YEVGEN MALANYUK - AN IDEOLOGIST OF UKRAINIAN GOTHIC

February 1 we celebrate the 119th anniversary since birthday of outstanding Ukrainian poet-nationalist Yevgen Malanyuk. On this occasion we offer you a translation of an article by Igor Zagrebelny dedicated to this prominent figure in Ukrainian culture.

The defeat of the national-liberation campaign of 1918-1920 has caused not only the desire to revenge, but also a wave of sober self-criticism. We have to search for reasons of our inner problems not in our "eternal enemies," but in ourselves - the following conclusions have made the Ukrainian intelligentsia taking into account the traumatic experience of the recent war. Yevgen Malanyuk was one of these intellectuals.

Malanyuk was born on February 1, 1897 in Arkhangorod (now Novoarkhangelsk, Kirovograd region). Having obtained primary education in 1914 became a student of the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute. However, the Great War has became an obstacle for Yevgen further education. The First World War ended for him in 1920, when the World War fronts have gradually turned to the fronts of a national-liberation war against the Bolshevik hordes. In 1920 Malanyuk gets to internment camps for the soldiers of UNR soldiers in Poland; in 1923 he moves to Czechoslovakia. There he became a student of  the hydrotechnical engineering department of the Faculty of Ukrainian Economic Academy in Podebrady.

Malanyuk writes a lot, in Polish internment camps he publishes the literary magazine "Veselka" with his friends. Later he started cooperation with Dmytro Dontsov and his "Literary-Scientific Herald," where in addition to poetry and essays the poet raises the issues of literary criticism, philosophy of history, cultural studies. Thus, constructive national self-criticism finds the expression in his essays, and poetry. As noted by Oleg Bagan: "Malanyuk, as a part of post-revolutionary generation thinks a lot and rethinks traditional view of the national history and culture as well as the forms of political struggle and the basics of Ukrainian mentality. At the same time, he was influenced by the conservative historian and the philosopher of the Ukrainian national idea Vyacheslav Lipinsky and the nationalist thinker Dmytro Dontsov." 

It is also worth noting that gothic is one of main concepts in Malanyuk's works. According to him the concept of "gothic" has several layers of meaning, which, however, overlapping each other and create common semantic integrity. In the poet's verses gothic reflected not only as an architectural style, but also as a symbol of traditional, Christian Europe, the European Middle Ages as well as spiritual qualities, which were inherent for those times, such as courage, hierarchy, honor, discipline, the ability to state-building. To emphasize these qualities Yevhen Malanyuk uses the images of "Rome" and "Variags."

Criticizing the Ukrainian mentality of those times Malanyuk considers that the Ukrainians not grown yet to the gothic mental level. He says, that autochthonous Ukrainians are drowned in the sea of "pan-moralism and pan-aestheticism." As we remember from history the Germans-Variags have contributed to creation of the mighty medieval Ukrainian state - Kievan Rus. Malanyuk sees it as something positive, as an essential injection. However, according to him, this injection was too small, because "These structurally-metal influences eventually were dissolved in the Moskovian Sea, that marked the fall of Rus."

Talking about the disease of the Ukrainian "I" the thinker made a number of disappointing conclusions. He writes about a passive, feminine, dreamy essence of the Ukrainian psychotype, and, as result "the lack of masculine, state-creative core." The main essence of the problem, according to Malanyuk, is "a character of passive observer, a philosopher-farmer, effeminated by wealth of their own land."

Yevhen Malanyuk, as well as Dmytro Dontsov, Yuriy Klen of Volodimir Yaniv belonged to the cohort of thinkers-occidentalists, who considered Ukraine as an integral cultural and spiritual part of Europe as an opposition to the Kremlin's  boorish attempts to impose the Moscowan Eurasianism. It should be noted that the aforementioned people clearly understood the difference between the modern liberal-capitalist "West" and the "Occidental world," with its conservative Christian culture. 

Due to the Bolshevik occupation of East and Central Europe Yevgen Malanyuk moved first to Regensburg, West Germany, and then, in 1949, to New-York, the United States. Realities of Western World are clearly reflected in the poet's works in the form of  conservative-pessimistic notes. New realities make him think more globally and wait for the God. "All the forces of matter are aimed now at the destruction of the Holy Spirit in us, their goal is to turn us back to clay and dust, of which the Creator once before created a man ...an ocean of darkness and evil floods the planet. His black waves swallow cities and countries. An only villages still lit by lights of prayer in silence. Church is a ship in this ocean of darkness and evil." he wrote.

Malanyuk criticizes all aspects of the Western lifestyle from mass culture to politics: "They consider democracy as a political system, at which the government argues that the mass governs itself." New York, a city where he lived the poet calls a "kosher cloaca." the poet wrote on his notebook: "I hate this city, it looks like a waspish hive, consisted from millions of honeycombs." 

The thinker even finds some, not even geopolitical, but metaphysical affinity between the US and USSR: "Roosevelt and the company united the US and the USSR as communicating vessels, they are mutually "overtook" each other, but first of all they jointly strangled Europe..."

As a poet-nationalist, Yevgen Malanyuk looked at the world through the eyes of a tragic optimist, through the eyes of "Contra spem spero." So he not only criticized "lack of gothic essence" in the Ukrainians of those times, predicted the coming of a new gothic era and birth of new Variags on the Ukrainian land.

Original article by Igor Zagrebelny