The City-Walerjan Pidmohylnyj’s Kyiv novel

 Walerjan Pidmohylnyj’s novel, Misto, The City, gives us a fabulous picture of 1920s post-revolutionary Kyiv. It’s a city overflowing with people, on the streets, in municipal parks, in bingo halls and beer cellars. In these few years Kyiv is a melting pot of cultures. There’s the essentially modern, expressed in new art forms: jazz, foxtrot, cinema and theatre. At the same time there’s an emphasis on tradition, with Ukrainian language and literature now fostered through the Ukrainisation policy. This is a novel which has the modern city at its centre, much like Alexander Döblin’s Alexanderplatz of the same era. But it’s also a Bildungsroman, as we see the city through the eyes of Stepan Radtschenko, a young man from the country who comes to Kyiv to study and transforms from serious post-revolutionary activist into sophisticated urban writer.

The novel’s opening is one of my favourite scenes. Stepan is travelling by steamer from his village of Tereweni up the Dnipro river to Kyiv. It’s evening, they’re not far from their destination, and the few scattered villages along the riverbank remind him of his village and the cultural work he was doing in the Silbud, the community centre there. He’s accompanied by two other young people from his village, all hoping to take the university entrance exam in order to study, all with letters of recommendation in their pockets. There’s Nadija and Lewko, passionate about agricultural economics, and both their stories will weave through Stepan’s in the months to come. There’s an incredible feeling of optimism here, of suppressed excitement, nervous anticipation too, reflected in the vision of the students pouring down Revolution Street after lectures to swim in the Dnipro, their brightly coloured swimsuits and bodies contrasting with the run-down grey buildings along the waterfront.

Stepan soon has to face the reality of his very modest background when he goes to his first digs—a friend of his uncle—and finds the only bed they can offer him is a workbench in the cowshed. He feels humiliated and insulted, and needs to get a job, yet is out of his depth with the complicated procedures for finding work in the city, as indeed with the procedures for taking the university entrance exams and obtaining a scholarship. He is adrift in this first section, wandering the streets of the city and observing, feeling lonely, sometimes missing the village and frustrated in his attempts to make romantic overtures to Nadija, now lodging in a tiny, simple hut with two other young women whose beaux are always present. On one occasion, in a burst of nostalgia for their country villages, they finish the evening singing Ukrainian songs—which I rather liked, reminding me of the wonderful moments of family singing in Sie kam aus Mariupol, She came from Mariupol.

But singing Ukrainian songs with his old friends from the village is not really where Stepan wants to be. He does brilliantly in his scholarship exams, attends the university which he appears to take in his stride—though there’s rather little detail generally about his studies in the novel—but is really fired up by an evening at the National Library where new writers are presenting their work. This is a fantastic scene, one of several compelling set pieces in the novel, where we first meet Kyiv’s literary establishment. The author has great fun gently mocking their wordy pretentiousness. One speechifying critic he describes as follows:

He bubbled over with quotations from world literature… he kneaded his words, shaped them like little pieces of pastry, sprinkled them with sugar and saccharin , decorated them with tiny gelée roses, holding them back for just one moment of ecstasy, before releasing his delicious treats for the world to taste. (My translation from the German).

The evening inspires Stepan with the idea of becoming a writer and he goes home and writes a passably good short story called The Cut Throat Razor. This is then published in a journal and provides his entrée into the literary world, albeit as a very new and unconfident writer, and accompanied by much soul searching along the way.

Along with the soul searching—and Stepan’s character is one of moods swinging from numb loneliness and despair to elation—there is a very practical side to this young man. He decides to ditch his studies to give himself time to write and finances this by getting a job with the Ukrainisation programme. He first has to brush up his own language knowledge which he does with characteristic dedication, and, once qualified, goes to various work places and cultural centres to teach Ukrainian language to the employees at the end of their working day. This was not always received with one hundred per cent enthusiasm.  I loved the irony here:  they’d rather have their tea than decline their verbs, and they were probably barely aware of the great responsibility towards the Ukrainian nation they were carrying on their shoulders. (My translation from the German).In order to look the part of the professional teacher of Ukrainian, Stepan buys himself a new suit.  His developing awareness of style and clothes is part of his metamorphosis into a city person and it’s no coincidence that at the end of Part One he burns the old battle field jacket he’s worn since his revolutionary days.

A more important theme, perhaps, reflecting this transition, is his relationship with women. I found this interesting not only for Stepan’s own story, but in what it says about gender relations at that time. Generally, Stepan does not acquit himself well. When he does eventually get to see Nadija, the girl from back home, on her own in the park, he’s in a furious mood, having been rejected by a critic, and he rapes her. His next lover is his landlady, Musinka, an older married woman, who initiates him into the pleasures of lovemaking. There’s a poignant scene some time later, when she’s admiring her handsome young lover showing off his new suit, when both she and we, the reader, know he will leave her for a partner more suited to his new status. His third girlfriend is Zoya, a quirky and modern young Kyivian with her short haircut and unromantic views: Love? There’s no such thing. People have just dreamed it all up. She holds out against Stepan’s physical advances for some time before agreeing to regular meetings in a separée, a room in a seedy establishment with dining table and couch, hireable by the hour, where lovers can meet. Zoya is summarily and brutally cast aside towards the end of the book when Stepan meets the stunningly beautiful Rita, a dancer, at a party in Kyiv. They dance and touch through hours of sensual abandonment, but then she goes off to catch the train to Kharkiv where she’s working—she’s a thoroughly independent, modern and urban woman.

Now our solipsistic hero Stepan, with his mean treatment of women, is a somewhat flawed hero, and his mood swings at times demanded patience as did the occasional flowery and overwritten imagery—I’m wondering whether this is a feature of literary Ukrainian writing at that time? However, there are also brilliant and succinct flashes of wit and irony which more than compensate, and any long windedness in Stepan or the imagery does not detract from what is for me the jewel of this novel, which is the evocation of the city of Kyiv. The streets, parks, and city areas through which Stepan wanders are all named and this had me getting out my guide book and using the helpful contemporary map at the back of the book to retrace his steps. There are fascinating descriptions of mass entertainment:  the bingo hall, the cinema, the beer cellar where a jazz band plays, the violinist gyrating to the music, nodding his head, pulling faces, leaping out of his seat as if punched in the stomach by the beats of the drum. There’s a sense of excitement too about the literary world, and the technology which facilitates the transmission of its ideas— the type setters at work, the huge printing presses producing the literary journal to be sent out across the country.

I read this novel in the new German translation just published by Guggolz Verlag and would like to thank them for their review copy. There are helpful notes at the back, a biography of the author Walerjan Pidmohylnyj, and an afterword by the translators, Alexander Kratochvil, Lukas Joura, Jakob Wunderwald, Lina Zalitok and Susanne Frank. Thanks to all of you for bringing this wonderful novel of Kyiv to us in German, such a great reminder of the rich cultural and literary history of Ukraine at a time when it is fighting for its very survival. I look forward to reading it next in English translation.