Arkadii Liubchenko: His Life, His Times, His Diary, His Furies

As a colleague of the writer Mykola Khvyl’ovyi, secretary of the literary association Hart, the short-story writer Arkadii Liubchenko (1899–1945) stood at the center of cultural politics. After the suicide of Khvyl’ovyi in 1933, Liubchenko published little, but he survived the deadly thirties without joining the Communist party or (except for a short time in 1938) being arrested. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, he evaded evacuation by going into hiding, then reemerged in occupied Kharkiv and began publishing again. He died just weeks before the end of the Third Reich.

In November 1941, when Kharkiv fell to the Germans, Liubchenko started keeping a diary. For the next three and a half years he rarely let a day pass without writing several pages. In the process he produced a remarkable account of life under occupation.

Liubchenko, who at first welcomed the Wehrmacht as a liberator, became disillusioned with German aims in the East. But he never shook off his belief that Jews were to blame for every conceivable ill, and his diary contains anti-Semitic outpourings of astonishing virulence. When a portion of the diary appeared in the West in 1951, critics mentioned the anti-Semitism only in passing. A fuller edition that was published in Ukraine in 1999 contained passages of even greater malignance.

Long puzzled by the discordance between the raging against Jews in the diary and the seeming absence of an anti-Jewish animus in Liubchenko’s stories, I set about reading the two parts of his corpus and studying his extensive archive. Drawing on psychoanalytic concepts and applying structuralist techniques, I will argue in my paper that the structure of the thinking that underlies Liubchenko’s diary and stories is identical. In the face of the hated Jew he saw his own features.