“It is Necessary to Get Enough that Europe, Not to Desire It”: Literary Environment of Soviet Ukraine of 1920s in Valerian Polishchuk’s Correspondence

Abstract

The article examines the ego-documents of the renowned Ukrainian poet Valerian Polishchuk, a representative of the Ukrainian Renaissance of the 1920s. The correspondence of the writer is of particular interest due to its richness and the important themes reflected in it. These are the poet’s letters to his wife, Olena Konukhes, which are archived in the Central State Archive-Museum of Literature and Arts of Ukraine. The aim of the paper is to determine, based on the writer’s letters, the circumstances of his trips abroad as well as to characterize the complex relationships within the literary and artistic environment of the 1920s. Besides, to examine the poet’s epistolary, other documents are also studied. It is worth noting that the poet’s letters to Olena Konukhes have not been fully analysed in historiography.

The most significant portion of the aforementioned letters is those written to the poet’s wife during his trip through Europe from the end of 1924 to the beginning of 1925. Together with Pavlo Tychyna and Oles Dosvitny, he first visited Moscow, where he had meetings with Vsevolod Meyerhold and other representatives of literary and artistic circles. During the trip, under the instructions of the People’s Commissariat for Education, he established connections with artists, including Ukrainian emigrants. It is obvious that the State Political Directorate monitored such trips, and Valerian Polishchuk’s journey with his colleagues was no exception. Thus, V. Polishchuk’s epistolary allows to observe from within the significant events of the poet’s life but also the broader literary and artistic intellectuals’ environment of Soviet Ukraine in all their complexity and contradictions.