HARD TIMES by Ostap Vyshnia, translated by Yuri Tkacz
Review by Wolodymyr Lewyckyj in “Oko”, May-June 1982
One of the features of the decade that followed Ukraine’s inception into the USSR was the so-called Ukrainianization period, which saw the number of Ukrainian books published in the Ukrainian SSR steadily increasing. The process reached its zenith in 1931, when 76.9% of all book titles published in the republic were in Ukrainian, and Ukrainian books constituted 84.5% of all the book production. Among the giants of twentieth century Ukrainian literature that emerged during this period were Mykola Khvylovy and Pavlo Tychyna, both of whom currently enjoy widespread popularity in the West. A lesser profile has been reserved for Ostap Vyshnia, a humorist and satirist who crafted for himself a place on the newspaper pages of 1920s Soviet Ukraine of such originality and distinctiveness, that he became known as the father of modern Ukrainian satire, and the most-read Ukrainian author after Taras Shevchenko. This last fact alone – his politics aside – makes Vyshnia an important figure for anyone wishing to understand fully the social, political and economic climate of the decade.
Vyshnia’s genius lay inn his familiarity with the vernaculars of the different regions of Ukraine, and his humor stemmed more from his expert use of colloquialisms – from the wide range of voices and personae these enabled him to adopt – than from actual descriptions of comic situations.
Born Pavlo Hubenko (1889) in the small village of Hrun in Poltavshchyna, Vyshnia knew to a tee the fancies, foibles and fetishes of the simple country people who waited impatiently for his next feuilleton to appear on the pages of the Kharkiv-based News. His prose – quick, fresh and perfectly colloquial – spoke in a voice that was true and immediately identifiable.; his characters – farmers, workers, loafers, con men – were drawn indirectly from life and inserted unpolished into his pieces, where the exactness of their reproduction in sharply focused situations made them all the funnier, or all the sadder, or all the more contemptible.
Vyshnia’s genius is inseparable from the Ukrainian language, and to make Vyshnia live in a language other than Ukrainian would be most difficult – some critics say impossible – task of any translator. Yuri Tkach, in his (as he states in the Translator’s Preface) attempt to disprove those critics, comes acceptably close to success. The Vyshnia translated in Hard Times, though inevitably paler than the original, reads easily, clearly, and naturally. Tkach ably substitutes English idioms for Vyshnia’s colloquialisms, provides a glossary for untranslatable terms, footnotes for others, and emerges with a product in which not only the literal meaning of, but also the vital voice behind Vyshnia’s words has been successfully reconstructed. This is particularly true of pieces like the cacophonic “Market Day”, the sardonic “How to Improve your Household", the laid-back "How to Cook and Eat Wild Duck Soup", and the devastating "Gynaecology", where the translations are impressed with the nuances necessary for a full appreciation of the humorist's art.
The forms used by Vyshnia were many and diverse, ranging from virulent anti-religious, anti-nationalist. and anti-capitalist diatribes to idyllic descriptions of nature, from sketches of friends and literary figures to drama reviews. In Hard Times (and as the selected title would suggest), Tkach concentrates on Vvshnia’s acerbic satire of Soviet life, written mainly before the writer’s ar rest as a suspected kulak sympathizer in 1933. In these pieces, bureaucrats, "experts", shortages, superstitions, idlers, red-tape absurdities – all feel the bite of Vyshnia’s tireless pen. The satirist had a close rapport with the common people whom he wished to not only amuse in times of deprivation, but to educate as well, and they came to see him as their ambassador to the powers that be. They spoke and wrote to him freely of problems and injustices; Vyshnia would respond with scathing feuilletons in the next editions of the newspapers that published him. These are the pieces that comprise the core of Hard Times, and give it its orientation.
From this earlier period, Hard Times also includes selections from Vyshnevi usmishky Krym ski (Vyshnia’s Crimean Chuckles), and several pieces from a cycle inspired by the satirist's trip to Berlin in the late twenties.
Released in 1943
Released from the labor camps in 1943 to serve as a propagandist in the Soviet Union's defense effort against Nazi Germany, Vyshnia returned to steady writing after the war, but never to his old form. He was careful to write within the boundaries prescribed by the Writer's Union, and until his death in 1956 he limited himself to the more lyrical pieces of his Myslyvski usmishky (Hunters' Chuckles), a number of which are included in Hard Times.
Like others of his time, Vyshnia initially believed in the Revolution, and much of his early satire was written with the intention of correcting the many inequities that the new order had either not yet solved, or had itself created. The end of the IJkrainianization period, the destruction of close friends, his own imprisonment, the total subjugation of the creative flame to state interests, the continuing and intensifying deprivations and persecutions, and the emerging terror and cynicism of the Stalin era proved his aspirations to have been ill-founded. An irony, lent them by the reader's awareness of what was to come, pervades early works like “Berlin's Museums Now”.
But in his prime, Ostap Vyshnia laid down the foundations and set up the parameters of a genre that were observed by both his contemporaries and later humorists, behind and outside the Iron Curtain. Though a little sketchy and selective in his presentation of Vyshnia's work, Yuri Tkach has done a fine and brave job in bringing the satirist to the English reader for the first time, giving him simultaneously a worthwhile glimpse into the period that gave rise to modern Ukrainian satire.
An ex-electrical engineer, Tkach has translated into English several Ukrainian classics, all of which are available by mail order from Bayda Books. He has recently completed a translation of a Mykola Ponedilok collection, and scheduled for publication this year are his translations of Oles Honchar's Sobor (Cathedral), an anthology of Ukrainian authors of the 1920s, and a selection of stories by dissident futurist Oles Berdnyk. Tkach has just arrived in Canada from Australia to translate full-time for the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies in Edmonton.