[In the following excerpt, Kaun discusses the sources, plot, and stylistic features of the Lay of Opanas, praising Bagritsky's work for its passionate optimism.]

Eduard Bagritsky was a member of the Constructivist Literary Center for some five years, but he bore no consistent allegiance to any school. His output, considerable for the short span of his life, is somewhat eclectic, showing traces of Robert Burns (a few of whose poems he lovingly translated) and other Western Europeans, as well as of a multitude of Russians, from Pushkin through the acmeists and futurists. Such traces, however, may be found in any wellread author, and it is futile to use them as a basis for any specific label. Bagritsky's verses vary in form, from regular meter (with a partiality for the amphibrach) to blank metric and free verse, futuristic broken lines, and arbitrary rhythms. As to subject, it ranges from Tyll Eulenspiegel and the romantic beggars of Burns to contemporary themes, the leading one being civil war episodes. His main work, on which his reputation stands, is Elegy on Opanas, a narrative poem, wherein epic mingles with ballad, and classic passages alternate with national motives from the ancient Lay of Prince Igor and from folk songs. The very name of the elegy, Duma, suggests Bagritsky's affinity with the celebrated Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), author of numerous dumy (the name applied to Ukrainian folk epics and songs); the text reveals further signs of this kinship.

The poem is saturated with Ukrainian color, in both land-scape and motives. Opanas is an Ukrainian peasant, unwittingly swept by the waves of revolution and civil wars into the camp of Makhno's "Greens," a variety of bandits midway between Reds and Whites, with anarchistic pretensions. Bagritsky conveys the gaudy romance of the strife by a variety of means, now by delicately suggestive images, now by Gargantuan revelry in gory detail. Woven into the large epic canvas is the personal drama of Opanas, the simpleton who was jolted out of his peaceful rusticity by a group of Bolshevik grain collectors led by the Jew Kogan. Resentful of the highhanded methods of the city chaps, Opanas joins the Makhno band, and is soon transformed into a picturesque brigand. His costume is an eloquent record of his exploits: a shaggy Cossack cap, a fur coat "taken off a dead rabbi near Gomel," a "French" military jacket of "English cut," stripped probably off some White officer, protege of the Entente powers, lastly a revolver dangling from the chain of a church censer. Luck is with him, as his squad surprises at night Kogan and his company, and to Opanas falls the honor of executing the Bolshevik.

Opanas moves back one leg,
He stands, he flaunts:

"How do you do, comrade Kogan?
Shave? You're next!"

An improbable note, perhaps admissible in an epic ballad, is introduced when Opanas, leading his captive to the wall, is revolted by the thought of killing an unarmed man, and offers to let Kogan escape. Not more probable is Kogan's refusal to be saved. To be sure, he reasons that his chance for escape from a Makhno camp is extremely slim, but what he says to Opanas sounds like grand opera:

"Opanas, work clean,
Don't blink the aim.

'Tis unseemly for a communist
To run like a wolfhound."

Bagritsky manages to avoid the impression of mock heroics, chiefly by means of colloquial dialogue. He likewise succeeds in suggesting the brooding mood of Opanas, after he shoots Kogan. Haunted by the image of the fearless Bolshevik, Opanas, captured by the Reds, confesses having executed Kogan, and pays with his life.

This skeleton of the poem can hardly give an approximate idea of its power and colorfulness. Bagritsky combines a gift for describing dramatic scenes, battles, surging crowds, executions, with the typical Ukrainian badinage that one finds in Gogol or Shevchenko. He tempers the pathos of fratricidal war and pitiless carnage by the contrasting tone of everydayness, by bits of homely colloquialism and banter, of folk song and folk wisdom. Above all, what makes Bagritsky dear to the Soviet reader is that in this Elegy, as in most of his poems, he is free from the allegedly Russian pessimism. Whatever the subject, even during the long torment of his dying days, Bagritsky expressed a passionate affirmation of life, an exuberant love for the sensuous, and an indestructible trust in man and mankind.