Mykola Leontovych: On Art, Memory, and a Swallow from Pokrovsk   Read about the author of “Shchedryk,” better known around the world in its English-language version as “Carol of the Bells,” and about Ukraine at war. Translated by Pavlo Shopin

A century ago, Mykola Leontovych’s music was first performed on European stages by the Ukrainian Republic Capella and immediately became a symbol of Ukrainian national identity worldwide. The figure of the composer retains socio-political weight to this day. Pokrovsk [a Ukrainian city in Donechchyna — ed.], where the artist spent four years, has been actively developing the brand of the “city of Leontovych” in the process of decolonization, creating its new cultural myth.

More than a hundred years ago, Mykola Leontovych was killed by a Chekist [an agent of the Russian secret service in the early years of Bolshevik rule — ed.]. Today, the Russian army is wiping out Ukrainian towns and villages, and Pokrovsk, a cityclose to the composer’s heart, is preparing for defense.

Bas-relief to Mykola Leontovych on the building of the railway station in Pokrovsk. Photo: www.trip-impressions.com

The Music of the “Singing Teacher” in the Cultural Diplomacy of the Ukrainian People’s Republic

Mykola Leontovych’s creative career took off during the formation of the independent Ukrainian state. The conductor Oleksa Prykhodko, who later became the administrator of the Ukrainian Republic Capella, recalled:

“In December 1918, a concert of the Ukrainian National Chorus (conducted by Oleksandr Koshyts) took place, which marked a significant event in our musical life. For the first time, Kyiv saw the performance of Mykola Leontovych’s “Legend” to the lyrics of Mykola Voronyi (“A young man fell in love with a beautiful girl”). The composition made such a strong impression on the audience that the Ukrainian authorities present at the concert decided to establish the Ukrainian Republic Capella and send it to Western Europe to promote the musical culture of Ukraine.”

Leontovych, who modestly considered himself a “singing teacher” and, even when learning his arrangements with an amateur choir, never admitted to his students that he was the author, refused to give his works for the Capella’s repertoire on a European tour. He said: “My songs are so incoherently composed that they cannot be sung on the Prague or Parisian stage.” Eyewitnesses recalled that the administrators of the Capella almost took the composer’s scores by force.

European observers did not share Leontovych’s self-criticism. The London-based national newspaper The Daily News and Leader reported that almost all of the songs were performed again as an encore, and “Shchedryk” and “Oh Over There, Behind the Mountain,” both created by Leontovych, were among the most original and beautiful.

The work of Mykola Leontovych was also appreciated in his homeland. In Lyudmyla Hrabovetska’s memoirs, we find a touching story about how, at the end of October 1920, Kyrylo Stetsenko arrived with the Capella in Tulchyn, where the composer spent his last years.

“The hall in the former Potocki Palace. Most people are standing, and all the passages, doors, and corners are packed. At the very end, in the corner, Mykola Dmytrovych, as always, modestly huddled near us. The concert consists only of his works. <…> At the end, Kyrylo Stetsenko comes to the front of the stage and says he would like to see Mykola Dmytrovych, whom they have come to see here. A whisper is heard, and the audience carries Mykola Dmytrovych on their hands across the hall, pulling him out of a corner. In a moment, he is on stage andshyly mutters something in response to Stetsenko’s welcoming words. Then, amidst the thunderous applause, they both hug and kiss.”

However, the composer’s everyday life was far from such fleeting moments of triumph: routine work with amateur choirs (more than once in the memoirs of choristers, one can come across phrases like “I am one of Leontovych’s voiceless students”), the inability to realize himself, lack of money, persecution by the Russian authorities in its various incarnations. The story of the artist’s life in the Donetsk region is worth briefly recounting here.

Leontovych’s Donechchyna

From a young age, Mykola Leontovych often had to move around for a better income or because ofproblems with his superiors and socio-political changes. In 1904, together with his wife and young daughter, the composer settled in the station village of Hryshyno, from which modern Pokrovsk originates. There, he worked as a music and singing teacher at a two-grade railway school and organized a choir of railway workers.

Mykola Leontovych with his wife and daughter in 1903

The composer’s daughter Halyna Leontovych wrote in her memoirs:

“We lived in a barracks for railway workers, a long one-story house in which we had a separate room. <…> In Hryshyno, my father led a choir of railroad workers who respected and loved him.”

One of the composer’s students, Hanna Orlova, said:

“He had to work hard, but thanks to his talent and great patience, his skillful approach to us children, a good choir was formed under his leadership. <…> We gave concerts not only at the Hryshyno station, but also at other stations <…>. Everywhere, we were welcomed very well, and we had great success. Mykola Dmytrovych was called on stage and the audience thanked him. We sang everywhere for free. Leontovych was selfless.”

Gradually, his life became more complicated, and shocks came one after another. While the composer and his family were on vacation in Kyiv, their house in Hryshyno burned down. Then, their newborn son Volodymyr died. Finally, Leontovych was persecuted by gendarmes for some time for his support of revolutionary teachers during the events of 1905–06. He was not allowed to continue working with the railway workers’ capella, only with a student choir, provided Ukrainian music was not performed. Depressed by this situation, Mykola Leontovych returned to his native Podillia in 1908, to Tulchyn, where he continued to teach at the women’s diocesan school.

From the “Golden Din” to the Chiming of the Bells

While working in the province, Leontovych did not waste the opportunity to escape to the capital, as Kyiv’s concert life attracted him. With theestablishment of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the composer moved with his family to Kyiv at the invitation of his friends, including Kyrylo Stetsenko, Pylyp Kozytskyi, and Oleksandr Koshyts. Here,Leontovych was entrusted with a significant mission: during the Ukrainian liberation struggle, which affected all spheres of life, including the Church, he created the first-ever liturgy in the Ukrainian language.

The service with Leontovych’s music, which took place in May 1919 at the crowded St. Nicholas Cathedral, marked the emergence of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church.

However, Leontovych did not have much time to enjoy the long-awaited opportunity to live and work in the capital of the independent Ukrainian state: Ukraine lost the armed struggle, and Kyiv changed hands between the Bolsheviks and the White Guard.

After the defeat of Ukrainian troops near Kyiv, which Symon Petliura called the “Kyiv catastrophe,” the White Guard general Bredov declared on 31 August 1919: “Kyiv is the ‘mother of Russian cities’, has never been Ukrainian and will never be Ukrainian.”

A long period of imprisonment and executions began. As Pylyp Kozytskyi recalled, “Under Denikin [Russian White Guard commander — ed.], Stetsenko, like Leontovych, led a semi-legal starvation existence, always waiting for an arrest.”

The historian Tina Peresunko notes:

“In November 1919, the poets Vasyl Chumak and Hnat Mykhailychenko, both employees of the Ukrainian magazine Mystetstvo, were killed. Later, the symbolist poet Pavlo Savchenko was killed. Even the local Russian Revival Union was afraid of the regime’s excesses and asked Denikin to stop persecuting the “Ukrainian cultural movement.” The Russian leader replied: “Culture cannot be separated from politics.”

To avoid being shot, Mykola Leontovych decided to return to Podillia. “The Black Hundreds [Russian monarchist and ultranationalist organizations active in the early twentieth century — ed.] were looking for me, so I had to leave Kyiv,” he shared with his friend Yakym Hrekh.

This decision was very painful for the composer. His daughter, Halyna Leontovych, recalled: “Now, when his talent was in full bloom, when he was working with musicians close to him, had common interests with them, and felt their support in his creative work, returning to Tulchyn would be the most dramatic event in his life.”

Nevertheless, in the fall of 1919, Leontovych finally left Kyiv and went to Tulchyn. And without money for transportation, he walked, covering a distance of 350 kilometers. “Shchedryk” was receiving standing ovations in the best European concert halls while its author was going through a period of severe poverty.

The composer’s friend, Yakym Hrekh, met himshortly before his death when Leontovych visitedhim:

“It was after Christmas of 1921. I was very surprised when I saw Leontovych in the yard, walking toward me. He was dressed in an old coat, wearing an original hat that his wife had sewn from an old coat. He was wearing one-fingered mittens (also made by his wife), and his pants were gray and black with large purple patches. He also carried a gift for me on a stick tied in a large scarf — kalachi. At first glance, he looked like a starving homeless traveler, not Leontovych.”

In the general atmosphere of anxiety and uncertainty, Leontovych must have suspected the possibility of his execution. During those Christmas holidays in 1921, the composer also visited his student Nadiia Tanashevych, with whom he worked on the libretto for his opera “On Rusalka’s Easter.”

In her memoirs, Nadiia quotes his words:

“The other day, I gave a concert in the barracks. I forgot my briefcase with various documents on the piano. I was immediately invited to a cup of tea. They took my documents and checked them. Then I remembered — they returned the documents. I am waiting for the results; maybe they will kill me.” In the briefcase were “tickets for traveling abroad, that Klavdiia Ferapontivna, Leontovych’s wife, found after his death and the whole family knew about.”

“I lie. Alone. My shot-through heart has decayed”

Mykola Leontovych was murdered at dawn on January 23, 1921, in his father’s house by the Chekist Afanasii Hryshchenko. The fact that the murderer was an agent of the Russian secret services was well known to the composer’s family and was recorded by his friend Hnat Yastrubetskyi, who documented the story of the composer’s father. The information about this was also accurately covered in the press of the Ukrainian diaspora.

However, in the Soviet Union, the documents about the murder of the Ukrainian composer were classified. In the official versions of the storypromoted by the communist regime, Leontovych’s murder was blamed on a “Petliura’s bandit” [Symon Petliura, the leader of the Ukrainian People’s Republic — ed.]. The circumstances of the murder and the identity of the killer became public knowledge only after Ukraine gained independence.

On the ninth day after Leontovych’s death, a committee was set up in Ukraine to honor the composer’s memory. Based on this committee, the Leontovych Music Society was founded, soon becoming the flagship of Ukrainian musical culture. The organization existed until 1928, and then, amid internal conflicts and the curtailment of the policy of indigenization in Ukraine, it was gradually reformatted into the Union of Composers of Ukraine.

The atmosphere of those days is well felt in the writing of the poet Pavlo Tychyna about the tragedy: “I am writing down notes for the choir. ‘Leontovych’s music’. This is wonderful. All of Ukraine has taken to singing Leontovych’s music. And what about Mykola Dmytrovych? He’s lying in a coffin, and nobody needs him. If you are quiet, they will kill you. If you become strong, you must kill. This is the rule of life.”

At the same time, the Viennese monthly journal Musica Divina summarized the responses to the Capella’s performances of Leontovych’s music: “Ukraine’s cultural maturity should become for the world a legitimization of its political independence.”

Pokrovsk: A Swallow with Singed Wings

For Pokrovsk, the figure of Mykola Leontovych became a national identity symbol. In 1938, the village of Hryshyne, where the composer had lived, was renamed Krasnoarmiyske (since 1962, the city of Krasnoarmiysk). In May 2016, on the 25th anniversary of Ukrainian independence, the city was renamed back to Pokrovsk, abandoning the symbols of the communist past.

The figure of Mykola Leontovych is immortalized in the symbols of the city: its coat of arms and flag depict a swallow, the same one that came with the carol [this reference comes from theoriginal Ukrainian lyrics of “Shchedryk,” better known around the world in the English-language version with different lyrics as “Carol of the Bells”— ed.] The image of the swallow is taken from a museum exhibition dedicated to Leontovych, a cracker box that the composer’s father once made with his own hands.

The flag of Pokrovsk

Back in December last year, while Pokrovsk was at the Ukrainian rear in a full-scale war, the historical museum implemented the Leontovych Week program with a variety of activities to mark the artist’s birthday.

Today, the Pokrovsky direction is one of the hottest on the front line. In December 2024, Ukrainian defenders repel fifty enemy attacks here every day. A few kilometers from the positions of the Russian army, the city itself lives under the bombardment of air strikes and recently lost gas supply.

Pokrovsk in December 2024. Photo: Radio Svoboda

More than a hundred years ago, Mykola Leontovych lived through the horror of the war in Kyiv. In 1919, he wrote in his diary: “From Lukianivka, from the direction of Sviatoshyn and Irpin, we hear cannon shots. It is a sad day. Both outside and in my heart, it’s bad.” At the same time, the musicians of the Republican Capella, touring Europe on a cultural and diplomatic mission, sent money from their fees to support the Ukrainian army.

Today, while Leontovych’s popular “Shchedryk” is once again being performed around the world on the eve of the Christmas holidays, Ukraine is once again fighting on the battlefield for independence.

 


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