Between two Powers: a Soviet Ukrainian Writer Mykola Khvyl'ovyi

The article examines the way in which Mykola Khvyl'ovyi, one of the most outstanding Ukrainian writers and yet one of the most controversial figures of early Soviet history, was assessed in national and diaspora historiography. It is argued that the self-referential character of Khvyl'ovyi's short stories along with the scarcity and unreliability of primary sources have contributed to creating a narrative of an ambivalent writer and communist Mykola Khvyl'ovyi. A simplistic approach to place the writer's political and aesthetic agendas in an "either - or" paradigm, artificially fitting his convictions into a communist or a nationalistic framework, is contested by the author. The aim of this examination is, thus, to make more understandable the choices of those national intellectuals of the 1920s for whom being both Ukrainians and communists did not seem contradictory. This brings the discussion of the ideological development of Khvyl'ovyi into a broader context, namely what it meant to be a national intellectual and what choices one was faced with, not in Moscow, but in a border republic, where any application of a national sentiment was seen as a threat to the revolutionary legacy.