Bohdan Boichuk’s Childhood Reveries: A Migrant’s Nostalgia, or, Documenting Pain in Poetry

This paper examines Bohdan Boichuk’s poetry by looking into the role his childhood memories played in forming his poetic imagination. Displaced by World War II, the poet displays a unique capacity to transcend his traumatic experiences by engaging in creative writing. Eyewitnessing war atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis does not destroy his belief in the healing power of poetry; on the contrary, it makes him appreciate poetry as the only existentially worthy enterprise. Invoking Gaston Bachelard’s classic work The Poetics of Reveries: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, I argue that Boichuk’s vivid childhood memories, however painful they might be, helped him poetically recreate and reimagine fateful moments of his migrant life.


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In his book The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884Bachelard ( -1963) ) underscores the importance of childhood memories in forming a poetic imagination."An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem," he insists, explaining how the happiness of the child's dreaming in solitude precedes the happiness of the poet engendering an image.1By invoking that inner child in ourselves, we can poetically recreate or reimagine fateful moments in our lives.Bachelard further states: "To reach the memories of our solitudes, we idealize the worlds in which we were solitary children" 2 and then concludes: "The child sees everything big and beautiful.The reverie toward childhood returns us to the beauty of the first images." 3However, as I will argue below, for some poets, the rekindling of childhood memories often entails a reverie of flight, trauma, and pain, especially if those memories are inextricably linked to personal loss and, moreover, are rooted in war and displacement.In other words, somewhat undermining Bachelard's approach, I contend that childhood traumatic memories can be as inspiring and productive when it comes to engendering poetic images as memories stemming from happy experiences.
Even those who are only superficially acquainted with the poetry of Bohdan Boichuk (1927Boichuk ( -2017) ) can easily discern how important his childhood memories had become for him throughout his long poetic journey.But Boichuk's inner child, in contrast to Bachelard's ruminations about childhood reveries, remembers everything through the prism of pain and suffering.It is no wonder, then, that the poet named his debut collection Chas boliu (The Time of Pain, 1957) -even his coming into this world occurred through pain, and he eagerly thanks his mother for giving him life when, heartbroken, he faces her death at the age of thirteen: For everything: for a ripped yell on a bed of birth, for pain knotting your insides, for moans, and for the baby between your knees bursting with a loud cry.For everything.4 (Za vse: / za peredertyi kryk / na lozhi rodzhennia / i smerty, / za bil, / shcho omotav utrobu, / za stohin, / skryvleni usta, / i za dytia v tvoikh kolinakh, / shcho bryznulo plachem./ Za vse.5)Later, in his long poem Podorozh z uchytelem (Journey with a Teacher, 1976), Boichuk also invokes the death of his mother but does so in a more restrained way: A bell struck at the collapsed hut.And I froze in its threshold -giving my departing mom a withered lilac branch and a clod of claynothing else.6 (Udaryv dzvin v obvalenu khatynu./ A ya v porozi vris -i materi v dorohu / pryvialyi kushch i hrudku hlyny -/ bilsh nichoho.7) By handling the memory of his mother's passing in such a minimalistic and metonymic manner ("a withered lilac branch and a clod of clay" stand for his depiction of a funeral), the poet underscores the abyss of pain experienced by him as a 13-year-old boy.Perhaps that is why he returns to his childhood memories reluctantly, although at the same time he feels compelled to reminisce about what he had witnessed, almost as if it was his duty to poetically document what had been seen and internalized: I dragged through the stubble of life my childhood out of wormwood and mint, erasing candor from my face to survive and to outwait.
My path cut through the hills from my home to the school in town,wherever my steps followed white-bark birches would grow.
In his brief "Introduction" to the translated volume Memories of Love: The Selected Poems of Bohdan Boychuk (1989), Mark Rudman could not have captured the Ukrainian émigré poet's biographical details more succinctly: Bohdan Boychuk was born in 1927 in a small peasant village in the Western Ukraine.In an autobiographical sketch he describes his childhood as "rich in poverty, simplicity, and the beauty of nature."But this pastoral situation, that "delicate balance of survival" was tilted by the events of World War II.Captured by the Germans, he spent the last months of the war doing hard labor.The next four years he spent in a Displaced Persons camp in Aschaffenburg, West Boichuk, Virshi vybrani i peredostanni, 78.
Germany, where he completed his high school education.In 1949 he came to America and enrolled in the City College of New York.9 And yet, this short paragraph sufficiently sketches a migrant's solitary journey from his place of birth and childhood to a new place where he matured as a poet.While the poet's adopted homeland facilitates for him a free artistic development and he embraces his displacement without grudges, his memories of horrendous World War II atrocities continue living in his mind and press to be artistically reimagined.10 Arguably, the most striking picture that his inner child poetically testifies to is the tragedy he witnessed as a schoolboy in the town of Buchach in Western Ukraine, absorbing the shock of the Nazis killing a Jewish woman on the street: suddenly close to the Sobiesky Well on the Railroad Street I noticed a killed woman with a Jewish profile, her body stuck to the asphalt with her arms spread out to the world, and next to her lay her crying handbag, shedding beads, pins and the warmth of small accessories of female essence.
Her head had been splintered by a bullet.Her hair was dark brown.
At her side lay an opened handbag, spilling pins, beads, combs… 12 Clearly, the poet provides more details in this prose rendition of the tragic incident.Here we learn, for example, that the woman was shot in the head, and we are also provided with the context for this brutal killing -the night action on the Jews; therefore, although there is no mention this time that the woman is Jewish, it is easy to infer from the preceding statement that this is in fact the case.
Three Dimensional Love is considerably more than just another Holocaust poem.The tripartite structure of the work, consisting of the songlike quatrain, free verse, and prose poem, presents different variations on the theme of love, from the ethereal beauty and possibilities of carnal sensuality, through mundane, if not brutal, realities of everyday existence, fleeting to the painful, yet hopeful, memories of the past.In the end, the most revealing and captivating part of the poem is the story told in the last prose segment.It relies on the childhood memories of a first teenage love amid the unfolding Nazi atrocities.The girl with whom the lyrical hero falls in love and spends a few precious moments among the town's ruins, or swimming in the nearby river, eventually disappears (presumably killed), leaving the young lover forever longing for her and searching for her his whole life, while feeling guilty for being the one who survived: A final silence collected in the glassy eyes of the dead.I was the only one who kept on walking over the earth of her absence, with the presence of the shadows of the executed, with the holes of crematoria.Why did I have to endure it?In the final account, the monastery on Raven Hill was a betrayal.The woman near Sobiesky Well -a betrayal.The bodies over the planks of Buchenwaldbetrayal.My witnessing was also a betrayal.I'm alive.13Perhaps Rudman was right to conclude in his introduction that Boichuk's "search for the girl could stand as a metaphor for all of his work." 14I think, however, that it is more fitting to say that he was also in search of that inner child lost somewhere on his life journey -the child he was too eager to reclaim.
The theme of love and death, so consistently employed by Boichuk throughout his literary career, reappears again in his long poem Kliasa bez visty (The Perished Class, 2014).This is yet another retelling of the love story we first encountered in Three Dimensional Love.The poet actually incorporates its prose segments as mottos in this new poetic rendition of the tragic teenage love between the poor Ukrainian boy and the Jewish girl Yana.In The Perished Class, Boichuk reimagines returning to his elementary school in Monastyryska as an elderly man who takes a seat at a classroom desk just as he used to as a child, but he cannot fathom why all his school friends are absent.The lyrical hero engages in a long conversation with his teacher Chornovus, who is still there (no doubt Boichuk intertextually alludes here to his long poem Journey with a Teacher), and at last understands that all his classmates are already dead.He also learns that his Jewish girlfriend was killed by the Gestapo weeks before he met her again in Buchach.In other words, the poet finally reveals that his love story, so beautifully and touchingly related in Three Dimensional Love, was in fact his childhood reverie, or the past that was dreamt "at the frontier between history and legend," as Bachelard succinctly put it.15It seems that only by spelling out the truth could Boichuk achieve some sense of closure: The old man looked at the teacher, who was still sitting on the window sill and listening.
- Teacher, to this very day I don't know what happened to Yana.I don't know where to look for her.
- Too late to look, -said Black-whiskers, approaching the "cathedral."- How then can I live without hope?- Hope is the realm of the living.I cannot help you with that.
- Teacher, take one more look at the Register.Maybe there's something about her in there.Black-whiskers carefully examined the book.
- Teacher, teacher, read it again.I don't understand.
- What is there to understand?Yana was shot a few weeks before you met her in Buchach.He packed his books and left.16 As the teacher leaves the classroom, the poet seemingly at last leaves the painful memory of his first love.What ensues for the poor boy from Monastyryska is the postwar life of a migrant, full of expectations for the betterment of his lot, yet always implicitly nostalgic about his home that never was.
Exilic displacement is not often thematized by Boichuk.He clearly avoids the motifs of uprootedness and homelessness in his poetry, but the idea of home and its meaning (be it his personal sphere or his relationship to his lost homeland) undoubtedly permeate his poetry.The poet often questions its validity or saliency (and taking into account his life experience, it is quite understandable), but behind such qualms one can easily recognize a migrant's nostalgia: into darkness.
On the edge of light years daylight appeared sometimes, and from time to time the star was falling into someone's hands.
Yes: home stood somewhere, and, perhaps, did not; the goal was somewhere, and, perhaps, was not.I went somewhere and knew: my path leads nowhere; I went and knew: my steps are life.
(ta ya ustamy khochu dotorknuty ran, / i chornu tuhu vydushyty z sertsia / na tvoi spechaleni doloni, / a tak naviky rozchynytysia / u loni chornozemu / i prorosty travoiu tvoho tila, // Kraino chornoho zhyttia.18)Gaston Bachelard cherishes childhood reveries for their ability to connect to a "cosmic memory which does not need the precisions of the social memory" 19 and further states: "In our reverie which imagines while remembering, our past takes on substance again.Over and above the picturesque, the bonds between the world and the human soul are strong.Then there lives within us not a memory of history but a memory of the cosmos." 20By invoking the painful reveries of childhood, Boichuk not only gave them poetic substance but also laid open his longing to understand the metaphysics of human cruelty through his attempts to reconcile the beauty of the world with the horrors of war.In some ways he seems to be implicitly arguing with Theodor Adorno and his famed statement that "there can be no poetry after Auschwitz."Boichuk entertains the opposite idea.Surviving as a person displaced by war, he appreciates poetry as the only existentially worthy enterprise, no matter how painful: "Poetry" Unbearable light cut through your chest and the word stabbed the heart.And for the rest of your life your numb body will ache and in your veins consciousness will pulsate blue you are alive.
):After the night Action on the Jews, as the Gestapo chased over the empty streets, hunting and shooting, I was headed down Railroad Street to the Commercial School.Near Sobiesky Well I saw 10 I elaborate on this in greater detail in my monograph on the poetry of the New York Group.See Literature, Exile, Alterity: The New York Group of Ukrainian Poets (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014),46-48.