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Permanent Revolution Art in Ukraine 20th to the Early
21st Century 1st Edition Alisa Lozhkina Digital Instant
Download
Author(s): Alisa Lozhkina
ISBN(s): 9786177799770, 6177799779
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 63.96 MB
Year: 2020
Language: english
PERMANENT
REVOLUTION
ART IN UKRAINE, THE 20th
TO THE EARLY 21st CENTURY

Alisa
Lozhkina

With the support

of the Ukrainian
Cultural Foundation

Published by
УДК 75(477)''20''=111
Л71

Alisa Lozhkina. Permanent Revolution:

Art in Ukraine, the 20th to the Early 21st Century. — ​
Kyiv: ArtHuss, 2020. — ​544 p.

Author — ​Alisa Lozhkina

Translation — Nathan Jeffers

Translation editor — Roman Ivashkiv

Editor — ​Ali Kinsella

UCF project coordinator — ​Kateryna Bova

Scholarly editors — ​Konstantin Akinsha,

Oksana Barshynova, Oleksandr Solovyov

Design — ​Aliona Solomadina

Layout — ​Vitaliy Bugara, Mykola Kovalchuk

Photo editor — ​Maksym Bilousov

PR manager — ​Maryana Musiy

Written by a leading Ukrainian curator and art critic, this book

is an attempt to draw the history of the development of visual
art practices in Ukraine, from the birth of modernism to the
present day, into a cohesive narrative. Particular emphasis is
given to the period since independence. How has the language
of art changed over the last century and a half? What role has
turbulence played in this process as Ukraine has undergone
a series of transformations from its provincial status on the
edge of the Russian Empire, through the difficult stage of
building socialism, all the way to achieving independence, the
Orange Revolution, the Revolution of Dignity, and the coming
challenges of its most recent history? This analysis offers
a brief overview of the main events and phenomena in Ukrainian
art, as well as a variety of illustrative material from dozens
of museum and private collections, and the archives of artists
and their families.

This publication was made possible thanks to a grant from

the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation (UCF) as a continuation of
a 2019 project. Then, the support of the Zenko Foundation and
the UCF made possible the publication of a Ukrainian-language
version of this book with the publisher ArtHuss, as well as
a French translation and publication of the manuscript with
the publisher Nouvelles Éditions Place. Special gratitude is
due to the head of the Zenko Foundation, Zenko Aftanaziv, © 2020 by Alisa Lozhkina, text
as well as the project’s producer, Karina Kachurovska. © 2020 by ArtHuss Publishing House

ISBN 978-617-7799-77-0
CONTENTS

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

PART 1.
BEGINNINGS. BEFORE THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION .. . . . . . . 16

CHAPTER 1.
THE BEGINNING OF MODERNISM: FROM THE 1880s TO 1917
A Change in Artistic Language and the Search for a National Style .. . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Modernism, the Secession, and Impressionism .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
The Beginning of the Avant-Garde. Cubo-Futurism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Querofuturism (or Panfuturism) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
The Izdebsky Salon and the Independent Odesans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

CHAPTER 2.
THE UKRAINIAN REVOLUTION AND THE RED RENAISSANCE:
FROM 1917 TO THE EARLY 1930s
The Ukrainian Revolution and the Founding of The Academy of Arts . . . . . . . . . . . 52
The Kultur-Lige (Culture League) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Art and Revolutionary Propaganda. The UkROSTA Windows and YugoLEF .. . . . . . 63
The Artistic Climate of the 1920s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
War of the Unions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Oleksander Bohomazov. From Cubo-Futurism to The Woodcutters . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
Vasyl Yermilov and the Constructivist Avant-Garde in Kharkiv . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
The Panfuturists, Mykhail Semenko, and Nova Generatsiia .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
Mykhailo Boichuk and his Circle. The Beginning of the Purges .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100

CHAPTER 3.
STALINISM AND THE CULT OF PERSONALITY:
THE EARLY 1930s TO 1953
The Birth of Socialist Realism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
On Thin Ice. The End of the 1930s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
World War II. Into the Fire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
Stalinist Grand Style and the Post-War Shift to “Biedermeierism” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
The Folk Alternative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

CHAPTER 4.
A MULTICULTURAL MOSAIC: WESTERN UKRAINE
BEFORE AND AFTER JOINING THE USSR
The Transcarpathian School of Painting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
Cultural Heroes on the Margins of Empire, Epochs, and Genres . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
The Forgotten Names of Interwar Lviv . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
CHAPTER 5.
A “DIFFERENT” KIND OF ART AND THE LATE SOVIET PERIOD:
1953 TO THE END OF THE 1980s
The Beginning of the Thaw and Austere Style.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
The 1960s Generation: Dissidents in Politics, Neo-Modernists in Art .. . . . . . . . . . . 179
Kitchen Table Discussions. The Orbit of the Kyiv Neo-Avant-Garde  .. . . . . . . . . . . . 192
Mosaics, Architecture, and the Monuments of Late-Soviet Modernism . . . . . . . . . . 201
The 1970s and Early 1980s: Quiet Art, Individual Mythologies,
and the Kyiv Underground .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
The Artists of the Kyiv Train Station. Hyperrealism, Chronorealism,
and the Last Soviet Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
The Kharkiv School of Photography .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
Odesa: From Nonconformism to Conceptualism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248

PART 2.
THE ART OF INDEPENDENT UKRAINE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266

CHAPTER 1.
THE NEW WAVE ON THE RUINS OF UTOPIA:
THE LATE 1980s TO 2004
A Permitted Renaissance: The Trans-Avant-Garde
and the Birth of the New Wave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
The Hard Border of National Post-Eclecticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286
Sex, Drugs, and Contemporary Art: The Squats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292
The Curator: From Overseer to Participant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303
The Lviv Artistic Alternative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308
Political Performances .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
The Painterly Preserve: An Abstract Direction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331
Transcarpathian Poptrans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337
In Search of a Master . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338
Away from Pictures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341
Odesa Drive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349
1990s Photography: A New Sense of Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361
A Return to Painting .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379

CHAPTER 2.
THE ORANGE GENERATION: 2004–2013
The Challenges of a New Millennium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383
The Galleries and Media Projects of the Years In Between . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 388
An Elemental Postmodernism and a Creeping Schizo-Baroque . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 399
Political Eros. The Orange Aesthetic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 404
Quick Response Art. The Revolutionary Experimental Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411
REP and Their Mature Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 416
Rebooting the Kharkiv School: SOSka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 426
Figurative Art in the Post-Media Age and the Glamor Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 432
Kherson Art-Brut and the Poetry of a Corporate Bottom Feeder:
Excel and Chanson .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 443
True Weirdos and a Return to Performance .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 449
Art and the Street . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 459
Hipsters, Social Networking, and a Deluge of Photographs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 466
The New Left vs. the New Right . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475
Art Institutions and Their Critics .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 480

CHAPTER 3.
BETWEEN A WAR AND A RAVE:
THE 2013 REVOLUTION AND BEYOND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 488
Art at the Barricades . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 493
Post-Trauma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500
The Apostles of Individualism: The Specter of Large-Format Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 509
A Conceptual Shift . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 517
Greater Ukraine. Nomads with the Motherland on Their Phones .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 520
The Rise of Women .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 525
The Poetry of the Provinces and a New Club Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 530
Forward into the Past. A Time to Think Retrospectively .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 536
In Place of a Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 542
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

The history of Ukrainian art is, in many ways, the history of Ukraine itself. As this book
moves through the last century, it shows us how art is inextricably intertwined with
ideology, identity, politics, and war. It shows us how Ukraine is still a contested space,
pulled this way and that by internal and external forces. An example of this that is rele­
vant to my job as translator is the issue of transliteration — ​not, perhaps, the most
glamorous subject, but one that is illustrative of the challenges that arose when bring-
ing this book into English. One important task was to ensure that all the names of peo-
ple, places, and publications were rendered in their Ukrainian form, a form less well
known to a western audience that may be more familiar with Russian spelling conven-
tions, such as Nikolai rather than Mykola, Olga rather than Olha, and so on. We worked
hard to ensure that Ukraine sat front and center both orthographically and thematic­
ally. After all, this book was written to do precisely that: to center Ukraine and its art
when so often it has been obscured, appropriated, or repressed. Transliteration was
thus a matter of decolonization and part of a wider and ongoing struggle in which
Ukraine’s identity and sovereignty has repeatedly been eroded and attacked. While
transliteration is one small area of contention, Ukrainian art is vast by comparison.
Alisa Lozhkina has done a brilliant job in weaving together decades of Ukrainian art
history to deliver us a rich tapestry of artistic expression that ranges from paintings of
the Carpathian Mountains to simulated sex acts outside the Ukrainian parliament. I am
proud to be part of a project that aims to share Ukraine’s art and history with a wider
audience since the lessons of Ukraine’s past are relevant for us all.
Settling on a specific method to transliterate Ukrainian names, places, and publi-
cations was not easy. If we applied a uniform set of transliteration rules we would have
found ourselves at odds with commonly used and understood spellings, or with the
wishes of individuals who choose to spell their names in a certain way. We trod a fine
line between keeping the book as accessible and faithful as possible, while at the same
time trying to maintain a measure of consistency. Our solution to this conundrum was
to use a simplified Library of Congress system as our baseline. We then turned to the
Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine as a further guide for spellings, as well as defer-
ring, where appropriate, to broader common usage. There is a mixture of Russian- and
Ukrainian-language sources in this book, so the appropriate transliteration system
has been applied in the footnotes where necessary. In the few instances I have added
my own footnotes for further explanation, they are followed by [Translator’s Note] or
[T.N.].
I want to thank Alisa both for her words and her ongoing support during this
project. I am also deeply grateful to Roman Ivashkiv and Ali Kinsella for the amount
of time and effort they invested editing this book. Any mistakes that may remain
are mine alone.

7
 MYKOLA PYMONENKO.
FORD. 1901.
OIL ON CANVAS. 89×140 CM.
FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE
ODESA FINE ARTS MUSEUM.
INTRODUCTION

In the thirty or so years since the collapse of the USSR, Ukraine has gained indepen-
dence, witnessed unprecedented growth in oligarchical capitalism and corruption, and
lived through three waves of mass protests, two revolutions, a hybrid war in the East
of the country, the annexation of Crimea, and an overdue and overwrought process of
decommunization. At the same time, Ukrainian politics has descended into pure car-
nival. Flashes of direct political action are routinely followed by long periods of drawn-
out political theater; the movement between these two modes characterizes this pe-
riod. A permanent state of social turbulence has gradually become habit and this, in
turn, has helped shape several generations of Ukrainian artists whose worldview is in-
extricably linked with life during times of radical change.
To this day, Ukraine is still seen by some foreigners as a small replica of Russia. The
reality, however, is that Ukraine has a radically different culture and political context
with its own particular history. Perhaps it is because Ukraine isn’t sufficiently exotic
that its “otherness” gets little attention and the country sits at the fringes of pan-Eu-
ropean discourse. Despite its immensity, varied history, and rich cultural tradition that
has been heavily influenced by the country’s artists, Ukraine remains a blind spot for
the rest of Europe.
In 1850, Karl Marx wrote about permanent revolution and how the final goal of all
revolutionary transformations was to transition to a classless society while bringing
radical change to society’s ideas and attitudes. In the 20th century, Leon Trotsky took
Marx’s words and reformulated them. As they sang in a famous Soviet song, “A rev-
olution has a beginning, but it has no end.” 1 In the case of modern-day Ukraine, the
state of permanent revolution is a fitting metaphor for the atmosphere in the coun-
try. Ukraine has been riding the roller coaster of social upheaval for three decades as
mass protests have followed one after the other, all while the tragic specter of 1917
hovers silently overhead. Where the Western intellectual’s fantasy about revolution
ends is where the reality of Ukraine’s recent history begins, and that reality exists in
sharp contrast to any theory.
The country’s artistic energy and atmosphere have evolved thanks to a combina-
tion of factors: the state of turbulence, which once begun doesn’t seem to have an
end; the country’s painful search for identity within a theater of shadows from the
past; the fact of living amidst the ruins of the greatest utopia of the 20th century; and
the sincere belief that, despite a multitude of historical scars, society can, and should,
change.
There is another unexpected aspect to the metaphor of permanent revolution in
modern-day Ukraine, which is in the spirit of Marx’s original theory about the export
and sharing of ideas. In recent years there has been an interesting development: fol-
lowing perestroika and the collapse of the USSR in Ukraine, as in other former Sovi-
et republics, it was commonly thought that a time would come when the country would

1
Leon Trotsky, Permanentnaia revolutsiia (Berlin: Granit, 1930). For Trotsky, the key to victory for
socialism in the USSR was the export of revolution to the West and the ensuing victory of communism on
a global scale. In this work, “permanent revolution” is meant in a metaphorical sense.

10
overcome the remnants of its totalitarian past and become a Western-style democra-
cy. Paradoxically however, everything is happening the other way around. It appears
now that Western countries are beginning to experience things that have long been
familiar in Ukraine. Indeed, any Westerners familiar with the history of post-Soviet
Ukraine would be forgiven for having slight déjà vu. There are oligarchs in power and
trophy wives, hybrid wars and color revolutions, the hollowing out of familiar narratives,
relativism, and a total loss of trust. Following the 2016 US elections, the whole world
began to talk about the “post-truth” age and information manipulation on the internet,
yet it was during the 2013–2014 EuroMaidan protests that Ukraine became one of the
first targets of a huge disinformation campaign with social networking sites flooded
with fake news.
The global changes brought about by the arrival of digital capitalism have intro-
duced deep confusion, a sense of bewilderment for the future, and the need to fun-
damentally rethink previous models of social order. Since the collapse of the USSR,
Ukraine has learned to survive atop the ruins of old values and ways of thinking. At
the same time, the country has managed not to fall back into the clutches of authori-
tarianism. In a sense, over the past three decades, Ukrainian society has already lived
through many of the challenges of modernity that the rest of the world is only now be-
ginning to encounter.
What place is there for modern art in a worldview which is almost entirely subordi-
nate to the eros of politics? What is political art in an environment where the very word
politics has become synonymous with corruption and lawlessness? At the same time,
what does it mean in a place where the country’s main square is regularly graced with
barricades whose beauty and elemental conceptualism the world’s best artists could
only dream of?
A surprising paradox exists in Ukraine today: while the art scene has developed
rapidly, there are still very few comprehensive texts that cover the history of the dif-
ferent movements and phenomena that make up Ukrainian modern art. The blame for
this lies, first and foremost, with the systemic and institutional crisis that exists in the
country, a crisis which, 28 years after Ukraine achieved independence, has still not
been overcome. Constant societal transformation does little to strengthen the func-
tion of memory. The individual’s inner voice, founded on the experience of past gener-
ations who have survived “the short 20th century” (which the historian Eric Hobsbawm
called the “age of extremes”), constantly whispers to us that some things are easier
to just forget. Thus, we find ourselves in a situation where the biggest risk to our art — ​
and society in general — ​is our memory ceasing to work.
Once Ukraine regained independence, modern art gradually became the domi-
nant artistic paradigm in the country. How are we to understand this phenomenon and
how does it relate to art from the Soviet period, the nonconformist tradition, and the
avant-garde movements of the early 20th century? Since 1991, not enough work has
been done to set up a comprehensive archive or conduct an analysis of the entire cul-
tural period. State museum foundations haven’t put in place any kind of comprehen-
sive procurement strategy, and the Ukrainian Museum of Modern Art remains a uto-
pian dream. Thankfully, in recent years the situation has begun to improve. It seems
that many have suddenly remembered how interesting it can be to write and publish

11
books. However, is it possible for just one person to dutifully restore the entire canvas
of events and write a detailed and rigorous history of Ukrainian art? Of course, this
would be an insurmountable task, which would require a completely different team and
time frame behind it.
This book does not pretend, under any circumstances, to try and cover all the fig-
ures and events in Ukrainian art. It is written from a subjective standpoint, and its aim
is to try and convey Ukraine’s artistic tradition as it exists amidst the complex trans-
formations facing our society. The project was first thought of in 2010 and began
life as a series of newspaper publications entitled Point Zero: A New History of Art. It
would never have been possible without the curator and art critic Oleksandr Solo­v yov,
a man absolute in his dedication to art. A long pause followed this series. At first, in or-
der to begin compiling an art history, it seemed that all we needed to do was to publish
a few articles online. Later someone would have to write a full history, a folio of several
tomes that analyzed everybody and everything. Years went by and web sites changed
and shut down. As it turns out, even the World Wide Web cannot claim to be the per-
fect place to store our memories. We, in fact, lost access to a sizeable portion of ma-
terial from the Point Zero newspaper series. Moreover, the “one-voice” approach to
history, supposing the existence of a single reliable narrator, has become hopeless-
ly outdated. The arrival of the post-information age has made it clear that history can,
and should, be comprised of different, often contradictory, voices, whose sum none-
theless creates an overall picture of the issue at hand. It is in this multilayered “voice,”
one of countless possible ways to write this history of modern Ukrainian art, that this
book is written.
I returned to the idea of this publication two years ago upon the initiative of the
French publishing house Nouvelles Éditions Place. I thought it was important to not
just write about the artistic phenomena of the last few decades, but to also include
a more general picture of the events that have taken place in Ukrainian society and
art since the beginning of the 20th century. The succession of transformations that
Ukraine has gone through in this period has been deeply painful, and as a result the
nation has engaged in what Aleida Assmann referred to as “all forms of forgetting” 2 as
a defense mechanism. Assmann’s research into the cultural memory of societies that
have experienced trauma helped me better understand our own situation. This book is
written for two very different audiences: the local and the English-speaking one. It is
possible that at points, Ukrainian readers will feel that I am describing certain obvious
things in too much detail.
Finally, I must thank all those involved in this project. I have always thought
that this is one of the nicest parts of writing a book. This publication would nev-
er have seen the light of day if it weren’t for the French philosopher and editor Igor
Sokologorsky’s wish “to publish something in Paris about Ukrainian art.” His sup-
port, sincere interest in Ukraine, and constant deadline reminders were invaluable to
me. Nor would this book exist if not for the artist Oleksandr Roitburd; my meeting with
him changed my life. Neither would it exist without Oleksandr Solovyov, and it is with

2
Aleida Assmann, Shadows of Trauma: Memory and the Politics of Postwar Identity (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2015).

12
 great pride that I consider him my teacher. This book was born from conversations
with the art historian Konstantin Akinsha. Over the last few years, we organized sever-
al European exhibitions of Ukrainian art as seen from within the context of revolution-
ary transformation, and it is thanks to this that we became friends. I also want to thank
the curator of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Nicola Lucci-Gutnik. Our collaboration al-
lowed me to look at Ukrainian art from a distance and to identify pivotal moments in
its most recent history. I certainly would not have managed this by myself. It was to-
gether with the founder of the Zenko Foundation, Zenko Aftanaziv, and the project’s
producer, Karina Kachurovska, that we managed to get a grant from the Ukrainian Cul-
tural Foundation (UCF) and make this dream a reality. I am very thankful to the UCF, to
the team at the book’s Ukrainian publisher, ArtHuss, and to our French partners, the
publisher Nouvelles Éditions Place. And of course, above all, I thank my mother, Nadiia
Lozhkina for her boundless love and support. I want to dedicate this book to her and
also to my grandmother, Olena Illivna Luhova, a Ukrainian historian, daughter of an
“enemy of the people,” and a passionate and incorrigible patriot. This book began in my
childhood, when every morning, sitting on the veranda of our small Soviet dacha, my
grandmother would tell me about the 20th century and teach me how to think.

13
PART 1. BEGINNINGS.
BEFORE THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION

Ukraine became an independent state on 24 August 1991. However, the path to that
independence lay through the 20th century and a whole host of obstacles and trau-
ma. At the beginning of the century, Ukraine was colonized and divided into two parts
controlled by two powerful empires. It wasn’t long before Ukraine found itself at the
epicenter of some of the biggest and most violent conflicts of that period. The col-
lapse of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, World War I, the 1917 revolution,
the civil war, the Holodomor of 1932–1933, 3 Stalinist industrialization, the Great Ter-
ror of 1937, World War II, and the Holocaust. There were tens of millions of victims, not
to mention the lost futures and deep wounds, which to this day have yet to heal, three,
four, five generations later.
For a short time after the 1917 revolution, Ukraine existed as its own state, the
Ukrainian National Republic (UNR), with its own government and constitution. Soon af-
ter, there was a coup, and Hetman Skoropadsky came to power, but he was quickly re-
moved from the leadership of the UNR. Soon, a bloody struggle between the Bolshe-
viks and the White Army began on Ukrainian territory. The balance of power switched
rapidly and repeatedly from one side to the other, though in the end the Bolsheviks
emerged victorious. Technically, it wasn’t until 1920 that the Red Army conquered
the UNR, with the Republic ceasing to exist in 1921. During that period, from 1918 to
1921, Ukraine had become the center of a powerful anarchist movement led by Nestor
Makhno.
After the Bolsheviks’ final victory, the national communists acquired a great deal
of influence in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. They were a group of political activ-
ists who combined their communist views with pro-Ukrainian cultural policies. This
led to a short, but bright cultural life in the country, which was tragically ended with
the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s. So when we talk about art from the late 1910s
into the 1920s in Ukraine, we must remember that this period represented a stage
of romantic fascination with utopia, and that it’s simply not possible to separate the
history of the Ukrainian avant-garde from the political views of the majority of its
representatives.
When talking about unofficial art in Ukraine during the Soviet period, we can see
tangible regional differences. The big cities formed their own traditions, which would
eventually influence the development of the new art that emerged from independent
Ukraine after 1991. It should also be remembered when examining these different tra-
ditions that Western Ukraine was the last region to become part of Soviet Ukraine and
that region has its own particular historical and cultural character.
Ukraine had special status in the USSR. As a matter of fact, Ukraine was second in
influence among all other republics. In the late Soviet period, it was commonly thought
that Ukrainians ruled the Soviet Union, such was the prestige that Ukrainian delegates
held when working among the Soviet elite. Nevertheless, Ukraine felt the full force of

3
A man-made Stalin-orchestrated famine. [Translator’s note]

16
pressure from Moscow throughout the entire Soviet era. While pretending to support
Ukrainian folk culture, in reality, the central authorities clamped down upon all forms
of freethinking in the republic, fearing the emergence of so-called “bourgeois nation-
alism.” As a result, cultural figures in Ukraine lived in a greater state of fear and con-
straint than those in Moscow. This is well illustrated by the late-Soviet saying: “When
they cut their fingernails in Moscow, they cut off their fingers in Kyiv.” All the same,
this didn’t prevent the creation of a unique artistic tradition, nor the formation of an
unofficial circle of artists who remain little known outside Ukraine. Even in Ukraine it-
self, which, having gained independence relatively recently, finds itself situated at
a crossroads of values and public discourse, the journey to processing the country’s
recent art history is only just beginning.

17
CHAPTER 1.

THE BEGINNING OF
MODERNISM: FROM
THE 1880s TO 1917

A CHANGE IN ARTISTIC
LANGUAGE AND THE SEARCH
FOR A NATIONAL STYLE
Ukrainian art met the 20th century at a crossroads. Amid a crisis in academic thought
and the inability of the realist tradition to adequately respond to the challenges posed
by the invention of photography and the demands of a growing capitalist society,
a global modernism was rapidly emerging. This modernism would define the work and
direction of several generations of artists. The year 1917 was approaching. A premo-
nition of social catastrophe and transformation hung in the air and, in fact, the clamor
of revolution could already be heard in artists’ studios. In less than two decades, there
was a swift metamorphosis galvanized by a powerful fascination for modernism, from
the colonial romanticism and ethnographic realism of Mykola Pymonenko and timid ex-
periments with impressionism to a cosmopolitan avant-garde and utopian abstraction.
This was a period in which art was radically reoriented from the local to a pan-Euro­
pean context; art became international and was subsumed into a larger internation-
al movement which has no single name. 4 The overall mixture of modernist tendencies
which characterized European art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries served as
a focal point for the artistic developments that were taking place simultaneously in
the part of Ukraine controlled by the Russian Empire and in the part controlled by the

4
Modernist tendencies in art appeared in the second half of the 19th century with the arrival of impres-
sionism, followed by post-impressionism, symbolism, Fauvism, and so on. Impressionism and its associ-
ated artistic movements are focused, on the whole, on reimagining how an artist sees. At a certain point,
art became saturated with optical games and illusions and artists began to explore new artistic territories.
One of the first attempts at such an exploration was a movement that set itself the task of expanding the
range of artistic techniques through a return to simplicity and the organic art of antiquity and non-Euro-
pean culture — ​a rehabilitation of decorative arts. Depending on the region, this movement had different
names: Art Nouveau in France, the Vienna Secession in Austria-Hungary, Jugendstil in Germany, Stile
Liberty in Italy, and Modernismo in Spain. Within the confines of the Russian Empire, the accepted term
for this movement at the time became modernism.

18
Austro-Hungarian Empire. Indeed, the nascent modernist movement acted as a focal
point within the larger European context too, from St. Petersburg, Moscow, Helsinki,
Vienna, Budapest, Warsaw, and Krakow to Paris, Barcelona, and Munich. In a sense,
this was the biggest wave of artistic globalization in history. The next time something
similar would happen would only be at the end of the 20th century with the emergence
of the first generation of post-perestroika artists.
Modernism appeared gradually in Ukrainian art. This slow emergence coincided
with a national search for new political discourses and the awakening of a national
consciousness. Despite the fact that Ukraine was divided between two empires, at the
end of the 19th century interest in the country’s history grew, which laid the founda-
tion for seeing Ukraine with its own autonomous cultural and historical identity. 5 In this
context, work with folkloric and historical themes gained special importance. As op-
posed to later periods when art of this kind would become an empty cliché, at this time
these themes played a noticeable role in shaping the identity of the new Ukrainian in-
telligentsia. The language of artistic expression would undergo radical changes at the
beginning of the 20th century; however, the search for a national artistic style would
capture the interest of artists with completely different viewpoints and from complete-
ly different artistic movements.
In the second half of the 19th century, the so-called peredvizhniki (itinerants)
played an important role in the part of Ukraine that was ruled by the Russian Empire.
This was a movement inspired by the left-leaning radicalism of educated sections of
society, which in particular idealized peasant and folk culture (i.e., the so-called narod-
nytstvo, or populism). Its art looked for an escape from the crisis in academic art while
also rejecting elitism and emphasizing the social and educational functions of pered-
vizhniki work. To reflect these principles, the Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions was
established, its most active period being between 1870 and 1880. A paradoxical phe-
nomenon, the paintings by the peredvizhniki were an experiment, an attempt to intro-
duce a social agenda into a conservative artistic language, an act that foreshadowed
the coming century with its own proletarian revolution. It wasn’t long, however, before
the artistic compromise between painting in an old style and depicting new content
could no longer be maintained, and the movement began to stagnate.
An important figure in understanding the future development of Ukrainian art is
Ilya Repin. One of the best painters of the 19th century and an active member of the
Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions, he maintained a complicated relationship with
modernism, however he did indirectly incorporate many elements of this new artis-
tic language into his work. Born in Chuhuiv in the Kharkiv region, he was educated in
St. Petersburg and from there became a part of the Society for Traveling Art Exhi-
bitions. Repin was one of the stars of the imperial artistic establishment, though at
the same time he maintained an interest in his homeland and its history his whole life.
He met with Ukrainian cultural figures and used Ukrainian subject matter in a whole

5
The late 19th and early 20th century is when the “Ukrainian national revival” (which has been written
about by many historians, including Hrushevsky, Doroshenko, and Krypyakevych) finally progressed
to a political stage. For more, see: Yaroslav Hrytsak, Narysy z istorii Ukrainy. Formuvannia modernoi
ukrainskoi natsii XIX–XX st. [Essays on the history of Ukraine. The formation of the modern Ukrainian
nation in the 19th and 20th centuries] (Kyiv: Geneza, 2000).

19
range of his works. The most famous of these is his work The Zaporozhian Cossacks
Write a Letter to the Turkish Sultan (1880–1891). This huge historical panel was cre-
ated by Repin under the influence of the Cossack historian and researcher Dmytro
Yavornytsky and the findings of the 1880 research expedition 6 to the territory of the
former Zaporozhian Sich. 7 Repin consulted Mykola Kostomarov, another eminent aca-
demic and specialist in Ukrainian history, when planning his route through Zaporizhia.
Repin’s painting became one of the most iconic paintings that feature Ukrainian
themes. It influenced the development of Ukrainian historical painting, it embedded
the image of Zaporozhian Cossacks in mass culture, and it is even indirectly reflect-
ed in the aesthetics of the protest movements in modern, independent Ukraine. Repin
would inspire not only the esteemed socialist-realists in the 20th century, but also the
leaders of the unofficial Kyiv circle of intellectuals of the 1960s and 70s. For example,
Valerii Lamakh dedicated his fifth Book of Schema to Repin. 8
Another realist of the late 19th and early 20th century whose art had a significant
impact on the Ukrainian school of painting was the artist and fellow member of the
peredvizhniki, Mykola Pymonenko. In his work, Pymonenko created a romanticized im-
age of the Ukrainian village, reflecting the stereotypes held in the Russian Empire of
life in “Little Russia.” He did this through numerous references to life in the country-
side, an abundance of ethnographic detail, sentimentality, and a bright color palette.
His painting Ne zhartui (Don’t Joke, 1895) has an interesting history. It depicts a fur­
ious mother walking towards two lovers who hold each other in an indecorous embrace
set amidst a Ukrainian pastoral scene. Once the century of technical reproducibili-
ty had got under way, this ironic composition, as if giving a peek into peasant life, was
spread among the population and achieved cult status. Thousands of reproductions
were made and new life was given to one of the most popular subjects of Ukrainian
folk art in the 20th century. 9 A shift towards expressionism could be felt in Pymonen-
ko’s later work; an example of this is his painting Kyiv Flower Seller from 1908.

6
Repin’s recollection of this trip is evidence of how seriously he treated Ukrainian history. He em-
barked on the trip together with the 15‑year‑old Valentin Serov. “I had two books, beloved by both of us,
by Antonovych and Drahomanov — ​A History of the Cossacks in Southern Russian Songs and Epics. We
were reading a Ukrainian epic, and Serov, who had been attending a Kyiv gymnasium for two to three
years, clearly savored the essence of the Ukrainian language.” Ilya Repin, Dalekoe blizkoe [Far and near]
(Moscow: Azbuka, 2010), 152.
7
A semi-autonomous Cossack state that existed within the 16–18th centuries. [T.N.]
8
Valerii Lamakh, Knigi skhem [The books of schema] (Kyiv, 2011), 831–913.
9
Among researchers, the painting was given the name Run, Petro and Natalka — ​Mother Is Coming with
a Rolling Pin, which was in keeping with the titles of similar paintings. At the beginning of the 20th centu-
ry, the practice of mass reproduction and distribution of famous artists’ works depicting the countryside
and folk life became commonplace. Other such artists include Kostiantyn Trutovsky and Karl Briullov.
For more, see: Petro Honchar and Lidia Lykhach, Chyste mystetstvo [Pure art]. Catalog for exhibition at
Mystetskyi Arsenal (Kyiv: Rodovid, 2017).

20
 ILYA REPIN.
THE ZAPOROZHIAN COSSACKS WRITE
A LETTER TO THE TURKISH SULTAN.
1889–1896. OIL ON CANVAS. 170×267 CM.
FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE
KHARKIV ART MUSEUM.

21
 FEDIR KRYCHEVSKY.
BRIDE. 1910.
OIL ON CANVAS. 215×295 CM.
FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE
NATIONAL ART MUSEUM OF UKRAINE.

22
 MYKOLA PYMONENKO.
KYIV FLOWER SELLER. 1908.
OIL ON CANVAS. 87×62 CM.
FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE
NATIONAL ART MUSEUM OF UKRAINE.

23
MODERNISM, THE SECESSION,
AND IMPRESSIONISM
The Ukrainian art scene began to radically change upon the introduction of elements
of modernism. In the mid-1880s the symbolist and Russian modernist artist Mikhail
Vrubel was working in Kyiv. Here he created murals and icons in St. Cyril’s Church, de-
signed friezes for St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral, and also began preliminary work on the
painting The Demon Seated, which would prove pivotal in his work as an artist. Vrubel’s
Kyiv period, which foreshadowed his later, more mature work, would exert significant
influence on the development of modernism in Ukraine. Another proponent of the
modernist style was the Pole Wilhelm Kotarbiński who lived in Kyiv from the 1880s un-
til his death in 1921. He took part in decorating St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral under the
direction of Viktor Vasnetsov.
The interior design of St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral became a pivotal moment in the
development of Kyiv’s artistic life in the late 19th century. The professor Adrian Pra-
khov, an authority in art history and archeology from St. Petersburg, was brought in
to take charge of the design and its implementation. It is hard to overstate the role
he played in the development of the art scene over the next few years. It was Prak-
hov who invited several famous artists of the time to work on the cathedral, the likes
of whom included Viktor Vasnetsov, Mikhail Nesterov, Pavel and Aleksandr Svedomsky,
as well as Mikhail Vrubel and Wilhelm Kotarbiński.
At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, Kyiv was growing at
a swift pace and transforming from a provincial town into a metropolis with significant
cultural ambitions. This growth was due to several factors, not least among them the
development of capitalism and the rapid growth in industry that was taking place at
that time on Ukrainian soil. The Tereshchenko family, sugar refinery owners with sub-
stantial land holdings, supported the artistic scene over the course of several years.
The father Ivan and his son Mykhailo were among the most important art collectors
and philanthropists in the Russian Empire. Following the 1917 revolution, their collec-
tion was nationalized and formed the basis for the art shown at the Kyiv Picture Gal-
lery, 10 situated in the former home of the family of Fedir Tereshchenko. The building
next door, which was also turned into a museum, was the former home of a distin-
guished family of Kyiv philanthropists whose former owners were Varvara (neé Teresh-
chenko) and Bohdan Khanenko. This museum now houses a rich collection of classical
European and Eastern art.

10
Today the museum is called the Kyiv Picture Gallery National Museum. [T.N.]

24
 IVAN MIASOEDOV.
PAVLENKO MANOR. 1900–1910s.
PHOTO. FROM THE
COLLECTION OF THE NATIONAL
ART MUSEUM OF UKRAINE.

VSEVOLOD MAKSYMOVYCH.
NUDES. DECORATIVE PANEL. 1914.
OIL ON CANVAS. 243×101 CM.
FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE
NATIONAL ART MUSEUM OF UKRAINE.
 FEDIR KRYCHEVSKY.
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST’S WIFE,
LIDIA STARYTSKA. 1914.
OIL ON CANVAS. 216×99 CM.
FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE
NATIONAL ART MUSEUM OF UKRAINE

26
 MYKHAILO ZHUK.
BLACK AND WHITE. 1914.
GOUACHE, PASTELS, WATERCOLOR ON PAPER. 207×310 CM.
FROM THE PRIVATE COLLECTION OF TARAS MAKSYMIUK.

27
 OLEKSANDER MURASHKO.
FLOWER SELLERS. 1917.
OIL ON CANVAS. 133.5×159 CM.
FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE
NATIONAL ART MUSEUM OF UKRAINE.

28
 The artists of Ukrainian modernism represented a wide array of different person-
alities and fates. The greatest Ukrainian painter at the beginning of the 20th century
was perhaps Oleksander Murashko. Originally from Kyiv, he trained at the St. Peters-
burg Academy of Arts studying under Ilya Repin, was a member of the Munich Seces-
sion, visited Paris, and was very familiar with impressionism. Murashko developed his
own style, combining a Secession palette and a Parisian deftness and elegance with
a more national style. He achieved particular success in his portraiture. Murashko paid
close attention to the depiction of light and shadow in his work, aided by his use of
color. Indeed, it was the play of sparkling light and patches of color that would come
to define his more mature work, blinding and hypnotizing the viewer. His 1909 paint-
ing Carousel, which depicts two young women at a busy folk fair, won the gold medal at
an exhibition in Munich 11 and was purchased straight away by the Museum of Fine Arts
in Budapest. Two pieces of Murashko’s art were shown at the Venice Biennale in 1910,
and between 1911 and 1912 he took part in several exhibitions associated with the Mu-
nich Secession.
The early 20th century marked the arrival of the Poltava artist Vsevolod Maksy-
movych, a painter influenced by Vrubel and Russian symbolism, as well as by the
paintings of the Austrian Gustav Klimt and the Englishman Aubrey Beardsley. He was
a bright, though fleeting, light on the horizon of Ukrainian modernism: when he was
20 years old, Maksymovych committed suicide. However, in just a couple of years,
from 1912 through 1914, he had managed to complete an impressive number of paint-
ings, establish friendships with Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Larionov, Vasilii Kamen-
sky and other futurists in Moscow, star in the now-lost avant-garde film Drama in the
Futurists’ Cabaret No. 13 (1914), and also to reconceptualize the Vienna Secession
through the prism of classical aesthetics. 12 The decorative scenes of luxurious feast-
ing that feature in Maksymovych’s work, the references to classical subjects, the cult
of the beautiful body, decadence, and eroticism all intertwine to form an instantly
recognizable whole, bearing witness to the outstanding talent of the young artist.
Vsevolod Maksymovych adopted his passion for athleticism and modernism from
his mentor, a fellow Poltavan, Ivan Miasoedov. The son of the peredvizhniki artist Gri­
gorii Miasoedov, he was educated at the best art schools in Moscow and St. Peters-
burg. After the death of his father, with whom he had a complex relationship, the
young artist moved to the family estate outside Poltava in 1911. The decadent artist
from the capital regularly shocked local townsfolk with his views and quickly became
the center of local bohemian life. He brought with him an interest in antiquity, then
fashionable in the St. Petersburg academy, and an interest in modernism and in the
new art of photography. The passionate and extravagant Miasoedov enjoyed strength-
based sports and achieved no small measure of success, taking part in competitions

11
Olha Zhbankova, introduction to Oleksandr Murashko. Tvory z kolektsii natsionalnoho khudozhnio-
ho muzeiu Ukrainy [Works from the collection of the National Art Museum of Ukraine] (Kyiv: PC World
Ukraine, 2000).
12
“The introduction of athleticism into the Secession style, together with frequent images of languid
ethereality, made up Maksymovych’s individual contribution to that style,” writes scholar Iryna Horbacho-
va in Storinky ukrainskoho modernu. Istoriia ta suchasnist [Pages from Ukrainian modernism. History and
modernity], https://storinka-m.kiev.ua/article.php?id=897

29
and circus performances. Another of his passions was nudism, an idea he active-
ly promoted in the artistic-philosophical group called the Garden of the Gods. This
group existed during Miasoedov’s Poltava period, and its members included Vsevolod
Maksymovych. 13
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Vienna Secession was a rich source of in-
spiration in Ukrainian art. The central figure in Ukrainian modernism at the time was
the artist, poet, and playwright Mykhailo Zhuk. Zhuk discovered his passion for the
Secession while at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, where he studied under the fa-
mous Polish modernist Stanisław Wyspiański. Zhuk’s name is inextricably linked with
Odesa, where he lived for many years. There he worked as, among other things, the
vice-rector at the Art Institute, which was soon after reorganized into an art college.
Before the 1917 revolution Zhuk taught painting to the Ukrainian poet Pavlo Tychyna
at the Chernihiv seminary. 14 The talented pair became close, their friendship founded
on their closely aligned worldview. Tychyna was the main hero of Zhuk’s panel painting
Black and White. The young modernist poet appears in the piece as a dark angel. The
viewer would never guess from his poems of that period that he would write some of
the future classics of socialist realism, valorizing collectivization and Stalinist industri-
alization. In Black and White, Zhuk characteristically combines floral motifs, a symbolic
poetry, and a rich decorative element, which was intrinsic to the Secession style. The
dark angel plays on a flute while a girl listens to him, frozen as if in prayer or from timid
indecisiveness. Perhaps she senses the gradual transformation of the poet-werewolf
Tychyna and the sad fate awaiting the enchantingly beautiful Ukraine that stretches
out beneath the wings of the painting’s central figures. 15
Another modernist of note working in Ukraine in the first third of the 20th century
was the artist Mykhailo Sapozhnikov. Much of this artist’s mature oeuvre was connect-
ed with the Dnipropetrovsk (today, Dnipro) region, and as a result most of his works
are now held at the Dnipro Art Museum. He was, perhaps, the most prolific symbolist
in the history of Ukrainian art.

13
Ivan Miasoedov’s biography is full of unexpected twists and turns. In 1912, he married an Italian
circus dancer and took her with him back to his Poltavan estate. Together they traveled around Ukrainian
villages, learning local dances and buying up old items of national dress. Miasoedov ended up in Germany
following the revolution, where he found a rather original use for his artistic talents. He began making
counterfeit banknotes, while his wife took care of their distribution. He landed in jail as a result of these
activities. After he was freed, he moved to Liechtenstein with his family with fake passports where he
was arrested again for forging state documents. Ivan Miasoedov died far away from Ukraine in Buenos
Aires in 1953. Up to the end of the 20th century, there were still legends in Poltava and Kharkiv about
this extravagant artist and the equipment he used to forge rubles, which was supposedly found in his old
Poltava home as it was being repaired in the 1960s. For more about these legends, see: Vladimir Yaskov,
“Khlebnikov. Kosarev. Kharkov,” Volga, no. 11 (1999).
14
For further information about the relationship between the artist and poet, and also to learn more
about Tychyna’s poetry collection Panakhydni spivy [Funeral hymns], which by some miracle was pre-
served in Mykhailo Zhuk’s archive, see: Boris Khersonsky, “Nadgrobnoe rydanie” [Tombstone wailing],
Mezhdunarodnyi literaturnyi zhurnal “Kreshchatik,” 17 (2002).
15
The model for the white angel was Pavlo Tychyna’s young love at the time, Polina Konoval, the daugh-
ter of the writer and public figure Ivan Konoval (Voronkovsky). For more details, see: Vitalii Zhezhera, “Ii
smert zminyla poeta” [Her death changed the poet], Hazeta po-ukrainsky, May 11, 2006.

30
 MYKHAILO SAPOZHNIKOV.
LORD OF DARKNESS. NO. 4, 2ND VARIATION. SERIES 1: SPECTERS.
1906–1916. DISTEMPER ON CANVAS. 125×105 CM.
FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE DNIPRO ART MUSEUM.

31
 OLEKSA NOVAKIVSKY.
LEDA. 1920s.
CHARCOAL ON PAPER. 143×220 CM.
FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE
NOVAKIVSKY FAMILY.
 In the first half of the 20th century, the most prominent figure in the search for
a national style in Ukrainian art was Fedir Krychevsky, a classmate of Ivan Miasoe-
dov’s in Moscow and fellow member of the Garden of the Gods in Poltava. While the
main body of his work would be completed following the revolution, his artistic excel-
lence was widely recognized as early as 1910. Krychevsky gained a reputation for his
attraction to monumentalism, ornamentation and scale, his assured painting style, and
his love for national motifs. Thanks both to graduating from the Higher Art School of
the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg and for painting the prize-winning work
Bride (1910), Krychevsky traveled to Europe on a trip paid for by the Academy. This trip,
which took him to Vienna and acquainted him with the work of Gustav Klimt, brought
about a fundamental shift in the artist’s creative vision. Henceforth for many years,
even into the Soviet period, he would incorporate elements of the Vienna Secession
into his work, threading Cubist and Boichukist elements onto Klimt’s far-reaching
influence.
Vasyl Krychevsky, Fedir’s older brother, also played a distinguished role in the de-
velopment of modernism in Ukraine. A painter, architect, film production designer, and
graphic artist, Krychevsky designed the coat of arms for the Ukrainian National Re-
public, a trident based on the crest of Volodymyr the Great, 16 the grand prince of Ky-
ivan Rus. He also worked on the construction of the provincial Zemstvo Building in
Poltava, 17 which was built in the architectural style of Ukrainian modernism and com-
bined elements of European modernism with national elements from the tradition of
Ukrainian baroque, in particular.
Modernism in Western Ukraine, at that time still under the control of the Austro-­
Hungarian Empire, understandably developed in its own particular direction. Howev-
er, there were several people who united both the East and West, and who appeared
to have anticipated a common future for Ukrainian art. An important figure in under-
standing the legacy of the Western Ukrainian artistic tradition is Oleksa Novakivsky,
a graduate of the Krakow Academy. His work straddled the intersection of impression-
ism, post-impressionism and expressionism. He moved to Lviv in 1913 upon the invi-
tation of the Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, a well-known patron of the arts and the
founder of the Lviv National Museum. It would be difficult to overestimate the role that
Sheptytsky played in the artistic development of Ukraine in the first decades of the
20th century. It is largely thanks to the metropolitan’s open-mindedness and author-
ity that Lviv modernism is so closely associated with religious themes. 18 With Shep-
tytsky’s support, Novakivsky founded an artist’s school in Lviv in 1923. The school
was attended by many artists who would prove central to the further development of
Novakivsky’s work, Roman Selsky, in particular. In his work, Novakivsky intertwined the
Ukrainian artistic tradition with religious themes, creating his own take on modernism.

16
Krychevsky’s trident is now depicted on the small coat of arms of independent Ukraine.
17
Today the building houses the Poltava Regional Studies Museum.
18
See: Sofia Bonkovska, “Lvivska setsesiia u tserkovno-obriadovomu mystetstvi Halychyny” [The Lviv
Secession in the church and ritual art of Halychyna], Ukrainske mystetstvoznavstvo: materialy, doslid-
zhennia, retsenzii (Kyiv: IMFE im. M. T. Rylskoho NANU) 10 (2010): 85–92.

33
 Petro Kholodny is an artist with an unusual biography. He was a physics teach-
er, the principal of a business school and the Taras Shevchenko First Ukrainian Gym-
nasium. He also served as the minister for national education in the Ukrainian Na-
tional Republic (UNR) and became a huge painting enthusiast. Following the collapse
of the UNR, he moved to Halychyna (Galicia) and settled in Lviv in 1922. While there,
Kholodny headed the Circle of Promoters of Ukrainian Art [Hurtok diiachiv ukrainsko-
ho mystetstva], a collective of cultured individuals who had emigrated from Eastern
Ukraine and who took an active part in local artistic life. From the 1910s on, the artist
developed his own recognizable style, incorporating elements of the Secession with
Ukrainian folk art as well as with the Byzantine and Galician icon painting traditions.
This style unites him with Novakivsky, but whereas Novakivsky’s art is elevated by his
expression and energy, Kholodny’s work is dominated by a Secession aesthetic and
ornamental sparseness. Kholodny came into his own while in Lviv. He left behind the
role of physics teacher and minister and dedicated even more time to decorative art,
painting walls and designing stained glass windows in the Dormition and St. Nicholas
Churches as well as in the Lviv Theological Seminary.
Elements of impressionism and post-impressionism began to penetrate into
Ukrainian art at the same time as the Secession movement. The influence of both
movements can be seen in the work of many artists, including Oleksander Murashko
and Fedir Krychevsky. The slightly delayed arrival of impressionism to the Ukrainian
art scene is also connected with the transformation evident in the later work of many
members of the peredvizhniki movement such as Kyriak Kostandi and Mykola Py-
monenko, among others. This process was also a result of the influence of the Kra-
kow Academy where the distinguished western Ukrainian Modernist Ivan Trush stud-
ied alongside the aforementioned Novakivsky and Kholodny. Other artists whose work
bears the influence of impressionism include Mykhailo Berkos, Mykola Burachek, Pet-
ro Levchenko, and Abram Manevich.
In the early 20th century, nearly all future members of the avant-garde went
through an impressionist period, which served as a form of training, freeing them
from the shackles of more traditional forms of seeing and artistic creation. Examples
of these artists range from Kazimir Malevich and Davyd Burliuk to Oleksandra Ekster
and Oleksander Bohomazov. For the majority of these artists, their impressionist peri-
od represented just a stage on their journey to forming their own artistic language. Im-
pressionism would return, though when it did, it would have to live through the com-
pletely different Soviet period. 19 Under totalitarianism, the word impressionism would
become taboo, and in certain periods, an accusation of being an impressionist could
potentially be life-threatening. However, during periods of ideological thaw, using el-
ements of the lightest forms of impressionism was permissible and would be seen as
one of the most radical ways to push the boundaries of fine art.

19
See: Halyna Skliarenko, “Impresionizm v ukrainskomu zhyvopysi. Osoblyvosti interpretatsii khudozh-
nioho dosvidu” [Impressionism in Ukrainian painting. The features of interpreting artistic experience],
Mystetstvoznavstvo Ukrainy, 11 (2010): 16–22.

34
 PETRO KHOLODNY.
THE FAIRY TALE OF THE GIRL AND THE PEACOCK.
1916. TEMPERA ON WOOD. 85×144 CM.
FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE NATIONAL ART
MUSEUM OF UKRAINE.

35
 DAVYD BURLIUK
WITH A PAINTED FACE.
PHOTO. C. 1914.

OLEKSANDER BOHOMAZOV.
TRAM, LVIV STREET. KYIV. 1914. PENCIL ON PAPER. 40.2×30.2 CM.
FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE KRÖLLER-MÜLLER MUSEUM,
OTTERLO, THE NETHERLANDS. OBTAINED WITH THE SUPPORT
OF BANKGIRO LOTTERY.

36
THE BEGINNING OF THE
AVANT-GARDE. CUBO-FUTURISM
In the early 20th century, the development of Ukrainian art was directly influenced by
its wider European modernist context. At first, the center of the European art world
was the Austro-Hungarian Secession, though it wasn’t long before Paris became the
central focus. In the 1900s and 1910s, many artists headed to Paris to see the newest
and most current art. Amongst these artists was the Odesan Sonia Terk who moved to
Paris in 1907 and would soon garner international acclaim as the artist and designer
Sonia Delauney. Other visitors to Paris included the fellow Kyivans and classmates at
the Kyiv Art School, Oleksandra Ekster and Alexander Archipenko. Ekster returned to
Kyiv and had a significant influence on the development of Ukrainian Cubo-Futurism.
Archipenko, on the other hand, would remain abroad, becoming a legend of interna-
tional modernism, yet throughout his life he would continue to pay tribute to his con-
nection with Ukraine.
At the end of the first decade of the 20th century, the art scene was to under-
go a radical change once again. In place of modernism, impressionism, and symbol-
ism, each with their own gentle opposition to the academic tradition and ideas of art
for art’s sake, more radical artistic movements arrived. These were movements that
aimed to destroy preexisting norms and to transform not only art, but the world in
its entirety. This ultra-left specter of modernist thinking would be grouped togeth-
er under the umbrella term “the avant-garde.” 20 However, that term was barely used in
the 1910s, and the artists referred to themselves with completely different names and
labels. Thus began the era of “isms,” and Paris was to dictate what was in fashion and
what was not. It was there that, in place of Fauvism, which was the most radical artis-
tic movement at the turn of the century, a completely new style arrived. The change in
tide was marked in 1907 with Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. In the years
that followed, Picasso, together with Georges Braque, would become the founder of
a new artistic movement that was destined to change how we see the world forever — ​
Cubism. Founded in Italy, futurism was a different revolutionary movement born un-
der the influence of cubism and inspired by the rapid industrialization and growth of
mass society. In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote the futurist manifesto in which
he celebrated war and the poetry of machines, while also calling for the destruction of
museums, libraries, academic institutions, and all traces of culture from the past. The
word futurism was hypnotic with its sense of power, dynamism, and momentum to-
wards the future. It was roughly at the same time that the Russian Velimir Khlebnikov
would think up the local term budetlian. By the summer of 1910, artists and poets who
were part of the newly formed futurist association Hylaea (Gileia, in Russian) would
use the term budetlian to label themselves. At the core of this group were the brothers

20
The term modernism was first used in 1929 by the poet and active member of the French Communist
party Louis Aragon when he wrote about Arthur Rimbaud. Avant-garde, used to denote the rough group-
ing of radical left artistic movements at the beginning of the 20th century, entered popular usage only in
the early 1970s.

37
Davyd and Mykola Burliuk, Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Benedikt Livshits,
Vasilii Kamensky, and Vladimir Mayakovsky.
The family history of Davyd Burliuk, the leader of the budetlians, is inextricably con-
nected with Ukraine. He was born in the region around Kharkiv and lived for a long
time in the south of the country in the Taurida gubernia. This wasn’t far from the city
of Kherson where his father worked as the manager for an estate in Chernianka. And
it was precisely in this region that the Hylaea group was founded, 21 named in hon-
or of the old name of that region which dates back to the work of Herodotus. Most of
the members of this group had a tie to Ukraine, sharing an enthusiasm for the coun-
try’s history of antiquity. In St. Petersburg, the group’s raw energy triggered both in-
terest and apprehension, and undoubtedly marked them out as decidedly different in
relation to the otherwise chilly atmosphere of the northern capital. “We bear witness
to a new invasion of barbarians, mighty in their talents, dreadful in their indifference.
Only the future will show us if they are ‘Germans,’ or instead Huns, of which no traces
will remain.” Here the poet Niklolay Gumiliov sensed the spectral energy of those from
the southeastern provinces of the empire. 22
Any attempt to try and define the boundaries of a “Ukrainian avant-garde” 23 en-
counters the general problem of a national culture existing within a larger empire.
Many artists who were originally from Ukraine are known to the world as members of
the Russian avant-garde. Today researchers are actively investigating the specifical-
ly Ukrainian components of the avant-garde movement, which were spread across
the territory of the Russian empire in the second decade of the 20th century. A pio-
neer in this field is Dmytro Horbachov, an art critic and a passionate advocate of the
Ukrainian avant-garde since the Soviet period.
Discussions surrounding the specific nationality of the avant-garde are method-
ologically ambiguous. The artists themselves were defined by a certain cosmopoli-
tanism, and in their work they posed global questions about the limits of artistic dis-
course and the capability of art to exist in a state of pure non-objectivity, while at
the same time retaining a utilitarian quality. However, as the history of the Ukrainian
avant-garde shows, non-objective art is not itself free of ideology. While the early
members of the avant-garde worked to destroy the established artistic canon, merci­
lessly threatening old norms and cultural codes, in fact, they were carrying out the
same experiment that the Bolsheviks would soon be carrying out on a national scale.
As a result, researchers of the national roots of the Ukrainian avant-garde recognize

21
In addition to Davyd Burliuk and his brother Volodymyr, the group also consisted of Vladimir May-
akovsky, Benedikt Livshits, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Velimir Khlebnikov, Vasilii Kamensky, Elena Guro, and
Anton Bezval. For further information about Hylaea and the futurists’ Chernianka period, see: Benedikt
Livshits, Polutoroglazyi strelets [One-and-a-half-eyed archer] (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel, 1989).
22
It is interesting to note here that art critics mirrored Gumiliov’s turn of phrase when describing the
“invasion” of Moscow by Ukrainian members of the trans-avant-garde and painters of the New Wave in the
late 1980s. The Gumiliov quote comes from Olga Rykova’s review of V. N. Terekhina and A. P. Zimenkov,
eds., Russkii futurizm: Teoriia. Praktika. Kritika. Vospominaniia [Russian futurism. Theory. Practice. Criti-
cism. Memories] (Moscow: Nasledie, 1999).
23
The term Ukrainian avant-garde was first mentioned in an academic sense by the art critic Andrei
Nakov in 1973 at the Tatlin’s Dream exhibition in London. The exhibition catalog: Andrei Nakov, Tatlin's
Dream: Russian Suprematist and Constructivist Art, 1910–1923 (London: Fischer Fine Art, 1973).

38
 OLEKSANDRA EKSTER.
BRIDGE (SÈVRES). C. 1912.
OIL ON CANVAS. 145×115 CM.
FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE
NATIONAL ART MUSEUM OF UKRAINE.

VADYM MELLER.
COSTUME SKETCH FOR THE BALLET MASKS BY CHOPIN.
BRONISLAVA NIJINSKA’S SCHOOL OF MOVEMENT, KYIV. 1919.
FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE MUSEUM OF THEATER,
MUSIC, AND CINEMA ARTS OF UKRAINE.

39
the universal agenda of those artist-revolutionaries, while also paying attention to the
stylistic features, color palette, and thematic focus of their work, which draw from the
rich tradition of Ukrainian folk art. At the beginning of the 20th century, this tradition
inspired a whole range of artists hailing from different positions and viewpoints. 24
During the early stages of the Ukrainian avant-garde’s development, several ex-
hibitions were put on in Kyiv and other cities. 25 Towards the end of 1908, the exhibi-
tion Zveno (Link) took place in Kyiv at the Musical Instrument Depot on Khreshchatyk
Street. Oleksandra Ekster and Davyd Burliuk organized the exhibition and, alongside
their own art, showed the work of Volodymyr Burliuk, Liudmyla Burliuk-Kuznetsova,
Mikhail Larionov, and Aristarkh Lentulov. Zveno was a continuation of the exhibition
Stefanos, which had opened in 1907 in Moscow. At the opening, Davyd Burliuk distrib-
uted copies of a manifesto entitled “The Voice of an Impressionist in Defense of Paint-
ing.” The artist declared, “The high priests of art are fleeing in their automobiles, tak-
ing their treasures with them in tightly locked suitcases. Self-satisfied bourgeoisie,
your faces beam with an all-knowing joy.” 26 While the Kyiv public did not give the ex-
hibition the response it deserved, it all the same became a milestone event in the his-
tory of art. These were the first steps of the future avant-garde in the entire Russian
Empire.
Another milestone in the history of cubofuturism was the Koltso (Ring) exhibition,
which took place in Kyiv at the beginning of 1914. It was organized by an artist’s group
of the same name, which included Ekster, though it was her classmate at the Kyiv Art
School, Oleksander Bohomazov, who played the leading organizational role. Bohoma-
zov’s own work underwent a rapid transformation during this time, evolving from a soft
pointillism toward Cubo-Futurism. However, this wouldn’t have been possible without
the influence of Ekster, who kept him up to date on the most recent developments in
the art world from abroad.
Ekster played a huge role in the Kyiv art scene during those years. She traveled
a great deal through Europe and became acquainted with Pablo Picasso and Guillaume
Apollinaire in Paris and made contact with the futurists in Italy. With the priceless in-
formation she accrued, she was able to keep Kyiv up to date on the rapidly changing
European art scene. The artist’s studio at 27 Fundukleivska Street 27 became a hub for
sharing new artistic ideas. Several future luminaries of the art world took part in her
workshops: Vadym Meller, Anatol Petrytsky, Oleksander Khvostenko-Khvostov, and
Pavel Tchelitchew. While at Ekster’s studio you could not only listen to lectures but
also look at the work of her students. There was always someone of interest giving

24
Dmytro Horbachov, Avanhard. Ukrainski khudozhnyky pershoi tretyny XX stolittia [Avant-garde.
Ukrainian artists from the first third of the 20th century] (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 2017), 28–50.
25
For more information see: Elena Kashuba, Pervye avangardnye vystavki v Kieve 1908–1910 godov:
“Zveno”, “Salony Izdebskogo”, “Koltso” [The first avant-garde exhibitions in Kyiv 1908–1910: Link, the
Izdebsky Salons, Ring] (Kyiv: Triumf, 1998).
26
This quotation comes from John Bowlt’s essay on Ukrainian modernism from John Bowlt, et al.,
eds., Ukrainskyi modernizm 1910–1930 [Ukrainian modernism 1910–1930] (Kyiv: Ukrainian Museum
Foundation, 2006).
27
Today this is Bohdana Khmelnytskoho Street.

40
a talk, whether it was Ilya Ehrenburg, Benedikt Livshits, Yakov Tugenkhold, or Viktor
Shklovsky.
In 1919, Vaslav Nijinsky’s sister Bronislava, a ballerina, choreographer, and member
of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, opened the avant-garde School of Movement (École de
Mouvement) in Kyiv. The school’s main purpose was to find a new language of chore-
ography. It was through her contact with Ekster and her students that Nijinska arrived
at an understanding of how to create a new form of ballet. The foundations of this new
understanding were laid as a direct consequence of the ongoing revolution in mod-
ern painting. 28 For her performances, Nijinska worked with one of the brightest lights
in Ekster’s circle, Vadym Meller, and then later went on to work with Ekster herself. Be-
fore this period Ekster had already worked in a theater, making costumes for Alex-
ander Tairov, who pioneered the concept of synthetic theater in his Moscow Cham-
ber Theater. There she helped him stage the plays Famira Kifared (1916) and Salomé
(1917). Thus, a theatrical avant-garde was born in Ukraine, destined to become one of
the brightest pages in the history of art from that period. By some miracle, sketch-
es for these innovative performances, staged in the late 1910s and early 1920s, sur-
vived the Soviet period and today make up one of the largest remaining physical rem-
nants of the Ukrainian avant-garde. These sketches were drawn by a range of artists
such as Petrytsky, Ekster, Meller, and Khvostenko-Khvostov. In the 1920s, the the-
ater director Les Kurbas staged political and philosophical performances remarkable
for their unique set design and for embodying the spirit of post-revolutionary Soviet
Ukraine. His work is a shining example of how world-class experimental theater existed
in Ukraine in the 1920s.

28
Georgii Kovalenko, “Bronislava Nizhinskaia i Aleksandra Ekster” [Bronislava Nijinska and Oleksandra
Ekster], Voprosy teatra (Moscow) no. 3/4 (2016).

41
 VASYL SEMENKO
IN FRONT OF HIS PAINTING CITY, 1914. PHOTO.
FROM THE ARCHIVE OF THE ARTIST’S NEPHEW,
MARKO SEMENKO; PROVIDED BY LIUBOV YAKYMCHUK.

42
QUEROFUTURISM (OR PANFUTURISM)
While the Cubo-Futurists were focused on the art scene across the Russian Empire,
another type of futurist group was born, one with a more national focus. Its leader was
the young poet Mykhailo (Mykhail) Semenko. At the end of 1913, along with two oth-
er artists, his brother Vasyl and Pavlo Kovzhun, Semenko founded the first Ukrainian
futurist group. Once they had pledged themselves to futurism, these young men gave
themselves exotic new names: Mykhail, Bazyl, and Pavl, and they set up the printing
house Quero (from the Latin: to search) where they began publishing small books in
Ukrainian. 29 It was their focus on nationality that caused a huge scandal around the
querofuturists. In February 1914, just a couple of months after the group was founded,
the scandal erupted following the publication of Semenko’s 8‑page poetry pamphlet
Derzannia (Audacity). In the pamphlet’s foreword/manifesto, Semenko made one of the
most radical gestures in the history of Ukrainian art. The audacious 21‑year‑old poet
violated the holiest of holies for a nation that had endured centuries of slavery. He
dared to speak irreverently of one of the most important symbols of the Ukrainian na-
tional movement — ​the national poet Taras Shevchenko and his Kobzar (his best-known
collection of poems):
You raise your greasy Kobzar and say: here is my art. Man, I’m embarrassed for
you… You bring me debased “ideas” about art, and it makes me sick. Man, art is some-
thing you haven’t even dreamt of. I want to tell you that where there is a cult, there is
no art. … Man, time turns Titans into worthless Lilliputians, and their place now is in the
annals of scholarly institutions. … I burn my Kobzar. 30
When the Italian Marinetti called for the destruction of museums and libraries, no
one doubted the value of Italy’s culture, which had in fact long been held up as the
cultural standard for the whole of Europe. When the “barbarians” from Hylaea an-
nounced their wish to throw Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and others off the ship
of modernity in their manifesto “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (1912), which was
hastily written in a Moscow hotel, they were addressing the rather different reigning
imperial culture of their own country. While both the “barbarians” and the querofutur-
ists existed within a Ukrainian context during this time, they never formally made con-
tact or recognized one another. 31 All the same, Semenko’s gesture was inspired by
the rhetoric of that 1912 manifesto. Semenko, however, appeared to have been even
more radical than his budetlian colleagues. In attempting to adapt futurist slogans to
a Ukrainian context, he had struck a nerve in a society that had long existed in a state
of colonial dependence and that retained a desperate hunger for freedom. As he
took aim at the authority of the past, he ended up striking the heart of the Ukrainian

29
Oleh Ilnytzkyj, Ukrainskyi futuryzm (1914–1930) [Ukrainian futurism (1914–1930)], trans. Raia Tkhoruk
(Lviv: Litopys, 2003), 26.
30
Mykhail Semenko, “Sam” [By myself] (1914). Translation from Oleh Ilnytzkyj, “Cultural Revolution:
Mykhail Semenko, Ukrainian Futurism and the ‘National’ Category,” Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal
4 (2017): 47.
31
Halyna Skliarenko, “Avanhard v Ukraini: obshyry iavyshcha, etapy rozvytku” [The avant-garde in
Ukraine. Extent of the phenomenon, stages of development], in Ukrainske mystetstvoznavstvo: materialy,
doslidzhennia, 320.

43
Other documents randomly have
different content
two empty beds staring at him, he had fallen into dreams,
distressing, accusing nightmares. By Tuesday morning he was not at
all sure that he was not a desperate criminal, worthy of prison and
perhaps even of hanging.
He longed—how desperately he longed!—to discuss the matter
with Riley. Riley was so full of wisdom and common sense and knew
so much more than did Jeremy about life in general. But, having
gone so far, he would not turn back, but he moved about on that
Tuesday like Christian with his pack.
Then, on Tuesday evening, came the great news. They had been
caught—they had given themselves up. They had spent all their
money. Thompson was bringing them back with him on Wednesday
morning.
The school waited breathlessly for the arrival. No one saw
anything; only by midday it was whispered by everyone that they
were there. By the afternoon it was known that they were shut away
in the infirmary. No one was to see them or to speak to them.
During that morning how swiftly the atmosphere had changed!
Only yesterday those two had been sailing for the South Seas; now,
ostracized, waiting in horrible confinement for some terrible doom;
they were only glorious, like one of Byron’s heroes, in their “damned
prospects” and “fatal overthrow.” All that day Jeremy thought of
them, feeling in some unanalysed way as though he himself were
responsible for their failure. Had he not done this, had he thought of
that—and what would Thompson do?
At the end of breakfast next morning it was known. He made
them a speech, speaking with a new gravity that even the smallest
boy in the school (young Phipps, Junr., only about two feet high)
could feel. He said that, as was by this time known to all of them,
two of their number had run away, had spent several days in
London, had been found, and brought back to the school. They
would all understand how serious a crime this was, the unhappiness
that it must have brought on the boys’ parents, the harm that it
might have done to the school itself. The boys were young; they
had, apparently, no especial grievance with their school life, and
they had done what they had from a silly, false sense of adventure
rather than from any impulse of wickedness or desire for evil.
Nevertheless, they had wilfully made many people unhappy and
broken laws upon whose preservation the very life of their school,
that they all loved, depended. He was not sure that they had not
done even more than that. He could not tell, of course, whether
there were any boys in that room who had known of this before it
occurred—he hoped from the bottom of his heart that no boy had
told him an untruth; he knew that they had a code of their own, that
whatever happened they were never to “tell” about another boy.
That code had its uses, but it could be carried too far. All the misery
of these four days might have been spared had some boy given
information at once. He would say no more about that. The boys
had been given a choice between expulsion and a public flogging.
They had both, without hesitation, chosen the flogging. The whole
school was to be present that evening in Big Hall before first
preparation.
 IV
Every seat in Big Hall was filled. The boys sat in classes,
motionless, silent, not even an occasional whisper. The hissing of a
furious gas-jet near the door was the only sound.
Jeremy would never forget that horrible half-hour. He was the
criminal. He sat there, scarcely breathing, his eyes hot and dry,
staring, although he did not know that he was staring, at the
platform, empty save for a table and a chair, pressing his hands
upon his knees, wishing that this awful thing might pass, thinking
not especially of Stokesley or of Raikes, but of something that was
himself and yet not himself, something that was pressed down into a
dark hole and every tick of the school clock pressed him further. He
saw the rows and rows of heads as though they had been the
pattern of a carpet; and he was ashamed, desperately ashamed, as
though he were standing up in front of them all naked.
The door behind the platform opened and Thompson came in.
He was white and black and flat, like a drawing upon a sheet of
paper. The gas gave a hysterical giggle at sight of him. Behind him
came Raikes and Stokesley, looking as they had always looked and
yet quite different—actors playing a part. Behind them was the
school sergeant, Crockett, a burly ex-sailorman, a friend of everyone
when in a good temper. He looked sheepish now, shuffling on his
feet. He looked terrible, too, because his coat was off and his
sleeves rolled up, showing the ship and anchor tattoo that he
showed as a favour to boys who had done their drill well.
Thompson came forward. He said:
“I don’t want to prolong this, but you are all here because I wish
you to remember this all your lives. I wish you to remember it, not
because it is the punishment of two of your friends—indeed, it is my
special wish that, as soon as it is over, you shall receive Stokesley
and Raikes among you again as though nothing had occurred—but I
want you all, from the youngest to the eldest, to remember that
there must be government, there must be rules, if men are to live in
any sort of society together. We owe something to ourselves, we
owe something to those who love us, we owe something to our
country, and we owe something to our school. We cannot lead
completely selfish lives—God does not mean us to do so. Our school
is our friend. We belong to it, and we must be proud of it.”
He stepped back. The school sergeant came forward and
whispered something to Stokesley. Stokesley himself undid his
braces. His trousers fell down over his ankles. He bent forward over
the table, hiding his face with his hands. Jeremy could not look. He
felt sick; he wanted to cry. He heard the sound of the descending
birch. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven—would it never end?—
eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve.
He heard the whole school draw a breath. Still he did not look.
Stokesley had not made a sound.
There was a pause. Still he did not look. Now Raikes was there.
The birch again. One, two, three, four——Then, as though someone
were tearing the wall in two, a shrill cry: “Oh! Oh!” . . . Horrible—
beastly. He was trembling from head to foot. He was low down in
that hole now, and someone was pushing the earth in over his head.
And now with the switch of the birch there was a low, monotonous
sobbing, and then the sharp cry again that, at this second time,
seemed to come from within Jeremy himself. Everything was dark. A
longer pause, and the shuffling of feet. It was all over, and the boys
were filing out. He raised his eyes to a world of crimson and flashing
lights.
 V
That night they were restored to their fellow-citizens. They were
sitting on their beds in the Baby Dorm examining their wounds.
Raikes could think of nothing but that he had cried. Stokesley
consoled him. As a last word he said to Jeremy: “Very decent of you,
Stocky, not to give us away. We won’t forget it, will we, Pug?”
“No, we won’t,” said Pug, a naked, writhing figure, because he
was trying to see his stripes.
“All the same,” said Stokesley, “it was smart of you not to come.
It was rotten; all of it. They were beastly to us at the hotel, and just
took our money. We went to a rotten theatre; and it rained all the
time, didn’t it, Pug?”
“Beastly,” said Raikes.
The room was silent. So that was the end of the adventure.
Jeremy, slipping off to sleep, suddenly loved the school, didn’t want
to leave it—no, never. Saw the rooms, one by one, the class-room,
the dining-room, Big Hall—Thompson, the matron, Crockett. All
warm and safe and cosy.
And London. Swimming in rain, chasing you, hating you, catching
you up at the last with a birch.
Good old school—the end of that adventure. . . .
CHAPTER XII
A FINE DAY
 I
It was a fine day. Jeremy, waking and turning over in his bed,
could see beyond and above Stokesley’s slumbering form a thin strip
of pale blue sky gleaming like a sudden revelation of water behind
folds of amber mist. It would be a real thumping autumn day and he
was to play half for the first fifteen against The Rest that afternoon.
He also had three hundred lines to do for the French master that he
had not even begun, and it must be handed up completed at exactly
11.30 that same morning. He had also every chance of swapping a
silver frame containing a photograph of his Aunt Amy with Phipps
minor for a silver pencil, and he was to have half Raseley’s sausage
for breakfast that morning in return for mathematical favours done
for him on the preceding day. As he thought of all these various
things he rolled round like a kitten in his bed, curling up as it was his
pleasantest habit into a ball so that his toes nearly met his forehead
and he was one exquisite lump of warmth. Rending through this
came the harsh sound of the first bell, murmurs from other rooms,
patterings down the passage, and then suddenly both Stokesley and
Raikes sitting up in bed simultaneously, yawning and looking like
bewildered owls. In precisely five minutes the three boys were
washed, dressed and down, herding with the rest in the long cold
class-room waiting for call-over. When they had answered their
names they slipped across the misty playground into chapel and sat
there like all their companions in a confused state of half sleep, half
wakefulness, responding as it were in a dream, screaming out the
hymn and then all shuffling off to breakfast again like shadows in a
Japanese pageant.
It was not, in fact, until the first five minutes at breakfast, when
Raseley strongly resisted the appeal for half his sausage, that
Jeremy woke to the full labours of the day. Raseley was sitting
almost opposite to him and he had a very nice sausage, large and
fat and properly cracked in the middle. Jeremy’s sausage was a very
small one, so that, whereas on other days he might have passed
over the whole episode, being of a very generous nature, to-day he
was compelled to insist on his rights. “I didn’t,” protested Raseley. “I
said you could have half a sausage if you did the sums, and you only
did two and a half.”
“I did them all,” said Jeremy stoutly. “It wasn’t my fault that that
beastly fraction one was wrong. I only said I’d do them. I never said
I’d do them right.”
“Well, you can jolly well come and fetch it,” said Raseley,
pursuing in the circumstances the wisest plan, which was to eat his
sausage as fast as he could.
“All right,” said Jeremy indifferently. “You know what you’ll get
afterwards if you don’t do what you said,” and this was bold of
Jeremy because he was smaller than Raseley, but he was learning
already whom he might threaten and whom he might not, and he
knew that Raseley was as terrified of physical pain as Aunt Amy was
of a cow in a field. With very bad grace Raseley pushed the smaller
half of the sausage across, and Jeremy felt that his day was well
begun.
He did not know why, but he was sure that this would be a
splendid day. There are days when you feel that you are under a
special care of the gods and that they are arranging everything for
you, background, incident, crisis, and sleep at the end in a most
delightful, generous fashion. Nothing would go wrong to-day.
On the whole, human beings are divided into the two classes of
those who realize when they may step out and challenge life, and
those to whom one occasion is very much the same as another.
Jeremy, even when he was eight years old and had sat in his
sister Helen’s chair on his birthday morning, had always realized
when to step out. He was going to step out now.
The insufferable Baltimore, who was a wonderful cricketer and
therefore rose to great glories in the summer term, but was no
footballer at all, and equally, therefore, was less than the dust in the
autumn, came with his watery eyes and froggy complexion to ask
Jeremy to lend him twopence. Jeremy had at that moment
threepence, but there were a number of things that he intended to
do with it. Because he detested Baltimore he lent him his twopence
with the air of Queen Elizabeth accepting Sir Walter Raleigh’s cloak,
and got exquisite pleasure from doing so. All these little things,
therefore, combined to put him in the best of spirits when, at half-
past eleven, Monsieur Clemenceau (not then a name known the
wide world over) requested Monsieur Cole to be kind enough to
allow him to peruse the three hundred lines which should have been
done several days before so admirably provided by him.
Jeremy wore the cloak of innocence, sitting in the back row of
the French class with several of his dearest friends and all the class
ready to support him in any direction that he might follow.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” Jeremy said. “Did you say three hundred
lines?”
“That is the exact amount,” said M. Clemenceau, “that I require
from you immediatement.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Jeremy politely.
“I need not repeat,” said M. Clemenceau. “Three hundred lines
by you at once for impertinence three days previous.”
“Why, sir, surely,” said Jeremy, “you told me that I need not do
them this term because . . .”
“No because,” interrupted M. Clemenceau at the top of a rather
squeaky voice. “There is no because.”
“But, sir,” began Jeremy; and from all sides of the class there
broke out: “Why, certainly, sir, don’t you remember——” and “Cole is
quite right, sir; you said——” and “I think you’ve forgotten, sir, that
——” and “It really wouldn’t be fair, sir, if——” A babel arose. As the
boys very well knew, M. Clemenceau had a horror of too much
noise, because Thompson was holding a class in the next room, and
on two occasions that very term had sent a boy in to request that if
it were possible M. Clemenceau should conduct his work a little more
softly. And this had been agony for M. Clemenceau’s proud French
spirit. “I will have silence,” he shrieked. “This is no one’s business
but mine and the young Cole. Let no one speak until I tell them to
do so. Now, Cole, where are the three hundred lines?”
There was a complete and absolute silence.
“Vill you speak or vill you not speak?” M. Clemenceau cried.
“Do you mean me, sir?” asked Jeremy very innocently.
 “Of course, I mean you.”
“You said, sir, that no one was to speak until you told them to.”
“Well, I tell you now.”
Jeremy looked very injured. “I didn’t understand,” he said. “If I
could explain to you quietly.”
“Well, you shall explain afterwards,” said M. Clemenceau, and
Jeremy knew that he was saved because he could deal à deux with
M. Clemenceau by appealing to his French heart, his sense of
honour, and a number of other things, and might even, with good
fortune, extract an invitation to tea, when M. Clemenceau, in his
very cosy room, had a large supply of muffins and played on the
flute. “Yes,” he thought to himself as they pursued up and down the
class-room, sometimes ten at a time, sometimes only three or four,
the intricacies of that French grammar that has to do with the pen of
my aunt and the cat of my sister-in-law and “this is going to be a
splendid day.”
 II
Coming out of school at half-past twelve, he found to his
exquisite delight that there was a letter for him. He was, of course,
far from that grown-up attitude of terror and misgiving at the sight
of the daily post. Not for him yet were bills and unwelcome
reminiscence, broken promises and half-veiled threats. He received
from his mother one letter a week, from his father perhaps three a
term, and from his sister Mary an occasional confused scribbling
that, like her stories, introduced so many characters one after
another that the most you obtained from them was a sense of life
and of people passing and of Mary’s warm and emotional heart.
Once and again he had a letter from Uncle Samuel, and these were
the real glories. It was natural that on this day of days there should
be such a letter. The very sight of his uncle’s handwriting—a thin,
spidery one that was in some mysterious way charged with beauty
and colour—cockled his heart and made him warm all over. He sat in
a corner of the playground where he was least likely to be disturbed
and read it. It was as follows. It began abruptly, as did all Uncle
Samuel’s letters:

Your mother has just taken your Aunt Amy to Drymouth

on a shopping expedition. The house is so quiet you
wouldn’t know it. I am painting a very nice picture of two
cows in a blue field. The cows are red. If you were here I
would put you into the picture as a dog asleep under a
tree. Because you aren’t here, I have to take that wretched
animal of yours and use him instead. He is not nearly as
like a dog as you are. I had two sausages for breakfast
because your Aunt Amy is going to be away for two whole
days. I generally have only one sausage and now just
about five o’clock this evening I shall have indigestion
which will be one more thing I shall owe your Aunt Amy.
The woman came in yesterday and washed the floor of the
studio. It looks beastly, but I shall soon make it dirty again,
and if only you were here it would get dirty quicker. There’s
a rumour that your Uncle Percy is coming back to stay with
us again. I am training your dog to bite the sort of trousers
that your Uncle Percy wears. I have a pair very like his and
I draw them across the floor very slowly and make noises
to your dog like a cat. The plan is very successful but to-
morrow there won’t be any trousers and I shall have to
think of something else. Mrs. Sampson asked your mother
whether she thought that I would like to paint a portrait of
her little girl. I asked your mother how much money Mrs.
Sampson would give me for doing so and your mother
asked Mrs. Sampson. Mrs. Sampson said that if she liked it
when it was done she’d hang it up in her drawing-room
where everybody could see and that that would be such a
good advertisement for me that there wouldn’t need to be
any payment, so I told your mother to tell Mrs. Sampson
that I was so busy sweeping a crossing just now that I was
afraid I wouldn’t have time to paint her daughter. When I
have done these cows, if they turn out really well, perhaps
I’ll send the best of them to Mrs. Sampson and tell her that
that’s the best portrait of her daughter I was capable of
doing. Some people in Paris like my pictures very much and
two of them have been hanging in an exhibition and people
have to pay to go in and see them. I sold one of them for
fifty pounds and therefore I enclose a little bit of paper
which if you take it to the right person will help you buy
enough sweets to make yourself sick for a whole week.
Don’t tell your mother I’ve done this.
Your sister Mary is breaking out into spots. She has five
on her forehead. I think it’s because she sucks her pencil so
hard.
Your sister Barbara tumbled all the way down the stairs
yesterday but didn’t seem to mind. She is the best of the
family and shortly I intend to invite her into the studio and
let her lick my paint box.
 Outside my window at this moment there is an apple
tree and the hills are red, the same colour as the apples.
Someone is burning leaves and the smoke turns red as it
gets high enough and then comes white again when it gets
near the moon, which is a new one and exactly like one of
your Aunt Amy’s eyelashes.
I am getting so fat that I think of living in a barrel, as a
very famous man about whom I’ll tell you one day, used to
do. I think I’ll have a barrel with a lid on the top of it so
that when people come into the studio whom I don’t want
to see, I shall just shut the lid and they won’t know I’m
there. I think I’ll have the barrel painted bright blue.
Your dog thinks there’s a rat just behind my bookcase.
He lies there for hours at a time purring like a kettle. There
may be a rat but knowing life as well as I do there never is
a rat where you most expect one. That’s one of the things
your father hasn’t learnt yet. He is writing his sermon in his
study. If he knew there weren’t any rats he wouldn’t write
so many sermons.
I’ve been reading a very funny book by a man called
France, and the funny thing is that he is also a Frenchman.
Isn’t that a funny thing? You shall read it one day when
you’re older and then you’ll understand your Uncle Samuel
better than you do now.
Well, good-bye. I hope you’re enjoying yourself and
haven’t entirely forgotten your
Uncle.
P.S.—I promise you that the lid shall never be on the
barrel when you’re there, and if you don’t get too fat,
there’s room for two inside.

He read the letter through three times before finishing with it;
then, sitting forward on the old wooden bench scarred with a
thousand penknives, he went over the delicious details of it. How
exactly Uncle Samuel realized the things that he would want to
know! No one else in the family wrote about anything that was
exciting or intriguing. Uncle Samuel managed in some way to make
you see things. The studio, the sky with the little moon, the red
apples, Hamlet flat on the floor, his head rigid, his eyes fixed; Aunt
Amy shopping in Drymouth, Barbara tumbling downstairs. That
whole world came towards him and filled the playground and blotted
out the school, so that for a moment school life was unreal,
shadowy, and did not matter. He sighed with happy contentment.
Young though he was, he realized that great truth that one person in
the world is quite enough. One human being who understands your
strange mixture equalizes five million who think you are simply
black, white or purple. All you want is to be reassured about your
own suspicions of yourself. A devoted dog is almost enough, and
one friend ample. Jeremy went in to dinner with his head in the air,
trailing after him, like Peter Pan, one shadow of the world
immediately around him, the world in which the school sergeant was
carving the mutton at the end of the table so ferociously that it
might have been the corpse of his dearest enemy, and the masters
at the high table were getting fried potatoes and the boys only
boiled, and Jeremy was not having even those because he had got
to play football in an hour’s time; and the other world, where there
was Aunt Amy’s eyelash high in the air, and the cathedral bells
ringing, and Uncle Samuel painting cows. Jeremy would have liked
to consider the strange way in which these two worlds refused to
mingle, to have developed the idea of Uncle Samuel carving the
mutton instead of the sergeant, and the sergeant watching the
evening sky instead of Uncle Samuel, and why it was that these two
things were so impossible! His attention was occupied by the fact
that Plummy Smith, who was a fat boy, was sitting in his wrong
place and making a “squash” on Jeremy’s side of the table, which
led quite naturally to the game of trying to squeeze Plummy from
both ends of the table into a purple mass, and to do it without
Thompson noticing. Little pathetic squeals came from Plummy, who
loved his food, and saw his mutton mysteriously whisked away on to
some other plate, and knew that he would be hungry all the
afternoon in consequence. He was one of those boys who had on
the first day of his arrival, a year earlier, unfortunately confided to
those whom he thought his friends that he lived with two aunts,
Maria and Alice. His fate was sealed from the moment of that
unfortunate confidence. He did not know it, and he had been in
puzzled bewilderment ever since as to why the way of life was made
so hard for him. He meant no one any harm, and could not
understand why the lower half of his person should be a constant
receptacle for pins of the sharpest kind. The point in this matter
about Jeremy was that, as with Miss Jones years before, he could
not resist pleasant fun at the expense of the foolish. He had enough
of the wild animal in him to enjoy sticking pins into Plummy, to enjoy
squeezing the breath out of his fat body, to enjoy seeing him without
any mutton; and yet, had it been really brought home to him that
Plummy was a miserable boy, sick for his aunts, dazed and puzzled,
spending his days in an orgy of ink, impositions and physical pain,
he would have been horrified that himself could be such a cad. He
was not a cad. It was a fine day, he was in splendid health and
spirits, he had had a letter from Uncle Samuel, and so he stuck pins
into Plummy.
When the meal was over he walked down to the football ground
with Riley, and told him about Uncle Samuel. He told Riley
everything, and Riley told him everything. He never considered Riley
as an individual human being, but rather as part of himself, so that if
he were kicked in the leg it must hurt Riley too; and there was
something in Riley’s funny freckled forehead, his large mouth, and
his funny, clumsy way of walking, as though he were a baby
elephant, that was as necessary to Jeremy and his daily life as
putting on his clothes and going to sleep. He showed Riley the piece
of paper that Uncle Samuel had sent to him. “By gosh!” said Riley,
“that’s a pound.”
“It’s an awful pity,” said Jeremy, “that you are not in Little Dorm.
Perhaps you could come in to-night. I’m sure Stokesley and Pug
wouldn’t mind. We’re going to have sardines and marmalade and
dough-nuts.”
“If I get a chance, I will,” said Riley; “but I don’t want to be
caught out just now, because I’ve been in two rows already this
week. Perhaps you could keep two sardines for me, and I’ll have
them at breakfast to-morrow.”
“All right; I’ll try,” said Jeremy. He looked about and sniffed the
air. It was an ideal day for football. It was cold, and not too cold.
The hills above the football field were veiled in mist. The ground was
soft, but not too soft. It ought to be a good game.
“Do you feel all right?” asked Riley.
They proceeded in the accustomed manner to test this. Jeremy
hurled himself at Riley, caught him round the middle, tried to twine
his legs round Riley’s, and they both fell to the ground. They rolled
there like two puppies. Jeremy exerted all his strength to bring off
what he had never yet succeeded in doing, namely, to turn Riley
over and pin his elbows to the ground. Riley wriggled like a fish.
Jeremy was very strong to-day, and managed to get one elbow
down and was in a very good way towards the other when they
heard an awful voice above them. “And what may this be?” They
scrambled to their feet, flushed and breathless, and there was old
Thompson staring at them very gravely in that way that he had so
that you could not tell whether he were displeased or no.
“We were only wrestling, sir,” said Jeremy, panting.
“Excellent thing for your clothes,” said Thompson. “What do you
suppose the gym is for?”
“It was only a minute, sir,” said Riley. “Cole wanted to see
whether he was all right.”
“And he is?” asked Thompson.
Jeremy perceived that Olympus was smiling.
“I’m a little out of breath,” he said, “but of course it’s just after
dinner. The ground isn’t muddy yet.”
“You’d better wait until you’re in football things,” Thompson said,
“then you can roll about as much as you like.”
He walked away, rolling a little as he went. The two boys looked
after him and suddenly adored him. Their feelings about him were
always undergoing lightning changes. At one moment they adored,
at another they detested, at another they admired from a distance,
and at another they wondered.
“Wasn’t that decent of him?” said Riley.
 “That’s because he’s just had his dinner,” said Jeremy. “It’s his
glass of beer. My uncle’s just the same.”
“Oh, you and your uncle,” said Riley. “I’ll race you to the end of
the playground.”
They ran like hares, and Jeremy led by a second.
 III
He was in the changing-room when suddenly the atmosphere of
the coming game was close about him. He had that strange mixture
of fear and excitement, terror and pleasure. He suddenly felt cold in
his jersey and shorts, and shivered a little. At the other side of the
room was Turnbull, one of the three-quarters playing for the “Rest,”
a large, bony boy with projecting knees. The mere thought that he
would have in all probability to collar Turnbull and bring him to the
ground made Jeremy feel sick. His confidence suddenly deserted
him. He knew that he was going to play badly. Worse than ever in
his life before. He wished that he could suddenly develop scarlet
fever and be carried off to the infirmary. He even searched his bare
legs for spots. He had rather a headache and his throat felt queer,
and he was not at all sure that he could see straight. One of those
silly fools who always comes and talks to you at the wrong moment
sniggered and said he felt awfully fit. It was all right for him; he was
one of the forwards playing for the “Rest.” It would be perfectly easy
for him to hide himself in the scrum and pretend to be pushing when
he was not. No one ever noticed. But the isolation of a half was an
awful thing to consider, and that desperate moment when you had
to go down to the ball, with at least five hundred enormous boots all
coming at your head at the same moment, was horrible to
contemplate. Millett, the scrum half playing for the “Rest,” and
Jeremy’s bitterest rival for the place in the fifteen, was looking
supremely self-confident and assured. Certainly he was not as good
as Jeremy on Jeremy’s day, but was this Jeremy’s day? No, most
certainly it was not.
They went out to the field, and everything was not improved by
the fact that a large crowd was gathered behind the ropes to watch
them. This was an important game. The big school match was a
fortnight from to-day, and Millett might get his colours on to-day’s
game quite easily. And then suddenly the feel of the turf under his
feet, the long, sweeping distance of the good grey sky above his
head, the tang of autumn in the air, brought him confidence again.
He was not aware that a lady visitor who had come out with Mr.
Thompson to watch the game was saying at that moment, “Why,
what a tiny boy! You don’t mean to say, Mr. Thompson, that he’s
going to play with all those big fellows?” And Thompson said, “He’s
the most promising footballer we have in the school. The half-back
has to be small, you know.”
“Oh, I do hope he won’t get hurt,” said the lady visitor.
“Won’t do him any harm if he is,” said Mr. Thompson.
The whistle went and the game began. Almost at once Jeremy
was in trouble. Within the first minute the school fifteen were lining
out in their own half of the field, and a moment later some of the
“Rest” forwards had broken through, dribbled, tried to pass, thrown
forward, and there was a scrum within Jeremy’s twenty-five. This is
the kind of thing to make you show your mettle. To be attacked
before you have found your atmosphere, realized the conditions of
the day, got your feel of yourself as part of the picture, gained your
first win, to have to fight for your team’s life with your own goal
looming like the gallows just behind you, and to know that the loss
of three or five points in the first few minutes of the game is very
often a decisive factor in the issue of the battle—all this tests
anybody’s greatness. Jeremy in that first five minutes was anything
but great. He had a consciousness of his own miserable inadequacy,
a state not common to him at all. He seemed to be one large
cranium spread out balloon-wise for the onrush of his enemies. As
he darted about at the back of the scrum waiting for the ball to be
thrown in, he felt as though he could not go down to it; and then, of
course, the worst possible thing happened. The “Rest” forwards
broke through the scrum; he tried to fling himself on the ball, and
missed it, and there they were sliding away past him, making
straight for the goal-line. Fortunately, the man with the ball was
flung to touch just in time, and there was a breathing space. Jeremy,
nevertheless, was tingling with his mistake as acutely as though a
try had been scored. He knew what they were saying on the other
side of the rope. He knew that Baltimore, for instance, was winking
his bleary eyes with pleasure, that all the friends of his rival half
were saying in chorus, “Well, young Cole’s no good; I always said
so,” and that Riley was glaring fiercely about him and challenging
anyone to say a word. He knew all this and, unfortunately, for more
than a minute had time to think of it, because one of the cool three-
quarters got away with the ball and then kicked it to touch, and
there was a line out and a good deal of scrambling before the
inevitable scrum. This time it was for him to throw in the ball, crying
in his funny voice, now hoarse, now squeaky, “Coming on the right,
school—shove!” They did shove, and carried it on with them; and
then the “Rest” half got it, threw it to one of his three-quarters, who
started racing down the field, with only Jeremy in his way before he
got to the back. It was that very creature with the bony knees whom
Jeremy had watched in the changing-room. The legs wobbled
towards him as though with a life of their own. He ran across, threw
himself at the knees, and missed them. He went sprawling on to the
ground, was conscious that he had banged his nose, that somebody
near him was calling out “Butters,” and that his career as a football
half was finally and for ever concluded. After that he could do
nothing right. The ball seemed devilishly to slip away from him
whenever he approached it. He was filled with a demon of anger,
but that did not serve him. He again went now here, now there, and
always he seemed to be doing the wrong thing. For once that
strange sure knowledge innate in him, part of his blood and his
bones, of the right, inevitable thing to do, had left him, and he could
only act on impulse and hope that it would turn out well, which it
never did. The captain, who was a forward, pausing beside him for a
moment, said, “Go on, Cole, you can play better than that.” He knew
that his worst forebodings were fulfilled.
Then just before the whistle went for half-time, just when he was
at his busiest, he had a curious, distinct picture of Uncle Samuel, the
red apple tree, and Hamlet lying on the floor of the studio waiting
for his rat. People talk about concentration and its importance, and
nobody who has ever played a game well but will agree that to let
your mind wander at a very critical moment is fatal; but this was not
so much the actual wandering of a mind as of a curious insistence
from without of this other picture that went with the scene in which
he was figuring. It was like the pouring of cold clear water upon his
hot and muddled brain. It was also as though Uncle Samuel, in his
thick, good-natured voice, had said to him, “Now, look here, I know
nothing about this silly game that you’re trying to play, but I’m here
to see you go through it, and the two of us together it’s impossible
to beat.” The whistle went before he had time to realize the effects
of this little intrusion. He stood about during the interval talking to
no one, wishing he were dead, but armoured in a cold resolve. After
all, he would not write to Uncle Samuel and tell him that he had
been left out of the school fifteen because he had not played well
enough. No one as yet had scored. The teams seemed to be very
evenly matched, which was a bad thing for the school. Everyone in
the school team was depressed, and the men in the “Rest” were
equally elated. If the whole truth were known, the play in the first
half had been very ragged indeed, but, as Mr. Thompson explained
to the lady visitor, “You mustn’t expect anything else early in the
term.” She made the fatuous remark that “after all, they were such
little boys,” which made Mr. Thompson reply, with more heat than
true politeness required, that his boys, even though they were all
under fourteen, could on their day show as good a game as any
public school, to which the lady visitor replied that she was sure that
they could—she thought they played wonderfully for such little boys.
The whistle sounded, and the game tumbled about, up and
down, in and out. Jeremy knew now that all was well. His “game
sense” had suddenly come back to him, and the ball seemed to
know its master, to tumble to him just when he wanted it, to stick in
his hands when he touched it, and even to smile at him when it was
quite a long way away, as though it were saying to him, “I’m yours
now, and you can do what you like with me.” He brought off a neat
piece of collaring, then a little later passed the ball back to his three-
quarters, who got, for the first time that day, a clear run, leading to
a try in the far corner of the field. Then there came a moment when
all the “Rest” forwards were dribbling the ball, the school forwards at
their heels, but not fast enough to stop their opponents; and he was
down on the ball, had it packed tight under his arm, lying flat upon
it, and the whole world of boots, legs, knees, bodies seemed to
charge over him. A queer sensation that was, everything falling upon
him as though the ceiling of the world had suddenly collapsed. Then
the sensation of being buried deep in the ground, bodies wriggling
and heaving on top of him, his nose, chin, eyes deep in earth, some
huge leg with a gigantic boot at the end of it hovering like a wild
animal just above his head; and then the whistle and the sudden
clearing of the ground away from him; his impulse to move, and his
discovery that his right leg hurt like a piercing sword. He tried to
rise, and could not. He was quite alone now, the sky and the wind,
the field and the distant hills encircling him, with nobody else in the
world. The game stopped, people came back to him. They felt his
leg, and it hurt desperately, but not, he knew at once, so
desperately that he never would be able to use it again. They
rubbed his calf and jerked his knee. He heard somebody say, “Only a
kick—no bones broken,” and he set his teeth and stumbled to his
feet and stood for a moment feeling exquisite pain. Then, like an old
man of ninety, tottered along. At this there was universal applause
from behind the ropes. There were cries of “Well stopped, Stocky!
Good old Stocky!” and he would not have exchanged that moment
for all the prizes in the bookshop or all the tuckshops in Europe. “Are
you all right?” his captain shouted across to him. He nodded his
head because he certainly would have burst into tears if he had
spoken, and he was biting his lower lip until his teeth seemed to go
through to his gums. But, in that marvellous fashion that all
footballers know, his leg became with every movement easier, and
although there was a dull, grinding pain there, he found he could
move about quite easily and soon was in the thick of it once more.
He was only a “limper” to the end of that game, but he did one or
two things quite nicely, and had the happiness of seeing the school
score another two tries, which put the issue of the game beyond
doubt. At the end, after cheers had been given and returned, the
pain in his leg reasserted itself once more, and he could only limp
very feebly off the field, but he had the delirious happiness of the
captain—who was going to Rugby next year, and was therefore very
nearly a man—putting his hand on his shoulder and saying, “That
was a plucky game of yours, Cole. Hope your leg isn’t bad.”
 “Oh, it isn’t bad at all, thank you,” he said very politely. “I almost
don’t feel it,” which was a terrific lie. He had done well. He knew
that from the comments on every side of him. The crowd had
forgotten his earlier failure, which, if he had only known it, should
have taught him that word of wisdom invaluable to artists and
sportsmen alike: “Don’t be discouraged by a bad beginning. It’s the
last five minutes that count.” Finally there was Riley. “You didn’t play
badly,” he said. “You were better than Millett.”
 IV
Later he was sitting with Riley, squashed into a corner of Magg’s,
eating dough-nuts. The crowd in there was terrific and the
atmosphere like a slab of chocolate. Riley and he were pressed close
together, with boys on every side of them. The noise was deafening.
It was the last ten minutes before Magg’s closed. It was Saturday
evening, and everyone had pocket-money. The two boys did not
speak to one another. Jeremy’s leg was hurting him horribly, but he
was as happy as “Five kings and a policeman,” which was one of
Uncle Samuel’s ridiculous, meaningless phrases. His arm was round
Riley’s neck, more for support than for sentiment, but he did like
Riley and he did like Magg’s. He was, perhaps, at that moment as
completely alive as he was ever to be. He was so small that he was
almost entirely hidden, but somebody caught sight of his hair, which
would never lie down flat, and cried across the room, “Three cheers
for Stocky, the football hero!” The cheers were hearty if a little
absent-minded, the main business of the moment being food, and
not football. Jeremy, of course, was pleased, and in his pleasure
overbalanced from the edge of the table where he was sitting,
slipped forward, and disappeared from men. His leg hurt him too
much, and he was too comfortable on the floor and too generally
sleepy to bother to get up again, so he stayed there, his arm round
Riley’s leg, swallowing his last dough-nut as slowly as possible,
feeling that he would like to give dough-nuts in general to all the
world.
Yes, it had been a fine day, a splendid day, and there would be
days and days and days. . . .
Magg’s was closing. He limped to his feet, and, with their arms
round one another’s necks, Riley and he vanished into the dark.
 Printed by
Cassell & Company, Limited,
La Belle Sauvage, London, E. C.4.
F85.823

TRANSCRIBER NOTES
Mis-spelled words and printer errors have been fixed.
Inconsistency in hyphenation has been retained.
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