“SHCHORS” BY VIKTOR PETROV AND OLEKSANDR DOVZHENKO

After the liquidation of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, in 1934 the Institute of the History of Material Culture (since 1938 – the Institute of Archeology of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR) was established. Viktor Petrov became a researcher at that institute. Since 1935, he worked on a topic assigned to him by the institute’s management (the so called «планова тема»), according to which he was to collect archival and oral history sources for a film script about the Red Army commander of the Civil War, Mykola Shchors (1895–1919). Back in February 1935, Joseph Stalin personally commissioned film director Oleksandr Dovzhenko to make this movie, which he planned to be a Ukrainian analogue of the Russian popular movie about Vasilii Chapaev. According to his second wife and co-director Yulia Solntseva, Dovzhenko dreamed of experimenting with the technical possibilities of cinema, which Soviet officials did not want to support, and thus he was forced to work on a movie that was shot within a strict ideological framework. Although Dovzhenko received full support, including financial one, from the Soviet authorities, which needed a world-class filmmaker, he lived in continuous fear:

“Stalin commissioned me to make the movie ‘Shchors,’ but does Stalin know that by doing so he poured poison into my heart and soul? How can an artist be told to do this or that? What if I won’t be able to succeed? Should I hang in that case?”

Another peculiarity of the situation – noted by contemporaries – was that Mykola Shchors, the protagonist of the movie, was conquering Kyiv and fighting in Chernihiv region against the troops of the Chief Ataman of the Ukrainian People’s Republic army, Symon Petliura, however Dovzhenko himself was in the ranks of the Petliuraists. While working on “Shchors,” which was reshot three times, several actors were arrested, Dovzhenko suffered an assassination attempt, a heart attack, and nervous exhaustion, but eventually fulfilled the goal set by his mighty patron.

Unlike Dovzhenko, who – having a status of an artist close to Stalin – could afford to be somewhat careless in his statements, Viktor Petrov could not openly reflect on his writings about Shchors. However, one can notice in his academic report «По следам Щорсовского похода» (“On the Traces of the Shchors’ Military Campaign”) what huge preparatory work for Dovzhenko’s movie was done by the staff of the Institute of Material Culture, who went to expeditions of Ukrainfilm, the first Ukrainian film studio. The materials collected during these research trips are partially preserved in the Central State Archive-Museum of Literature and Arts of Ukraine in the personal collection of Viktor Petrov (collection 243, inventory 1, box 101), which was established by his wife, Sofia Zerova, and partially in his collection in the Research Archive of the Institute of Archeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Copies of the latter documents are showed below. Among them there are memoirs on Mykola Shchors written by his soldiers, copies of documents covering the history of the Bohun Regiment as part of the First Ukrainian Soviet Division, which Shchors commanded, and newspaper clippings of the time. Such sources were necessary because, according to Petrov, there was not enough reliable biographical facts about Shchors at the time. On the basis of this scattered and often contradictory information, Viktor Petrov wrote a biographical novel about the Soviet commander:

“The novel pursues the following goals: 1. To find out or, if it is impossible, at least to approach finding some of the facts, which for Shchors and his biography would be indisputable, 2. To try to make a coherent and consistent story out of the scattered accounts of individuals.” (p. 214)

And imitating the style of the 1930s he added:
“We want to know all of Shchors! The order of comrade Stalin must be fulfilled and it will be fulfilled.” (p. 216)

However, Petrov introduced into his story about Shchors important considerations that had nothing to do with his protagonist, which was a skillfully made literary convention. For example, writing about Semenivka, a town in the Chernihiv region where, according to the memoirs of his contemporaries, Shchors allegedly fought against the Austro-German troops, Petrov mentions… the Baroque. He argues that the Baroque was not only a style in architecture, for example, but permeated the everyday life and worldview of local peasants, who partially preserved the early modern traditions of their shoemaking workshop (pp. 311–313). In addition, Petrov includes historiosophical reflections on epochs that change by negating each other, on the acceleration of time during the most recent epoch, and on the fragmentation of a person of the twentieth century era – these ideas he would later develop in texts published in postwar Germany in the 1940s.

Although these excerpts of an unfinished biographical sketch on Shchors were never fully published, one of their abridged versions appeared in Ukrainian language during 1935–36 on the pages of the Dnipro-based magazine “Shturm.” However, instead of mentioning Viktor Petrov, the author was listed as Oleksandr Dmytrovych Semenov. According to the preface by Shchors’s brother Hryhorii, Semenov was his subordinate and friend. Interestingly, a Russian-language version of this biographical novel has also been preserved. From the letters of Semenov to Petrov kept in the Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine, it is known that this version was also prepared for publication, but for unknown reasons it was never published.

It is important to add that – as is often the case in the Viktor Petrov collection – fragments of other literary and research works written by the researcher are found among the Shchors files. For example, in both files on Shchors (IA NAS of Ukraine, collection 16, boxes 177 a and 177 b) one can find several pages of the manuscript of the novel «The Girl with the Teddy Bear» (1928) (pp. 319, 324), a literary and critical essay on “The Black Council. Chronicle of 1663 year” by Panteleimon Kulish (pp. 317, 320–323, 326), and some of Petrov’s thoughts on the works of Mykola Hohol (p. 325). So, before reading the documents, it is appropriate to quote the last published words from the Ukrainian-language version of Viktor Petrov’s novel “Shchors”: “Caution is above all!”

References:

1. Олександр Довженко. Том 2 / Упорядкування Юрія Шаповала. Харків, 2022.

Viktoriia Serhiienko