Yuriy Lavrinenko & the archaeologist's sense
Giedroyc decides to reach out to Yuriy Lavrinenko (1905-1987), a Ukrainian dissident author living in the US. In many ways, he was the perfect choice. Lavrinenko was part of the same generation and milieu that was to be the subject of the book. He was born in 1905 in the Kyiv region, and studied at Kharkiv University in the 1920s, from which he was expelled in 1929 for his pro-Western stance. Prohibited from landing any job opportunity, he was then sentenced to 3.5 years in the gulag on the Arctic peninsula of Taymyr. In 1942, he eventually managed to flee to Austria, and then the USA. Lavrinenko, as it seemed, had all the makings needed to play the role of anthology editor and compiler. Problems, however, lay elsewhere.
The two main criteria for the anthology’s subject matter were determined by Giedroyc as follows: the anthology was to contain only pieces by Ukrainian Soviet authors, published in the USSR, which effectively meant not including Ukrainian emigré authors. Secondly, it was to include only pieces which, at the time, were prohibited in the USSR. The time frame was determined as 1917-1933, a period which spanned the initial booming development of Ukrainian national culture (under the Soviet policy of the so-called ‘korenizatsiya’) that had later been followed by a stark change of political course: the introduction of sweeping repressions and ultimately the extermination of an entire Ukrainian literary milieu.
Lavrinenko set down to work in the US libraries, only to realise what a breakneck task he was facing. ‘Everything that pertains to this anthology – belongs to a realm already submerged and forgotten,’ he wrote to Giedroyc. He laments how printed materials ‘were destroyed, lost, hidden or are [otherwise] inaccessible’, and fears that due to the lack of available materials, he could ‘select a second-rate piece, while omitting a first-class material’. The task seemed overwhelming: ‘One needs the awareness of an archaeologist here. So strange, considering we’re talking about such recent times. That’s how utterly destroyed we have been!’
In another letter to Kultura’s editor-in-chief, he writes:
"The documentation of contemporary Ukrainian history (1917-1957) is in a terrible condition, some things, even the most important ones, remain simply unknown. The scariest thing is not the fact there’s nowhere to find them, but there’s also nowhere to look for them. Editions which once were available, are not there any more."
Lavrinenko’s research and its results, in the form of the published anthology, to a great degree brought about the situation where one of these ‘most important things’ is known today. And importantly, Ukrainian readers know where to look for it – and where to find it.