Home » Ukraine » Viktor Domontovych » Дівчина з ведмедиком) (The Girl with the Teddy Bear
Viktor Domontovych: Дівчина з ведмедиком) (The Girl with the Teddy Bear)
Our hero is Ipolit Varetskhi, known by his patronymic Mykolaivych. The book opens in 1922 in Kyiv. The Russians have a deliberate policy of starving Ukraine to get them to cooperate so things are very hard for everybody.
Ipolit is a chemist but currently works as a teacher in school which is very badly paid and he struggles to pay his bills, like everyone else else. However, there are plans to reopen the chemical laboratory of the factory where he used to work. This seems to have the support of the authorities and so he is very keen on the idea. At one of the meetings on the topic he gets to meet Oleksandr Tykhmeniev, a well-off bourgeois who has survived and prospered because his skills are useful to the Soviets. He asks.Ipolit if he will teach his daughters, as he has heard good things about Ipolit. Lesia is eighteen and polite and reserved while Zyna, sixteen, displayed a mocking ironic bravado . He arrives with a sledge which, he explains , is to carry home the food parcels he receives from the American Relief Administration. The father is not there while the mother criticises the workmanship on their rented house and he gets the idea that she will be no more impressed by his teaching. Indeed, he discusses the teaching not with the mother but with, Lesia who behaves responsibly while Zyna plays with her teddy bear and mocks him and seems much more like a child than the teenager that she is. He is invited to dine with them after the lesson, which of course he accepts and Zyna mocks his amateurly repaired spectacles. Purely to embarrass him, as she admits later, she asks if that is a constraint when he tries to kiss someone.
Her behaviour continues during the course of the lessons over the next few weeks. However, though the behaviour continues, he finds that he is strangely drawn to her. The lessons continue from February to May when the family goes to Moscow.
Once she has gone, he very much misses her and starts to pine and hopes that they might come back early. He goes past the house several times eventually andeven goes to Moscow to see if he can find her, at which point he realise that this is stupid and he abandons his plans.
It is only now that we discover that h
e has a girlfriend, a colleague at the school who teaches art. She is Maria Ivanivna and he now spends time with her.
When the summer is over, he starts to focus very much more on the chemical laboratory and discontinues both the lessons and seeing Maria, He occasionally dines with Oleksandr Tykhmeniev and family and finds thatZyna has grown up and no longer teases him. However, he later continues teaching them and finds her outspoken. For example she says that a young man has suggested that she should have a nude photos of her taken so she can look at them in later life and remember how she was, which she does . She even offers to show these photos to Ippolit He is of course shocked. She adds >The fall of womanhood is a superstition created on the one hand by timidity of old maids and on the other by the debauchery of men. Her sister is much more reserved. The mother, of course, tells Ippolit not to listen to her and that her daughter is a beautiful and pure woman. However, it is clear that Zyna has strong views on her future life. For example, example she is apparently planning on learning Chinese. Ippolit and Zyna and family holiday in Crimea and the two seem to grow closer but drift apart when they return to Kyiv. However things get more complicated when they have sex and he thinks that it is his duty to propose to her as a result and she is furious at that.
Later a male friend to whom recounts the incident criticises him. You have not you have not experienced any profound fascination with anything and have not become accustomed to taking frivolous things seriously in consequence you do not know that if you frivolously regard matters which are supposedly serious and important it is easy to reveal their bizarre and fallacious essence. and tells him to let Zyna have her own way.
Some time passes and he is focused on the chemical factory. He has to go to Berlin to get materials, reports, and the like for the project. He had heard that. Zyna was in Berlin but he is unable to track her down. However things go wrong for him and he has to spend some time in hospital in Berlin.
Back home, he reminisces about his time in Berlin and about Zyna and wondered whether that perhaps he did see her after all.
This is something of a strange book in that the characters seem to come and go.Maria Ivanivna whom he had been close to completely disappears from the story and he seems to be more focused on the chemical factory than he is onZyna though he is clearly very much a attracted to her. He becomes a teacher, but admits that he does not like it and is no good at it and he is only good at the work he does at the factory. He is even admits he is close to Lesia thougj that does not go anywhere. Oddly, apart from a few comments from the mother , the parents seem well out of the picture even though they must have had an idea of what is going on.
It has been suggested not leased by the translator, that this may be a sort of Lolita work though written well before Nabokov’s book, I think that this can be compared with Lolita in the sense that it is about an older man being attracted to a girl/young woman but I do not think that this can be compared too much to Lolita not least because of the modus operandi of the two men is substantially different.Humbert has only one interest and that is a sexual relationship with Lolita while Ipolit , though clearly attracted to Zyna . has other things going on in his life, which as his friend pointed out. often take priority.
Overall, it is very interesting to read early 20th century Ukrainian novel and one that does directly confront issues of sex and sexuality as well as whow omen see their role, even if all women is not share the views ofZyna.
Publishing history
First published in 1928 by “SYAYVO
First published in English in 2026 by Dedalus
Translated by Steve Komarnyckyj