There are two parallel stories in Tanja Maljartschuk’s novel Forgottenness. It’s the story of Viacheslav Lypynskyi, born in 1882, an important figure in the early 20th century struggle for Ukrainian independence. It’s also the story of the narrator, a young Ukrainian woman, and a writer concerned with the way time consumes everything, not merely disappearing things and people, but leaving no trace of them behind. She reads about Lypynskyi’s death in 1931 in an old newspaper, and becomes intrigued by him, finding echoes of his life in her own. Both lives are explored in alternating chapters, with the struggle for Ukrainian statehood centre stage. And though there is disappointment, loss and misery in both narratives, the stories are leavened by a wonderfully rich vocabulary, by some simple but striking imagery and by that dark humour so characteristic of Ukrainian writing.
Lypynskyi shows his commitment to Ukrainian statehood from an early age. His family are Polish, living in the town of Zaturtsi , north east of Lviv and the young Lypynskyi has been sent to university in the Polish city of Krakow. His family are horrified when he returns from uni, insisting that his first name Wacław be spelled the Ukrainian way, Viacheslav,and, worse still, speaking Ukrainian which wasn’t even a language, just a rural dialect, a hodgepodge of Polish and Russian which they’d never heard emerge from the lips of an educated person, only from the local poor. This is just the beginning of Lypinskyi’s fascination with Ukrainian language and culture. He’s officially studying agriculture at Krakow, but finds himself spending more time in the Ukrainian Studies department, where he impresses his teachers with his grasp of the language. He develops an interest in Ukrainian history, not as far from agriculture as you might think, comments our narrator—after all, both disciplines are concerned with roots!
Truth be told, Lypynskyi is a classic polymath, his interest in history turning later to a passion for the new discipline of sociology, but his pursuit of ideas always in the interest of the cause of Ukrainian statehood. In a few vignettes, we are shown how revolutionary and objectionable this idea was to the Polish upper classes, including to his wife, Kaziemiera, an upper class Polish woman from Krakow. At that time, the territory of present day Ukraine was part of the Russian empire. They too, wanted to quash any ideas of Ukrainian independence and the Ukrainian language was banned in Russia until 1905. Even then, there was censorship. In 1907 when Lypynskyi edited a collection of poetry by the great Ukrainian poet Shevchenko, the Tsar’s censors sentenced him to 3 years’ banishment. Already ill with consumption, he fled west on a counterfeit passport and ended up in a sanatorium in Zakopane in southern Poland.
On the face of it, the narrator says, there are only three things that link her to Lypynskyi: the fact that she visited his home at Zaturtsi, the fact that he spent time in her home town at the end of World War 1 as an envoy of the Ukrainian state, the fact that they share the same birthday of April 17th. But there are echoes that resonate across the two lives in more subtle and diffuse ways, sometimes just by the repetition of a word or phrase. So, though she took Ukrainian Studies at university, the subject mattered less to her than the activity of working out information in detail, dividing up knowledge into individual branches and moving along every branch to its roots. (those roots again!). There are some resonances in their love lives. Both meet their future lovers in the university lecture hall. Lypynskyi, now lecturing, is transfixed by the tall, dark-blonde student, Kaziemiera, rooted to the spot, till the janitor asks him to move aside in order to sweep up his dignity, splattered against the wooden floor. The narrator’s first lover is her lecturer too—the first of three, oddly resembling one another with their golden hair and blue eyes.
There are similarities in their desperate reactions when these relationships fail. Lypynskyi says he has a black abyss in his soul and later gives up salt in his diet, so that he can expel Kaziemiera from his memory, that memory of her emerging from the sea while honeymooning in Venice. He resigns himself to a life sans salt and sans flavour. A life without Kaziemiera. Our young narrator’s reaction is similarly dramatic: she can neither eat nor sleep—though there’s some self-mocking in her suggestion that everyone must have a bout of proper suffering at least once, just to show how big their soul is—XS, S, M or XL? Hers, she claims, is sizeless. They both suffer breathing problems too: Lypynskyi chronically as a result of TB, the narrator during panic attacks. INHALE-EXHALE is an exhortation that appears regularly in both stories.
It’s well into the book that we learn about the narrator’s family, and are given a glimpse of life in Ukraine post 1931 when Lypynskyi died. It’s almost as if they’re taking up the baton of history, these ordinary people—it’s their turn now to speak. There’s Grandma Sonia, who was left on the steps of an orphanage by her father, telling her he was going to fetch some plum-butter pampushky. He never returned, dying of starvation in the gatehouse of a factory complex. This was 1932 and the start of Stalin’s man-made famine, the Holodomor. There’s Grandpa Bomchyk who grew enormous, weighing 150 kilos when he died. This wasn’t just because he came from a generation that didn’t find it necessary to exercise, but because his body was a receptacle for the accumulation of unutilized laughter. After toiling on the fields all his life, he owned nothing, having handed over his land and livestock to the collective farm after the Second World War. As the reasons for laughter grew fewer and fewer, his body began to increase in size. It simply swelled from a surplus of giggles that had yet to come out.
Towards the end of the book the historical events come thick and fast, but the writer does an excellent job of outlining the fall of both the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires and the complex situation in Kyiv, when this seemed a moment for the realisation of Ukrainian independence. Lypynskyi is watching this from Vienna, where he’s dispatched in1918 as the ambassador of the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic. There’s a powerful account of Vienna at the end of World War 1, the grandeur of the buildings along the Ringstrasse contrasted with the desolation and hunger of the people: the green chariots jutting from the roofs of the government structures that lined the Ringstrasse looked like moss-covered crosses in littered, neglected cemeteries. The sombre mood in Vienna matched only by the misery felt by Lypynskyi at the failure of the movement for Ukrainian independence, a feeling of devastation that coated everything around him.
At first glance, this is a story of failed ideals, to be sure. But to my mind, these are dead and not yet buried. Lypynskyi’s idea of territorialism, the vision of the inhabitants of a common land united in the interests of that land, irrespective of their ancestry, language, faith or occupation is surely still relevant today. I was moved by the narrator’s story, the coupling of her fascination with Lypynskyi with the revisiting of her own family’s stories, the show of strength in her visit to what remained of the Lypynski’s family estate. The discovery that his grave had been ploughed over by a random tractor driver in Soviet times, his bones dispersed. Yet not without trace: in this powerful and moving tribute to Lypynskyi, Tanja Maljartschuk has held him back from the jaws of that gigantic blue whale, Time. She has preserved him from Forgottenness.
This is a moving and compelling account of a tumultuous period in Ukrainian history, brought alive through rich characterisation, and wonderful language thanks to Zenia Tompkins’ flawless translation. But it’s also about the importance of memory. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Thanks to Bullaun Press for the review copy.
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