The Girl With The Teddy Bear—a 1928 Ukrainian novel that survived Stalin’s purges—reaches English after 97 years

Introduction by Halyna Pahutiak · Excerpt translated by Steve Komarnyckyj · Edited by Euromaidan Press

The novel

The Girl With The Teddy Bear, now published in English for the first time by Dedalus Books in a translation by PEN Award-winning translator Steve Komarnyckyj, is a cult classic of Ukrainian modernism.

First published in 1928 by the private Kyiv publishing house Siayvo, with the endorsement of the Neoclassicist poet Mykola Zerov—who would himself be executed by Stalin in 1937—the novel has been compared to Nabokov’s Lolita and Ivan Klíma’s A Summer Affair.

It does not flinch from the harshness and inconsistencies of Soviet life. The novel opens in late 1922 during the famine years, with its protagonist Varetskyi living in grim poverty. The windows of his apartment are not glass but plywood.

He relies, we learn later, on rations from the American Relief Administration to survive. A visit from an old acquaintance sets in motion a train of events leading to a doomed obsessive love affair and a murder in Berlin. It is as psychologically relentless as D.H. Lawrence in its depiction of obsessive love—and a remarkably courageous debut in a totalitarian society.

The excerpt published here focuses on a lyrical passage set by the Dnipro, when the protagonist spends a day on the river with a teacher alongside whom he works. Their gentle romance forms a subplot to his darker obsession with a young girl.

The man who was not there

Viktor Domontovych—the pen name of Viktor Platonovych Petrov (1894–1969)—wore many masks. He was a novelist, but also an archaeologist, ethnographer, philosopher, and literary critic, publishing fiction under his pseudonym while pursuing scholarly career under his real name.

He belonged to the generation of Ukrainian writers known as the “Executed Renaissance,” who rose in the 1920s after the collapse of the Tsarist empire, and was close to the Kyiv Neoclassicists.

Unlike many of his peers, Domontovych survived the 1930s purges. How he survived is part of his mystery. In 1937, he was arrested and released after two weeks—a period in which he may have been recruited by the Soviet secret police.

During the German occupation, he edited a Ukrainian literary journal in Kharkiv. After the war, he fled to Munich, became a professor at the Ukrainian Free University, and published fierce criticism of the Soviet regime.

Then, on 18 April 1949, he walked out of his flat in Munich’s Schwabing district and vanished. His colleagues assumed Soviet agents had killed him. Six years later, his name turned up in a published list of Soviet archaeologists. He had quietly returned to the USSR and was working at the Institute of Archaeology in Kyiv, where he died in 1969.

Why this book matters now

The Soviet regime adopted a policy of “Ukrainianization” in the 1920s, encouraging the use of Ukrainian so that the occupying power would be seen as a Ukrainian government. But the leaders in Moscow shared the traditional hatred of Ukrainian culture which, alas, is a leitmotif of Ukrainian history.

The permission was short-lived. By the 1930s, the regime had reverted to the centuries-old Russian project of erasing the language, and the writers who gave Ukrainian literature its modernist flowering were shot, starved, or worked to death in camps.

As Askold Melnyczuk, an American author of Ukrainian descent, notes: “The Russian war on Ukraine has always been a war on its language.” The contempt runs wide and deep in Russian literary culture. Vladimir Nabokov, in his 1944 study of Gogol—himself a Ukrainian-born writer who wrote in Russian—put it this way:

“We must thank fate (and the author’s thirst for universal fame) for his not having turned to the Ukrainian dialect as a medium of expression, because then all would have been lost. When I want a good nightmare, I imagine Gogol penning in the Little Russian dialect volume after volume…”

What Nabokov calls the “Little Russian dialect” is none other than the Ukrainian language, which is about as close to Russian as Spanish is to Italian.

Nabokov’s contempt was not individual. It reflected centuries of state policy. Ukrainians fell victim to persecution as an ethnic group, their culture and language subjected to persistent structural erasure. As early as 1627, Tsar Mikhail ordered all copies of the Ukrainian Didactic Gospels destroyed.

What followed was an almost 300-year campaign against the language, from Peter I’s decree banning printing in Ukrainian to the secret Valuev Circular of 1863, which declared the Ukrainian language essentially did not exist.

Russians have, unfortunately, exported their denigration of Ukrainian culture to the West through soft power. Although Ukraine is the largest country entirely in Europe, its literature remains marginalized, and attempts to promote it often encounter difficulties that expose how the long war Russia waged to eradicate Ukrainian culture continues to be fought in the minds, hearts, and bookshelves of the West.

There are Ukrainian books that surpass their Russian equivalents because, like Domontovych’s, they look unflinchingly on the Russian empire and, with no grand narrative to defend, confront the moral conflicts head-on. We need at this moment to see both Russia and Ukraine clearly.

But it is only through Ukrainian eyes, and those of other colonized peoples, that we can finally understand the cycles of violence Russia has inflicted across Eurasia. The publication of unjustly neglected Ukrainian classics will not only enrich our collective literary heritage but help clear a perception that has been colonized by Russia as thoroughly as the lost lands of Circassia and Ichkeria.

The Girl With The Teddy Bear: excerpt from Chapter V

On one particular day I passed the grey concrete portico by the river and, having descended the steps, sat down on one of the concrete benches. I waited for Maria Ivanivna as agreed. The concrete of the bench still retained the dampness of the rain that had fallen yesterday evening and overnight.

The green slope of the hillside cut sharply through the horizon, the island, the Dnipro, and the riverside meadows. The red-brown tin chimney of the water treatment plant competed with the green poplars and the white columns of the monument.

It was still early. Noisy boys kitted out with fishing rods and baskets rushed headlong past me on the steps, swerving around each other, to snap up the best places on the shore. Sluggish, dishevelled prostitutes walked past, going to snooze below the steps or in the shrubs on the thickly grassed hills after a sleepless night. A bureaucrat with a tightly-packed briefcase would occasionally stroll past hoping to take a swim and not be late for work. University students passed by carrying books, a boy and a girl, with a sweet dream of combining the Dnipro, the sun, love, and study for the exam scheduled for the day after tomorrow.

I didn’t sit for very long. Maria Ivanivna was punctual, she did not like arriving early and having to wait. She carried a package wrapped in newspaper which contained a bathing suit and something to eat.

I kissed her hand and we went down the steps to the river.

The Dnipro glittered in the sun like the scales of some massive silver fish. The sun splintered into radiant drops and drifted on the tremulous waves, my eyes blinded by the unbearable glare.

There was a smell of resin from the fresh pine planks of the pier, which was struck occasionally by a large, swaying fishing boat. A cool breeze blew off the water.

I jumped into the boat and stretched my hand out to Maria Ivanivna:

“Hop-la! Come in.”

But she didn’t dare step into the boat immediately, the transfer from the pier to the vessel seemed dangerous to her. Although Maria Ivanivna wouldn’t admit it, I’m sure that the complicated procedure of crossing the river unnerved her, spoiled her mood and largely poisoned the pleasure of travelling to the other shore.

“Marusia! Faster, be brave! Give me your hand!”

She was visibly anxious and had to force herself to move. She gave me the package, then one hand, then the other, then hesitantly stepped with one foot onto the bench in the boat. Then I caught her and she fell into my arms and hugged me.

The danger had passed, she was in the boat.

Its red-hot sides were painful to the touch, the sun had already baked them. At a moment like that, squinting, you can put your face under the sun’s rays and it is as if warm female hands are gently caressing your face. It was still early. The boat was empty apart from us. In a small bay nearby where a willow leaned over the dark green water, some boys with fishing rods caught pike, silently and attentively watching their floats on the water.

When we tired of looking at the boys with fishing rods and a few more people were getting into the boat, we started complaining impatiently about the delay.

A sun-tanned boatman, naked apart from his underpants and a coat with several holes, appeared. The motor started up, a stream of gasoline reeked as it spread over the water. We set off!

* * *

Then we passed a whole day on the Dnipro.

We took off our shoes and walked barefoot across the soft marshy soil of the sandy Trukhanov Island to the other side where the river flows. On the left, between the hills overgrown with willow bushes, we had a favourite tranquil place. No one came there and our solitude would be undisturbed.

The imprint of Marusia’s body in the sand was preserved where she had laid yesterday. The sand that I had covered myself with was only slightly dispersed by the wind.

This lonely place was ours. There were no swimmers nearby. Occasionally a woman or girl would pass by behind the bushes, bending under the weight of buckets, and boys drifted past in a boat along the Bakai, calling out to each other.

Solitude, silence, sun, sand and willow bushes. You could lie on the sand for hours without moving and look into the blue sky where your vision disappeared into infinity. In that boundless blue, time, consciousness, the ‘I‘, everything that was, is and will be, would be lost.

A snail crawled across the sand and in the sluggishness, sunny hours you might wonder where and why he is in a hurry, when time has stopped, and there is only the sweet, languid languor of the sun in this world that alone reigns over people and the universe.

But there are no thoughts here.

Marusia gathered sand in her hands tilted her palm and poured a thin, ash-yellow stream through her open fingers. The slow fall of the sand reminded her that this is exactly how the stream of sand flows through an hourglass. She looked at me and said:

“This is how time passes.”

I pulled her head towards me, kissed her lips, felt her narrow and small body warmed by the sun, kissed her eyelids and answered:

“There is no time here. There is only peace, the sun, silence and you.”

“And you.”

The two of us, only the two of us. The world was sealed into a small valley between low hills overgrown with willow bushes. Here the sunny universe began and here it ended, its infinity was eternal. Desires yearned for nothing except for this eternal, boundless sunny day.

There was a green bay beyond the hills and bushes, its water reflected the blue sky, green willows and the steep white-yellow sandy shore. Everything, the sky, the trees, the shore live a repeated, doubled life in the translucent mirror of water.

We bathed there. Maria Ivanivna was afraid to enter the water alone and I led her by the hand. She would not go any further after the water reached her waist. I supported her on my arm and she, splashing and splashing, helplessly waving her arms in the water and made timid, unsuccessful attempts at learning to swim.

Then we had breakfast. Sand always infiltrated the bread and meat, we ate and it crunched on our teeth.

Sleep and peace enveloped us again. Bees buzzed above the bushes, drowsy, so drowsy, drunk with honey and happiness, like my drunk and sleepy heart. All was well, all was good, and there was blessed peace and silence. This was the last bitter tenderness of love, when both partners have realised the inevitability of their separation and are now finishing its dregs. The willow leaves gleamed as if afraid, they were sticky and bitter-sweet.

We didn‘t speak out loud about breaking up, but for me and for Maria Ivanivna it was clear that these were our last meetings and that this summer would never be repeated again.

In the immutable sunny tranquillity we celebrated the joy of that radiant last day, knowing that it is one and an only day like itself, that every ‘today‘ is already stamped with the irrevocable and inevitable ‘was‘.

The End