their joust and complete acquiescence, even if it were to cost parts of his anatomy. That’s how animals save themselves from an iron trap in the woods, by gnawing off the ensnared paw.
“Ms. Szumińska is now, whether consciously or unconsciously, playing into those improvident Polish patriots who, dreaming of a Greater Poland, ignore the aspirations of Ukrainians—or Rusyns, as you call them—to be independent. When the time comes, Ukrainians will catch the Poles by surprise when they go up against them because people like you, dear lady, are perpetually belaboring that the Ukrainian nation doesn’t exist. So which of us is the bigger traitor? Which of us harms Poland more: I with my truth or you with your lies?”
He straightened up. He felt numb, almost dead. The clergy could be sent for to sing a funeral service. In fact, one of them did show up, the church’s Roman Catholic ksiądz. “A house of God is not the place for such discussions,” he said, and, with a peaceable gesture, led everyone outside.
At the exit, Lypynskyi and Kazimiera brushed shoulders and recoiled as if scalded. A moment later, she had dissolved into the crowd, and the last thing that Lypynskyi saw was her chin, raised upward and pointed like an alpine prickle. That prickly and upraised face promised to hate him as long as the world kept spinning, perhaps even after it stopped. This was the end. Lypynskyi sighed, relieved and exhausted, and headed off in the opposite direction.
He decided to visit the Kraków prostitutes the following day and did so with an uncharacteristic malevolence. In the embrace of a voluptuous stranger, Lypynskyi made his peace. He wouldn’t think about Kazimiera anymore.
But she would think about him.