Mykola Khvyl’ovyy, Dmytro Dontsov, and the Transgressive Symbiosis of Communist and Nationalist Visions for a Revolutionary Ukrainian Literature

Abstract

Despite the tense geopolitical situation in interwar Eastern Europe, Ukrainian litterateurs at first elided the physical and ideological boundaries guarded by state authorities on either side of the Polish-Soviet border. Cultural leaders on the far right and far left, separated by a chasm of fear and loathing, nevertheless read and
responded to one another’s works. In some cases, representatives of the two sides shared common influences, beliefs, and aesthetic ideals, and even took the risk of signalling their admiration for the theories and creative accomplishments of sworn enemies in the opposing camp, favourably invoking “foreigners” to serve opposing agendas. Amid the relative openness, fluidity, and experimentalism that characterised the first (i.e. pre-Stalinist) half of the interwar period in Ukraine, few regarded nationalism and socialism, or even Bolshevism, as mutually exclusive concepts. Rather, there were synergies and points of contact between the two. Examining the public interaction of the Communist writer Mykola Khvyl’ovyy (1893–1933) and the nationalist literary critic Dmytro Dontsov (1883–1973), I argue that the Ukrainian cultural and political ferment of the 1920s was transgressive in two senses. Firstly, it cut across the political boundaries of party membership and citizenship that divided Ukrainians into Soviet and non-Soviet, socialist and nationalist. Secondly, it defied expectations of ideological purity and loyalty at a time of growing but not yet insurmountable hostility. The result was a symbiosis of right and left-wing agitation, in both Soviet Ukraine and south-eastern Poland, for a revolutionary, anticolonial, and modernist Ukrainian literature.