Marko Pavlyshyn - review of Duel
Borys Antonenko-Davydovych, Duel. Trans. from the Ukrainian by Yuri Tkacz. [London]: Glagoslav Publications, 2022. 201 pp.
Borys Antonenko-Davydovych (1899-1984) was one of the few Soviet Ukrainian writers of his generation who survived the Stalinist purges. He spent the years between 1935 and 1957 in labour camps and exile. An activist of the briefly independent Ukrainian state, Antonenko-Davydovych joined the Ukrainian Communist Party, but shunned politics after the UCP’s forced self-liquidation and merger with the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine.
Antonenko-Davydovych had published a collection of short stories and two short novels by the time Smert´ (Death; Duel in Yuri Tkacz’s translation) appeared in the journal Zhyttia i literatura in 1927 and as a separate book in 1928 – surprisingly, given the novel’s potential to be read as an open critique of the goals and practices of the Bolshevik party. Later banned in the Soviet Union, like almost all of the output of the cohort today known as the ‘executed Renaissance’, Smert´ was again published in London in 1954. Yuri Tkacz’s translation first appeared in 1986 with Lastivka Press in Melbourne. The Glagoslav edition follows the text of that translation and includes the same useful factual introduction by Dmytro Chub (1905-1999).
The republication of Duel in the year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is timely. A penetrating representation of the psychological imperatives that compel the functionary of a would-be totalitarian regime to inflict suffering in the name of an inhumane ideology, the novel also uncovers the culture of colonial prejudice that the Soviet Union inherited from the Russian Empire.
Antonenko-Davydovych is not usually considered one of the foremost Ukrainian writers of the 1920s and early 1930s. He was not as radical in his anticolonial invective as the polemicist Mykola Khvyl´ovyi, nor as experimental as the prose writer Maik Iohansen or the poet Mykhail´ Semenko, nor as subversively ironic as the dramatist Mykola Kulish. Antonenko-Davydovych was described by Mykola Hlobenko, a touch condescendingly, as ‘standing closer to his naturalist predecessors in his way of describing characters, his generally quite uncomplicated compositional technique, and his “genre painting” approach to the presentation of images, sometimes brutal, of everyday life’ (‘Avtor smilyvoi knyhy’, introduction to Smert´ [London: Ukrains´ka vydavnycha spilka, 1954], p. 6).
In fact, the realism of Antonenko-Davydovych’s Duel is a major aesthetic accomplishment. The novel vividly and convincingly represents the inner turmoil of Kost´ Horobenko, a child of the petty bourgeoisie and a former fighter for Ukraine’s independence, who has become a Bolshevik and must take part in imposing, by terror if need be, the dictatorship of his party upon a resentful former middle class, a sceptical intelligentsia and an unwilling and angry peasantry.
Duel reveals Horobenko’s embrace of violence, even inhumanity, as the inevitable consequences of forces beyond his control. Horobenko’s tragic flaw is his unalterable past. Tarred with the brush of the nationalism that is anathema to fellow Bolsheviks, he nonetheless yearns to persuade them of his party loyalty and ideological ardour. His inability fully to quell his residual family and national consciousness results in paroxysms of self-hate, rage at people of his own background and cravings to destroy them physically (‘These Batiuks needed to be shot dead, for a young nation could not be sentimentally rotten, infected with pustules’ (p. 107)).
Horobenko’s anguish unfolds against the background of situations characteristic of the new Soviet reality: the ‘voluntary’ Saturday workday, the tense interview with a party superior, or the sortie of party activists into a village to ensure the correct outcome of local elections. In each of these situations, party activists discredit themselves through ambition, pettiness, bullying, in-fighting and mutual denunciation. Their war against perceived class enemies runs parallel to their covert enmity toward cultural identities other than the Russian. Antonenko-Davydovych decries this endurance of colonial domination especially in his representation of his characters’ spoken language. The vocabulary of the colonial masters has penetrated into the speech of untutored Ukrainian city folk and farm workers to the point where they can speak only a mixture of their own language and Russian; party functionaries dismiss the use of Ukrainian as an affectation on the part of eccentric intellectuals; and careerists struggle to imitate a high-status version of Russian pronunciation.
Representation of this complex sociolinguistic situation is almost impossible in English, and Yuri Tkach prudently limits himself to reproducing one aspect of it that is readily visible in translation: the changes that occur when Ukrainian names are pronounced according to the phonetic rules of Russian. In this as in his many other translations Tkacz aims for, and succeeds in producing, a fluent and natural-sounding English text that replicates Antonenko-Davydovych’s straightforward prose and, in particular, the naturalness of the original’s dialogues.
The new publication of Duel augments the growing list of Ukrainian literary works available to readers whose interest in matters Ukrainian has been intensified by the current war. The phenomenon is a welcome, if slender, silver lining to an especially menacing thundercloud.
Marko Pavlyshyn
Monash University