PERSPECTIVES: Homage to Mykola Leontovych (01/25/98)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

Homage to Mykola Leontovych

I wouldn't have thought it possible, but the truth is I was getting tired of Mykola Leonotovych's "Shchedryk" (Carol of the Bells) during this past Christmas season. On the radio, in shopping malls, television, ice-dance exhibitions, even for a champagne commercial, there it was: da, da-da, da; da, da-da, da; da, da-da; da, da-da, da ... If ever there's been a Ukrainian melody that's entered the popular repertoire of American culture, this one has.

The problem is, I can't think of too many other Ukrainian contributions to American society or world culture. Besides Leontovych's "Shchedryk," pysanky at Eastertime and "perogies" (varenyky) any time, what has Ukrainian culture given that's entered popular culture or, for that matter, the world theatrical, literary musical or artistic repertoire?

In art, there's the sculptor, Alexander Archipenko and the printmaker Jacques Hnizdovsky, and in cinema Oleksander Dovzhenko, but they're just about the only artists whose work you'll see outside a Ukrainian context.

This lack of a Ukrainian presence on the world stage, though, does not mean the culture doesn't measure up. But it does reflect the grim political realities that confronted the Ukrainian people throughout most of the 20th century.

Under tsarist Russia, the Ukrainian language was banned. No Ukrainian novels or serious theatrical productions were possible. As for large-scale orchestras, ballets or art galleries, Ukraine with its tiny middle class had neither the money nor the audience to support those ventures. Only with the Revolution of 1917 did the door finally open to serious Ukrainian culture.

Mykola Leontovych was one of those who benefited. He had graduated from a theological seminary in 1899 and then spent nearly 20 years as a teacher and choirmaster in provincial towns. He remained generally unrecognized until 1918, when he came to Kyiv to teach at the new Conservatory and the Lysenko Institute of Music and Dance. His compositions soon entered the repertoire of the Ukrainian Republican Kapell under the direction of Oleksander Koshetz, which was touring Europe and the United States on behalf of the new independent Ukrainian National Republic. One of the works clicked - "Shchedryk" - now you hear it all the time. Without independent Ukraine's investment in the Republican Kapell and Koshetz's dedication, no one would have heard the "Carol of the Bells."

The tiny window of opportunity that opened with Ukraine's independence in 1918 spawned hundreds of other artistic careers. Archipenko had begun his career in Kyiv, but moved to Paris before World War I and made his reputation there. Oleksander Dovzhenko, on the other hand, stayed in Kyiv and created several pioneering movies on Ukrainian themes in the '20s, inventing camera techniques that are now standard cinematic devices.

As for literature, Ukraine from 1918 into the late 1920s exploded with creativity, with a large variety of journals and publishing houses encouraging new, young voices to write poetry, stories, novels and plays for a newly literate nation eager to read about itself.

All of this came to a bloody end with the rise of Joseph Stalin. He and his apparat imprisoned and murdered Ukrainian artists, burned their books, stopped their stage productions, banned their music, smashed their sculptures and ripped their canvases. The whole nation was sealed off and its culture targeted for elimination. The world barely noticed the massacre via starvation of 7 million peasants in the winter of 1932-1933.

It was a terrible time for anyone to be alive, but for the artist it was death, either literally with a bullet to the back of the head in some commissar's cellar or in the creative sense, when every original thought was strangled before it could be expressed. Every piece of art had to glorify the state, the party, Joseph Stalin. Artists were punished not just for expressing forbidden thoughts, but for expressing themselves at all, if they dared do so without permission and approval. This era of censorship and socialist realism lasted 60 years, ending sometime during the reign of Mikhail Gorbachev when people gradually lost their fear and eventually rose up.

Today, Ukraine is again independent and the door for Ukrainian culture is open once more. Ukrainian artists are starting to take advantage of the opportunity. The New York Times recently had a very nice review of a Carnegie Hall concert by the Kyiv Chamber Choir, featuring the works of Ukrainian composers spanning the centuries from the 17th to the 20th: Artem Vedel, Mykola Lysenko, Volodymyr Stetsenko, Mykola Diletsky, Lesia Dychko, Volodymyr Stepurko, Alexander Yakivchuk, Yuri Alzhnev, Anatoly Avdiievsky and yes, Mykola Leontovych, who I'm sure would have been pleased that the choir sang something other than his famous "Shchedryk."

The reviewer described the works as "a particularly interesting cultural yield" with the individual works descried as "serene, gorgeously harmonized," "compelling" and "lush." The choir, directed by Mykola Hobdych, was "disciplined, well-blended" and "appealingly varied in color and flexible."

I'll be honest with you: I haven't heard of most of these composers, and I've certainly never heard their music. If I haven't, then I doubt if very many others have. The same lack of knowledge about Ukrainian culture prevails across many different art forms.

There are terrific Ukrainian novels, I'm told, by authors like Ulas Samchuk and Pavlo Zahrebelny, but their works are hard to find in Ukrainian and they remain untranslated (as far as I know). Even a fine young American novelist like Askold Melnychuk, who got glowing reviews from The New York Times for his 1994 book about the Ukrainian American experience, "What is Told," is relatively unknown in his own Ukrainian American community. He needs readers to make it in the highly competitive world of American publishing.

Ukrainians are among the strongest, most resilient people in the world. Very few nations have endured the slaughter and the generations-long assault on their culture the way Ukrainians have and emerged from it alive and intact. Nonetheless, the traumas from that grim national experience are deep and troubling: crime, corruption, alcoholism, cynicism, unemployment, falling birthrates - you name it.

The way out of that malaise will not be easy and there is no magic solution. But this I know: Ukraine's problem is spiritual as much as it is economic, social or political, and the way to promote spiritual health is to focus on the arts.

My own New Year's resolution, therefore, is to be part of the audience that buys books and CDs, goes to concerts and gallery openings and other venues featuring Ukrainian artists - in short, to support what is needed for the culture to emerge with another flowing that makes it possible for another Leontovych to emerge. What a pleasant resolution!

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