Paradise Lost: On Maria Matios' Bukova Zemlya (2019, A-ba-ba-ha-la-ma-ha)

by Maria Genkin

Bukova Zemlya, a mammoth of a novel from Ukrainian author Maria Matios about the 225-year history of Bukovyna, recreates the cultural diversity of the borderland region famed for its peaceful co-existence, portraying how this unique environment disappeared when land-hungry empires started fighting over it. First and foremost it is a story of nation building. Are Austrian Ruthenians the “lesser Russians” that are a part of the Russian nation, as Vladimir Putin asserted in his article on the subject of Ukrainian national identity? Would Austrian subjects of the Kaiser feel any affinity for the Russian soldiers they fought against in World War I? What if those soldiers spoke their language? What makes a nation, and, more importantly, what makes the Ukrainian nation? Why do some of the divisions persist among close relatives even in our time?

Bukovyna, a small region in the southwest of Ukraine, was a part of the Austrian Empire until the First World War. The Romanians and the Soviets fought over it until it was eventually annexed into the Ukrainian SSR. During all this time the region's diversity greatly diminished: most of the Jewish population perished during the Second World War and survivors emigrated to Israel. Ethnic Romanians were sent to Siberia or executed. Ukrainians, or Ruthenians as they were known under the Austrian Empire, were divided by occupying forces, sent to Siberia, or forced to spy on one another.

Tony Judt mentioned Bukovyna in one of his last essays, “The Edge People”, published in The New York Review of Books on November 7th, 2013. In the essay he extolled the south western Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi, otherwise known as Czernowitz, as one of the places “comprising multiple communities and languages—often mutually antagonistic, occasionally clashing, but somehow coexisting.” Maria Matios’s 927-page historical novel is an epic dive into Bukovyna’s history and its diversity. Matios herself calls it a panoramic-novel as it follows several families over the course of 225 years. There is a clear structure comprising three major parts, but each part could have easily been released as a separate volume of an ongoing saga.

The three families profiled in the book are the von Wassilkos the Wagners, and the Berehivchuks. The Von Wassilkos are Romanian Barons, a rich landowning family in the Austrian Empire. The Wagners are Swabian colonists (from a cultural, historic and linguistic region in southwestern Germany) that have lived in Bukovyna since the 1750s. The Berehivchuks are a Hutsul family that lives on the Von Wassilkos’ land.

While Matios takes some time to introduce these clans, these introductions are important, for we get to see the interactions between these communities from a historical perspective. We also find out that the von Wassylkos are Ruthenians, descendants of the ancient Kievan Rus princely branch that made it all the way southwest to the lands bordering the Romanian kingdom. And while they have nearly forgotten about their roots, they do keep some of their traditions alive. But all of this background is there only to set a stage for the time period when most of part one takes place - the First World War.

What follows is a thoughtfully researched and engagingly told story of the Russian invasion of Chernivtsi in 1914. We follow Czernowitz leaders to Siberia in deportation, eerily similar to what will come again in 1940 after the Soviet Union annexes Bukovyna from Romania. We also get embedded in a Hutsul regiment of the Austrian Army as this is where one of the Berehivchuks and Wassylkos are enrolled. Most importantly, we explore the changing identities of the Wassylko and Berehivchuk families. In one touching scene, Darius Berehivchuk, a soldier of the Austrian army, gets to interact with Russian soldiers from the other side of the front line, and in a development that seems surprising to both sides, each side is speaking the same language. Ukrainians do not yet know that they are Ukrainians, but can already sense that their identity and allegiance to the old Empires are rapidly breaking apart.

Nicholaus von Wassylko, a character based on the actual historical figure, eventually takes center stage, and we spend a lot of the novel following the Austrian politician as he represents Bukovyna in Vienna. We also see him making a transition from a Romanian gentleman with only a faint idea of his origin, to a player in Ukrainian politics, as he fully embraces his family’s Ruthenian heritage, learns Ukrainian, becomes a diplomat of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, and then largely spends his inheritance on supporting the Ukrainian cause. He also marries a Jewish actress.

Not knowing anything about Wassylkos prior to reading the book, I couldn’t comprehend how a story like this had never appeared anywhere else before in my readings. Matios knows that what she is fictionalizing is not well known by Ukrainians, so she gives the reader plenty of background information.

The second part of the story takes place in the interwar period, in 1940, when the Soviets have already taken over Bukovyna. The historical character we get to know in this part of the book is Fritz Schellhorn, a German consul to Romania stationed in Czernowitz and responsible for the displacement of native Germans out of the Soviet Union. One of the Wagners is also working on procuring passes for the Germans, and he encounters a lot of resistance from some members of his community as their roots are now firmly implanted in Bukovyna.

But back to Shellhorn. Although he is a member of the Nazi Party, he abhors its policy towards Jews and tries to save them. Czernowitz Jews were heavily Germanized prior to the Second World War, with many having served in the Austrian Army during the First World War. Fritz Schellhorn manages to obtain Reich passports for them without a J-identification, effectively allowing them to blend into Germany as German citizens. He also fights for local jews not to be deported to Transnistria concentration camps, where most perish, and manages to save several thousands of them from deportation.

Amazing story, right? Yet, this is the first time I have come across it and even the documentary evidence in the place that holds all information, the internet, is quite scant. Yet, Matios quotes entire passages from Shellhorn’s correspondence and recreates several years of this person’s life with incredible detail. Fritz Shellhorn gets arrested by the Soviets and spends ten years in the Gulag, survives it, and passes away in Germany in 1982 six years shy of turning a hundred years old. Undoubtedly, there are several more books that are waiting to be written about him.

The last part of the book is the most lyrical and self-contained narrative of post-war Bukovyna. Matios herself is a writer of Hutsul origin and many of her prior works have been about this ethnic subgroup of mountaineering people living on the edge of great Empires. She once again shines here by telling us a compelling love story between a member of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and a local girl. But this being a historical novel, there is a lot of content to take in. We learn about UPA operations, its recruitment process, coordination between regional groups, preserving archives, resistance, and the practice of retributions to the locals. We also learn about the Soviet practices of fighting the insurgent group. We see the Hutsul families being deported to Siberia or reallocated to Donbas. We also get to see the Soviets, and in a very surprising turn of events, we get to see their humanity. The Soviets are also Ukrainians, and some of them survived Holodomor, an artificial famine engineered by Stalin in 1933. Their interaction with the locals raises similar questions to what Darius Berehivchuk encountered almost half a century before: we are all Ukrainians, so how come we are on the opposite sides?

Not surprisingly, the novel concludes in Donbas in 2014. The war is everywhere in Ukrainian literature these days, and it manages to make itself present in this largely historical novel about a very different part of the country. Not surprisingly, we once again see two Ukrainians, in this case related by blood, on opposite sides of the fighting. We know why they are on the opposite sides. It is not their convictions or their values - it is a historical legacy of colonization, and erasure of memory that gets them to that point.

If all of this sounds like a lot, it is. I am not even mentioning some of the smaller narrative points. For example, famous Bukovynians Olha Kobylyanska and Paul Celan also make appearances in the novel. There is no sense in editing down the sweeping narrative of the novel to a broad panorama of events, yet this saga might have benefitted from being broken into separate self-contained volumes. If I had been bestowed the role of editor, I would have cut the introduction that goes on for 50 pages and describes the conversation between God and the angels about Bukovyna. Readers, beware. It is best to skip it and dive right into the narrative, which is rich and engaging—everything that this philosophical preamble is not.

Matios also does some groundbreaking work on portraying the Jewish population of Bukovyna in Ukrainian literature. I do wish that some of the Jewish characters had more depth and were more central to the story, but her honesty in describing the Holocaust is also quite commendable. As the Hustul woman Fedora laments the loss of her friends in the post-war period: “They are all dead. The kind ones, the evil ones - all dead, there is not a trace left. Killed by evil people, killed by kind people - God himself hasn’t stopped the carnage. Some go to church now, praying for their health, and their family’s health, forgetting how many innocent souls are murdered with the hands that are now praying to God.”

Another issue I took with Matios’ book is that while it shows the complexities of relationships between local Ukrainians, east Ukrainians, the Germans, and attempts to introduce Jews to this narrative, it almost completely avoids portraying local Romanians. There is some discussion about the Ionescu regime and its antisemitism, but there is nothing on the attempted Romanianization of the city of Czernowitz—known then as Cernăuți—during the interwar period. It is an interesting and telling emission, but then again, she had to stop somewhere.

The book’s realistic style and panoramic approach are reminiscent of Vassily Grossman’sLife and Fate, a favorite with western audiences. It is hard to tell how Matios’s novel would fare in translation, and it is even harder to imagine that such a gigantic work will be undertaken any time soon, but with some smart editing and repackaging as separate books, this book would easily become a breakthrough hit of Ukrainian literature in the West.