The 1960s in the Soviet Union became widely known as Khrushchev’s Thaw, a period of relative liberalization of political and cultural life. In Ukraine, this period was characterized by an activisation of cultural life, yet under the Committee of State Security watching. Nonetheless, since the late 1960s, the political climate became less favorable as the relative liberalization of the preceding decade came to an end. This period brought new restrictions regarding freedom of speech and new waves of arrests of artistic intelligentsia. In this political and cultural environment, the movement of dissidents was established as an opposition to the regime.
In today’s Ukraine, Hrytsko Chubai is better known as the father of Taras Chubai, the front-men of the rock band “Plach Yeremii” [“Jeremiah`s Cry”]. Taras Chubai is the popularizer of the poetic heritage of his father (a lot of poetries by Hrysko Chubaі became the lyrics of the band, for example, such works as “Korydor” [“Hallway”], “Svitlo i Spovid`” [“The Light and the Confession”], “Vidshukuvannia Prychetnoho” [“Seeking the Blamed”] etc.). Nonetheless, Hrytsko Chubaі was one of the most prominent Ukrainian poets of the 1970s, and a central figure of Ukrainian underground culture in Lviv.
The artistic literature landscape of Lviv was centered around the self-published (samvydav) artistic and literature journal “Skrynia” [“The Chest”], the only issue of which appeared in 1971. Hrytsko Chubai initiated this publication, but other authors of this journal included Oleh Lysheha, Mykola Riabchuk, Victor Morozov, Volodymyr Onyshchenko, Roman Kis`, Orest Yavorskyi, Yurko Kokh, and so on.
Riabchuk, the member of this artistic group, recalls the deliberations around the naming of the journal: “It’s also hard for me to say, why this particular name was chosen. Perhaps, it was an unconscious or conscious allusion to a certain tightness, to such kind of encapsulation. In other words, in our space, we have a kind of only our chest. Maybe, it was a certain unconscious hint to the process of writing to the desk, to the chest. Meanwhile, it also allowed us to play with these folklore patterns” (Riabchuk 2008, para. 30).
The idea to create the journal emerged among the participants of literary apartment evenings (“literaturnuky”, “kvartyrnyky”) organized by Hrytsko Chubai in his flat in Lviv. His wife, Halyna Chubai, helped to create the first volume using a typewriter and two kinds of paper, the rude one and the one usually used for cigarettes, and Volodymyr Onyshchenko created the journal cover (Riabchuk 2008, para. 1 ̶ 2).
The key features of Skrynia are two-fold. On the one hand, the publication was characterized by an apolitical vibe as to avoid political persecution (Riabchuk 2008, para. 1). On the other hand, it embraced modernity that contradicted the declared socialist nature of the Soviet regime. Despite the lack of a strong nationalistic orientation, Skrynia’s non-socialist tendencies were enough to draw the interest of the Communist Party, leading to subsequent confiscation of all Skrynia copies. According to Riabchuk, it was exactly the cover that triggered the Party’s decision regarding the journal. In his design, Onyshchenko drew inspiration from modernist graphic artist Heorhii Narbut, the creator of the coats of arms, banknotes and postage stamps for the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Onyshchenko combined traditional folklore and modern ornaments, leading to the official review that the cover of the journal was reminiscent of the “nationalistic” journal covers published during the 1920s-30s (Riabchuk 2008, para. 3).
According to scholars and contemporaries, Chubai never considered or identified himself as a Ukrainian nationalist (Skrypnyk 2014, p. 78). Nonetheless, during certain periods of his life, he maintained close friendships with the Kalynets family, Iryna and Ihor. Both of them were writers and cherished nationalistic ideas, defending Ukrainian independence idea statement and anti-Soviet position. As such, their political views were in opposition to the apolitical stand of Chubai, who was devoted to poetry only. The only poem by Chubai published in Skrynia was Maria, the work that avoided social themes and problems and was characterized by hermetic depiction of the poetic world.
Nevertheless, the censorship at the beginning of the 1970s was very hard, and even apolitical activity, if it did not maintain the soviet ideology, was enough to get in prison. After the founding of the journal, many of the participants in Chubai’s literary group were arrested and interrogated in detention centers. Iryna and Ihor Kalynets were sentenced to 6 years of prison colony and to 3 years of labor camps in Mordovia, and other participants of the group were expelled from universities (Riabchuk, for example) or continued to be watched by secret services (as Chubai himself). Marianna Cheletska (2018) said that “a release of Skrynia was connected with the spreading of the poem Vertep by Chubai and with imprisoning of Chubai for four days in the detention center because of Kalynets family court case in 1972” (Quoted from p. 117).
The poetical activity of Hrytsko Chubai was connected not only to Skrynia, where he was the editor-in-chief but also to the journal Ukraїnskyi Visnyk [Ukrainian Herrald], another samvydav publication established by Viacheslav Chornovil in 1970. Chornovil was the editor-in-chief of Ukrainskyi Visnyk, which existed during 1970-1972. Unlike Skrynia, Ukraїnskyi Visnyk was not above politics. Apart from Chubai, such poets as Ivan Sokulskyi, Vasyl Stus, Valentyn Moroz, Ihor Kalynets, Vasyl Symonenko, Ivan Drach, Mykola Cholodnyi, Bohdan Stelmakh published their work in the journal.
Only two poems by Hrytsko Chubai appeared in Ukraїnskyi Visnyk: the poem Velykden—Kosmach, 1970 [The Easter—Kosmach 1970] and the poem Vertep [The Nativity Scene] (Paska & Perehinchuk 2023, p. 126). They were featured in Volumes IV and V in 1971, respectively. Although highly artistic, those poems contain political undertones that reflect the ideological mood of the 1970s.
The poem Velykden was a reflection and an allusion to a certain event in the life of Valentyn Moroz. On Easter Day in 1970, the secret services made a provocation against the poet in an attempt to arrest him. This poem is part of a poetic cycle Pisni dlia zolotoii klitky [Songs for gold cage], which Chubai fully devoted to Valentyn Moroz (Danchyshyn 2018, p.145). Chornovil selected this poem for publication in Ukraїnskyi Visnyk because of its resistance pathos (Paska & Perehinchuk 2023, p. 129).
Chubai uses an allegorical image of a dragon to represent the repressive soviet system. The dragon, same as the Soviet regiьe, pretends to be “indigenous”. According to Nazar Danchyshyn (2018), the image of the dragon could be a reference to Petro Shelest, the first secretary of the Central Committee of Communistic Party in Ukraine from 1963 up to 1972. The legacy of Shelest is highly ambivalent. On the one hand, his tenure is known for the Ukrainian national cultural revival (the Sixtiers generation). On the other hand, there were two waves of arrests during his rule. The first one took place from August to September 1965 against the persons defending the revival of Ukrainian national cultural intentions. Vasyl Ovsiienko stated that “the power itself pushed the dissenters from the communism (it is better to say, dissidents or revisionists) to the state of its restless enemies”) (Ovsiienko 2018, p. 209). The second wave of arrests took place from January to April 1972, in connection to the KPSU’s decree “On the Literary and Artistic Critics”, demanding to increase in the ideological and theoretical level of literary and artistic critics, its relevance for the struggle regarding the un-orthodox worldview) (Quoted from Paska & Perehinchuk 2023, p. 129). The arrest of Valentyn Moroz outpaced the second wave over 1.5 years (Danchyshyn 2018, p. 146) because of his consideration and promotion of the integral nationalism conception that was closer to the OUN ideology [1] (Ovsiienko 2018, p. 212). Another important instance that marked Shelest’s tenure was a fire on 24 May 1964 (referred to as officially sanctioned arson) in the State Public Library, which destroyed nearly 600 thousand volumes of valuable old printed books, manuscripts, rare books, archives, and other materials related to Ukrainian history and culture.
For Chubai, the image of prison as depicted on the Easter eggs stands for the Soviet repressive system, when Easter is not a religious celebration of the Resurrection of Christ but an ordinary day in a Soviet prison, where there is no God. In Chubai’s poetry, the opposition of sacral vs. profane is the key artistic strategy to depict the modus of being within the “prison reality”, where the Soviet Union appears as a totalitarian prison. The image of a pysanka [“Easter egg” in original Ukrainian text] where “a prison is painted” also could be a hint to the repressive tendencies and restriction of all ways for Ukrainian national cultural development.
Another composition by Chubai published in the Ukraїnskyi Visnyk was the poem Vertep, originally written in 1968, and frequently presented during the literary evenings. According to Nadia Havrylchuk (2008), the poem is a modification of baroque Ukrainian drama, characterized by two dimensions – the sacred and the profane. In the poem, this modification appears via a constant switch between different poetic forms. Vers libre stands for the profane dimension of a prison, and represents the movement without true progress. While the more sophisticated quatrain – a stanza of four lines – is used as an allusion to the sacral dimension, which in the poem is represented through the optics of divine harmony, out of touch and beyond the space of repressions. The mood of the protagonist in this poem is reminiscent of that of Hamlet:
Hamlet:
Denmark’s a prison.
Rosencrantz:
Then is the world one.
Hamlet:
A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst. (Shakespeare n. d.).
The epigraph of the poem Vertep also has interesting peculiarities. It is taken from Latin: “Nihil semper suo statu manet,” which means: “Nothing remains forever unchanged.” It is also very close to the phrase “Nihil est omni parte beatum,” which means “nothing will be absolute”, which is ascribable to Horace, and, according to this phrase, the proverb establishes an eternal development of humanity and nature, the sense of proverb also provokes to cognition and improvement of themselves. (Osypov 2009, p. 177). In the poem by Chubai, this epigraph brings additional meaning and makes the whole poem epical and a bit ironical regarding the depiction of the image of the Soviet Union, which is depicted via the allegorical universalized image of civilization. The meaning of the epigraph has visional features of the author’s faith that proclaim the world changes and the prison is not forever.
In conclusion, the two poems by Chubai could be considered as an appearance of non-direct anti-Soviet protest. The author’s works appeared in connection to his life occurrences, and to the lives of his colleagues, and they completely referred to the situation of repression that emerged via the Thaw that provoked the struggle with other thinking and consequenced in two waves of arrests. The irony of the author`s direct to the Soviet system was equaled to the straight opposition against the totalitarian system.
[1] OUN, or the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, was a civilian and political right-radical movement that emerged in the 1920s, that was considering the opportunity for the Ukrainian nation to create a united and independent state. In 1940, the movement was divided into two fundamental branches: the first one, revolutionary, which was radical and militant, led by Stepan Bandera, and the second one, which was more liberal, led by Andrii Melnyk (Hai-Nyzhnyk 2022, para. 1-2; Kucheruk 2022, para. 1). The ideology of integral nationalism was closer to the branch of revolutionary OUN. This type of nationalism, according to Heorhii Kasianov, is characterized by “denying of basic humanistic principles, preaching the principles of complete obey of personal interests to the interests of the state, the full devotion to the own nation, xenophobia and militarism. It also inherited a respect for historical and national traditions from conservative nationalism. At the same time, integral nationalism is not interested in the well-being of the whole of humanity and particular nations. The own nation for integral nationalists is the highest value. The most prominent feature of integral nationalism is an aggressive attitude toward another-thinking and other nations. This type of nationalism completely rejects the liberal principles” (Kasianov 1999, p. 185).
In today’s Ukraine, Hrytsko Chubai is better known as the father of Taras Chubai, the front-men of the rock band “Plach Yeremii” [“Jeremiah’s Cry”]. Taras Chubai is the popularizer of the poetic heritage of his father (a lot of poetries by Hrysko Chubaі became the lyrics of the band, for example, such works as “Korydor” [“Hallway”], “Svitlo i Spovid`” [“The Light and the Confession”], “Vidshukuvannia Prychetnoho” [“Seeking the Blamed”] etc.). Nonetheless, Hrytsko Chubaі was one of the most prominent Ukrainian poets of the 1970s and a central figure of Ukrainian underground culture in Lviv. Below, there will be analyzed two poems by Hrytsko Chubai, the poem Velykden – Kosmach, 1970 [The Easter – Kosmach 1970] and the poem Vertep [The Nativity Scene] (Paska & Perehinchuk 2023, p. 126).