Valerian Pidmohylny. The overgrown path to the grave at plot no. 31

Later, with proletarian hatred, Soviet critics would call him a class enemy.

In 1934, he was arrested, tried, imprisoned on The largest Soviet special-purpose camp of 1920-1930 on the Solovetsky Islands of the White Sea, where "enemies of the people" were heldSolovki, and shot in the A forest massif in Karelia used by the Soviet authorities for mass executionsSandarmokh tract.

“If Pidmohylny had written everything he wanted to in his time, we would simply have had a different literature,” writer Oksana Zabuzhko noted in her book And Again I Get Into the Tank.

In search of a bright spot

“I look back at what I have experienced. Where are my joys? My life is like a muddy path. A path that one does not walk on, but wanders along, slowly moving their feet, unable to throw off the heavy mud. Tired in the first step, exhausted in the next, I look for a bright spot on the path I have traveled and do not find it,” Pidmohylny said about himself.

He died at the age of 36. Half of his life was spent literally fighting for physical and literary survival. In a letter to his friend, the poet Yevhen Pluzhnyk, he wrote: “I don't know about you, but for me, from the age of twenty onward, the streak of life has been a constant struggle to overcome pessimism.”

For this pessimism, for his sense of the absurdity of existence, some contemporary Ukrainian critics call Pidmohylny a forerunner of European Existentialism is a movement in twentieth-century philosophy that recognized freedom as the highest human value. In literature, it manifested itself as the desire of writers to understand the reasons for the absurdity of existence, human despair, loneliness, and sufferingexistentialism. Valerian can be called differently — a forerunner of existentialists, the most realistic of realists — he was himself. He wrote as it was revealed to him, mercilessly and soberly.

From Lord Lister to intellectuals

Pidmohylny is now said to be the founder of Ukrainian intellectual prose. And he did not even receive a higher education. He was born in the village of Chapli (now the territory of the city of Dnipro) in 1901. According to Valerian himself, his father was a landless peasant. Researchers suggest that he could have worked as a clerk in Count Vorontsov-Dashkov's estate or even as a manager. His mother also worked at the estate.

After attending a parochial school, Pidmohylny graduated from the Katerynoslav Real School. In 1918, a university was opened in Katerynoslav, and Valerian became a student. However, he did not graduate from the university, as hunger drove him to look for a teaching job in the province in 1920. He knew French brilliantly. Where did he learn it? It is not known for certain. When Soviet publishing houses stopped publishing him as a “class enemy”, he would make a living by translating brilliantly the works of French classics.

Pidmohylny published his first works in the school magazine. These were adventure stories signed with the name Lord Lister. Lord was a hero of German tabloid crime novels. An honest adventurer, a superman, and a character who intimidates bandits and state detectives. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the whole of Europe read this novel, including little Valerian from Chapli.

A few years later, his characters will be discussing Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher of the second half of the nineteenth century, author of the concept of the superman, the will to power, and a critic of Christian morality.Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant was the founder of German classical philosophyKant, Sigmund Freud was an Austrian psychologist and psychotherapist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Father of psychoanalysis as a method of studying the human subconsciousFreud, and other European philosophers in a very professional manner. His characters will become variations on the theme of the superman — how he asserts himself in revolutionary reality, and they will use Psychoanalysis is a set of psychological theories of personality, methods of studying mental processespsychoanalysis in their relationships with women. Pidmohylny will even brilliantly Valerian Pidmohylny's article "Ivan Nechuy-Levytsky" was published in 1927 in the journal Life and Revolution.use Freudianism to interpret the “peasant” works of Nechuy-Levytsky!

Being an intellectual, he wrote for intellectuals. The Soviet government would also use it against him.

By the way, the writer Todos Osmachka left memories of how the author worked:

“If someone visited Pidmohylny during the day, they would always find him at his desk, working. And he would say the same thing to every visitor: ‘I have only five minutes for you... And then, please, help yourself with my books...’ And he would point to the library. Such an attitude at the time of the revolution, when people not only did not respect their neighbor's time, but did not even respect human life for the sake of the dominant doctrines, caused some to admire, and others to be dismissive of the young writer's counterrevolutionary inclinations.”

He dared

In 1921 Pidmohylny moved to Kyiv. He earns his living by teaching and working as a bibliographer at the Book Chamber. He became a member of the Writers' Association, the Lanka group of writers, from which MARS, the Workshop of the Revolutionary Word, later spun off.

“The young rebels — Pidmohylny, Yevhen Pluzhnyk, Todos Osmachka — formed a distinctive literary group called Lanka. As innovators should, they accused elders of retrograde and provincialism. The name was meant to symbolize their desire to connect the links in the broken chain of Ukraine's cultural commonality with Europe. They proclaimed a break with the imperial heritage and did everything to reduce Russian influence,” wrote literary critic Vira Aheieva.

Pidmohylny defends free creativity as opposed to ideologically biased creativity. “In our country, any work that absolutely and categorically does not meet the requirements of the official ideology is condemned, regardless of whether it is good, valid, or necessary,” Pidmohylny The literary discussion of the 1920s was a public discussion of the ways of development, ideological and aesthetic orientation, and tasks of the new Ukrainian Soviet literature, as well as the place and role of the writer in society. It was triggered by Mykola Khvylovyi's article "On Satan in a Barrel, or Graphomaniacs, Speculators, and Other Enlighteners".joined the literary discussion in 1925.

He is also an active participant in the process of Ukrainization of public life, as he is convinced that it is the language that unites and defines a nation. The characters in his novels teach Ukrainian at courses. In 1926ß1927, together with Yevhen Pluzhnyk, he compiled a dictionary called Phraseology of Business Language. Ukrainians had to build a Ukrainian administrative apparatus that would use the Ukrainian language. At the time, compiling a dictionary was a feat of titans. Meanwhile, Valerian was only 26 years old.

“If today we have such familiar constructions as the city budget, resolution, ruling, decision, complaint, and to send a statement, it is all in this dictionary. That is, these two guys created a masterpiece,” emphasizes linguist Iryna Farion.

He writes a series of short stories called The Insurgents, depicting the famine in Ukraine in 1921-1922. For any Soviet writer, these topics are suicide. How dare one write about the elements of the Ukrainian liberation struggle? How dare you write about the cannibalism of people who went crazy with hunger? Pidmohylny dared.

In Ukraine, however, Pidmohylny managed to publish only a few stories from the series that were irritating to the Soviet authorities. Therefore, he submits his works for publication in the emigrant magazine Nova Ukraina, edited by the former head of the UPR Directorate, Volodymyr Vynnychenko. Proletarian ideologues perceive this as a betrayal. Even Mykola Khvylovyi speaks of “Petliura's agitation”. Pidmohylny justifies himself in a letter to the The socio-political, literary, and scientific monthly was founded in 1923 in Kharkiv and was published until February 1936.Red Way: “I had to send the material abroad because the conditions for printing at home were unfavorable.”

His excuse was accepted. In 1928, Pidmohylny was even allowed to go on a creative business trip abroad to Prague and Berlin. The following year he was in Moscow for the Week of Ukraine. But very soon the writer's life changed dramatically.

Pidmohylny was removed from the editorial board of the journal Life and Revolution, and his works were almost never published. In 1930, the trial of the Ukrainian intelligentsia began in the so-called The trial of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine was a demonstrative case fabricated by the Joint State Political Directorate of the Ukrainian SSR in the late 1920s, which exposed a fictitious anti-Soviet organization among the Ukrainian scientific and church intelligentsiacase of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine. Pidmohylny was horrified to hear the defendants recognize themselves as enemies of the Soviet government. He even went to Kharkiv, entered the courtroom, and saw morally destroyed people who had once been the nation's intellectual elite.

What to write about?

In 1932 Pidmohylny moved to Kharkiv. It is the capital, and perhaps his new works will be published there. He was wrong.

“I haven't been able to write anything for about two years,” he wrote in a letter to the writer Arkadii Liubchenko. And to the writer Viktor Domontovych, he said in despair that he did not know what to write about.

He wants to understand everything that is happening in the country. He even translated a treatise by Helvetius, where the eighteenth-century French philosopher called despotism the worst enemy of the public good. But Helvetius did not suggest how to get rid of Stalin's despotism...

In Kharkiv, Valerian managed to publish only one story, From the Life of a House. It's about an old lady who is forced to live in an uninhabitable apartment as a class enemy. It was in this story that the lines appeared: “The class enemy is like a full-time position in every factory and institution that someone has to hold.”

In Kharkiv, Pidmohylny survived the Holodomor. He, the author of stories about the famine of 1921-1922, knew well that the lack of food kills everything human in a person. He was one of the initiators of the creation of a writers' canteen in the The Slovo House is a residential building in Kharkiv built in the late 1920s by a cooperative of writers.Slovo house, and miraculously managed to get food for it.

However, writing about the new Holodomor was out of the question.

“Very short, wearing big glasses, which are worn by very poor people, slightly bent over, modest, with a sweet smile, quiet and unnoticeable among the eternal bustle of the house,” Volodymyr, the son of playwright Mykola Kulish, recalled Pidmohylny of the Kharkiv period.

Pidmohylny did not have his own apartment in the Slovo building; he lived with the writer Oleksa Varava. It was here that the KGB officers came to search in December 1934.

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Camp and death

Pidmohylny was arrested as a member of a counterrevolutionary organization that planned terror against the party leaders — after Sergei Kirov was a Soviet statesman and politician, the first secretary of the Leningrad City Committee of the CPSU. He was assassinated on December 1, 1934.Kirov's assassination, repressions began in the country.

“This case also involved 17 other writers, including Hryhorii Epik, who testified that Pidmohylny almost single-handedly planned to kill Pavlo Postyshev, one of the organizers of the Holodomor of 1932-1933 in Ukraine. A confrontation was arranged between Epik and Pidmohylny, where one testified against the other. Pidmohylny denied all charges,” wrote literary critic Anhelina Stolitnia.

Pidmohylny wrote an official statement to the investigator: he had never belonged to a terrorist organization and had never conducted terrorist activities. Thus, he denied all charges brought by the investigation.

However, on January 11, 1935, interrogation reports recorded Pidmohylny's confession. The same protocols state that he fought in Petliura's army and in the early 1920s, when he wrote “nationalist works”, he did not feel close to the Soviet government.

Later, art historian Leonid Cherevatenko stated that the writer Hryhorii Maifet, who was involved in the case along with Pidmohylny, told him how Valerian signed these protocols. He allegedly told the investigator that he would not sign anything until he was given a pile of paper, a pencil or a pen so that he could finish his book.

We are talking about the novel Autumn of 1929. In it, Valerian wanted to talk about collectivization in the Ukrainian countryside. It is unknown whether he finished this work. Nor is it known where the manuscript is. Perhaps it is still stored somewhere in the KBG archives.

...On March 28, 1935, the court passed a sentence: 10 years in prison. Valerian served his sentence in the Solovki prison camp. He translated Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and read British editions of Plutarch was an ancient Greek philosopher of the first and second centuries AD.Plutarch, thus learning English.

On November 3, 1937, he was shot dead.

Endure the horror

From Solovki, Valerian will write to his wife: “Settle down seriously, firmly and, most importantly, don't feel tied to me. You have a child, and I am the past.”

Was he sincere in these words? Probably not. Otherwise, he would not have asked his wife in another letter to keep and work on the manuscript of his unfinished work, Untitled.

Pidmohylny met Kateryna, the daughter of the priest Chervinskyi, in 1921, when he moved from starving Kyiv to Vorzel to work as a teacher at a local school. They married a year later, and Kateryna later became an actress in Kyiv theaters. In 1928, their son Roman was born.

After Valerian's imprisonment, Kateryna and Roman were moved to the apartment of Mykola Kulish, who was also arrested. The playwright's son Volodymyr recalled Kateryna's words at the time: “If my husband had died, I would have cried for him to get over. But he lives somewhere else, he was torn away from us, the family was destroyed, my husband was taken away from me, and my son's father was taken away from him... God, give me the strength to endure this horror!”

However, the Pidmohylnys did not live in that apartment for long. According to a decree of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR of June 8, 1934, all family members of the “enemy of the people” who lived with him at the time of the crime were deprived of their voting rights and exiled to remote areas for a period of 5 years. That's how Kateryna and Roman ended up in Alma-Ata. They returned to Kyiv only after the Second World War. In 1949, Roman, a medical student, died of heart failure.

Monument with white bas-reliefs of a man and a boy

Kateryna was given an apartment in the Rolit house, which was built in 1934 for writers and poets, following the example of the Slovo house in Kharkiv. Literary scholar Yaryna Tsymbal wrote: “Kateryna Ivanivna, whom everyone called Katrusia, was given a room in a three-room apartment of a literary couple, Mykola Sheremet and Vira Yenina. The Sheremets never got tired of going to the Union and demanding that Katrusia be moved out, saying that there were no conditions to work with her in the appartment.”

Valerian Pidmohylny's burial place is unknown. That is why Kateryna installed a bas-relief on Roman's grave at the Baikove Cemetery in Kyiv, which was shared by her son and his father.

According to Yaryna Tsymbal, in the summer Kateryna Ivanivna would go straight from the Palace of Pioneers, where she worked as a librarian, to the cemetery and spend the night there, and return to work in the morning.

After her husband was rehabilitated in August 1956, Kateryna hoped to publish his works and carefully prepared them for publication. Nothing came of it. Pidmohylny's publications in Ukraine resumed only in the late 1980s.

Kateryna Pidmohylna died in 1962. She was buried next to her son at the Baikove cemetery. While writing this story, we decided to check the condition of the Pidmohylnys' grave. It took us more than two hours to find the grave among the nettles and weeds. There was the garbage dumped next to it.

Few people apparently know who is buried under the monument with two white bas-reliefs of a man and a boy, which bear Valerian Pidmohylny's autograph. Only when you wipe the dirt off the slab on the ground do you see the barely visible letters, and then you can read that Valerian Pidmohylny and his son Roman are buried here. But in fact, the father is not buried here — his remains remained in Sandarmos, where he was shot.

However, in the city about which he wrote his most famous novel, the grave of his son and wife could become a place where people come to visit Pidmohylny. But the path to this place is not well-trodden.

“Do you know what our city is? It's a historical dead body. It has been stinking for centuries. I just want to air it out,” Valerian Pidmohylny wrote in The City.