The Harvard Summer School 7 week Ukrainian for Reading Knowledge course is designed to provide students with an essential knowledge of Ukrainian for reading and research purposes and is primarily but not exclusively for graduate students in all disciplines – humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and business. It is also intended for those preparing for professional careers in the international law, finance or diplomatic service. Texts from a variety of fields are used in class. The language teaching is proficiency based and aimed primarily at developing reading skill. But in reality for many students these 7 weeks become a window into a largely unknown and quite exciting culture.
The case in point is this year’s HUSI student Alex Langstaff who currently is a PhD candidate at New York University and soon will be a residential fellow at the Ecole Normale Superiore in Paris. His writing has appeared in academic journals Artforum, New Eastern Europe as well as in The Drift magazine. We asked Alex to share with us his Summer School experiences. Instead he came up with an article on Ostap Vyshnia (1889 – 1956), a brilliant Ukrainian short story writer who became the victim of Stalinist purges and spent a decade in the Gulag labor camps. O. Vyshnia was, probably, the most popular Ukrainian author in 1920s – 1930s, but his name means nothing to Western readers.
So while preparing one of his required weekly presentations on Ukrainian literature Alex Langstaff discovered the short stories Ostap Vyshnia wrote when he visited Berlin. And now we are extremely glad Alex Langstaff “ignored” our request and turned his Summer School impressions into an inspiring essay. Glory be to free spirit!
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By Alex Langstaff
Babylon Berlin through Ukrainian Eyes
Weimar Berlin was a cauldron of nocturnal energy, an eighth wonder of the world that seemed to contain all of the twentieth century’s promise and failure. Decadence and destitution rubbed shoulders in this strange city that seemed perpetually illuminated on the sandy Prussian plains. In 1928, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil’s Threepenny Opera premiered, Alfred Döblin was finishing his expressionist masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz and the Nazi party won its first parliament seats. And Ostap Vyshnia arrived on assignment from his Kharkiv newspaper.
Vyshnia is one of the great forgotten chroniclers of the spirt of his age. All the possibilities and foreboding premonitions of the 1920s are baked down into his rich, pithy, and hilarious short essays. Remembered in Ukraine as a comic bard, and beloved by his enormous readership, Vyshnia is little known abroad. But Vyshnia’s critical humor and masterful command of ordinary language lit up the Ukrainian imaginary of Weimar Berlin, and deserve a larger audience. Vyshnia will still enchant readers nearly a century later. He had followed a steady stream of Europe’s great correspondents coming to witness the incredible unfolding of Berlin like moths to a lantern. And he was part of a cohort of Ukrainian writers and artists who saw the city as a laboratory for elaborating ideas of tradition and modernity within Ukrainian culture during its efflorescent renaissance of the 1920s.
Between Twain and Roth
Vyshnia reveled in his detour from the Communist Party-recommended itinerary of crowded housing, political rallies and socialist cooperatives. Rather, he sought Berlin’s best clubs, theaters and cinemas where laughter and revelry filled the air. He confessed to his readers that “when our man finds himself in a large European city, the first thing he does is run off to view the corruption of the bourgeoise.”
Dear comrades! Please understand us foreign travelers: we are all keen to see the agony, the last minutes, the last throes of the class enemy. But what if this enemy should corrupt away and die? What a pity it will be that you had the opportunity to see its dying screams and didn’t! So that’s why it’s the first place that you go. To see for yourself how the bourgeoisie is perishing. ‘Doing the Charleston and drowning in champagne!’ As for the proletariat, there’ll still be time to observe its lifestyle and work, because the proletariat is the future.”
This delicious humor and barely concealed sarcasm were typical of Vyshnia, née Pavlo Hubenko. Vyshnia is often likened to Mark Twain. The two share a piercing intelligence and wit hidden beneath their vernacular humor of everyday life and its bizarre characters. But there is also something of Josef Roth in him – Roth the doyen of the feuilleton, the native of Brody, graduate of L’viv and fellow Berlin arrival and witness.
Roth and Vyshnia worked in the tradition of the flâneur. Their reportage is defined by velocity, movement, peripatetic roving and exploration. They are on a zig-zag hunt for the “microscopic”, the “diminutive of the parts” they observe unbidden in the nooks and crannies of life. Roth renders this with a philosophical air of irony and melancholic gravity. Vyshnia uses an oral tradition of storytelling. He is more like a phonograph playing record after record of the most sing-song dialogue imaginable that he has curated for us. Their resulting feuilletons are thus different, but both microcosms that subvert the monumental, totalizing projects of the day.
Roth and Vyshnia should be understood as heirs to the central European, post-Habsburg republic of the feuilleton. As they stalked the glowing department stores of Kurfürstendamm in search of the ‘microscopic’, it is a pleasant daydream to imagine what an encounter between them would have been like. A coffeehouse named something suitably metonymic like ‘Café Europa’ perhaps, with red velvet cushions, and bellowing clouds of tobacco smoke.
Adverts and Asphalt
1920s Berlin is famous for being the subject of pathbreaking reportage and cultural analysis by Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and others. But looking across the writing of Ukrainian writers in Berlin, we can see a remarkable consonance and dialogue in motifs, almost as if there was some larger affective community.
Walter Benjamin wondered “What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon sign says – but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt.” The neon glow of advertising and its reflection in asphalt streets was a defining image of nocturnal Berlin. Poet Valerian Polishchuk described “electric suns reflected from the asphalt, flooded with the breathless stream of advertising lights” (Rozkol Evropy, 1925). Writer Oleksandr Kopylenko enthused over the iridescent asphalt along which cars glided, like “pure, shining ice, its shadow racing in pursuit, reflected in the depths of a road surface that is transparent as glass” (“Dva Berliny”, 1929). Like Polishchuk, he also saw an “explosions of lights, paints and colors, curving flashes and the blaze of electric waterfalls.”
Vyshnia’s short, punch style of ‘ordinary’ speech was no less effusive or breathless, inviting the reader to an exceptional kind of immediacy. “The electricity is burning. And with what colors! Blue, and violet, and white, and yellow, and red! In short, everything. And it’s all reflected off the asphalt. And looking down along the street, it’s as if the whole thing is a multi-colored rainbow. Cars, buses, motorcycles wrap it with spotlights. Yes, you are walking in some kind of inferno!” Neon, asphalt, neon, asphalt: light and motif ricocheting through one common vocabulary of Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian writing about the mysterious streets of Berlin.
Berlin as Mirror
Literary scholar Tamara Hundorova has identified a large group of Ukrainian novelists and poets who made the pilgrimage to 1920s Berlin in an attempt to clarify their own sense of what Ukraine and ‘Europe’ meant in their work. These writers, she says, “were able to use the experience of their westward journeys to subvert the ideologized nations of what was ‘one’s own’ and what was ‘alien’ in the Ukrainian literature of the 1920s, and to erect a protective shield against the monologism of the Soviet literature of the 1930s.” Berlin was a mirror, a ‘fiery pool’ reflecting Ukraine back onto itself.
Like the best travelogues, Vyshnia’s pieces were indirectly sometimes, or entirely, about Ukraine. This proved especially effective for shining harsh light on the soviet regime and its litany of arbitrary fines, empty newspeak and ineffectual bureaucracy. Customs officials and their “cherished phrase: ‘not allowed’” were a particular focus of Vyshnia’s scorn:
“When you are travelling abroad you don’t have to worry about customs, of course. But on the way back… Oh, my God, the price you have to pay because of customs! About three weeks before leaving Germany the talk begins:
… ’Come from Potsdam?’
‘Yes!’
‘Wilhelm wasn’t mad when he chose to live there. What a park! And the rooms! The fountains! The cleanliness! The order everywhere!’
‘Yeah! Makes you wonder. But do customs really let through only one pair of shoes?’ ”
Berlin’s neon nightscape was also put to use. ‘Berlin in the Evening’ opens with a pastiche of Soviet pretensions to avant-garde technology and modernity. Playing the role of a wide-eyed, naïve everyman reader, Vyshnia expresses amazement at the kind of electric turbines Berlin must have to make “night indistinguishable from day”. Open-mouthed, he quizzes Berliners where they found such an effective ‘Little Turkey’ (Турчанка) – the diminutive name given by Kharkivites to the city’s single operating electric turbine, which was a secondhand castoff from Istanbul. He receives vague and confused answers from Berliners but perseveres. “ ‘Maybe you could give me the address. I would go home and tell the local government, so that it could buy one for itself.’ ” This article was published in 1930 in a collection of travel writing titled How to Make a Berlin out of Kharkiv (як із Харкова зробити Берлін). But already that year, the curtain was closing on the Ukrainian interwar cultural renaissance.
Vyshnia’s electrifying genius awaits a new generation of younger Ukrainian readers to discover and inspire, and his feuilletons from Weimar Berlin offer an excellent entry point for a foreign readership. Placing Vyshnia alongside Josef Roth and other famous writers who stood at the gates of Berlin Babylon, we confound the dichotomy of East and West that perennially hovers over Ukrainian belles-lettres. We give the lie to the siloing of Ukrainian writing as ‘soviet’ and/or peripheral. And in these dark days when Ukraine and Ukrainian culture is fighting for its survival, such rediscoveries carry different stakes than those of peace time. Fortunately, Vyshnia is also one of the funniest writers I’ve ever read. Find out for yourself.