Avant-gardist versus Neoclassicist

Viktor Petrov graduated from the University of Kyiv in 1918 and became a prominent scholar in the Ukrainian Academy of Arts created by the Ukrainian National Republic and subsequently taken over by the Soviet regime. For the next twenty years he filled many important positions in the Academy, among them secretary of the Historical Dictionary Commission and director of the Ethnographic Commission. Until he stopped publishing in the thirties, he was known in literary circles as Viktor Domontovych, a prose writer and a member of the neo-classicist circle around Mykola Zerov. During the Second World War, after the Academy had been moved to the Urals, he suddenly reappeared in occupied Kharkiv, where he worked for the German PropagandastafFel editing the journal Ukrains'kyi zasiv (Ukrainian Seeding). Following the evacuation of Kharkiv he retreated with the German front. The post-war years saw a great burst of literary activity in the camps that housed displaced persons. Here PetrovDomontovych, by virtue of his intellectual stature and organizational abilities, played a leading role in the formation of the emigre Ukrainian literary organization MUR and once again became a productive writer. Iurii Sherekh called him one of the greatest, if not the greatest intellectual figure in the emigration.1 On 18 April, 1949, he suddenly and inexplicably disappeared. It was not until 1956 that he mysteriously resurfaced in Kyiv as the senior staff member at the Academy of Sciences Institute of Archaeology and as director of its scientific archives. In the years that followed, he stopped work as the creative writer Domontovych, although as Petrov he continued to produce scores of articles on ethnography, excavated Trypillean and Proto-Slavic settlements, and investigated the ancient burial mounds and Scythian artifacts.2 1965 produced another surprise: he was honoured with a medal for his achievements as a Soviet spy. He died in 1969. The involvement with the Soviet secret police remains a

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