Раїса Троянкер

Activity: Culture
Date of birth: October 30, 1909
Date of death: December 29, 1945
Navigator: World Wars

Ukrainian poet of Jewish origin. Author of romantic and love-erotic lyric poetry, the “Sappho of Uman” from the Executed Renaissance era. Born on October 30, 1909, in Uman; died on December 29, 1945, in Murmansk.

Raisa Troyanker, the daughter of an Uman synagogue watchman, came from an orthodox Jewish family and received a corresponding upbringing. However, even as a teenager, she dared to make a radical break with her family: she ran away from home with a traveling circus, having fallen in love with an Italian performer—a tiger tamer. For a year, she toured small towns and villages, and her signature act was placing her head inside a tiger’s mouth. In memory of those times, Raisa was left with a scar on her leg, which she later turned into her trademark feature.
“The tiger was old and apathetic, but once even he grew enraged and scratched Raya so badly that he almost tore her leg off,” Yuriy Smolych wrote.
Yet within a year, the circus romance grew tiresome for Raisa, and she ran away again. Later, she began an affair with the writer Onopriy Turhan, who became her first husband. Their marriage brought a daughter, Olena. Judging by the poetic lines dedicated to her, this child was the final straw for the Troyanker family:
My father drove me away and cursed me, because I have a child from a goy. He said he wished the earth would swallow both you and me, Olenka.
Raisa Troyanker’s first poetic publication dates back to 1925, when the author was only 16—it was the poem “In Great China” (U velykomu Kytai), published in the newspaper Robitnycho-Selianska Pravda (“Workers’ and Peasants’ Truth”). Even then, she joined the “Pluh” (Plow) union of peasant writers, and later moved to Kharkiv with her husband, enrolling in the Institute of Public Education.
In Kharkiv, which was the artistic and cultural hub of Ukraine in the 1920s, Troyanker entered the circle of writers of the “Red Renaissance,” who would later go down in history as the Executed Renaissance. There, she joined Valerian Polishchuk’s “Avangard” (Avant-garde) group and was published in the magazines Hart, Selyanka Ukrainy, and Shkval. Smolych, calling Troyanker a “splinter of pre-revolutionary life,” wrote that she took upon herself “all the influences of the old times, the epoch of the decay of literature and the decay of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia.” However, this was not necessarily a condemnation; according to the very same Smolych, “her poetry had two themes, and they combined in a bizarre way into one: the romance of ancient Jewish traditions and boundless erotics. For Raya was a virtuoso of debauchery, and her eroticism was phenomenal.”
Indeed, Troyanker, practically the only female poet in the male-dominated circle of Kharkiv artists, was a true femme fatale who did not shy away from love affairs—it is said that nearly every Kharkiv writer had a relationship with her. The woman herself, who passionately signed her name as “Rai-ya,” made absolutely no secret of her boundless sensuality. In a letter to Ivan Dniprovsky, the poet even confessed that she was undergoing “Freudian” treatment for nymphomania—this letter is preserved today in the Kharkiv Literary Museum.
“And how much did this affect her poetry? Well, to be honest, not at all. She does have a poem about her first sexual experience, but other than that, there are no poems about physicality as such. They feature completely understandable motifs; for example, when her daughter Olenka was born, there are poems about motherhood, about the child, about the bond with the child. And far stronger in her poetry, for instance, is the theme of Jewishness, the relationship with her father, and her Uman family,” says literary scholar Yaryna Tsymbal.
However, it would be a mistake to assume that interest in Troyanker was tied purely to her sexuality. She was a woman of extraordinary erudition, an avid reader, and knew many poems by heart. Her education was not limited to literature—Troyanker was well-versed in other fields of art as well as the humanities, showing a particular interest in history and geography.
In 1930, she married the Russian writer Ilya Sadofyev, and a year later moved with him to Leningrad. This likely saved her from the repressions that later victimized the majority of Kharkiv writers. The couple settled in Leningrad, where Troyanker found employment at the newspaper Novaya Zarya. In 1935, the marriage dissolved, and the poet moved to Murmansk, where she worked for many years as a journalist for the newspaper Polyarnaya Pravda. During World War II, she served as a war correspondent, for which she was awarded the Medal “For the Defence of the Soviet Transarctic”.
Raisa Troyanker’s final collection of poetry was published in 1942. Titled Surovaya Lirika (“Harsh Lyrics”), it was written in Russian and contained entirely typical propaganda passages about the “immortal Lenin” and “Stalin’s beloved voice.” In these heavily ideologized verses, nothing remained of that sensual “Rai-ya”—the former circus performer who flaunted her tiger-bite scar, adored the color lilac, and drove men to madness. She died of a malignant tumor at the age of 37 and was buried in Murmansk. Her grave has been lost.

Author: Olha Herasymenko