The Ukrainian reading public in the 1920s: real, implied, and ideal

ABSTRACT

The reading public was discussed in the Soviet Ukrainian press during the 1920s, at a time when the drive to eliminate illiteracy and implement Ukrainization was scoring increasing successes. Sociological studies of the “real” reader indicated strong preferences for pre-revolutionary authors and foreign writers in translation. Under pressure from Moscow, in the late 1920s Mykola Skrypnyk, the Commissar for Education, and the literary theorist Kost' Dovhan' changed the rhetoric advocating Ukrainization, stressing its proletarian content. They supported the concept of an “implied” working-class reader who read Ukrainian and was simultaneously committed to developing socialism and a “proletarian” culture. However, many sophisticated writers pitched their work to an “ideal” reader, whom they imagined as the end-product of Ukrainization – a culturally literate, urban, and critically thinking consumer. The three ways of conceptualizing the consumer clashed, as the Ukrainization policy went through two major shifts during the period of the first five-year plan (1928–33). Ideologists, educators, and writers adapted to these shifts by redefining the way they conceptualized the reader.

Durant les années 20, les amateurs de lecture furent discutés dans la presse soviétique ukrainienne, une période où la campagne à éliminer l’illettrisme et à appliquer l’ukrainisation enregistrait un succès grandissant. Les études sociologiques du « vrai » lecteur indiquaient des fortes préférences pour les auteurs prérévolutionnaires et pour les écrivains étrangers traduits. Sous la pression de Moscou, vers les années 30 Mykola Skrypnyk, le Commissaire pour l’Éducation, et le théoricien littéraire Kost' Dovhan' ont modifié la rhétorique préconisant l’ukrainisation, avec emphase sur son contenu prolétarien. Ils ont soutenu le concept d’un lecteur ouvrier « implicite » qui lisait en ukrainien et s’engageait au développement du socialisme en même temps qu’une culture « prolétarienne ». Pourtant beaucoup d’écrivains raffinés destinaient leurs œuvres à un lecteur « idéal », l’imaginant comme le produit fini de l’ukrainisation – un consommateur culturellement instruit, urbain et réfléchi. Les trois façons de conceptualiser le consommateur se sont heurtées, alors que la politique d’ukrainisation passait par deux grands changements pendant la période du premier plan quinquennal (1928-33). Les idéologues, les éducateurs et les écrivains se sont adaptés aux changements avec une redéfinition de la façon dont ils conceptualisaient le lecteur.

KEYWORDS:

• Soviet Ukraine
• reader
• 1920s
• Ukrainization
• literature

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination, 28–29.

2. Siropolko, Narodnia osvita, 157, 159.

3. Mykola Skrypnyk reported that in 1929–30, 50.2 percent of books in libraries and reading rooms located at institutes of political education were in Russian and 43.7 percent were in Ukrainian (Siropolko, Narodnia osvita, 207). A survey of trade union libraries, reported in a study published in 1930, revealed that 85.5 percent of books were in Russian and 12.5 percent in Ukrainian. However, among miners, for example, the demand for Russian and Ukrainian books was equal (Ibid., 174). The overall library situation was much worse. In 1927 in a speech to the union of library workers, Skrypnyk stated that the percentage of Ukrainian books in state libraries was 1 percent and in libraries open to the public it was 15–18 percent (Ibid., 173).

4. Wolfgang Iser has described how the reader implied or imagined by an author can be detected within a text, and how in the process of reading a text different readers can “actualize” potential meanings. In this way the scholar suggests a link between the author and reader, both of whom “produce” the text. Reading is therefore an event of construction that occurs between text and reader (Iser, Implied Reader, xii).

5. During the first major show trial of the SVU (Spilka Vyzvolennia Ukrainy; Union for the Liberation of Ukraine) in April 1930, Skrypnyk identified the SVU as “a nationalist, Petliurite, fascist organization” that had spread its influence among educators throughout the country. According to him, members of the SVU represented the old Ukrainian culture. The new one would represent a proletarian culture of state industrialization and agricultural collectivization (Skrypnyk, “Novi linii,” 221, 227).

6. There is evidence that a counter-Ukrainization had already been conceived in the mid-twenties within the secret police, the OGPU or GPU (United State Political Administration, 1923–34). The trials of “nationalists” in the early thirties were organized to prevent the crystallization of a political opposition in Ukraine during the crisis resulting from collectivization and famine. Both the trials and the accompanying mass arrests were instigated by Moscow and carefully organized by the secret police. See Shkandrij and Bertelsen, “National Operations”; Bertelsen and Shkandrij, “Secret Police.”

7. Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 53–54.

8. Ibid., 58–59.

9. Ibid., 60.

10. Ibid., 61.

11. Liber reports that Stalino, today’s Donetsk, was the major exception to this trend, although a Ukrainian Komsomol paper appeared there (Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 61).

12. Skrypnyk, “Novi linii,” 211.

13. Ibid., 212.

14. “Desiatylitnii iuvilei,” 213. By comparison, the figures for the immediate post-revolutionary years had been 1373 in 1917 (of which 747 in Ukrainian), 1526 in 1918 (of which 1084 in Ukrainian), 1414 in 1919 (635 in Ukrainian), 860 in 1920 (457 in Ukrainian), 667 in 1919 (214 in Ukrainian), and 680 in 1922 (of which only 186 had been in Ukrainian) (“Persha Vseukrains'ka Vystavka,” 233).

15. Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 83.

16. Siropolko, Narodnia osvita, 191–192.

17. Quoted in Siropolko, Narodnia osvita, 196.

18. Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 50.

19. The 1931 census did not register statistics according to national composition (unlike the 1926 census), probably because authorities suppressed this information, which provided ammunition for those who favoured a greater Ukrainization of the party and bureaucracy (Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 56–58).

20. It was this suspicion that led to Stalin’s criticism of Mykola Khvyl'ovyi and Oleksandr Shums'kyi in 1926, and the latter’s removal as the Ukrainian Commissar for Education. The letter is reproduced in Shkandrij, Modernists, Marxists, 94–95.

21. Shapoval, Prystaiko, and Zolotarov, ChK-GPU-NKVD, 135.

22. Pauly, Breaking the Tongue, 249.

23. Skrypnyk, “Novi linii,” 223–224.

24. The term was used at this time to stigmatize those who either denied the existence of a separate Ukrainian identity or viewed it merely as a regional variant of Russian. Mykola Khvyl'ovyi’s pamphlet Ukraina chy Malorosiia? (Ukraine or Little Russia?), which circulated in 1926, associated the Little Russian complex with colonial oppression, fear of imperial authority, and the inability to assert oneself. Party authorities denounced the pamphlet and prevented its publication. For translations of selected passages see Khvylovy, Cultural Renaissance in Ukraine, 225–232; for an analysis of Khvyl'ovyi’s argument see Shkandrij, Modernists, Marxists, 62–63.

25. Skrypnyk, “Zblyzhennia i zlyttia,” 263.

26. Skrypnyk, “Novi linii,” 215.

27. Pauly, Breaking the Tongue, 239.

28. Cherniak, “Zhurnal'na problema,” 5–6. In 1928 in Soviet Ukraine a total of 124 journals were published in Ukrainian and 56 in Russian. By comparison, in 1929 a total of 232 newspapers were published in Ukrainian and 19 in Russian. This was already a large jump from the previous year, for which the corresponding numbers were 82 and 55 (Siropolko, Narodnia osvita, 191). Russian journals and newspapers published in the main cities of the Soviet Union were printed in much larger runs, and many of these mass-circulation dailies dominated the market in Ukrainian cities.

29. Dovhan', “Sotsiial'na funktsiia,” 40, 46.

30. Ibid., 37.

31. Kerekez, “Khudozhnia literatura,” 19–21.

32. Dovhan', “Sotsiial'na funktsiia,” 38.

33. Hodkevych, “Ukrains'ke krasne pys'mentsvo,” 62; and table at the end of this issue, 111–114.

34. Cherniak, “zhurnal’na problema,” 9.

35. Ibid., 12.

36. Ibid., 16.

37. Kerekez, “Khudozhnia literatura,” 22.

38. Ibid., 22–23.

39. Ibid., 24.

40. Siropolko, Narodnia osvita, 222. In one survey from 1924–25 the libraries of Kyiv provided the following figures for their most frequently borrowed authors: Jack London 714, Emile Zola 616, Upton Sinclair 465, Maksim Gor'kii 374, H. G. Wells 361, O. Henry 328, Volodymyr Vynnychenko 271 (Dovhan', “Cherhova problema,” 81).

41. Dovhan', “Ukrains'ka literatura,” 42; Kerekez, “Khudozhnia literatura,” 22.

42. Kerekez, “Khudozhnia literatura,” 22; Rudenko, “Shcho chytaie”; Dovhan', “Cherhova problema,” 81.

43. Rudenko, “Shcho chytaie.”

44. Sukhyno-Khomenko, “Piatyrichka,” 6.

45. Cherniak complained that the network of Ukrainian journals was insufficient to service the population. Specialized journals in construction, medicine, engineering, for example, had small runs, even though steady growth was being experienced in industry. The demand for some journals had risen. Bezvirnyk (Atheist) had gone from 6037 in 1928 to 23,653 in 1929; Radians'ka osvita (Soviet Education) from 12,640 to 18,275 in the same year. The demand for children’s journals had risen rapidly: Dytiacha zmina (New Child) from 18,912 to 65,224. Druh ditei (Children’s Friend) from 1624 to 7713. Dytiachyi rukh (Children’s Movement) from 4629 to 10,135. Za hramotu (For Literacy) from 3100 to 27,929 (Cherniak, “Zhurnal'na problema,” 11). The failure to create a distribution system with outlets and a marketing system was a constant complaint. Russian journals often had preferential conditions and were of course able to take advantage of established networks and higher volumes since they were printed in Russia and imported (12).

46. Iohansen, Podorozh liudyny and Antonenko-Davydovych, Zemleiu ukrains'koiu.

47. Antonenko-Davydovych, Zemleiu ukrains'koiu, 12.

48. Sukhyno-Khomenko, “Piatyrichka,” 8.

49. Ibid., 4.

50. Kerekez, “Khudozhnia literatura,” 26–27.

51. For a selection of these articles see Skrypnyk, Statti i promovy.

52. Antonenko-Davydovych, Zemleiu ukrains'koiu, 162.

53. Sukhyno-Khomenko, “Piatyrichka,” 12.

54. Ibid., 18.

55. Lovell, Russian Reading Revolution, 29.

56. Bilets'kyi, “Chytach, pys'mennyk,” “Ob odnoi.” On the reader’s conservative taste see his “Petro Panch,” 105, 107.

57. Fylypovych, “Sotsiial'ne oblychchia”; Zerov, “Nove pys'menstvo,” “Lesia Ukrainka,” “Literaturna postat'”; Aizenshtok, Kotliarevshchyna, “Proty tradytsii.”

58. Kappeler, “Small People,” 87–88. Kappeler reports that in the 1897 census 67,066 people belonging to the hereditary nobility listed Ukrainian as their mother tongue, and the proportion of Ukrainian-speaking nobles (descendants of the Hetmanate’s ruling class) was particularly significant in the Left Bank. In Poltava gubernia, for example, “Ukrainian speakers not only constituted 98 percent of the peasantry, but also two thirds of the hereditary nobility, 15 percent of the merchants, 51 percent of the ‘burghers’ (meshchane), and 83 percent of the clergy” (88).

59. Ivan Franko, for example, sided with the “instructive” and “popular” and against the proponents of modernism: “You know, when I write anything, I do not try to create chef d’oeuvres. I do not attend to the perfection of form, etc. Not because this is in itself bad, but because at the present time the main thing should be the idea itself, the chief task of a writer should be to move, to interest, to thrust a book into the reader’s hands” (Fylypovych, “Shliakhy Frankovoi poezii,” 209). This conflict of nineteenth-century populism with twentieth-century high culture surfaced in the period of early modernism (1890 to 1914) and again with particular force during the Literary Discussion of the 1920s. It is noteworthy that scholarship on the reader produced in the 1920s shows an awareness of the need for these publics to coexist. The appearance of a mass reader was an issue elsewhere. In her Fiction and the Reading Public Q. D. Leavis analyzed popular taste in Britain during the twenties, and commented on the threat to literary standards posed by commercial exploitation of the demand from lowbrow and middlebrow readers. The explosion of the publishing industry was seen as a dangerous threat to the craft of fiction and deplored as a debasement of cultivated standards. Similar attitudes were sometimes embraced in Ukraine by those who saw the split between the literary intellectual and untutored common reader posing a danger to the survival of modern Ukrainian culture.

60. Brooks, Russia Learned, 333–334.

61. Antonenko-Davydovych, Zemleiu ukrains'koiu, 161–162.

62. Kulyk, “Age Factor,” 297.

63. Ibid., 297–298.

64. See, for example, Boiko, “Narodnytstvo.” Militantly pro-Bolshevik writing in the early 1930s associated the Ukrainian peasantry with reactionary views and resistance to revolution, often mixing terms of abuse such as “Petliurite,” “bourgeois,” “nationalist,” “Autocephalist” (a reference to the Autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church), “kulak,” and “fascist.” Examples of this kind of language can be found in the poetry of Pavlo Tychyna and Leonid Pervomais'kyi from this time.

65. The neglect of the highbrow was to some degree compensated by writings and publications in interwar western Ukraine (then part of Poland) and in the émigré communities in Central and Western Europe. In the twenties banned or inaccessible works by Soviet writers like Ievhen Pluzhnyk, Valeriian Pidmohyl'nyi, Borys Antonenko-Davydovych, Iurii Ianovs'kyi, and Mykola Khvyl'ovyi were published abroad. Writers who lived outside the Soviet Union, some of whom had emigrated after the failure of the struggle for independence, also produced a literature aimed at the sophisticated reader. In the interwar period writers like Ievhen Malaniuk, Oleksandr Oles', Bohdan-Ihor Antonych, Iurii Lypa, Leonid Mosendz, and Ulas Samchuk were published in western Ukraine (Galicia, Bukovyna, and Transcarpathia) and in émigré centres. Although literature with a primarily educational function was also produced (children’s books, popular fiction, textbooks and readers of various kinds), outstanding writers were recognized. The Ukrainian community in Galicia, for example, regularly awarded prizes for works such as Ulas Samchuk’s Volyn' (Volhynia, 1934–38) and Leonid Mosendz’s Zasiv (Seeding, 1936). Ironically, in Soviet Ukraine many writers who felt threatened in the late twenties and early thirties began to write books for children because they believed that there was less risk of political persecution arising from such publications.

66. In examining the taste of Soviet Russian readers in the post-Stalin period, Mehnert (1983), Dunham (1976), Friedberg (1962 and 1977), and Lovell (2000) all indicate the widespread preference for both Russian and foreign classics. Friedberg provides tables of the number of classics published (Russian Classics, 177–199) and indicates that the boom in publishing Western writers began in 1955 (Decade of Euphoria, 8). Dunham has indicated an accommodation, or concordat, with what she calls a “middle class” that was not interested in ideology or further revolutionary upheavals. Private aspirations and values, accompanied by pat ideological gestures, which included the traditional mythology of Russian nationalism, became the norm in the period following the Second World War (Dunham, In Stalin’s Time, 16–18, 30).

67. Shchepotiev, “Literaturni sudy,” 8.

68. Ibid., 9.

69. B[ykovets], “Literaturni sudy.”

70. Kokot, “Litsud,” 33.

71. Lovell has pointed out the existence of manuals describing how to conduct such evenings: “One manual of 1927, offering instruction on how to conduct ‘evenings of worker criticism’, observed that an ‘organ of worker control over mass literature’ was essential, but that workers, when expressing their opinions, should not ‘repeat themselves or stray from the main objective of their meeting’” (Russian Reading Revolution, 31).

72. Bykovets', “Khudozhnia literatura,” 32.

73. IV Vseukr., 345–346.

74. Ibid., 357.

75. Lovell, Russian Reading Revolution, 13.

76. Dovhan', “Cherhova problema,” “Ukrains'ka literatura,” Do pytannia.

77. Mezhenko headed UNIK from 1922–31. To escape persecution he resigned his position and moved first to Kharkiv and then in 1934 to Leningrad. In 1945 he returned to Kyiv as director of the library of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. In 1949 he was again accused of nationalism and forced to return to Leningrad. He returned to Kyiv in 1960 and died in 1969. Dovhan' disappeared in 1937. For a study of Mezhenko’s Kyiv years, 1919–33, see Kasinec, “Iurii O. Ivaniv-Mezhenko.”

78. Dovhan', “Sotsiial'na funktsiia,” 11.

79. Ibid., 24.

80. Ibid., 29–30.

81. Ibid., 5.

82. Voinilovych’s “Mekhanika protsesu” is mentioned as an example of such a mechanistic approach in Dovhan', “Sotsiial'na funktsiia,” 8.

83. In 1930, Dovhan criticized his colleague and former superior Iurii Ivaniv-Mezhenko for ideological failings (Kasinec, “Iurii O. Ivaniv-Mezhenko,” 14–15). Do pytannia, his major work of 1931, stressed “proletarian control” of the production, distribution, and marketing of books, along with the education of readers. He justified the need for ideological vigilance by alluding to the possibility of foreign military intervention (Do pytannia, 33). His “Za bol'shevistskii katalog” of 1936 argued that the main function of the card catalogue was to reveal the class or political nature of literature, and therefore a systemic rather than an alphabetical catalogue would be more appropriate.

84. Dovhan', “Sotsiial'na funktsiia,” 38.

85. Ibid., 30.

86. Ibid., 32.

87. Ibid., 49.

88. Dovhan' mentions, for example, how contemporary readers reinterpret classics and ancient texts according to predetermined ideas, what Wolfgang Iser later called a “horizon of expectation.” Dovhan' argues that such a horizon prevents readers from perceiving the work in any other way (Ibid., 46–47).

89. Lovell, Russian Reading Revolution, 36.

90. Pauly, Breaking the Tongue, 38.

91. Kuziakina, Piesy Mykoly Kulisha, 60.

92. Ibid., 61.

93. Ibid., 87.

94. Ibid., 205.

95. Ibid., 206.

96. Ibid., 217.

97. For an introduction to some of these experimental and avant-garde works see Makaryk and Tkacz, Modernism in Kyiv, and Shkandrij, “Avant-Garde Prose.”

98. Epik, Bez gruntu, iii–1v, xiii–xiv.

99. Ibid., vi.

100. Steinberg has shown how Russian writers of proletarian origin exerted an often unacknowledged, and sometimes unwelcome, influence on early Soviet culture. Worker writers questioned the boundaries of elite culture and challenged representations of what the lower classes ought to think and feel, causing Bolshevism’s guardians of orthodoxy to complain that these writers did not speak “their” language (Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination, 22). Alexandre Sumpf has described the tension between Russian employees who ran the rural reading rooms and authorities in charge of political education (Sumpf, “Confronting the Countryside,” 475). Matthew Lenoe’s Closer to the Masses describes how by the early thirties the Soviet Russian press had adopted a rhetoric of mobilization and agitation, ditching the earlier language of enlightenment.

101. Fowler, “Yiddish Theater,” 171.

102. Smolych, “Do rozmov.”

103. Epik, Bez gruntu, 11, 28.

104. Ibid., 13.

105. Kulish, “Kryha rozstane.”

106. Ibid.

107. Epik, Bez gruntu, vii.

108. For a discussion of Pervomais'kyi’s militant Bolshevik poetry and his subsequent evolution into one of the greatest Ukrainian lyrical poets of the century, see Petrovsky-Shtern, Anti-Imperial Choice, 166–227; and Shkandrij, Jews in Ukrainian Literature, 125–136.

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Myroslav Shkandrij

Myroslav Shkandrij teaches Ukrainian and Russian literature in the Department of German and Slavic Studies at the University of Manitoba, and is the author of the recently published Ukrainian Nationalism: Politics, Ideology and Literature, 1929–1956 (Yale University Press, 2015).