Mykola Zerov: son of ethnic Russian shot for Ukrainian nationalism
He had no equal in recitation and oratory. He wrote elegant sonnets, and his translations made ancient authors speak Ukrainian. Mykola Zerov could have lived in Ancient Greece or Rome, participating in Rhapsodes were the creators and performers of ancient Greek epic songs.rhapsode tournaments. But he lived in Ukraine when the Soviet regime was establishing itself there.
For him, the revolutionary change of the world was not in the destruction of the old culture, but in the orientation to its best classical examples, in the return to their origins. For his devotion to the classical canons, he and his associates were called neoclassicalists.
Very soon this definition will become a curse. And Mykola Zerov, the unsurpassed intellectual and culture bearer, branded as the leader of the neoclassicalists, will receive a bullet in the back of the head from an NKVD This refers to the Chekist Mikhail Matveyev, who was a peasant in the Novgorod province before serving in the NKVD.thug who finished two grades of village school.
Today, in a series of materials by hromadske about the figures of the Ukrainian Executed Renaissance, we are going to tell you about Mykola Zerov.
The oldest of 11 children
Although he came from Bryansk peasants, his father graduated from a teacher's institute and rose to the position of inspector of public schools. His mother was from a Cossack noble family near Dykanka. The couple had 11 children — Mykola, born in 1890, was the oldest.
They lived in the Poltava region. The father, an ethnic Russian, read his children Russian-language educational stories written by himself and did not tolerate Ukrainian at home. The mother, on the other hand, spoke only Ukrainian with the servants and ordinary people.
Was Mykola interested in issues of national identification in his youth? Zerov's classmate at the Kyiv gymnasium was the future member of the Central Rada and first Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Ukrainian People's Republic, Oleksandr Shulhin. According to him, Mykola was indifferent to public affairs, including Ukrainian national affairs, even during the 1905 revolution. On the occasion of his high school graduation in 1908, Zerov himself jokingly signed his photo to Shulhin: “To the fighter and speaker from the utterly unprincipled person.”
However, Zerov, a philology student at Kyiv University, became a regular at the Ukrainian Club Rodyna, organized by Mykola Lysenko, Olena Pchilka, and other members of the A semi-secret organization of Ukrainian intellectuals in Kyiv that was engaged in social, cultural and educational activities.Old Community. In 1910, Zerov spoke on behalf of the students at the grave of Ukrainian public and cultural figure Borys Hrinchenko. Meeting with Mykola that same year, Shulhin noted that Zerov had become a conscious Ukrainian.
During the Ukrainian liberation struggle, Mykola intuitively felt where he would do the most good — not in the army, not in the civil service, but at the lecture hall. He lectured on Ukrainian studies, edited the bibliographic journal Knyhar, became a professor of Ukrainian literature at the Today it is the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.Kyiv Institute of Public Education, and simultaneously taught Ukrainian literature at several other educational institutions in Kyiv.
Mykola Kostovych's lectures revealed to the minds and hearts of his listeners who they were and whose children they were. The prodigal son returned to his mother, the destitute Ukraine, and the ignorant son received powerful and noble national incentives for the rest of his life.Leonid Vakulenko, student of Mykola Zerov
From an opponent in a literary debate to an enemy of the Soviet government
In his educational zeal, Mykola is convinced that contemporary Ukrainian literature has great prospects. Young talented authors have emerged, and the variety of their works promises original literary achievements!
Opponents argued to Mykola that contemporary literature needed not diversity but clear revolutionary regulation.
A year later, a large-scale literary The literary debate of 1925-1928. It is considered to have begun with H. Yakovenko's article “On Critics and Criticism in Literature” (Kultura i zhyttia, 1925, April 20) and M. Khvylovyi's response to it.debate was already underway in Ukraine, as Ukrainian poets and writers still hoped to resist the Moscow Bolshevik ideological fist. In this debate, Zerov proved to be an excellent polemicist.
“We want a literary environment in which what is valued is the work of the writer, not the manifesto, not the literary careerism of the ‘man from the organization’, but the author's artistic demanding attitude, first of all, to himself,” Zerov emphasized.
Zerov was outraged that the new government demanded that a literary work be evaluated not by its artistic merits but by its ideological content. He in the 1925 article “Europe — Enlightenment — Education — Likbez”mocks the party critics, saying that the earth revolves around the sun, regardless of Copernicus' social background. And he refers them to the works of Marx to convince them that the class view of a phenomenon always falls short of general logic. Proclaiming his Ad fontes! (“To the origins!”), he called again and again to oppose class ignorance to the eternal values of world culture.
However, party poets and critics constantly shifted the literary debate into an ideological plane. From an opponent in the literary debate, Zerov turns into an enemy of the Soviet government.
Whoever does not kneel will be shot
In June 1926, the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union gave Zerov and all neoclassicists a devastating assessment:
Today, among Ukrainian literary groups such as the neoclassicists, we can observe ideological work designed to meet the needs of the growing Ukrainian bourgeoisie. These circles are characterized by the desire to direct Ukraine's economy on the path of capitalist development and to keep it in touch with bourgeois Europe.
After that, Zerov could no longer participate in the discussion of the tasks and guidelines of contemporary Ukrainian literature. In order to have an indirect influence on the literary process, he wrote prefaces to publications by Ukrainian writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1929, he published these articles in a separate book, From Kulish to Vynnychenko.
How could Zerov have known that soon afterwards the Soviet authorities would call Volodymyr Vynnychenko was the first head of the UPR Directorate, head of the General Secretariat and Secretary General of the Interior.Vynnychenko a fascist? That he himself, Professor Zerov, would be a witness in the case of the counterrevolutionary The trial of the Union for the Freedom of Ukraine is an exemplary case fabricated by the Chekists against Ukrainian scientific intellectuals and religious leaders.UFU?
We need to bring the Ukrainian intelligentsia to its knees. Whoever does not kneel will be shot.Solomon Bruk, investigator in the case of Mykola Zerov
Zerov was forced to testify against the former vice-president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, literary critic Serhii Yefremov — the judges decided to take advantage of the scientific differences that existed between the two critics. “Do you think that Yefremov's works are harmful to Soviet youth?” the judge asked. “I don't agree with them,” Zerov replied and wanted to explain what he found questionable about Yefremov's scientific statements. But the judge was not interested in scientific subtleties: “So you consider them harmful,” he interrupted Zerov. Mykola Kostovych was simply confused by such bold manipulations.
A few years later, the authorities took up Zerov directly.
In January 1934, a regular meeting of the literary section of the Society of Militant Materialist Dialecticians was held at Kyiv University. The report “The Bourgeois Nationalist Literary Concept of M. Zerov and Khvylovism” was delivered. Zerov as a literary scholar and critic was ground to dust.
The speaker was a former student of the professor, Petro Kolesnyk.
In the fall of 1934, Zerov was dismissed from his position as a university professor and banned from scientific work. Soon after, his ten-year-old son Kostyk, his only child, his hope and pride, died of scarlet fever.
Only two university colleagues and two students had the courage to attend his son's funeral. At one point, they even thought that the grieving father had gone mad: over the grave, Zerov began to deliver a speech in Latin, reciting ancient authors.
Did you think it was inappropriate? Can't you understand that I'm burying not only Kostyk, but also myself? That I am addressing my dead son, because I will no longer have to speak to the living?Mykola Zerov, poet, literary critic, translator
He must have had a crystal ball.
Arrest and death
Any job in Kyiv was out of the question. In January 1935, Zerov went to Moscow in search of income, where he translated Horace's works into Russian at the request of the Akademia publishing house. He lived in the village of Pushkino near Moscow, as far as possible from the meticulous party members. There he was arrested on April 27, 1935, and taken to Kyiv.
A few months later, Mykola confessed to being one of the leaders of a nationalist cell that intended to assassinate the leaders of the USSR and create an independent bourgeois Ukraine. In February 1936, Zerov was sentenced to ten years in prison and sent to the Solovki camp.
When I saw him for the first time on Solovki on a gray spring day, he was wearing his “professor” hat with his unchanged pince-nez and his characteristic sincere smile. Mykola Kostovych was given a shovel. The foreman told him where and how much land he had to dig. Zerov went to his plot. Around lunchtime, while walking in the same fields, I came across the professor sitting on a rock reading Virgil.Semen Pidhainyi, Ukrainian historian, prisoner of the Solovki camp
Zerov's superiors assigned him another job: cleaning the premises. They did not forbid him to translate Virgil's Aeneid in his free time. On September 19, 1937, Mykola wrote to his wife that he had finished the translation (the manuscript of the translation has not yet been found). Three weeks later, Zerov's case was reviewed by the Leningrad NKVD and he was sentenced to death. On November 3, in a sand quarry on the 19th kilometer of the Located on the Karelian Peninsula, RussiaMedvezhyegorsk-Povenets road, State Security Captain Matveev pulled the trigger.
Sofia Zerova continued to send money to her husband for eight more months. No one informed her of his death. The KGB continued to cover their tracks. The following entry is dated January 23, 1957, in the civil status records of the Leningrad registry office: “Mykola Kostiantynovych Zerov died on October 13, 1941, age 51. Cause of death: paralysis of the cardiovascular system.” This date will be reported to Sofia as the official day of Mykola's death.
After all, Zerova, not Petrova
Zerov's symbolic burial place is in Kyiv, at the Lukianivka Cemetery, next to the grave of his son. Sofia's ashes also rest in Lukianivka, next to her second husband, Viktor Petrov, who is known to Ukrainians as the writer Author of the novels The Girl with the Bear, Doctor Seraphicus, Alina and KostomarovDomontovych.
***
...Mykola met Sofia Loboda, a professor's daughter, back in 1912. They were married on February 13, 1920, at St. Borys and Hlib Church in Kyiv. Sofia, a philologist by training, was working at the Book Chamber at the time.
He was reserved, delicate, sensitive, friendly, prone to jokes and wit even in unfortunate circumstances... He was surprisingly impractical, and he could not even chop wood. Zerov and I lived happily together, he had a smooth, calm character, never got irritated by various trifles of life and inconsistencies, and even joked about them.Sofia Zerova, wife of Mykola Zerov
From hungry Kyiv, Mykola went to teach in the town of Barashivka. The parents of his students paid him for his work with flour, millet, and salo, helped with firewood, and this made life very easy for the young couple. The Zerovs often had friends visit them in Barashivka. Once Viktor Petrov came to visit. He was four years younger than Sofia, so at first no one took his love for Mykola's wife seriously.
Zerov was organized, self-demanding, and strived for perfection in everything: in writing poetry, in sharpening a pencil, in editing texts, and even in choosing a caracul for a collar or trying on a suit. Zerov is expansive, agile, like living silver. He is extremely polite and correct. A man of high and open mind.Viktor Petrov (Domontovych), writer, philosopher
Zerov was quite critical of his opponent.
Mykola and Viktor went through life on their own paths, but they were always connected by their love for Sofia and kept each other in sight. Even from Solovki, Mykola asks his wife about Petrov: “Why don't you write anything about him?”
There are 31 letters that Zerov wrote to Sofia from the camp at the Central State Archive of Music, Literature and Art. Even when it comes to everyday things, Mykola knows how to be gentle: “You ask what to send me next time. The same thing, dear Sonik — salo, crackers, sugar...” He asks her for recent photos, detailed stories about her life, discusses books and translations with her, and dreams of celebrating her birthday together. He admits that after the death of his son, she and literature are the main things in his life.
Mykola was shot, and Viktor Petrov lived a long life.
“Looking back, one embraces the decades that have passed with one glance and only one feeling — you have always been at the center of everything,” Viktor wrote to Sofia in 1953. Four years later, 67-year old Sofia would marry him. But she would remain with Mykola's surname. In 1966, she would become the compiler of Zerov's selected works. Viktor would prepare notes for them. She lived with Mykola for 14 years and with Viktor for 12. Sofia Zerova died in 1985, having lived to the age of 95.
Legacy
For a long time, only close friends knew that the critic and translator Zerov wrote poetry. He liked to create handwritten collections of them and give them as a memento. During Zerov's lifetime, two of his books were published: in 1920, Anthology of Ancient Poetry, and in 1924, Kamena. Critic Serhii Yefremov called Zerov's translations of Ovid and Catullus “beautiful” and said that they “aptly dress the ancient Roman life in the clothes of the Ukrainian word.”
And one of the most prominent poets of the Ukrainian emigration, Ukrainian writer, cultural encyclopaedist, publicist, literary critic, centurion of the UPR Army, emigrated to Europe after the defeat of the UPR. He died in the United StatesYevhen Malaniuk, said about Kamena:
“...Many nations may envy us because of such a textbook of taste and style, such a treasure trove of words, such a cultural monument.”
For those interested in 20th-century Ukrainian literature, hromadske has prepared a special project called “Executed Renaissance” — here you can read the life stories of artists who were killed by the Soviets in the 1930s.