Rarely has a novel so thoroughly exemplified a nation’s death and resurrection than Vasyl Barka’s The Yellow Prince. Based on the author’s firsthand experience, it is the horrific account of a Ukrainian family and village caught in the maelstrom of Joseph Stalin’s artificial famine during the winter of 1932-33, when the Soviet dictator tried to liquidate not only resistance to the forced collectivization of agriculture, but all manifestations of Ukrainian national consciousness.
In the novel, a family – along with its village, culture, and way of life – is cast like flotsam upon the roiling waters of history. Seen from the ground, from the perspective of the farmers who populate this village, the events that overwhelm them manifest as a scourge from the north. The powers-that-be come with guns and fierce ideology. Those powers revile everything the farmers hold most dear: their ties to family, the crops they cultivate, the God they worship. Those powers loot and destroy the temples in which the villagers have prayed for generations, steal the fruit of the black earth they have tilled all their lives. Nothing is theirs anymore. The powers have even given them a name – kulaks (kurkul, in Ukrainian), meaning fists. The farmers are told that all kulaks must be liquidated if they do not change. But no one tells them what exactly they must change into. They are only told where to go to change – to the collective farm, where it is clear that they will become slaves.
The life-and-death dilemmas that this family faces every step of the way – from hiding morsels of stale bread they sneak into their mouths to venturing outside to bury their dead or setting out on foot for the nearest town despite marauders preying on the hungry and feeble – punctuate a descent into unspoken horror. A living hell in which death is the only release.
The Yellow Prince was practically unknown to Ukrainians inside the Soviet Union after it was published in the United States in 1963. The book was not merely unavailable to most Soviet Ukrainians, but it could, if found, become an express ticket to the Gulag.
For nearly 20 years, until it was published in French translation by Gallimard, The Yellow Prince remained almost a secret among diaspora Ukrainians. It was recognized as much more than just a masterpiece of Ukrainian prose, it was also a vital document written by a firsthand witness to a genocide that had largely been obfuscated and subsequently ignored. Although The Yellow Prince was read by handful of literati, the general public outside of the Soviet Union would have to wait for the 1986 publication of Harvest of Sorrow by British historian Robert Conquest to get what might be considered an “objective” historical study of the Holodomor, as Stalin’s artificial famine would come to be called.
Meanwhile, inside the Soviet Union, as Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost (openness) gained momentum, The Yellow Prince was smuggled in from the West and found readers in Soviet Ukraine. Among them was a young playwright and science fiction writer, Serhiy Dyachenko, who adapted the novel into a screenplay. He passed the screenplay on to film director, Oles Yanchuk, who would make Famine-33, a film explicitly based on The Yellow Prince. “As soon as I read the screenplay, I knew this was a film that had to be made,” Yanchuk recalled in a 1991 New York Times article.
Initially, Famine-33 was intended to have a commercial release, but the timing lined up in a fortuitous – one might say fatidic – manner. Just as preparations for the film’s release were underway, the August 1991 coup took place. Within little more than three months, Ukraine would be voting on a referendum for independence. The producers were so moved by the film when they saw it that they decided to air it on national TV on the eve of the referendum vote.
It’s hard to say to what extent the nearly 29 million Ukrainians who voted for independence (92.26 percent of valid votes) were swayed by Famine-33, but the facts that a film about the Holodomor was broadcast nationally, and that an actual referendum on independence took place – all within weeks of the Soviet Union’s bloodless (for the most part, at least then) dissolution – were nothing short of miraculous.
Vasyl Barka, who was still alive, though well into his 80s, recalled some three years after the referendum, in an interview recorded by Voice of America’s Ukrainian service, his “joy that my Yellow Prince had served in the events of the referendum.” Yet he also mentioned that just as Ukrainians went to the polls, Gorbachev was threatening them on TV from Moscow. “If you vote for independence, there will be blood, fire and ruin.” To say that Barka had a prophetic foreboding of what could happen if Ukrainians set out on a real, substantial path of independence from Moscow would be an understatement.
Barka: from wide-eyed communist to mystic in exile
Vasyl Barka (1908-2003), the pseudonym of Vasyl Ocheret, was born into a family descended from Cossacks in the village of Solonytsia, in central Ukraine’s Poltava region, very near the towns of Myrhorod and Dykanka made famous by Mykola Hohol (better known as Nikolai Gogol, his Russified name) in his early “Ukrainian” tales.
During the 1920s, as Ukrainian literature experienced an unprecedented flowering in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War, the young Barka wrote poetry deeply influenced by Pavlo Tychyna. Although Barka considered himself a progressive communist (despite never having joined the party), his first book of poetry, Ways (1930), was pilloried in a review entitled “Against Class-Enemy Outbursts in Poetry.” Barka was accused of trying to resurrect the religious “relics of capitalism.” He was pressured to recant. As a form of reeducation, the writer’s union pushed him into a part-time job at a metalworking factory, which led to a collection of poems whose title could be translated as Workshops, or even Guilds (1932). After more attacks from Communist Party publications, he realized he would not be published anymore and simply “went silent.”
Already in 1928, due to conflicts with local apparatchiks, Barka had left Ukraine proper, to settle in Krasnodar, just north of the Caucasus Mountains, where many Ukrainians descended from the Kuban Cossacks lived. In 1932 Barka married a Circassian woman. They not only managed to survive the 1932-33 Holodomor, but in the spring of 1933 his wife gave birth to their son. Although the famine reached the heavily Ukrainian region of the Kuban, on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, it was much more severe around Poltava, where Barka’s family remained. And through correspondence with his brother, he was able to learn many details of events that the government went out of its way to suppress, details that would later be incorporated into The Yellow Prince.
Throughout the 1930s Barka studied philology and medieval Italian literature, defending his doctoral dissertation in Moscow on “the realistic and fantastic in Dante’s Divine Comedy.” In many respects, it was this deep-dive into Dante that definitively pulled him away from his atheism and fast-waning communist convictions, back to the Orthodox Christianity of his childhood.
When World War II broke out he volunteered as a soldier in the Red Army and was seriously wounded. After a long recovery he was taken to Germany as a prisoner in early 1943. There he worked as forced labor in Berlin, both as proofreader at a Ukrainian publication and firefighter, putting out the blazes caused by daily Allied incendiary bombing. It was during this hellish period of Berlin in flames that Barka started writing again.
As the war was ending, Barka managed to escape repatriation back to the Soviet Union by walking hundreds of kilometers over the course of a month from Berlin to territory controlled by the Allies. At first he lived in the displaced persons camps in Germany. Finally, in 1950, he settled in the United States.
In New York City, after various menial jobs, he found work as an editor for an émigré press, and later for Radio Liberty’s Ukrainian section. Eventually, poor health led him to retire to the Catskill Mountains, where he lived an ascetic life in a wooden tower on the grounds of the Ukrainian Workers’ estate in Glen Spey, New York. In the Catskills, Barka wrote most of his major works, including The Yellow Prince, during which he would often fast in order to experience the hunger he was describing.
I had the good fortune of spending time regularly with Barka from 1988 to 1993, then less frequently until his death in 2003. I was translating his poetry and would visit him in his tower. He became my spiritual mentor, my elder, or starets to use the old Slavonic term. He spoke openly about his experiences – many of which could only be classified as mystical. For example, when he was wounded during World War II, he recounted how he had been clinically dead, and how he felt an angel pulling his body back to life – actually saw it. Another time, he had been “resurrected” during a long illness with fever, he told me.
I asked him once about the title of The Yellow Prince and who it referred to. He didn’t specify any person or figure, but he remembered distinctly that during the famine, with hunger gradually encroaching all around, everything around him took on a pale yellow hue. Others corroborated that perception. Years later, while translating the Book of Revelation from the Greek into Ukrainian, Barka would be reminded of that yellow in the description of the Fourth Horseman’s “pale” horse (Rev. 6:8) – though in Greek the color would be khloros, a yellowish-green associated with the tawny pallor of a corpse.
Ultimately, Barka’s works can only be fully understood by taking into account the religious context in which they were conceived. One can appreciate numerous “literary” aspects of The Yellow Prince, but there is no way to go beyond the surface of it without a feeling for the religious man’s view of existence. As Walt Whitman wrote in “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads”: “No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance, or attempt at such performance, or as aiming mainly toward art or aestheticism.”
As such, Barka is a religious poet – religious in the deepest sense of the word. Mircea Eliade’s description of homo religiosus in The Sacred and the Profane is an apt introduction to how Barka experienced the black earth that is literally the foundation of all The Yellow Prince’s action – where the dead are buried and from which the mysteries are resurrected:
For religious man, nature is never only “natural”; it is always fraught with a religious value. This is easy to understand, for the cosmos is a divine creation; coming from the hands of gods, the world is impregnated with sacredness…
We must not forget that for the religious man the supernatural is indissolubly connected with the natural, that nature always expresses something that transcends it.
In order to be fully appreciated, all of Barka’s works – especially his lyrical poems, but even his novels – must be read as religious: devotional acts and experiences grounded in the Logos itself.
For Barka, the death of Ukraine’s agrarian way of life, set in the hellish context of a famine beyond our imagination, is a watershed event in human development akin to the Neolithic Revolution. The dreaded instruments and ideologies of mechanized death, so painfully portrayed in The Yellow Prince’s account of the Holodomor, supplant the sacred rhythms of cyclical death and resurrection inherent in agrarian societies. And a resurrection, of sorts, is intimated in The Yellow Prince. But it is so contingent on a shattered hope and faith that – apart from the poetry, and even in the poetry – one is left more with a vague sulfuric aftertaste than any sense of resurrection.
Myron Katrannyk is a sort of everyman mauled by history.
Ukrainian history and the Holodomor
There was a time, little more than a decade ago, when any introduction to a book about events in Ukraine would require a fair amount of background material on who Ukrainians are.
Since the Revolution of Dignity in 2014 and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, however, volumes have been written about what separates Ukrainians from their northern neighbors, and books by Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians have been given their due attention.
Suffice it to mention just two books written in English and published relatively recently that cover the Holodomor: Timothy Snyder’s 2010 Bloodlands, about the area of devastation consumed between Hitler’s dreams of an eternal Reich and Stalin’s dystopian terrordrome, from World War I through World War II; and Anne Appelbaum’s 2017 Red Famine, a book specifically about the Holodomor, which expands greatly on Robert Conquest’s work, thanks to the availability of documents made public after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Bloodlands makes it abundantly clear that Ukraine lies on a historical fault line, the meeting of geopolitical tectonic plates, if you will, and that a geopolitically seismic upheaval unleashed mass destruction in the first half of the 20th century. The Age of Empire experienced its most violent death throes there.
Red Famine goes even deeper into the specifics of how a revanchist attempt to shore up the precarious Russia Empire in the guise of Communist internationalism convinced Stalin to use collectivization as a pretext for annulling all remnants of Ukrainian national consciousness that might pose an obstacle to his project of consolidating total power.
While many Russian propagandists try to portray the Holodomor as a primarily Soviet phenomenon, not specifically intended to exterminate Ukrainians and their resistance, Red Famine gives the lie to that thesis. Through fresh documentary sources, Appelbaum’s study reveals degrees of malign intentionality and their manifestation – in terms of human suffering – that are worthy of an ulterior examination of “the banality of evil.”
Applebaum insists that Stalin’s was a double-pronged approach: “Taken together, these two policies – the Holodomor in the winter and spring of 1933 and the repression of the Ukrainian intellectual and political class in the months that followed – brought about the Sovietization of Ukraine, the destruction of the Ukrainian national idea, and the neutering of any Ukrainian challenge to Soviet identity.”
As Stalin was consolidating his power over the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, Ukrainian culture and society were in the midst of a renaissance. Thanks to the process of Ukrainianization and the New Economic Policy, which allowed small landowners with farms to pursue free market practices, Ukrainian culture, whose base had always been rooted in the countryside till that time, was thriving. And the Soviet Ukrainian capital of Kharkiv became a beehive of literary activity.
All that came to an abrupt and vicious end with Stalin. He interpreted Ukrainian national consciousness as a phenomenon fundamentally antithetical to a dictatorship of the proletariat. As such, Stalin set out to liquidate the kulaks as a class. In retrospect, his rationale was rather elementary: by eliminating Ukrainian culture – based on notions of agrarian society and its inherent freedoms, not least of which spiritual – he could also take control of Ukraine’s agricultural wealth. In Stalin’s mind, millions of deaths were not an inordinate price to pay for the industrialization of the Soviet Union. In fact, if those lives were viewed as a stumbling block to his internationalist techno-futurist vision, then good riddance.
Such reasoning comes through in The Yellow Prince, expressed in “peasant terms” as a struggle between the good of regenerative growth and the evil of mechanized death. And in the mind of the protagonist, it takes the shape of a veritable theomachy.
It’s as if a collective turning away from the light has infected an entire plane of reality – the steppe – and turned it into a field seeded by death: human, vegetal, and, above all, spiritual.
The problem of evil
The Yellow Prince is a terrifying book. It tracks the family of Myron Katrannyk – his wife, mother and three children – as their village is overwhelmed by hunger, a manufactured hunger orchestrated by Bolshevik hierarchs and implemented by their cadres in order to collectivize Ukraine’s farms, appropriating all private property, and requisitioning all grain and any other food. Katrannyk is a sort of everyman mauled by history.
On the surface, The Yellow Prince could be a genocide novel imagined by Kafka, in which evil is not only ubiquitous, but patently absurd to those caught in its clutches. A deeper exploration could liken it to a modern adaptation of the Book of Job.
What distinguishes The Yellow Prince, however, is the sheer scale of realism – a naturalistic approach fostered by the modernist tradition of the early 20th century that sprang from the great realist novels of the 19th century. The reader is rapidly overwhelmed by the fact that this really did happen – in history. It is not just a fictional story contrived with turning points meant to entice the reader and generate forward motion. There is a sense of inexorability, against which fictional narrative techniques simply whither.
Essentially, the Yellow Prince is more like Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, only set mostly outdoors in a wasteland apparently bereft of hope beyond finding a crumb of food that might enable survival for another day.
But Barka’s is an especially terrifying book because the antagonist of the title is not just some Bolshevik functionary, or a man with a rifle guarding a grain silo. It is not Stalin himself. The antagonist is the terror born of privation. Ostensibly, that privation is expressed through the lack of food. But the privation, the lack, is a much more universal one; and its expression springs from the core of Barka’s world view. It is a religious, specifically Christian notion of evil – not in any “popular” sense, with images of Satan in some inferno of eternal damnation, but in the highly refined conception that underpins the Orthodox spiritual tradition.
As Gregory of Nyssa writes in his De Virginitate: “No evil exists in its own substance lying outside the faculty of free choice.” Or to cite Saint Augustine’s City of God: “For evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name ‘evil.’” In both traditions, Greek and Latin, evil is surely perceivable, but it lacks substance and is more a falling away from the light. In the most abject of cases, it is an active, militant rejection of God’s love.
Such a distinction is implicitly presented to Myron Katrannyk early in the book. In Chapter 3, the narrator describes how Katrannyk falls prey to images of “the beast” as he listens to Otrokhodin, the Bolshevik who has come to his village to requisition all the grain:
The speaker’s image somehow creeps into an uneasy reverie. From rusty green, he turns fiery mouse brown in the shadow, his sharp pincers all chewed up by cruel claws. Behind him, darkness and wraiths hovering: deep gray, glowing brighter as they near – and the creature’s burning ochre image, dumb to tears and preying on life.
Katrannyk sees “the dragon” in the figure of Otrokhodin: “For several months it’s been running through his imagination – the yellow one rising up like a plague from the underworld, where he’s strung metal wires under the night, to find Katrannyk’s eyes.”
In a brief exchange that serves as theological lynchpin to the entire novel – at least as far as the problem of evil is concerned – Katrannyk recalls a recent encounter with a priest, in which he asks about the image:
“What is it? What can I do about it?”
“You’re letting yourself be tempted over the beast,” the priest grieved.
“Not at all,” Katrannyk objected. “I’m not tempted by him.”
The priest corrected him:
Not by him; over him. There’s a difference. Over the idea, not by any substance. Guard your heart and don’t let it be deceived. Fight the lie! Return to full humility and live with love as your light: love for everyone, for God the most. And pray every minute. Prayer is the strongest force on earth.”
Katrannyk listened to the advice and sincerely wanted to implement it, but with all his problems and worries he resisted; the vision crept back into his thoughts the same old way.
There’s the speaker again, shapeshifting – uttering sentences like a gravestone crow prophesying ruin...
Despite all his earnestness and efforts, Katrannyk cannot muster that “full humility” and “love for everyone.” As a result, his lack of absolute love opens a gap through which the image of the beast creeps into his consciousness and progressively consumes him, undermining his already precarious, famished physical and mental state with justifiable fears for the survival of his family, fears that merely widen the gap.
An analogous process takes place throughout the narrative – but at a societal level. Unimaginable evil rears its head everywhere. Horror. And there is no single villain to identify. It’s as if a collective turning away from the light has infected an entire plane of reality – the steppe – and turned it into a field seeded by death: human, vegetal, and, above all, spiritual.
The characters descend into depths that smack of Dante’s Inferno. In one episode, Katrannyk, attempting to travel to where he can earn money for his family, is caught in a round-up and literally thrown with the dead and near-dead into a burning pit. Marauders lurk behind trees. Once upstanding families resort to cannibalism. Thus black market meat is infused with a cosmic doubt.
And the reader must know that all this really happened.
Barka implicitly gives the protagonist (and reader) an otherworldly task: to love everyone, including Otrokhodin, including Stalin. It is an impossible task – at least on this plane of reality. But it stems no doubt from Barka’s theological vision of the world – which was sparked and shaped largely through his experience of the horrors he depicts.
As already mentioned, Barka is an eminently religious writer, in the deepest sense of relinking (religio) the material and spiritual, the profane and the divine. He is calling on the reader to look behind the yellow “presence” of the titular prince, look into the evil, and see it as absence, like the absence of food.
Barka’s vision of the world and his metaphysics can be traced from Plato through the Church Fathers to 18th century Ukrainian philosopher and religious thinker Hryhoriy Skovoroda. But the ability to adapt a religious sensibility to the modern age came to Barka largely from the German idealists, such as Hegel, and especially from the late 19th century philosopher and “sophiologist” Vladimir Solovyov. As for specific theologians who were Barka’s elder contemporaries, the Russian priest Sergius Bulgakov (1871-1944) was paramount. Bulgakov’s notion of the “symbolic” as bridge between the profane and the divine, informs all Barka’s poetry. And Barka’s theology owes much to Bulgakov’s universalism: that in the final restoration of “all in all,” what in Greek is known as the Apokatastis, all shall be saved – including Stalin and Lucifer.
In his magnum opus Bride of the Lamb, Bulgakov seems to preface the problem of evil that pervades Barka’s account of genocide: “A true theodicy will be possible only in the eschatological fullness of time…” And the key to everything in Orthodox Christian spiritualty is the understanding, as Clement of Alexandria (c.150 – 215) and so many later Church Fathers insisted, that “the Word of God became a man so that you might learn from a man how to become a god.” In other words, theosis, or deification, the path of partaking in the divine nature. “Only deification is capable of justifying creation. It is the only theodicy,” Bulgakov writes.
The antagonist the title is not just some Bolshevik functionary, or a man with a rifle guarding a grain silo. It is not Stalin himself. The antagonist is the terror born of privation.
But Barka saves such ambitions for his other works. In The Yellow Prince he limits himself to presenting his characters – and readers as well – with a mere glimpse through the pervasive horror.
Here as elsewhere, Barka’s vision of universal love is intimately related to the mystery of the earth: how it regenerates and nurtures all life on this planet. Throughout Barka’s oeuvre, if his vision frequently soars through ethereal realms, the source of that vision is always the earth from which flesh and blood is fed and in which all life eventually comes to rest.
It’s as if Barka’s answer to the evil spreading like a miasma from the north were secreted away somewhere in the ground now being fought over – not some abstract principle, but a mysterious force suffusing the very soul of the earth.
As the novel concludes, one survivor, walking down a road into dire uncertainty, sees a cloud-like form on the horizon:
He hurries down the rough road lined with long strips of plants, dew hanging from their leafy edges – clear and white. Sparks glisten from them. When he looks back at the stovemaker’s yard, there, where the treasure is buried, a flame rises up with a huge radiant mix of jasmine light, purple, blood and blinding fire, as if the powers of some other life have raised the jewel from the depths of the earth and revealed it. The flickering pillar scatters lightning in every direction through the vault of the sky, like storm clouds, and takes the shape of the chalice the peasants hid in the black earth, never betraying the secret to anybody as they died horrifically, one by one in a doomed vicious cycle.
It appears to descend on them, with incorruptible and invincible power: eternally offering salvation.
For Barka, the key to that salvation, and any resurrection – which in The Yellow Prince he depicts as a chalice one can imagine as an ocean spilling over the black earth – is so basic, yet all but impossible for mere humans: “Love – and forgive everything.” (Там буду я, там будеш ти, / люби – і все прости.)