Viktor Petrov (1894–1969) was a vitally important figure in the development of modem Ukrainian literature in the twentieth century. He is essentially unknown in English-language scholarship, which is, unfortunately, unlikely to change any time soon. But even in Ukrainian scholarship, where his significance is generally acknowledged, Petrov is a figure who struggles for attention; he is shrouded in mystery, hidden in the shadows, and inadequately documented and researched. This is what gives the editors their titular metaphor—mapping. They wish to bring cartographic description to the uncharted landscape that is Viktor Petrov, an intellectual expanse they compare to the unexplored places that ancient Roman cartographers marked as “Hic sunt leones.”
These uncharted territories in the study of Viktor Petrov (perhaps better known under his literary pseudonym, V. Domontovych) are many and of different kinds. The most intriguing is his role as a Soviet spy. As WWII progressed, Petrov was sent across the lines to the German side, where he put on a German uniform. After the war, he ended up part of the vibrant Ukrainian expatriate intellectual community in the DP camps. He was a member of MUR (Mystetskyi ukrainskyi rukh, The Artistic Ukrainian Movement) and this is when most of his important literary work was published, although some of it had been written in the 1920s. Then, in 1949, he disappeared from his apartment in Munich, eventually re-surfacing as a Soviet hero in Moscow and finally returning to Kyiv, where he worked as a scholar but wrote no more fiction. There he resumed a romance from three decades earlier with the wife (now widow) of his friend Mykola Zerov, a victim of Stalinist repression, and returned to his prewar work as an archaeologist and scholar of antiquities. His fiction and scholars hip are equally intriguing, though less hair-raising and sensational. His writing can be described as neo-classical modernism, a mix of intellectual rigor, stylistic experimentation, and thematic singularity. A strong interrelation exists between his fiction and his scholarship. He also had an interest in biography and produced a series of fictionalized works on a variety of notable people.
This volume contains the papers from a conference that took place at the Jagiellonian University in Kracow on June 6–7, 2019, on the 50th anniversary of Petrov's death. There are nineteen essays, grouped in five categories, plus a general introduction and name index. The essays are all in Ukrainian, except one, in Polish, about the problems and issues involved in translating Petrov's works into Polish. Two of the essays are biographical (one of which suggests another mystery: that Petrov himself wrote the essay published in Toronto on the second anniversary of his disappearance!) Two more essays are documentary in nature, exploring previously unknown correspondence to and from Petrov. The rest are in the familiar genre of literary and intellectual explorations and analyses of his writing.
Naturally, a collection of conference papers cannot become an exhaustive, cohesive, and systematic analysis of a writer and scholar's accomplishments. The authors in this collection pursue their own interests without any attempt to coordinate, compare, or align their views and ideas with one another. The essays are not all on the same intellectual level. Some pursue matters of only tangential interest, such as theatricality in Petrov's works (he wrote no plays) or the urbanism of his depiction of Kyiv. The bulk of the essays offer particular, personal, and discrete literary interpretations of one or more of Petrov's works.
Despite this unsurprising, indeed expected heterogeneity, there is a remarkable unity among the various essays in this volume, which derives, of course, from the subject: Petrov himself. While there is much about his writing and ideas that is still open to discussion and analysis, some fundamental principles are clear: foremost among them, his firm conviction that intellectual history—indeed, the development of civilization—is discontinuous. Petrov, reacting to much of early twentieth century philosophy, felt that rational convictions about what is knowable are suspicious, that elegant schemes of continuous historical development (including Marxism) are unfounded, and that the past is better understood as discrete segments of peculiar intellectual prejudices, rather than a progress ion of dialectical developments. In aesthetic terms, this translated into modernist experimentation and skepticism. These ideas, in various forms, are the essential bond that holds together the majority of essays in this collection. At the core of this volume are the essays that analyze Domontovych's fictional works in relation to Petrov's analytical writings, and position them in this modern philosophical environment.
The individual authors in the volume see and present these ideas in various contexts and understand them in different ways. Alfred Sproede sees Jean-Francois Lyotard's metanarratives. Myroslav Shkandrij sees Cornelius Castoriadis's political analyses of authoritarianism. George Grabowicz sees uncertainty as the underpinning of modernist experimentation. Vera Aheeva sees the vagaries of historical memory. In these and other essays, Domontovych/Petrov emerges as a complex but essentially knowable, discoverable phenomenon of modernist literature and early twentieth-century philosophy. Perhaps one day more of his work and more of this scholarship will be available in English as well. In the meantime, we can be happy that the cartographers have narrowed the uncharted territory of the lions. Indeed, it seems the lions have become much more familiar and have moved into the intellectual space that we already inhabit.
