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Title: Ukrainian literature
Studies of the leading authors
Author: Clarence Augustus Manning
Release date: January 25, 2026 [eBook #77771]
Language: English
Original publication: Jersey City, NJ: Ukrainian National Association, 1944
Credits: Paul Fatula, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UKRAINIAN LITERATURE ***
_Ukrainian Literature_
_Studies of the Leading Authors_
_By_
CLARENCE A. MANNING
ACTING EXECUTIVE OFFICER
DEPARTMENT OF EAST EUROPEAN LANGUAGES
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
_With a Foreword_
_By_
PROFESSOR WATSON KIRKCONNELL
UKRAINIAN NATIONAL ASSOCIATION
JERSEY CITY, N. J.
1944
COPYRIGHT, APRIL 1944
BY
PROFESSOR CLARENCE A. MANNING
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
NEW YORK, N. Y.
PRINTED IN U.S.A. BY
HARMON PRINTING HOUSE
POUGHKEEPSIE, N. Y.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Foreword 4
Introduction 5
The Background of Ukrainian Culture 7
Hrihori Skovoroda 17
Ivan Kotlyarevsky 23
Hrihori Kvitka-Osnovyanenko 34
Taras Shevchenko 41
Pantaleimon Kulish 56
Marko Vovchok 61
Ivan Levitsky-Nechuy 66
Changing Conditions 71
Ivan Franko 76
Lesya Ukrainka 89
Mikhaylo Kotsyubinsky 96
Vasil Stefanyk 103
Oles 112
After 1918 118
Bibliography 123
FOREWORD
The Ukrainians have sometimes been termed “the Irish of the Slavonic
world,” and the epithet is not infelicitous. In both cases there is
a tradition of ancient, almost legendary, glory, followed by long
centuries of stifled independence, in which the stream of national life
disappeared underground almost completely--only to emerge in turbid and
eager flood in modern times.
The two nations’ literary traditions are likewise comparable. The
_Cattle-raid of Cooley_ in the old Ulster-cycle has its counterpart
in the _Raid of Igor_, a powerful epic-fragment whose provenance
is clearly Kievan and not Muscovite. The abundant Irish legacy
of folk-song (recorded by Douglas Hyde and others) is more than
paralleled by the countless Ukrainian folk-songs, full of echoes of
“old, unhappy, far-off things.” In both instances, there is a copious
religious literature in medieval times. Most comparable of all are
the literatures of the modern awakening, in which national authors,
repudiating the dominant literary traditions of English (used by
Goldsmith, Burke and Moore), Russian (used by Gogol) and Polish (used
by Zaleski), have turned with intense political enthusiasm to the
cultivation of their own ancestral speech.
Yet there are striking differences. While Irish Gaelic is today the
official language of a small state of 3,000,000 people, many of whom
are acquiring the language in school with reluctance and difficulty,
Ukrainian is the cherished mother-tongue of nearly 50,000,000 Slavs
in Eastern Europe. Regardless of all political considerations, the
cultural dynamic of so large a group cannot be permanently disregarded
by the scholar and the general reader. Professor Clarence A. Manning,
of Columbia University, is rendering a service to international letters
in making available, in English, a brief but comprehensive history of
Ukrainian literature. It is a timely task, courageously carried out.
WATSON KIRKCONNELL
_Hamilton, Canada._
INTRODUCTION
Ukrainian literature offers perhaps the best medium for studying the
aspirations of the Ukrainian people and their mode of existence. In
many ways it presents a sad picture for Ukraine has suffered much
during the last thousand years and the efforts of its people to develop
an independent state which could give them freedom and happiness have
been thwarted again and again. We have the almost unique example of
a nation of forty million people that has not been able in the last
centuries to become the master and the director of its fate, that has
been doomed to undergo every form of humiliation and yet has held firm
its resolve to try again at the first opportunity that offered any hope
of success.
It is the task of history to explain this anomalous situation and
historians, whether friendly or hostile, have not been slow to take
advantage of their privilege. The narrators of the story of Ukraine
have approached the subject from every conceivable angle. Some have
denied stoutly that there ever was a Ukraine. Others have declared that
the nation met its fate because of its own errors and defects. Still
others have challenged these unfavorable views and have laid the blame
on better prepared and grasping neighbors. There are many more of these
explanations but we have little to do with them.
Literature explains the results of history. It shows us the effects
that history has had upon the masses and upon the individual. It gives
us in artistic form a picture of the reactions of the people to the
conditions under which they are compelled to live and even more than
history, it mirrors their ideals and their dreams for the future. Yet
it does even more than this.
The important thing in modern literature is the light which it throws
upon the personalities of the authors themselves, both as individuals
and as representatives of their people. No one in modern literature can
produce a memorable work without making clear the innermost workings of
his own soul and thoughts and feelings. When we look from this point
of view at such men as Shevchenko and Franko, we realize that we are
dealing with real spiritual and intellectual leaders with a real faith
in democracy and that these men have a message not only for their
people and age but for the entire world.
We are often inclined to believe that a literature which is little
known can have little of value in it. The permanent worth and the
greatness of an author are not immediately visible in the sale of his
works and in the number of translations that are made of them. Accident
plays a large rôle and often an unlucky but great author must wait
years for recognition while another who is fortunate but less great
will receive almost immediate and quick-passing praise as a genius. We
need only think of the large number of last year’s best-sellers that
have gone into a speedy oblivion and of the world’s masterpieces which
continue a slow but steady sale for decades as the real virtues slowly
but surely attract a multitude of devoted readers.
Human nature is remarkably constant from age to age and country to
country but there develops through the centuries a specific character
of each nation and culture. Manners and customs may change. Costumes
may be discarded and varied. Economic conditions may be outgrown or
swept away by revolution. Something remains and that something is the
very kernel of the national character which perseveres and expresses
itself in literature.
This kernel may be obscured by superficial details. Its qualities
and virtues may be hidden by external trappings. It may seem to take
strange and unusual forms. It may seem to be inconsistent with much
that tradition and religion and education have built around it but it
still remains and the sympathetic reader who can look below the surface
of the outward form can realize its meaning and its significance for
humanity.
This is especially true with Ukrainian literature. Its modern period
started with the _Eneida_ of Kotlyarevsky in 1798 and it has under
severe difficulties carried on from then until the present. Yet it has
never wavered in its two outstanding qualities, a keen sense of realism
and above all a confidence and belief in democracy in every form and
this is its chief characteristic. There is hardly a literature which
is more devoted to the cause of the common man and presents him more
sympathetically in his struggles, his difficulties and his achievements
and if there may be said to be anywhere a literature of the common man,
it is the Ukrainian literature.
CHAPTER ONE
THE BACKGROUND OF UKRAINIAN CULTURE
Ukrainian literature in its present phase may be modern but Ukraine
and the Ukrainians are not a new phenomenon in the world’s history.
They have played their part under one name or another for over a
thousand years on their native soil and they have had a rich past which
furnishes the present with the soil on which it can operate.
What then is Ukraine? Who are the Ukrainians? What is the Ukrainian
language? A simple answer to these questions opens up the entire
Ukrainian problem, one of the most complicated in the whole of modern
Europe and yet superbly simple if the idea is once adopted that the
Ukrainians are a separate people who wish to live their own lives in
their own way in their own land.
The Ukrainian language is an East Slavonic tongue which is closely akin
to Russian but which differs from it very sharply in many important
grammatical and phonetic ways. The language is spoken by a people of
some forty millions in number who inhabit an area that was included
between 1939 and 1941 almost wholly in the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet
Republic and was after 1941 occupied by the Nazi invaders. Before the
Second World War, the country was divided between the Soviet Union,
Poland, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia. Before the First World War, it was
divided between Russia and Austria-Hungary, and we have to go back for
centuries before we find a free and united Ukraine.
Yet at that time the land was not called Ukraine but Rus, and even
before that it had had a long and complicated history revealed only
by archaeological exploration and scattered references in ancient
authors. There are many gaps in our knowledge but enough remains to
show that the organization of the state in the ninth century was but
the last act of a drama that had resulted in the development of an
important pre-Christian culture. After the adoption of Christianity,
its history is better known and we realize the importance which the
country played in the world. Under the name of Kievan Russia, it has
been treated by Russian historians who wish to deny that there ever was
a Ukrainian culture which differs in any degree from the northeastern
neighbor, Moscow. Its name, its culture, and its literature have all
been preempted by Moscow which refuses to admit that there ever was a
culture in the south which might develop in its own way and along other
lines than did the tsardom of Moscow or Muscovy.
Yet in those days the ancient Rus or Ukraine embraced territory that
was never again to be brought under the control of the tsars. Ancient
travellers talk of a Rus that extended from the neighborhood of Prague
to the east and they then speak calmly of passing from there to Muscovy
for the old state was markedly different in area from many of the
common conceptions.
In the beginning, and here was the geographical root of the tragedy of
Ukraine, the Slavs who spoke this language lived in a belt of greater
or narrower width from the Carpathian Mountains to the sea of Azov.
Their land was longer from east to west than it was from north to south
and it cut across the central portions of all those great rivers that
flow from the north into the Black Sea. Nowhere except in the west were
there any natural boundaries in the form of mountain ranges. To the
north and east there were only the great plains of eastern Europe which
were open to every invader from the depths of Asia and these invaders
had appeared for millenia in an almost uninterrupted sequence, when the
first Slavonic state was erected around the city of Kiev.
It was an unfortunate geographical situation, for it imposed upon the
princes the constant and never-ending task of guarding a long and
indefensible frontier with a relatively small population and enormous
distances. Without modern methods of communication, the task was
hopeless. The princes were unable to hold more than a small area under
their personal supervision and the evils that were attendant upon
feudalism were not slow in making their appearance.
In vain the more competent and conscientious rulers tried by almost
superhuman efforts to hold their positions. Almost without their
knowledge large regions grew up into quasi-independent realms and
civil war was the result of the interference of even the best beloved
monarch. The provinces and regions went on their own sweet way with
little thought of obedience to a distant central authority and they
were far too ready to seize a momentary advantage by an alliance with
some one of their neighbors. At some time during the last thousand
years, part at least of the people of Ukraine have been allied with
Muscovites, Poles, Lithuanians, Rumanians, various Mongolian tribes,
Turks, and Tatars of the Crimea. For a long period Lithuanians and
Poles were able to assert a secure political control and today the
Soviet Union and Germany are fighting for the same area.
Ukraine paid bitterly for all these feuds of her neighbors, for her
position was difficult and desirable. As we have seen, the state cut
across all the rivers that ran into the Black Sea. They were the
natural method of communication between the Baltic and the Black Seas,
even as Ukraine contained the normal land route from Asia to Europe. It
is small wonder then that the rich agricultural land was the welcome
and alluring prize to many an invader from time immemorial to 1941.
Bad as all this was, the situation was made worse by the fact that the
territory of Ukraine became the battleground between the Byzantine and
Latin cultures. The great cleavage in the Christian world was often
fought out on Ukrainian soil and religious feuds were added to the
personal quarrels and ambitions of the neighboring sovereigns.
Ukraine received its Christian culture from Constantinople. In the
first centuries of her existence, this was an advantage for the
intellectual hegemony of Constantinople was unchallenged. It is
hard today to understand that the great city on the Bosphorus with
its unparalleled church of Hagia Sophia was the real centre of
Christian culture and civilization. The Emperor of Byzantium was the
Christian secular ruler _par excellence_. His wealth and his power
were unrivalled save perhaps by the Mohammedan Caliph of Bagdad. Rome
looked with envy at the riches and the splendor of the great city of
Constantine. It remembered what it had itself lost at the hands of the
Germanic barbarian tribes and was proudly jealous. The West envied the
glory of the East and sought diligently to seize control of the border
lands and to extend its control wherever possible.
It was at this period that the Kievan state was organized and St.
Volodimir formally accepted Christianity, largely it is said because
of the splendor of the service in the Church of Hagia Sophia. Soon a
second Hagia Sophia was erected at Kiev and if it did not equal the
splendor and the amazing beauty of the elder church, it was still one
of the richest and most impressive structures north of the imperial
city. The state adopted the standards of Constantinople and the legends
and folk tales tell us of the wealth and power of the princes of Kiev,
of their gold and precious stones, of their glory and their pride, yes,
and of their intelligence and learning.
We must not think of education in early Kiev in terms of modern public
schools and a high degree of literacy. There was none of that but
where was it to be found? At a time when such kings of England as
William I and Richard Coeur de Lion were barely able to sign their
names, Volodimir Monomakh was able to carry on the business of state
in seven languages. The princesses of Kiev were sought in marriage by
the most powerful rulers of the day and the blood of the royal family
passed into the veins of the sovereigns of England, France, Sweden,
Hungary, Poland, and Byzantium itself.
The new state had difficulties in the way of internal organization but
no more than the neighboring countries. There were civil wars and heavy
taxes and oppression of the people but those were universal failings.
All the virtues and the vices of Byzantium were copied on a reduced
scale in Kiev and its dependencies and the countries of Western Europe
were in an even more deplorable condition.
Yet Byzantine culture was a strange phenomenon. It is hard for
us to conceive of a great city and a great empire with powerful
armies in which religion was the all-absorbing subject of interest.
Constantinople was a fusion of the remains of Greek civilization, of
many elements of the Roman Empire, and of ideas, habits and customs
that had been brought in from Asia Minor, north Africa, Arabia, and
points further east. Its religious art was based on principles which
were far from realistic. Its ikons and its mosaics are still the
wonder of the world, as the cleaning of the mosaics in Hagia Sophia is
showing us. Its wealth, luxury, and formalism are proverbial, and yet
the slightest acquaintance with its history shows us that there were
very human aspects of life hidden under the stately pomp and the cold
splendor of display.
It is small wonder that the Rus and the pagan Slavs were attracted
by this outstanding and beautiful culture. Constantinople had no
objections and Saints Cyril and Methodius created the first Slavonic
alphabet and carried the Liturgy in Slavonic to Moravia and Bulgaria
and the other Slavonic lands. Finally it penetrated to Rus in the days
of St. Volodimir and Christian Kiev was on its way.
Soon all the books of the Church and the lives of the saints which had
been translated into Church Slavonic were available in the capital
and were gradually corrected into a language which was intelligible
at Kiev. But such works as the _Russka Pravda_ (the Russian law code
of the eleventh century), the writings of Daniel the Palmer and the
_Instructions_ of Volodimir Monomakh speak of the high level which had
already been achieved. There was little secular literature of which
we know except the writings of the princes and their supporters. The
only outstanding specimen of imaginative writing is the _Tale of the
Armament of Ihor_ which has presented as many problems as it has solved.
Yet with all of the drawbacks and the troubles, life in Kiev was good
in the twelfth century, until in 1169 Prince Andrey Bogolyubsky of
Suzdal in the north sacked the city and moved the centre of the state
to his native town and then later to Moscow. The interpretation of
this action has long been a bone of contention between Ukrainian and
Russian scholars. To the latter it was a necessary and logical step in
the development of the Russian Empire. To the former it was a brutal
conquest of a civilized government by foreigners and strangers. It
did cause a sharp break in history which was emphasized still more by
the fact that the new centre was never able to assert its authority
over Galicia and Volynia to the west. The dynasty reigning there even
was able for a time to call themselves the Kings of Rus. Whatever the
merits of the controversy over the relations of the princes of Suzdal
and Moscow to those of Kiev and the south, the fact remains that
Kievan Rus and Ukraine was now split in half and was not to be brought
together again fully except for a few months in 1918 and 1919.
Perhaps the damage would have been alleviated, if time had allowed the
normal development of Moscow. The coming of the Mongols and Tatars
changed everything. When the hordes of Genghis Khan swept over the
land, Kiev bore the brunt of the desolation at a time when it had
hardly recovered from the sack of the preceding century. The princes
of Moscow readily submitted and henceforth the Tatar element and
traditions grew in the northern capital. This process continued for two
centuries and at the end of that period, when Ivan the Great finally
declared his independence and assumed the title of Autocrat and Tsar
of Russia, the manners and customs of Moscow were very different from
those which had prevailed at the time of the coming of the Tatars.
Ukraine had a different fate. The western provinces formed a dangerous
wedge between Poland and Hungary and extended into the area claimed
by the Latin world. The Holy Roman Empire was pressing eastward with
the Germans as the nucleus and the predominant power. Poland and
Hungary confronted with this turned east in their turn. Both were Roman
Catholic powers and western in culture and organization. Both were in
frequent alliance and their dynasties were related by marriage. It was
to the interest of both to crush Rus with its Orthodox traditions and
its Byzantine culture. To the north was Lithuania, still pagan but with
able rulers. To make a long story short, the end came in 1349 when the
Western principalities of Ukraine fell under the power of Lithuania
and Poland. At about the same era the people in the Carpathians passed
under the control of Hungary. Lithuania acquired control of the area
around Kiev, so that by the time of the marriage of Jadwiga of Poland
and Jagiello of Lithuania in 1385, a large part of Ukraine was under
the control of Catholic rulers and the remainder was under the Tatar
yoke.
With Moscow drifting eastward in its point of view owing to the
influence of the Tatars and Ukraine gravitating westward under the
control of Poland and Lithuania, the breach became wider than in the
beginning and Ukraine was unable to work on its own behalf or to resist
the encroachments of the West. Especially after the Union of Lublin in
1569 when Poland and Lithuania were formally united into one kingdom,
Western influences grew stronger. More and more pressure was exerted
upon the people to join the Roman Catholic Church, to adopt Polish,
and to lose their identity in the new state. This was especially true
in the case of the nobles and the wealthier classes. More and more
they were Polonized and as they became ardent advocates of their new
culture, they endeavored to force it also upon their people. Ukraine
and its national spirit seemed to be doomed.
Ukrainian opposition to this process was bitter and continuous but
the successes were few after many of the feudal lords passed over to
the new regime. The lesser nobles continued the struggle. Deprived
of any means of expressing their opinions to the heads of the state
and without skilled and daring leadership, they saw their traditional
privileges whittled away and themselves reduced to greater and greater
straits. For a while it seemed as if Protestant ideas might seep in,
but this stopped with the suppression of the Reformation in Poland.
A few of the nobles as Prince Constantine Ostrozky endeavored to
develop and strengthen the Orthodox (Byzantine) culture of the people.
He tried to secure teachers from Constantinople for his schools but
the Patriarch after the fall of the city to the Turks was weak and
powerless and he was not in a position to carry out any strong policy.
A few able monks as the young Cyril Lukaris, later the celebrated
Patriarch of Constantinople, arrived for a short time, but they could
have very little success and again and again the sons of a devout
Orthodox father themselves Polonized and thus undid all that the older
men had accomplished.
Then too in cities as Lviv there were various brotherhoods interested
in education. They tried to establish schools and printing presses and
to defend the old faith and customs and they did noble service. Still
even these efforts did not bear too much fruit. They were checked
at every stage by the government and their work was so tied up with
the defence of the Orthodox Faith that they were not interested in
giving much secular learning to the young and that little was largely
influenced by the Latin intellectual manner of thought. They used the
old Church language which was becoming steadily more distinct from the
vernacular tongue and created a sterile and polemic culture which often
had little real value.
Finally in 1596 through the Union of Brest a part of the Orthodox
Church in Ukraine acknowledged the supremacy of the Pope. There was
however great resistance to the new measure, the Orthodox hierarchy
was reestablished by the efforts of the faithful and they regarded
the Uniat Church as an agent of Polonization. The Academy of Kiev
under a series of able leaders, as the Metropolitan Peter Mohyla, did
splendid work in maintaining the Faith. Mohyla worked out a form of
Orthodox scholasticism which retained most of the Orthodox manner of
thinking and was yet available as a weapon again the Polish and Jesuit
propagandists. Yet the Academy like the schools of the brotherhoods
was never able to break with a narrow ecclesiastical tradition and to
launch itself on a program of progressive education.
A more effective, if cruder, method of opposition lay in the rise
of the Kozaks, peasants who fled to the east to live their lives in
freedom as they desired. These men were prepared to fight against any
foe, whether he were Pole, Muscovite, Tatar or Turk. At first they
were a wild and turbulent group but their leaders finally forged them
into an efficient force. Now and then the Kings endeavored to secure
their assistance by payments and by enrolling some of them in units
in the Polish army but the Kozaks remained independent and a pillar
of strength to all Orthodox movements. Finally in the seventeenth
century the hetman Bohdan Khmelnitsky won with them for a short time
practically complete independence and again Ukraine could breathe
freely. Bohdan died before he had established the new state on a firm
basis and won for it international recognition. In his last years he
found it necessary after the Kozak Wars which started Poland very
definitely on the downward path to put himself and the Kozaks more
or less under the protection of the Tsar of Russia. There was thus
reestablished an official seal on that relationship which had been
interrupted when the Tatars invaded Rus four centuries before. The
result was none too satisfactory for the autocratic Moscow of the day
constantly interfered with the liberties of the Kozaks and in 1667 in
a treaty between the Tsar and the King of Poland, Ukraine was again
divided between Russia and Poland, with the Dnieper as the dividing
line.
The next century and a half is a sad tale of broken promises and of
political intrigue. Moscow and Poland alike repudiated every agreement
which was made with the Kozaks and the Ukrainians. Discord arose in
the ranks of the Kozaks between the officers and the privates, for
the former tended to adopt the manners and customs of the neighboring
nobles. As Russia steadily increased in power, she kept attempting to
reorganize the whole of Russian Ukraine on the same lines as the rest
of the Empire. Then Catherine the Great abolished the post of Hetman.
She followed that up with the destruction of the Kozak centre, the
Zaporozhian Sich, and finally liquidated all Ukrainian institutions and
rights and bound the peasants to the soil.
Things were little better on the Polish side. There were the revolts of
the Haydamaki and other groups but they were put down by Russian troops
who were lording it over Poland. Finally when that unfortunate country
was divided by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, Austria took most of the
Ukrainian section of Galicia and Bukovina and added the Ukrainians to
the ethnic confusion that formed the Hapsburg Empire. For this group
Lviv was now the principal centre but the mode of living there and the
methods of control of the Ukrainians or the Ruthenians as they were
usually called in Galicia were very different from that exercised in
Russia.
There was by the end of the eighteenth century really two Ukraines.
There was the Great Ukraine under Russian control with its religious
culture mainly Orthodox and there was Western Ukraine or Galicia under
the Hapsburgs with the Uniat Church as the predominant religious body.
Life moved at a different pace in the two sections but there were the
same tendencies to denationalization, Russian in one case, Polish in
the other, and the future of the people and their culture seemed very
dark.
Yet in the seventeenth century at the time of the temporary flourishing
of the Hetmanate, Ukrainian scholarship and spirit won one of its most
signal victories. Moscow during its long period of subjugation to
the Tatars had lost touch with the outside world, and its relations
even with the Orthodox Churches of the east had become limited to
a mere readiness to give liberally to the wandering Patriarchs who
came to collect donations. The dangerous legend of the Third Rome
and the accompanying belief that Moscow was the centre of Christian
civilization had taken root, and the Muscovite scholars, if they could
be called such, objected to all contact with the rest of Europe.
Kiev was a possible exception, for the princes of Muscovy still had
a traditional respect for the city and its culture. When the tsars
finally realized that they needed some outside learning, it was the
scholars trained in the Academy at Kiev who were called in to assist.
Some of these were invited to Moscow. Others went to escape Polish
pressure. Yet all that was done in the way of intellectual progress was
done by these men. The reforms in the Russian Church, incomplete as
they were, were spurred on by the Kievan scholars and it was they also
who inspired the beginnings of Russian literature, halting as they were.
Not enough attention has been paid to this movement and to the
influence that Kiev exerted upon Moscow during the seventeenth century.
It was a time when Russian military power was making itself supreme but
in the world of culture it was the scholarship of Ukraine that was the
master. The names of men from Kiev appear with monotonous regularity
as the intellectual leaders of Moscow. Many of the greater Muscovites
studied at Kiev and it is not too much to say that if Kiev had given
Moscow its intellectual start at its foundation, so again in the
seventeenth century it was Kiev that started the northern country on
its return to Western intellectual ways.
Unfortunately most of this was in the narrowly religious sphere. The
Academy of Kiev was still predominantly interested in theological
polemics. During the long struggle with Poland, the Western ideas
which had penetrated the Academy were largely connected with religion.
There was little or no attempt to study the achievements of the West
in literature and art and other secular subjects. Those who sought
secular learning were usually absorbed in the Roman Catholic Church and
in Polish life. Those who maintained the old traditions were usually
peasants who were themselves suspicious of all innovations and the
masters treated more and more the speech of their Ukrainian peasants
and serfs as an object of scorn and of amusement. Along with the
decline in Ukrainian liberties, there came a steady reduction in the
number of educated or even partially educated persons. As a people the
Ukrainians were losing and losing rapidly all the marks and even the
traditions of an educated class. Their interests were becoming those of
serfs and peasants and they seemed destined to be swallowed up in the
mass of the dominant races about them.
Thus at the end of the eighteenth century, the vast majority of the
Ukrainian people had ceased to figure in the world of culture. They
still had their folk songs which told of the exploits of the Kozaks
and their great Hetmans and leaders of the past. They spoke among
themselves in the vernacular but whatever schools there were still
taught the Church Slavonic language which was hoary with age and which
was by now very different from the daily spoken speech. Ukraine had
drifted into an intellectual backwater. It is small wonder that many
young men trying to escape from this stagnation looked for a more
active life and became lost to the cause of the people. The whole
question was whether the forces of destruction would sweep the country
before there came a new inspiration to lift the people intellectually
and to rekindle a healthy life. Fortunately a solution was found.
CHAPTER TWO
HRIHORI SKOVORODA
It was at the darkest hour when the rights and privileges of the
Ukrainians were being consistently reduced in Russian Ukraine and all
hope seemed lost, that there passed across the scene a strange figure.
That was Hrihori Skovoroda, philosopher, poet and ethical teacher. Even
today it is hard to understand his attitude toward life, for he was
one of those men who are sincerely human but who stand aside from the
vices and evil deeds of men and in their avoidance of the bad, refrain
also from much of the good, if not from life itself. Had Skovoroda been
ambitious, he could have occupied almost any post in the service of
the Russian government. Had he been thoroughly moved by nationalistic
fervor, he could have had anything that Ukraine could offer him. An
able man, he wished for nothing except to be allowed to live his life
in his own way, to teach whom he wished as he wished how to live, and
perhaps because of his refusal to fit into the conventional mode of
existence, he left an indelible but none too sharply defined imprint
upon all who came into contact with him. All of the writers who
remodelled the Ukrainian language at the close of the century speak of
him with the greatest respect and he was a precursor of the Ukrainian
Renaissance which was to follow just a few years after he ceased his
wanderings.
Skovoroda was born in 1722 in the village of Chornukhi in the province
of Poltava. His parents were Kozaks and his father had belonged to the
Lubny Regiment. They were not of the lowest class materially and the
young boy had the opportunity to secure what education was available.
He was a remarkably sensitive child and unlike the majority of his
fellows, he cared more for reading than he did for the rough sports of
the day. Religion and the Bible interested him but he early declined
to be bound by the conventional interpretation, and this grew upon him
as he passed through life. Because of his beautiful voice, his father
sent him to study at the Academy of Kiev. He stayed there for two years
and then he went to St. Petersburg and had a position in the court
choir of the Empress Elizabeth. She had secretly married Aleksyey
Rozumovsky (1709-1771) and he induced her to do something for Ukraine.
She even restored the post of Hetman after it had been abolished in
1734 and appointed her husband’s brother Cyril to the position. In 1744
Skovoroda returned to Kiev and resumed his studies. His talents and
his voice were such that the Archbishop urged him to take holy orders.
It was in vain. Skovoroda absolutely refused and expressed himself so
forcefully that he was finally compelled to leave the Academy.
In 1750 he had an opportunity to visit Hungary with Major General
Vishnevsky and he gladly took advantage of it. Then for a while he
was a singer in the Orthodox Church of Pest. He travelled extensively
around the neighborhood of Pest, to Vienna, Bratislava and the
neighboring regions and he seems also to have wandered on foot through
Poland, Prussia, Germany and north Italy. During this time he seems to
have interested himself in the classical authors of Greece and Rome and
in the writings of the Church Fathers. He also learned Greek, Latin,
German and Hebrew. Yet we can be very sure that he was more interested
in the world and the people whom he met than he was in serious and
intensive study from books.
He finally returned home and then for about ten years lived almost the
life of a recluse, endeavoring to understand his own character and
feelings. Next he had an opportunity to teach poetry in the seminary
at Pereyaslav but he obstinately refused to change his convictions
and he declared that for the Ukrainian (Church Slavonic) language,
the accentual system was better suited than was the syllabic system
employed by the French and Poles. As a result he lost the post. He
served for a while as a private tutor and lost that in consequence of
too severe a scolding of the boy whom he was teaching. Then came a long
series of offers. In 1759 he was asked to teach poetry at the College
of Kharkiv and was compelled to leave because the bishop wanted him to
enter a monastery. In 1764 he visited Kiev and in 1766 he was asked to
teach ethics at the college of Kharkiv again but he was soon forced out
because of the strangeness of his ideas.
From then until his death in 1794, he lived the life of a wandering
scholar, welcomed wherever he might be, whether on the big estates
of the nobles or in the poor huts of the peasants. He cared nothing
for material success and little more for shelter. His death was
characteristic of his life. He was visiting on an estate and at dinner
was never more cheerful. A little later he disappeared and the host
found him in the garden digging a hole. He remarked jokingly that it
was where he wished to be buried. No one paid any attention or thought
it strange when he disappeared after supper. It was not until the next
night when he had not appeared that the host went to his room and found
him dead, November 9, 1794.
Accustomed as we are to a life of constant and ceaseless activity
with great emphasis on material success, such an existence as that
of Skovoroda may seem to us the acme of uselessness and we may often
regret that in him Ukraine lost a son who could have accomplished much
for her regeneration. Perhaps the reverse was the truth. Skovoroda
taught much and wrote a considerable amount, but his writings were
intended for his close friends, especially a young student Kovalinsky,
and were not published during his lifetime. He accomplished his work by
oral instruction and still more by the powerful force of his example,
for his life spoke more clearly than his words and proclaimed his utter
indifference to the gradations of rank and honors that had been the
means of bringing Ukraine to its fall. Here was the outstanding thinker
of his day who dared to proclaim and act upon the principle that the
great of the world were no more important than the small and who could
not be hired or induced to do what he regarded as wrong and inexpedient.
It might be possible to compare Skovoroda with Socrates, for the Greek
philosopher also accomplished much in ancient Athens by his constant
and provoking habit of asking questions about all matters of moral and
ethical importance. Nevertheless Socrates was married and played his
part in the Athenian democracy. Skovoroda did not marry and avoided
all public functions. He was not a voice crying in the wilderness and
uttering a prophetic message. He was merely a quiet and educated Kozak
moving among men, living his own life with a quiet dignity that showed
both his self-respect and his consideration for other people. He could
smile as easily and as bitingly at the aristocratic pretensions of the
nobles as he could be indulgent to the whims and superstitions of the
people. Yet wherever he went and whatever he did, he impressed upon all
around him his own attitude toward life and allowed them to understand
of themselves what he meant.
His great object in life was to know himself, to understand human
nature and human capabilities, and that nature was as inherent in the
serf as in the nobleman. As he once expressed it, “The wisdom of the
lords that the simple man is ‘black,’ seems to me as amusing as the
wisdom of the so-called philosopher that the earth is dead. How can a
dead earth produce living children? And how from a ‘black’ people can
there be born ‘white’ lords?”
A well-trained classicist, Skovoroda echoed the quotation of Terence,
the Latin comedian, “Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto,” (I
am a human being; I regard nothing human as alien to me.) All of
life was his field and he studied in every situation how to obtain
self-knowledge and self-happiness. His answer was very simple. “The
necessary things for happiness are not difficult to secure. The
difficult things are unnecessary.”
Happiness is not something that can be secured by wealth or by health.
It is something that exists in the human heart as a gift from God and
man has only to reach out and take it and know when he has it. It
was a quietistic philosophy but it cut sharply across the social and
political views of the time and the more Skovoroda tried to fit himself
into the world, the more he became technically less dangerous to the
established order, the more bitter and unflinching was his indirect
criticism of it.
Perhaps Skovoroda was greatly influenced by the western Protestant
teachings that he met on his travels. Perhaps he was in contact with
the Masonry of the day, for it was the Masonic lodges that first
printed many of his works. Perhaps he drew upon certain intangible
strains of human motivation that had inspired the early Kozaks to seek
for liberty in the wilderness and which led him as a scholar to try to
attain the same kind of intellectual freedom that they had sought by
force of arms and by emigration from their homes.
His thought was deeply affected by the classical authors whom he had
read and still more by the Bible. Yet from childhood, while he knew
the Bible thoroughly, he refused to accept it literally and he sought
from it an inner meaning which alone could satisfy him. He practically
rejected both theology and the Church in their conventional forms and
yet he was profoundly religious and highly ethical in his outlook on
life.
There was a certain pantheism in his teachings. “The greatest truth has
no specific name. To the ancients God was the Supreme Reason. He had
among them different names as Nature, the Essence of Words, Eternity,
the Hour, Necessity, Fate. And among Christians His most common names
are Spirit, Lord, Tsar, Father, Reason, Truth.” Elsewhere He is also
Nature and Love.
Skovoroda saw in the universe the macrocosm which revealed God’s
greatness and power. God was likewise in the microcosm, in the nature
of the individual man, in his heart and in his innermost being. It is
for this reason that happiness is to be found inside a man and not
outside among acts, rewards, or possessions.
He lived according to his theories and so the people grasped his
message without reading his philosophical dialogues. Their very
titles are suggestive. There is _Narcissus or a discussion about
self-knowledge_, _The book Ashkan on the knowledge of one’s self_, _A
friendly Conversation on spiritual peace_, etc. They were constructed
in the form usually of a Platonic dialogue but they expressed in
written and permanent form the ideas that he was expounding in his
constant talking and traveling.
He also wrote poems and fables in the conventional form which repeated
the same ideas for the common people. Such subjects as the _Blessed
Herod_ and the _Poor Quail_ show the way in which he popularized his
ideas. Fables and similar poems had been cultivated as a literary form
at the Academy of Kiev and Skovoroda turned it into a living form of
writing.
His dialogues and essays on literature have been lost but they showed
an appreciation, we are told, of the real nature of the Ukrainian
language and accent. Yet Skovoroda was not an epoch maker in any
way. He valued the vernacular speech but he was still too much under
the influence of his training to use it in place of the stilted and
artificial language which was then current in Ukrainian letters. He
still preferred to write in that artificial mixture of Ukrainian,
Russian, Polish, and Church Slavonic that was the language taught at
the Academy and as a result his writings passed into that oblivion
which did not concern him at all. He had not cared whether or not they
were published. It would not bother him, if they were forgotten, for
they were but a subsidiary part of his work.
With his unmystical and individualistic religion and ethics, Skovoroda
fits well into the picture of the eighteenth century Enlightenment,
as it appeared in various countries of Europe. He was sharply opposed
to the elegant scepticism of Voltaire which had become the ruling
fashion in many of the European courts. He was nearer to the Deists
and to certain eighteenth century Protestant theologians and on one
side of his being, he was of that group of eighteenth century thinkers
and scholars as Benjamin Franklin, Mikhail Lomonosov, and Dositej
Obradovich who laid the foundation for the nineteenth century and the
beginnings of Romanticism.
On the other side, he belonged rather with a group of Slavonic
thinkers of all ages, as the Czech Peter Chelcicky and later in part
Leo Tolstoy, who sought to avoid the evils of the world by living an
existence apart from it. These men had a vision of an ideal existence
to be secured by extreme simplification and abstention from the affairs
of the world in the interest of a higher and a different utility.
With it all, in a demoralized and disorganized Ukraine, where
the national life was flickering to a new low, he revealed the
possibilities of a newer and different democracy and a kindly and
humane outlook on life. His was not the task to sponsor or to lead
a reaction against the prevailing system. His was not the task to
defend the existing order. He endeavored to stand apart and thereby
he kindled a spark of hope in the people by ignoring, rather than by
defying the prevailing system. He taught the value of the individual
in a day when the individual was neglected. He taught the dignity of
man as man in a day when rank and external glory was the supreme good.
He taught calm and deliberate thinking at a time when people cared for
little except external pomp and show. He emphasized the reality of the
spirit and of the truth when the will of the sovereign was the supreme
law. That was his teaching and he proved it by his own example. It is
small wonder that he did not take the next step and yet that the men
of the next generation felt his influence and were glad to express
their obligations to him in fields and in ways that he never would have
believed possible or valuable.
CHAPTER THREE
IVAN KOTLYAREVSKY
Four years after the death of Skovoroda, there began to circulate in
the country near Poltava manuscript copies of an amusing travesty of
Vergil’s _Aeneid_, written by one Ivan Kotlyarevsky. It attracted
attention not only because of its subject matter and treatment but
because the author had for the first time endeavored to write in the
ordinary vernacular of the day. In other words, modern Ukrainian
literature had been born.
To understand the value and significance of this, let us glance at the
political situation in Eastern Ukraine. In 1764 Catherine the Great had
induced the last of the Hetmans, Cyril Rozumovsky, to resign his post,
and in return he received from the Empress large grants of land. The
position of Hetman was replaced by a Little Russian Board which worked
strenuously for the Russifying of the country. There still remained
the Zaporozhian Sich which had lost much of its former power but which
still gathered around it many “unruly” Kozaks. In 1775 after the war
with Turkey and the suppression of the revolt of Pugachev, Catherine
sent a large army against this and confronted with overwhelming force,
the Kozaks were obliged to submit. The regular Russian system of
landholding was introduced and the Kozaks who did not join the Russian
army had to become serfs. A large number refused to accept either of
these alternatives and during the next years emigrated to Turkey. Then
in 1783 the last remains of the Hetman state were abolished.
Thus perished Ukrainian autonomy in the Russian Empire and a large
number of the officers and the gentry willingly Russianized in order to
reap the advantages of their new position. Ukrainian songs, manners,
and customs became a subject for popular jesting. At the same time many
of these Russianized Ukrainians not only distinguished themselves in
the Russian service but also in Russian literature. Such men as Vasili
Kapnist made a name for themselves in literature and played almost as
great a role in the Russian eighteenth century as the Kievan scholars
had done in the pre-Petrine period.
The new culture of St. Petersburg that had succeeded the old
Byzantine formalism of Moscow was heavily under the influence of the
pseudo-classic culture of eighteenth century France. The leading
writers vied for the honor of being the Russian Vergil, the Russian
Racine, the Russian Molière, etc. They carried the use of classical
allusions to an almost ridiculous extreme and outside of the comedies,
there was little about their works that was distinctively Russian.
Their originality lay in an almost unconscious caricature of the French
models and it was the vigor and energy of the authors that kept them
from being as ridiculous as they might have well become.
In addition to that, the theoreticians of Russia found it necessary to
develop in Russian the three styles of poetry as outlined by Boileau.
There was the high style to be employed in odes, tragedies, and epics
and the language of these forms was to have the highest proportion of
Church Slavonic words. Then came the more ordinary styles, and finally
in the low style of comedies there was to be the pure vernacular
speech. It was all carefully arranged by the scholars and the arbiters
of fashion by _a priori_ reasoning and not by practical experience or
literary skill. It could not fail to produce smiles and hence there
were several attempts to write burlesque epics and to poke a heavy fun
at the excesses of the more egotistical authors.
Yet it is to be noted that humor of this kind had long been a
characteristic of Ukrainian writing. The intermezzos that had been
inserted in the mystery plays were full of such burlesque exactly as
they had been in the West in an earlier period and the Academy in
Kiev had developed despite its formalism the comic element which was
inherent in the Ukrainian character.
All this brings us back to Ivan Kotlyarevsky, the talented founder
of modern Ukrainian literature. He was born in 1769 in Poltava in an
impoverished noble family. This was just five years after the abolition
of the Hetmanate and but six years before the destruction of the Sich.
When the boy was sixteen, the last vestiges of Ukrainian autonomy were
abolished. Thus in his youthful years he passed through the depressing
atmosphere of the downfall of the Ukrainian state. He studied in the
Seminary at Poltava and won a certain reputation as a poet. This did
not give him a livelihood and so for several years he remained as a
private tutor in the homes of various nobles. Then he entered the
Russian civil service and later served in the army as a captain. When
he retired from this, he secured a position as inspector in one of
the Poltava schools for the children of impoverished nobles. Later as
a welcome guest at the home of the Governor General Repnin, he became
director of the theatre at Poltava. He died in 1838.
His was a life lived in general superficial agreement with the new
order. There is no record that Kotlyarevsky met with any difficulties
because of his use of the Ukrainian language or because of his ideas
and it is perhaps a little extreme to credit him with far-reaching
separatist ideas. At the same time he clearly recognized the difference
between the Ukrainians and the Russians. He had a lively interest in
the conditions of his people and he deeply regretted that history had
not developed differently. He was not afraid to say that conditions as
he knew them were not ideal but it would be rash to press his views too
far, when we consider the general atmosphere of his times.
During his lifetime also there began the intense interest in folk
songs and folk customs. Rousseau had taught an interest in the lives
of the simple people and Herder as early as 1773 had begun to write
his glorification of the folksongs of the people. Everywhere in Europe
this form of study was growing. Scientists and poets alike worked on
the same themes and hardly a year passed without some new work in this
field. Macpherson’s _Ossian_ was already known in Russian as well as in
French and German. During the reign of Catherine the _Armament of Ihor_
had come to light and in the early nineties scholars and courtiers
“discovered” the idol of Tmuturakan and established a vogue for “South
Russian” antiquities.
Yet it is very significant that Kotlyarevsky in his first Ukrainian
work did not produce anything along these lines. Neither did his
interest in the people and their speech lead him to make a scientific
study of the language of the people. In this he differs sharply
from the Czech scholar Dobrovsky and he differs equally sharply
from Lomonosov and the other writers who founded modern Russian
literature. Poland too had its own development on the basis of French
pseudo-classicism which later passed into the Romantic period.
Kotlyarevsky started on the basis of the old classical culture of the
Ukrainian schools and stood nearer to the enlightened sceptics of the
eighteenth century than to the younger group of Romantic authors.
There is a story that he had commenced the _Eneida_ during his studies
at the Poltava seminary and had worked over it for many years. It is
perhaps possible, for there is much in it that reminds us of a work
conceived in a school perhaps as a definite and humorous reaction to
the excessive Latin training that was customary at the time.
It was a bold idea to undertake a travestying of the _Aeneid_ but it
was something that might be done under the conditions prevailing, as
other authors of Russia had done. The use of the vernacular was only a
slight extension of the normal usage for a burlesque epic should not,
under the strict rules, have been written in the high style and we can
therefore understand the course of Kotlyarevsky’s reasoning in starting
upon this work.
The most significant fact is that the author definitely decided to
depict Aeneas and his companions as Ukrainian Kozaks wandering around
Europe in search of a new home. The comparison was obvious but it took
a mind of considerable penetration to grasp the situation. Then as
now the vast majority of classical students insisted upon seeing the
ancients in a vacuum which had no relation to present reality. On the
other hand in the very first paragraph Kotlyarevsky sets the key note.
Aeneas was a clever fellow
And he was a superb Kozak.
He stood all ills and did not bellow,
Surpassed his men on every tack.
But when the Greeks old Troy had fired
And made of it what they desired,
He took his pack and drew a sigh.
A group of Trojans he did rally,
All banished boys, to make a sally
And showed his heels to Troy for aye.
The very opening stanza could not fail to bring to the mind of every
Ukrainian the parallel between Aeneas and the Kozaks from the ruined
Sich and with that as his text Kotlyarevsky worked on, following the
Aeneid very closely and yet modifying the adventures of the Roman hero
so that they would fit perfectly into the position of the Kozaks. His
skill in selecting the proper details and episodes show his amazing
talent in this difficult task.
Of course there were passages that were entirely unsuited to his
purposes. There was nothing in recent Ukrainian history which he
could use as Vergil used the destruction of Troy. Even aside from
difficulties with the censor there was no possible similarity between
the capture of the great city and the surrender of the Sich. None of
the older sieges which the Sich had undergone would have fitted into
the picture, as the source of the migration, and so Kotlyarevsky
merely assumes the fall of the home of Aeneas and goes on with his
story.
For the same reasons he slurs over those episodes which take place
upon the sea and it is in these passages that the work becomes rather
a burlesque upon the original poem. In their earlier and happier days,
the Kozaks had made many a raid down the Dnieper and across the Black
Sea against the Turks but for a couple of centuries their exploits were
associated with the land and so Kotlyarevsky could not adapt the scenes
at sea with the same skill and wealth of allusion that he could the
episodes on land.
Yet the great difference lies in the position of the authors. Vergil as
the poet laureate of Augustus was describing the events leading up to
the foundation of mighty Rome at a time when Rome was the mistress of
the world. It was safe and necessary for him to introduce prophecies
of Rome’s coming greatness and of the glories that the descendants of
Aeneas were to win. Anchises in the underworld could safely predict the
coming of all those great men who were to increase the prestige of Rome
and the Julian line for centuries to come. Kotlyarevsky, a contemporary
of the emigration of the Kozaks, saw their glory in the past. What was
to be their future? As he looked at the wretched inhabitants of Ukraine
and the suffering Kozaks abroad, he could only hope and that hope had
to be indefinite for the Russian sovereign had decided that there would
be no more Ukraine and any prophecy of resurrection might be treated
as treasonable. Thus the main differences in the treatment can be
explained by the different position of the two authors.
The religious attitude of the authors is also very different. Vergil
believed or pretended to believe in the gods of Rome. He had to
maintain the proper attitude of piety to the state. Kotlyarevsky treats
them as brawling and unidealistic beings, very human individuals with
all the vices of the Kozaks and little of their human virtues. Thus
Juno, the tutelary deity of the Latins and the implacable foe of Troy,
becomes a very ill-tempered _baba_ and she is described accordingly.
The gods who drink their fill and beyond are ordinary mortals. In this
there is a great deal of the scepticism of Voltaire and the criticism
of paganism by the older Christian tradition that believed in the evil
character of paganism, perhaps even more than a deliberate satire on
the rulers of Moscow with their almost divine pretensions as is thought
by Yefremiv (Istoriya Ukrainskoho Pis’mentsva Vol. I, p. 361). We can
never forget that Kotlyarevsky was an Orthodox Christian, writing
for his coreligionists and that they had been taught that the pagan
gods were either non-existent or evil and hence not deserving of a
respectful treatment.
It is not so often noted that the _Aeneid_ of Vergil is not the
only source of Kotlyarevsky’s poem. He undoubtedly knew his Homer,
especially the _Odyssey_, and the gods of the _Eneida_ are often human
in a manner similar to those of the Greek poet, although there is not
the same naivete in their description and Kotlyarevsky does not feel
the need of making them superhuman with the human virtues and vices
raised to a high degree. The Greek influence can be clearly seen, for
the poet perhaps for metrical reasons is far more apt to name the ruler
of the gods Zeves (Zeus) than Jupiter, the regular form in Vergil.
There is also a deliberate slurring over of supernatural incidents. The
miraculous plays very little role except in the transformation of the
ships of Aeneas into swans. Kotlyarevsky follows Vergil in passing over
lightly the episode of Polyphemus but he cannot resist the temptation
to bring Aeneas close enough to Circe’s Isle to see the animals into
which her different victims have been changed. Thus the Poles have
become rams, the bearded Muscovites goats, and the Prussians foxes.
He does not hesitate to depart from Vergil in the account of the visit
to the underworld. He definitely says so himself:
For Vergil, may he reign forever,
Was always wise, as we well know.
We would not harm him now or ever
But he lived many years ago.
Besides in hell conditions differ
From what they were when he looked thither.
And when the long departed wrote.
I now will give the present story,
Will change, omit some details hoary,
And from my elders I will quote. (III, 42)
So he includes in hell all those who have transgressed the Kozak spirit
and code and all who are working in this world to make unbearable the
lot of the poor people.
With these outstanding changes, Kotlyarevsky with good-natured fun
and real pathos makes Aeneas and his Kozak followers proceed through
the Latin story. They get uproariously drunk at Dido’s court. Aeneas
deserts Dido. They conduct the games in Sicily in the Kozak manner,
even to the scene where old Entellus, the former champion, is drunk in
a ditch and cannot be roused to meet the young challenger until he is
promised sufficient liquor, quite like the legends of Ilya of Murom
in the old byliny. The Kozaks revel and fight as they did once in the
Sich, they are loyal to one another and finally when they do make their
way to Italy, they learn Latin out of the same grammar that was taught
in the Ukrainian schools of the day and they make their petition to
Latinus in a grotesque mixture of tongues which may be well translated:
Aeneas, noster magnus panus
And Troianorum mighty prince
A-roaming o’er the sea, a gypsy,
Ad te, O rex, has sent us nunc.
Rogamus, domine Latine,
Do not destroy our wretched heads.
Permitte us to live among you
E’en for pecuniam or gratis.
We all will thank you always satis
For your beneficentia. (IV, 46)
Likewise in places where Vergil indulges in descriptions as in the
catalogue of the Italian clans, Kotlyarevsky gives us long passages
of information as to the Kozak leaders of the past and he describes
the various Kozak regiments as taking part in the campaign. He does
not mention either Khmelnitsky or Mazepa. Both were perhaps dangerous
figures to introduce, for the one had brought the Kozaks into
connection with Russia and the other was in bad odor with the Russian
government. It was therefore more convenient and more in line with the
policy of Kotlyarevsky to omit any clear mention of either.
The author showed however an amazing grasp of the manners and customs
of the Ukrainians of his day. Without idealizing or degrading them, he
pictures the life of Aeneas and his followers exactly as the Kozaks
lived, even to their petty virtues and vices. There is almost an
atmosphere of folklore study about certain passages and it testifies to
Kotlyarevsky’s powers of observation and selection that he was able to
do this so successfully.
The _Eneida_ was a revelation to the Ukrainians. Here was a poem in the
common vernacular, glorifying the Kozaks. It was very different from
the attitude of the historians, whether they were pro- or anti-Kozak,
and was nearer in spirit to the popular songs of the day. But what a
difference! For in the _Eneida_ Kotlyarevsky had dared to be himself,
to play with his material and to break out a new road.
The effect was almost instantaneous. What other writers had not been
able to accomplish with serious tracts or flaming denunciations, in
the old artificial language, Kotlyarevsky had done with a sure and
firm touch, thanks to his appreciation of the language and customs of
the people. Those who wished merely to laugh could find an abundance
of humor. Those who were more serious could see the sufferings of the
people hidden under a perfectly transparent guise. There was a message
of hope in the comparison. If Aeneas and his Trojans, the founders of
mighty Rome, had to pass through such hardships, then the cause of
Ukraine was not lost, so long as any of her sons remained alive.
It is small wonder that the poem speedily became popular and went
through three editions in a few years. It touched off the long hidden
spark which most had regarded extinct. Henceforth Ukraine had a written
language understood by the people, and it was up to them to write in it
as well as speak in it. The country and the people had the proof that
their ordinary vernacular could be adapted to literature and that real
books could be written in it. Once and for all in Eastern Ukraine the
artificial language vanished and slowly but surely its place was taken
in publications by the vernacular of Kotlyarevsky.
Meanwhile the author kept on with his ordinary work. He did not try to
repeat the performance. He did not engage in any propaganda for the new
language but his home became the centre for the steadily increasing
number of people who were awakening to a self-esteem that had been
sadly lacking for many years. That was the highest praise that could be
given to a work. Critics can analyze it and try to find the detailed
meaning of each allusion. They can seek for the author’s point of view
on many questions of the day. They can annotate every line. They can
praise or condemn. Kotlyarevsky had done the impossible and opened a
literature in a new language and he could rest content.
Meanwhile the years moved on and there was a growing number of books
written in the vernacular. Kotlyarevsky retained the friendship of the
Governor General and became more and more interested in the theatre and
finally was put in charge of the theatre in Poltava.
The Ukrainian theatre was in a bad way. There were troupes of serf
actors on many estates and in some of the main cities there were
theatres but there were no Ukrainian plays for them to perform. What
they did was to give uninteresting performances in a mixture of
Russian, Polish and Ukrainian. They satisfied a certain need but the
general level of education was so low that the new performances were
little more than the degradation of the old religious and school plays.
In 1812 Prince Shakhovskoy, realizing the musical value of the
Ukrainian folksongs, produced what he was pleased to call a Ukrainian
vaudeville, the _Kozak Poet_. This employed certain Ukrainian themes
and was written in what purported to be the Ukrainian language but
Shakhovskoy did not know the vernacular speech and his language was
neither Russian nor Ukrainian but a hodge-podge of unreal and assumed
forms. The _Kozak Poet_ became very popular and its linguistic defects
were largely unnoticed, for there was no fully accepted standard, and
his work was highly praised, especially by all those who were seeking
for advancement in the Russian service.
It displeased Kotlyarevsky, who had already shown some talent in
various amateur performances and he determined again to be a forerunner
in another field. In 1819 in his own theatre at Poltava, he produced
two comedies _Natalka Poltavka_ and _Moskal Charivnik_. (The Muscovite
Wizard.) The celebrated actor Mikhail Shchepkin, a Ukrainian by birth,
took part in these performances. They were the first real Ukrainian
plays written for a modern theatre and they have held their own on
the stage for over a century. Let us say frankly that they are not
masterpieces of the dramatic art but neither are they to be despised.
They are adapted to the stage and it is not only patriotic fervor that
has kept them alive.
Let us look a little more closely at the _Natalka Poltavka_,
“an opera in two acts,” as Kotlyarevsky calls it, though it is
really an operetta. It contains many elements that are typical of
the Franco-Italian play of the period. The characters are quite
conventional. There is the heroine, a beautiful country girl who has
been reduced to poverty by the death of her father but who is still
honorable and virtuous. She is a type that goes back through the ages
into the ancient world. There is the poor orphan boy who was regarded
as unworthy to become her husband and who returns rich at the crucial
moment. There is the sincere but ambitious mother. All these are stock
characters from world drama and if Kotlyarevsky had merely put these
types through their paces, he would have laid a good basis for the
Ukrainian theatre. He did more than merely imitate the conventional
models. He was deeply conscious of the difficulties of his people and
if he was not heroic in the later nationalistic sense, he stood for
an ideal that was strange in his day and boldly emphasized various
qualities of the Ukrainian temper.
Take the conversation between Petro and the _Vyborny_ and the _Vozny_.
Petro had been to the theatre in Kharkiv and had seen there the drama
of Shakhovskoy which was creating so much excitement. He boldly
declared that he could not understand it because the Moskal did not
know how to write the Ukrainian language or draw a Ukrainian character.
Here he definitely expresses the author’s sense of literary criticism.
It is very interesting that Petro is fully conscious of his difference
from the Moskals and that the _Vozny_, the judicial official, no more
educated than Petro, corrects the historical mistakes which Shakhovskoy
made about Ukraine.
In the _Moskal Charivnik_, Kotlyarevsky also pokes fun at those
Ukrainians who endeavor to turn themselves into Russians but this play
is far weaker and less clear in its construction. In the _Ode to Prince
Kurakin_, he stresses the same points and the hardships of the people.
Both of his dramas contain snatches of poetry, sometimes purely
original and sometimes a reworking of the poems of Skovoroda. They end
with a chorus as in the traditional dramas of the day and they show
Kotlyarevsky’s command of other forms of Ukrainian verse as well as the
epic.
The striking characteristic of all of Kotlyarevsky’s work is the
democratic character of his writings. The nobility had been pretty
well Russianized and it was only the common people who preserved the
native language. However, while he depicted them in a kindly humorous
way, he never lost an opportunity to speak out strongly about the
peasant virtues and to emphasize that democratic tradition which had
always been so strong in Ukraine and in the lives of the Kozaks. Thus
Natalka in her talk with the _Vozny_ definitely refuses to marry him,
because she is of poor peasant stock and he comes from the gentry.
There is hardly a literature which took its rise in such a clearly
democratic atmosphere as did modern Ukrainian and Kotlyarevsky from the
very beginning set the keynote which was to be followed by all of his
important successors.
Yet with it all Kotlyarevsky did not present the Ukrainian cause in a
manner that would get him into trouble with the authorities. He was
not a political agitator nor a man to menace by his actions the social
order of the day. He was a literary innovator and the creator of the
Ukrainian language and like most of the early leaders of the Slavonic
revival in various countries, he did not work in the field of politics.
He did not aim at reviving the political independence or the political
system which had been overthrown by the Russian Empress. At that time
Ukrainian culture had been so buffeted and demoralized that the first
and most essential factor was the creation of a new spirit and a new
self-respect.
That was his work and he succeeded admirably in what he undertook. It
is even said that many of the Russianized nobles were moved to tears
when they read in his lists of the Ukrainian regiments and groups their
own family names and recalled the old traditions which they affected to
have forgotten. Critics of the later day bewailed his frivolity and the
light tone in which he worked. Yet those very men were compelled to use
the language which he had forged and they profited by all that he had
accomplished. That language which had been derided as a peasant tongue
was revamped into a literary medium and when Kotlyarevsky died, he
could look out at a world in which the great poet Shevchenko was just
beginning his career. The creation of the language was the first step
toward this flowering and that was the work of Kotlyarevsky who formed
the speech out of an unwritten vernacular and taught his people to use
it and to use it in a democratic spirit.
The _Eneida_ was really the beginning of a new movement even as the
comedies were the practical start of the modern Ukrainian theatre. They
stand as a solid monument to Kotlyarevsky and every critic, friendly or
hostile, must realize the full measure of his accomplishment.
CHAPTER FOUR
HRIHORI KVITKA-OSNOVYANENKO
Kotlyarevsky had paved the way for a Ukrainian literature and he had
set standards for it in poetry and the drama. He had shown that the
Ukrainian language was a proper vehicle for literature and he had given
to it a strongly democratic quality. Yet the task of winning a proper
place for the literature was not yet completed.
It was still necessary to break through the stubborn opposition of the
gentry who then formed the bulk of the educated class. Most of these
had been Polonized or Russianized and while they knew the language,
they were ashamed to use it in their writings. They felt the charm of
Ukraine and of the Ukrainian scenery and customs, but they preferred
to write about it in the more popular and supposedly aristocratic
languages. As a result there appeared in both Polish and Russian
literature a large number of books which dealt with Ukrainian themes as
if they were a special subdivision of the culture of the master groups.
The authors regarded the Ukrainian language as suitable only for works
in a lighter vein and as a source of amusement. The Ukrainians were
often caricatured and derided and this procedure only increased the
tendencies toward assimilation.
In Polish we find the _Maria_ of Malczewski and in Russian we
have Gogol’s _Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka_ and the collection
of _Mirgorod_ with the great story of _Taras Bulba_, a brilliant
description of Kozak life as Gogol conceived it. Yet Gogol had an
attitude of unbending loyalty to the Russian Tsars. He knew relatively
little of Ukrainian history, although he was proud of the fact that his
family had been famous in the Sich and his father had written several
plays in Ukrainian after the tradition of Kotlyarevsky.
It was necessary to widen the range of the Ukrainian subject matter
and to create new forms of writing but this was no easy task under the
conditions of the day. As at Poltava, so at Kharkiv there was a great
interest in things Ukrainian, especially after the foundation of the
university there in 1805 but there was a general aristocratic tone to
the entire social life and the same tradition that Kotlyarevsky had
opposed at Poltava.
Despite these handicaps certain steps in the development of the
literature were taken by Hrihori Kvitka, a landowner of the
neighborhood of Kharkiv. He was born in 1778 and received the usual
superficial education of the day and of his class. He had little
regular instruction and that little was entirely in Russian. Largely
through the influence of Skovoroda, he became deeply religious at the
age of twelve and wanted to enter a monastery. His parents prevented it
and they finally put him in the Russian army. In a short time he left
it and entered the civil service. Then he tried the army again and when
he was twenty he entered a monastery as a lay brother. This life too
proved uncongenial and finally he left it and returned home to busy
himself with the social life of the day and to dabble in intellectual
pursuits. Of course he read the _Eneida_ but it did not inspire him to
imitate it or to use the Ukrainian language.
Instead of that, he began to write in Russian under the pen name of
Falaley Povinukhin. His stories attracted a certain amount of attention
in Kharkiv but they made no impression on the literary world of the
two capitals. They were merely stories written by a provincial Russian
for a provincial audience. Kvitka would have remained unknown and
unnoticed, had chance not led him to try his native Ukrainian.
He was joking one day with a writer who was endeavoring to compose
in his native tongue and Kvitka asked him to write something serious
and sentimental in it. When the author replied that the language was
unfit for such subjects, Kvitka became displeased and to prove his
friend wrong, he decided to write himself some stories in Ukrainian
and soon he turned out two of his main works, _The Soldier’s Portrait_
and _Marusia_. Their success was immediate in Ukrainian circles and it
was not long before they were translated into Russian and brought the
author that fame which he had never achieved in his Russian writings.
Before this in 1812 he had become the director of the theatre in
Kharkiv and this inspired him to write dramas and especially comedies.
In 1831, he gave up most of his interests in Kharkiv and retired to his
estate at his native village of Osnova, from which he took the pen name
for his Ukrainian writings, Osnovyanenko. From that time he came to the
city only once a year to carry out his duties as Marshal of the local
nobility. Thus absorbed in society and his estates, he died in 1843 at
a ripe old age.
It is curious that in his later days the very success which he had won
for the Russian translations of his Ukrainian works, many of which he
had made himself, led him back to Russian and he again tried without
success to achieve fame in that language, while he prepared Ukrainian
translations of his Russian books. The result was a weakening of the
value of his works, for it can be truthfully said that Kvitka wrote
nothing of importance except in Ukrainian.
To a large extent Kvitka was typical of the vegetable existence of the
nobles of the day. The timeless life on the big estates gave to the
masters abundant and placid happiness and isolated them from the life
that was proceeding at an ever increasing tempo in both Ukraine and
Russia. Kvitka maintained the old conservative attitude toward life and
was always the talented amateur and the respectable reactionary in his
views. Thus in his _Letters to my dear Countrymen_ which appeared in
the thirties, he definitely set forth a type of reactionary doctrine
which had long since been repudiated by the great writers of the same
period in Moscow and St. Petersburg. He unhesitatingly declares “As
God is heaven, so is he (the tsar) on earth” and he explains to his
countrymen of the government of Kharkiv the glories and the virtue and
the divine origin of the imperial regime. Radical critics attacked him
for his views but we must never forget that throughout his entire life
he was a provincial nobleman who accepted uncritically the slogans of
the day as they were accepted in the Russianized circles of Kharkiv
society.
If these _Letters_ could be taken as the whole of Kvitka’s work, he
would hardly deserve mention but it was only a small part of his
activity. _The Little Russian Tales_ published in Moscow in 1834-37 and
in Kharkiv in 1841 were very different.
Let us take _Marusia_ as an example. Marusia, a young Ukrainian girl
and a paragon of all virtues, is the daughter of a fairly well-to-do
farmer. She falls in love with a poor young man, who, as an orphan, has
to serve in the army. To escape this and to make money to buy himself
off from this obligation, he leaves home. This moves the heart of old
Naum, Marusia’s father, and he consents to the wedding but sends the
young man on a business trip before the marriage takes place. The
lovers part in the cemetery and Marusia promises to meet him there.
Soon after she is taken ill and dies and her funeral is being held as
the future bridegroom returns. Broken-hearted, he gives up his career
and becomes a priest but after a short time he dies of grief in a
monastery.
The story is filled with ethnographical details. Kvitka knew the
colorful life of the peasants and the vast number of customs that were
carried out with almost religious scruples and he inserted them into
his tale. We learn of all the ritual of courtship and of love making
and in the hands of a less skillful writer, these details would make
the story drag. Kvitka avoids the danger and _Marusia_ is one of the
best tales of village life on its brighter side.
Yet the heroine is almost cloyingly sweet. There is little or
nothing of the earthly about her and she is a typical heroine of
the sentimental era which was attendant upon the introduction of
Romanticism. This fashion had been started by Zhukovsky in Russian with
his translation of the German ballads and now Kvitka adapted it to
Ukrainian. The theme bears striking similarities to the contemporary
Czech ballads of Erben and Celakovsky where we find the same
over-sentimentality particularly in the case of young girls.
In his tales Kvitka had adapted this ballad material to prose and
strange as it may seem, they really antedate similar works in French,
German and Russian. This heavily Russianized nobleman who admired and
almost worshipped the tsar wrote in Ukrainian a very strong plea for
the people and produced realistic peasants who shared the thoughts and
emotions of their fellows. He knew the life of the peasants around
Kharkiv and depicted them sympathetically and in glowing colors.
He also noticed the differences between the Ukrainians and the
Russians. He shows it in their reactions to various motives and he
makes at least a passing reference to the hostility or at least the
aversion that existed between them. Thus Vasil, the lover of Marusia,
says when he tells about his entrance into the business world, “I got
along at once with my companions, although they were Moskals.” In the
same way in another of his early stories, _The Soldier’s Portrait_, the
peasant artist who takes his painting to the fair for criticism, is not
impressed when a Russian is deceived by its realism, “for it is no feat
to deceive a Moskal.”
In his early peasant stories, Kvitka has a rather light and somewhat
humorous touch and many of his sketches of peasant life are
distinguished by the general gaiety that pervades the atmosphere.
Yet he soon became aware of the darker sides of the picture. Thus in
the _Unfortunate Oksana_, he gives us the same theme that was used
with such great effect by Shevchenko in _Katerina_, the story of the
unfortunate girl who is seduced and carried off by a Russian captain
who promises to marry her and then abandons her with her baby. She
finally returns to her home to her aged mother. Petro, a young man whom
she had formerly loved, now becomes her brother and when the captain
returns and gives the child, his child, a few coins for nuts, the
mother throws them out of the window into the street. The evil desires
of the captain have been helped by the pride and the beauty of Oksana
who has hoped and dreamed of a husband who would be of higher social
station than she is and it is this desire to rise above the other girls
of the village that leads to her downfall and tragedy.
In the dramas which Kvitka wrote for the Kharkiv stage, he has the
same attitude but he very often uses the same mixture of Ukrainian
and Russian that was the vogue before the dramas of Kotlyarevsky.
Thus in _Shelmenko the Orderly_, the hero who is saved from military
service into which he has been plunged by the scheming and unscrupulous
village clerk, talks Russian consistently whereas the orderly usually
speaks Ukrainian. The way in which the governor unmasks the rascality
of his subordinate and punishes him is typical of Kvitka’s attitude
toward the imperial regime. The crooked clerk is also a good example
of the climbing and corrupt Ukrainians who desire to get away from
their peasant past. As the inn keeper says, “The village clerk, a
peasant with money, is ashamed to be with his brothers and wastes money
for a costly meal and expensive wines,” because he thinks that this
represents enlightenment and improvement.
Again and again in these plays as in his stories, Kvitka the
reactionary does not hesitate to put down the truth as he sees it,
even though it runs counter to many of the preconceived ideas which
he elsewhere stubbornly defends. He does not idealize many of his
characters and almost unconsciously he gives us the attitude of the
people to their Russian rulers. Thus Nikita says in this same play, “My
father did not teach me to write in order that I should become evil
and worthless and he tried to put me on the right path.” It is also
interesting that he, speaking Russian, still cannot read and write his
native tongue, for he knows only the church language, that arbitrary
and artificial system to which Kotlyarevsky had given the death blow
with his _Eneida_.
After giving such rich and varied pictures of Ukrainian life, it
is strange that he returned to Russian and in such stories as _Pan
Halyavsky_, he describes in a fairly amusing manner the life of a
typical rich cub with his stupid Polish tutors and his inability
to accomplish anything. In great detail the author shows how he is
tyrannized over by his ambitious wife who succeeds in sending him to
the country, so that she can play around with the army officers who
seem to her more attractive. Perhaps in a way Kvitka is not so untrue
to his own feelings, for he draws a sharp differentiation between the
native life of the villages and the gay existence of the capital.
Kvitka then stands in a curious position in Ukrainian literature. He
undoubtedly deserves the praise which was showered upon him for his
ability in describing Ukrainian peasant life in excellent and readable
prose. He marks a definite advance over Kotlyarevsky in the greater
range of emotions and themes which he handles and in the more serious
moods that appear at times. Yet it was not in him to be a champion of
the cause of his people. It was not in him to break definitely with the
polished world of the great estates and to start a definite movement
for the assistance of the peasants. He recognized the dubious position
of Ukraine in its contacts with the Russians but at the same time he
appreciated the advantages which the connection with Russia had given
him and his aristocratic friends and he was constantly torn between the
two ideals.
Kvitka was really a passing phase in the development of Ukrainian
literature. In many ways he can be compared to Gogol who had definitely
stepped across the line into Russian. Kvitka was held back by his
success in his Ukrainian stories. He knew the village life around
him and felt that it was only from that life that he could draw his
best themes. Yet he did not analyze or think through his position.
He remained within the framework and lived the life of the average
Russianized Ukrainian nobleman and hence it was, as he swayed back
and forth, that he was condemned by Shevchenko and the ardent young
patriots of the next generation.
At the same time he found a deeper appreciation at home than in Russia.
Byelinsky, the great Russian critic and liberal, expressed himself very
strongly against the peasant stories of Kvitka, for he did not believe
that peasant life could furnish the material for serious literature and
despite his marked democratic leaning, he was opposed to the use of the
Ukrainian language for literary purposes. Hence he condemned Kvitka
on all counts. Nevertheless Kvitka has held his own for his peasant
stories especially in Ukraine. They have been often edited and reedited
and still find large masses of readers, despite the sentimental style
in which many were written. Had he been inclined to rest his fame
upon his Ukrainian stories, his place would have been higher, and he
could have polished them even more highly. As it is, his Russian work
has been forgotten, his Ukrainian stories have lived, and we must
consider him as another milestone in the resurrection of the Ukrainian
consciousness and in the development of the language. The great master
had not yet appeared to crown the work but Kvitka was one of the men
of the transition period who builded better and more solidly than they
knew or dared to imagine.
CHAPTER FIVE
TARAS SHEVCHENKO
It was a favorable time for poetry, if not for the poet himself. The
second quarter of the nineteenth century saw a great flowering of
poetry in Russia and in Western Europe. The first wave of interest in
folk poetry was reaching its height and together with the Romantic
movement was spreading into the Slavonic countries. There was a lively
interest everywhere in the collecting of folk songs and not only
in Western Europe but throughout the Balkans there were the first
rumblings of the new nationalistic interest in language. Goethe was
translating and praising the Serb ballads which had been brought to his
attention. The Czechs were discussing with vehemence the authenticity
of the ancient manuscripts recently discovered by Hanka. Safarik was
working on the history of all Slavonic literatures. Mickiewicz had
already achieved fame as a poet and his residence in St. Petersburg
during the twenties had spread a knowledge of his works throughout
Russia. The Polish Romantic movement was dominating the Polish scene
and the great trio of Mickiewicz, Slowacki, and Krasinski were doing
their best work.
In Russia too poetry was in its Golden Age. It was the period of
Alexander Pushkin, the greatest of the Russian lyric poets. Around
him was gathered a group of the gilded youth who had mastered the art
of elegant verse and who had wide human interests, even though they
cloaked them under a mask of aristocratic dilettantism. As their patron
and adviser, Zhukovsky was still the master critic. With his excellent
court connections, where he was the tutor of the young Tsarevich, later
Alexander II, he was able to save the poets from the consequences of
their own pranks and to give them good advice on their literary work.
More than that Gogol with his Russian stories on Ukrainian and Kozak
life had concentrated the attention of the general public on the life
of Little Russia, for the name of Ukraine was still taboo in official
circles. Now, if ever, was the time in Russia when there might be a
hearing for Ukrainian culture, even if there were still no feeling for
any change in the political situation. The era of the Russian literary
gentlemen was at its climax. That of the plebeian realists was yet to
come.
It was an ominous time for the poet himself. The Russian armies,
returning from the defeat of Napoleon, had brought with them the
seeds of modern democratic and republican influences. This had led
the progressive aristocracy to embark upon the ill-fated Decembrist
Revolution and when the tragic consequences of that evil day had
passed, it was realized that Nicholas I with his narrow bureaucratic
tendencies had destroyed the political power of the liberal elements of
the country. Many of the literary men had suffered and even Pushkin was
for a while under suspicion and in real danger. Then came the Polish
revolt of 1831 and the Russian armies stormed Warsaw and destroyed the
little autonomy that had previously existed in that land. Nicholas was
suspicious of new outbreaks and as he firmly bound the universally
recognized Pushkin with golden chains and broke his heart at the
Russian court, so he was on the watch for any new malefactors who might
venture to preach the hated liberal ideas.
It was just at this moment that a young Ukrainian serf, Taras
Shevchenko, arrived in St. Petersburg, little dreaming of the changes
that a few short years would make in his life.
He had been born on February 25, 1814, in the little village of
Morintsy in the government of Kiev and was therefore a Ukrainian of
the right bank of the Dnieper, far to the west of the home of both
Kotlyarevsky and Kvitka. His father, though a serf on the estate of
Vasily Vasilyevich Engelhardt, was able to read and write. His mother
was also of a superior type and the boy always respected her memory
and admired her, even though she died when he was nine years old. His
father married again but the step-mother was not kind to him, and when
his father died in 1826, the twelve year old Taras was left as an
orphan amid the hard conditions of serfdom.
He had already been attracted to painting and he made several attempts
to study with various local painters but his experiences were so
unpleasant that he finally gave up and returned to his native village
to pasture the cattle. A new attempt to get permission to study brought
from the overseer of the estate merely an order to serve in the bakery
but his failure there was so evident that he was appointed instead a
page in the mansion.
This gave him at least the opportunity to feast his eyes on the
beautiful works of art that it contained and encouraged him in his
early attempts to copy them. He had to do this secretly and when his
master discovered his copying and painting, the boy was soundly
flogged. Nevertheless Engelhardt, like many other nobles of the day,
liked to have educated serfs on his estate, and since Taras seemed
competent, he took the boy with him first to Vilna and then after the
outbreak of the Polish revolt to St. Petersburg and apprenticed him to
the painter Shirayev.
Shevchenko learned relatively little here and life was very hard but he
had the opportunity to make the acquaintance of the Ukrainian artist
Ivan Soshenko. This was a piece of good fortune, for Soshenko soon
introduced him to Karl Petrovich Bryulov, the most fashionable painter
of the day.
Bryulov was then at the height of his fame. He was of a French Huguenot
family which had long been domiciled in Russia and had been allowed
to Russianize his name, only when he received a fellowship to study
in Italy in 1821. He stayed there twelve years and took the Italian
capital by storm. There he painted his masterpiece, the _Last Days of
Pompeii_, which encouraged Bulwer-Lytton to write his novel on that
subject. He had come to know personally Sir Walter Scott and the other
English authors who visited Italy. Now in 1833, back in Russia, his
studio was frequented by the most fashionable people of the day. His
courses at the Academy were the goal of all students and the approval
of Bryulov meant success or failure for the average artist.
It was this man who took an interest in the young serf and desired to
have him as a student, but no serf could be admitted to the Academy.
Engelhardt refused to give Shevchenko his liberty but finally offered
it in return for 2500 rubles. To secure this sum Bryulov painted a
portrait of the Russian poet Zhukovsky and this was sold in court
circles by a lottery. The money was easily raised and on April 22,
1838, Shevchenko, then twenty-four years of age, became a free man,
just one year after the death of Pushkin. He commenced his formal
studies at the Academy of Art and finished the course in 1845 as a free
artist.
Probably as early as 1837 he had begun to write poetry but his writings
began to attract attention only after he was set free. In 1840 he
brought out a slender volume, the first edition of the _Kobzar_, at
the expense of a Ukrainian landowner Petro Martos, whose portrait he
was painting. There was something new and startling in the quality of
this first work with its emphasis upon the decay of the old Ukraine and
the pictures of the sufferings of the people. It was typical of the
spirit of Shevchenko that one of the poems _Katerina_ (named after his
beloved sister) portraying the sufferings of a Ukrainian girl betrayed
by a Russian lover was dedicated to Zhukovsky. Incidentally it may be
mentioned that Zhukovsky was himself the illegitimate son of a Russian
officer and a Turkish girl who had been captured in war.
He then set to work upon the _Haydamaki_, his longest and greatest
poem. He finished it in 1841 and published it in the same year.
In 1843 he paid a short visit to Ukraine and everywhere he was received
with the greatest honors as the Ukrainian poet _par excellence_. He
was entertained by the various magnates including Prince Repnin, the
governor, who was of Ukrainian origin, and his daughter Barbara. He
visited his native village and he could not fail to be impressed as he
never had been with the hardships which the people were compelled to
undergo.
As soon as he completed his course in the Academy, he returned to
Ukraine and spent the summer of 1845 travelling around the country,
visiting the sites of famous buildings. He soon found a position in the
Archaeological Commission where his skill in painting stood him in good
stead.
He finally settled in Kiev and soon found himself among a group of
enthusiastic young men and scholars, including Nikolay Ivanovich
Kostomariv and Panteleimon Kulish. Filled with the enthusiasm of youth
and stirred by those revolutionary currents which were preparing the
movements of 1848, they organized the Society of Saints Cyril and
Methodius, for the purpose of creating a great free union of all the
Slavonic peoples under a republican form of government. It was typical
of the change that had taken place in Russian and Ukrainian life since
the time of the Decembrists that this new movement was headed not by
members of the gentry or army officers but by a group of professors,
scholars, and men of letters. The naturally radical instincts of
Shevchenko and his ardent patriotism for Ukraine led him to associate
himself with them and he shared their dreams as well as their activity.
The authorities soon heard of the movement and acted swiftly and
savagely to suppress it. Apparently its existence was revealed to
the authorities on February 28, 1847. The matter was referred to St.
Petersburg and on April 5, Shevchenko and his friends were arrested.
An investigation and trial followed and on May 30, he received the
verdict that he was to be enrolled in the army in the Orenburg
Independent Corps with the rank of private and the tsar added in his
own handwriting, “under the strictest supervision with the prohibition
of writing and drawing.”
Shevchenko had been a free man for only nine years. Now he was back
in bondage under an even more intolerable yoke, torn away from his
beloved Ukraine and condemned to live as a soldier in the most remote
area of eastern Russia on the borders of Asia. At first his service
was none too rigorous, for sympathetic commanders attached him to two
expeditions to explore the Sea of Aral and allowed him to make sketches
for the records of the expedition. When this came to the attention of
the authorities in Petersburg, the privileges were speedily revoked and
the tsar’s instructions were carried out literally. Finally Shevchenko
was sent to the fortress of Novo-Petrovsk.
After the death of Nicholas I, the new tsar Alexander II pardoned him
in 1857. Influential friends in the capital interceded for him and he
heard in May that he was to be liberated but the official formalities
were slow and it was the end of July before he was finally released,
and he was able to start on his way home. He had reached Nizhny
Novgorod on his way to Petersburg, when he was again detained, for
his amnesty had not given him the right of residence in either of the
capitals. It was March, 1858, before he was able to go further and
even then he had to remain under police supervision. On his way to St.
Petersburg, he stopped at Moscow to visit his friend Shchepkin, the
celebrated actor, and he was kindly entertained by the Aksakov family.
In St. Petersburg, he resumed his studies at the Academy of Art and
he renewed many old friendships, especially with Count and Countess
Feodor Petrovich Tolstoy, who had been instrumental in securing his
release. At their home he met such literary men as Count Aleksyey
Konstantinovich Tolstoy, and in fact all of the conservative and
liberal group of cultured writers, who appreciated the real value of
art, literature, and freedom.
In 1859 he secured permission to pay another visit to Ukraine for the
first time in twelve years and he spent the summer dreaming of marriage
and of securing a little home for himself on the banks of the Dnieper.
It was all in vain. On his return to St. Petersburg, he did succeed in
securing the liberation from serfdom of his family but that was all.
His health began to fail and he died the day after his birthday on
February 26, 1861, just on the eve of the liberation of the serfs.
It was a sad life that Shevchenko had led. Out of his forty-seven
years, he had been a serf for 24, in the army 10, and under police
supervision for three and a half, so that there were only nine years
under which he could feel himself a free man to come and go as he
would. There is hardly any other writer of the same prominence to whom
fate was so uniformly unkind. Yet despite it all and despite all the
obstacles which he had to face he had succeeded in placing Ukrainian
literature on its feet as a recognized literature and it is highly
significant that whatever may have been his radical ideas, he retained
to the end the friendship and confidence of the Russian aristocratic
writers far more than he did that of the liberals. Even Turgenev did
not fail to look at him with some hesitation and the liberal critics
utterly failed to understand his feelings of love and sympathy for
Ukraine. On the other hand Apollon Grigoryev, one of the Slavophile
critics, ranked him as a poet above both Pushkin and Mickiewicz.
From his earliest writings Shevchenko was the bard of Ukraine. The fate
of the Kozaks and the misfortunes of his unhappy people were constantly
in his thoughts and in his early works, in accordance with the Romantic
currents of the day, he idealized the life which they had lived, the
stern and bitter conflicts which they had waged for independence and
he glorified the _kobzars_, the folk bards, who alone preserved for
posterity the memory of the heroic deeds of the Ukrainian past.
That is the message of _Perebenda_, the poor old bard who wanders
around homeless and neglected, singing of the great heroes of former
days, singing wherever he can receive a few coins to eke out his
miserable existence, and yet ever returning to the graves of the
departed warriors to mourn over the fate of Ukraine. There was much in
the old bard that can remind us of Shevchenko himself and of the role
that he imagined for himself from his first steps in the art of writing.
There have been many attempts to trace the literary origin of this
type of the old peasant bard which was so widespread and common in
Ukraine and the other Slavonic lands. Some have tried to find the
model in Mickiewicz, in the poems of Pushkin, but perhaps after all,
we can imagine without too much fancy that Shevchenko had heard from
his teacher Bryulov, the friend of Sir Walter Scott, of the _Lay of the
Last Minstrel_. Those words at the beginning of the English poem,
The way was long, the wind was cold,
The minstrel was infirm and old.
His withered cheek and tresses gray
Seemed to have known a better day.
The last of all the bards was he
Who sang of border chivalry.
sets the tone of _Perebenda_ far better than do all the mystical and
prophetic bards that have been invoked as models. We have an indirect
support of this in the preface of the second _Kobzar_ of 1847, when
Shevchenko says that the Russians point to the fact that Scott did not
write in his own language, but “he was born in Edinburgh and not in
Scotland.... And Burns was also a great national poet.”
The pathos of the last minstrel, as Scott draws him, is close to the
message of _Perebenda_, but Shevchenko adapts him perfectly to the
Ukrainian scene. There is less of the beautiful romance about the
Ukrainian situation. There is a deeper sadness and a deeper pathos, as
the burden upon the lower classes was heavier and more intolerable.
Scott described a situation of two centuries before and conditions had
changed and mellowed with the passing of time. Shevchenko, the freed
serf, was thinking of the life which he had once personally known and
of the battles in which there had participated men whom he had known in
Ukraine. In the _Kobzar_, he laid his main emphasis on the struggles
between the Kozaks and the Poles. Moscow and the Russians play a
subordinate part, for after all Shevchenko was from the right bank of
the Dnieper where the bloody Kozak wars against the Poles had been
fought in the preceding centuries.
The only poem that describes the relations with the Russians is
_Katerina_, the story of the young girl who has a child by a Russian
officer who has seduced her and then cast her off. When she finally
overtakes him, he is unwilling to recognize her or his child. This
social theme was to grow in importance as Shevchenko matured, but it
rests upon his observation of the present rather than his regard for
the past.
The _Kobzar_ marked an epoch in modern Ukrainian literature. For the
first time a poet had arisen to pour out his heart in his native tongue
and to express the sufferings of his people and their past. Shevchenko
was not like the earlier authors who had developed Ukrainian but who
had also worked extensively in Russian. He did very little in the
Russian language and even that little belongs to the most unimportant
part of his work. He was a Ukrainian first, last, and always and he
never was attracted by any of the compromises that were so convenient
and popular.
The next year saw the publication of the _Haydamaki_, the greatest
poem of Shevchenko and the masterpiece of Ukrainian epic poetry. It
goes back to the last struggles in Western Ukraine in the eighteenth
century, to the last uprising of the peasants and the Kozaks in
a futile attempt to secure relief from their Polish masters. His
grandfather had told him stories of this struggle, the Koliivshchina,
which spread fire and sword through part of Ukraine in 1768, and in
the poem Shevchenko reworked these legends on the basis of eye-witness
accounts. As he says:
My grandsir was there and my father who’s dead,
It happened one Sunday on closing the book
And drinking a cup with a neighbor of ours,
My father asked grandsir to tell us a tale
Of Koliivshchina, how there they had fought,
How Zaliznyak, Gonta had punished the Poles.
His aged old eyes flamed afresh as the stars,
His words came out fluently, youthful, and strong;
How they finished the Poles, and how Smila was burned.
The neighbors in fear and in sorrow were dumb
And I in my youth more than once set to weeping
In grief for the sexton.
But no one did notice
How wept the young child in the still of the cabin.
Thanks, grandsir, for all that you kept in your head,
The glory that once was the pride of the Kozaks,
Now I to my grandchildren tell the same tale. (I. 2421ff)
In the preface the poet speaks in the same mood, bewailing the
invariable tendency of the day to treat Ukrainian themes as a source of
gaiety and merriment while “Ukraina’s weeping.” To him a country and a
culture that had produced such warriors as the bards had sung of was
not something to be mocked and treated as of small esteem. The hetmans
and the atamans of the past were worthy of a better fate and a better
regard among following generations.
There is nothing mild about the poem. The convulsion of the
Koliivshchina had been too terrible for that. It was a tale of savage
massacres, one of those wild outbursts which was a war to the bitter
end and where the oppressed, once they had taken up arms, could look
only for victory or death. Yet the best passages in the poem are not
the battle scenes--in one sense Shevchenko slurs over them--nor are
they the pictures of devastation and of slaughter, but rather the
preludes to the action, the gathering of the clans, the blessing of
the weapons, scenes of the country which was so soon to be overwhelmed
with bloodshed, and apostrophes to those leaders who had carved out for
themselves a place in legend and in folklore and whose most patriotic
efforts had met only with failure and disaster.
The prologue and the epilogue show us the enthusiasm of the poet and
his spirit. Shevchenko was not bloodthirsty. He was not a military
man. Yet as he looked out at the world, he could not fail to see the
difference between the past centuries, when the Kozak hetmans moved in
the most aristocratic circles of Poland and matched wits and swords
with the Polish magnates and the present time when the poor serfs were
denied the least human rights.
The visit to Ukraine in 1843 seems to have made a great difference in
his ideas. The first ideal of Shevchenko was the free Kozak state, the
Sich where the men made and unmade their officers, and he emphasized
in his early poems the great struggle of these lovers of freedom
against the Polish nobles. Later in the Hetman state, the rights and
privileges of the ordinary Kozaks had been largely curtailed and a new
form of aristocracy had grown up among the Ukrainian people. It was
this new race of aristocrats that had made the treaty of Pereyaslavl
with Moscow and had fashioned the Russian yoke upon the Kozaks. Much
as he admired Bohdan Khmelnitsky, he could not help feeling that this
act was the cause of all the troubles of Ukraine. He was not enough of
a student of history to appreciate the complications of the situation
in which Bohdan found himself and he did not see the difference between
the great Hetman and his lesser followers who allowed themselves to be
deluded and deceived by the Muscovite ambassadors in the seventeenth
century. Perhaps there was more than a grain of truth in the artistic
insight of the poet but he differed sharply with the scholars of his
day, including his friend Kostomariv, and went on his own way. He was
more fascinated by the figure of Mazepa who joined with Charles XII
of Sweden against Peter the Great than he was with Bohdan seeking
Muscovite support against the Poles. From 1843 on, Moscow and the
Russians were for him the chief enemy of Ukraine. He was still free
and had not yet met the personal disillusionment with the Russian
regime. Still his return to Ukraine and the startling effect that the
sufferings of the serfs made upon him seem to have swung his sympathies
into a social channel and away from the romantic pictures of life in
the Sich.
This is the theme of the _Great Grave_ (_Veliky Lyokh_), a curious
but effective mystical poem, in which under various forms Shevchenko
pictures the past, the present, and the future of Ukraine. The lost
souls come from three crucial periods of Ukrainian history. One had
cooperated with Bohdan in surrendering to Moscow, the second opposed
Mazepa in his attempts at liberation, and the third had aided Catherine
in abolishing the Sich. Then come the three crows, the Ukrainian which
recognizes what has happened to bring the land to its doom, the Polish
which expresses the fate of Poland and the Muscovite which boasts
of its success. There are the poor singers who in their misery are
endeavoring to collect alms for praising Bohdan. Finally there is the
excavation of the graves, the little one where lie the bones of Bohdan
and the great one in which are buried the spirit and the independence
of Ukraine and which will also one day be excavated so that the nation
can rise again. The poem is one of the most famous of Shevchenko’s
and perhaps nowhere does he express more powerfully and bitterly his
disapproval of the oppression of Ukraine by Moscow and the Russians.
In the _Caucasus_ he sympathized with the still continuing struggle of
the mountaineers to maintain their independence from the Russian yoke.
He sees the pathos of the natives and he compares it with the fate of
Ukraine before the Moscow arms.
At the same time Shevchenko commenced to pay more attention to the
suffering that he observed among the poor of his country. He had
alluded to social ills in _Katerina_. Now he repeats and repeats the
same message as in the _Hireling_ where the poor deceived girl never
confesses to her son that she is his mother, until she is on her death
bed. All her life long she has had to treat him as the child of the
kindly couple who have taken her in and given her protection when her
own parents had cast her out. The sufferings of the girl at the hands
of Muscovite lovers and the cruelty of the village toward those who
have transgressed its moral code weighed upon his soul and more than
once he returns to this theme which was to be one of the chief subjects
which he treated in later days.
Another result of the dreams of the Society of Saints Cyril and
Methodius is the _Heretic_, dedicated to Safarik and singing the praise
of the great Czech patriot Jan Hus, who was burned at Constance for
his religious and political views. Yet the treatment of Shevchenko is
characteristic for he sees in Hus not so much the national hero or the
great scholar as he does the representative of the common people. This
is the first time when he went outside of Ukraine for a subject but we
can see very clearly how those qualities which he glorified in Hus are
precisely those which he desired for his own people and if we are to
interpret any of his works symbolically we can do it here and feel that
Hus is another lost leader of the Ukrainian people.
A deeper and more tragic note appears in his works as the hour came
for his arrest. There is more of the purely personal lyric, more of
a feeling of pessimism as he realizes that he had attained a certain
freedom for himself but that this only laid upon his shoulders the
heavier burden of securing it for his own people. He could not enjoy
his personal success while he remembered that his people and his family
were still in bondage. More and more he came to draw inspiration from
the Old Testament and the sufferings of Israel.
His arrest threw these new feelings into the foreground and during his
confinement in St. Petersburg, he produced a surprising quantity of
excellent songs which expressed his sorrow and his discouragement. Let
us take the following as an example:
It makes no difference to me,
If I shall live or not in Ukraine
Or whether any one shall think
Of me ’mid foreign snow and rain.
It makes no difference to me.
In slavery I grew ’mid strangers,
Unwept by any kin of mine;
In slavery I now will die
And vanish without any sign.
I shall not leave the slightest trace
Upon our glorious Ukraine,
Our land, but not as ours known.
No father will remind his son
Or say to him, Repeat one prayer,
One prayer for him; for our Ukraine
They tortured him in their foul lair.
It makes no difference to me,
If that son says a prayer or not.
It makes great difference to me
That evil folk and wicked men
Attack our Ukraine, once so free,
And rob and plunder it at will.
That makes great difference to me.
At times as the difficulties and hardships of life descended upon him
in the faraway districts of Orenburg and Aral, he became discouraged
but the vast bulk of his poetry was a lamentation for his absence from
his beloved Ukraine. He dreamed of the beauties of its fertile soil now
that he was in an arid and desolate region and he lamented the sad fate
of his beloved country as well as his own. A surprising number of poems
deal also with the hardships and the troubles of a young girl who has
been left an orphan to make her way in a cruel and unfeeling world.
Perhaps in some of these we may easily imagine that the girl symbolizes
Ukraine, for the two themes of the ruined country and the ruined girl
more than once merge in the thoughts of the sympathetic poet.
As the rigors of imprisonment became still more severe, Shevchenko
tried his hand at prose in various stories which he dated from before
his imprisonment but he seems to have done this in an effort to avoid
the tsar’s prohibition of writing and drawing. These stories, while
they are good, add little to his reputation. Shevchenko was primarily
a poet and the prose which he wrote contains little new, either in
ideas or content. They are largely reworkings of the same themes of
the suffering girl, the tyrannical landlord, the Muscovite seducer and
oppressor that he had dealt with earlier in more concentrated form in
his verse. They have attracted less attention than his poetry and as in
the case of Pushkin form the minor part of his work.
We must mention two poems of this period. One is the _Prophet_ in which
he sets forth the value of the poet as a proclaimer of the divine
ideals but the unappreciative people reject and kill him and choose a
tsar in his place. The other is _To the Poles_, in which he laments the
feud that the Jesuits had stirred up to destroy the harmony that had
once prevailed between the free Poles and the free Kozaks. The poem
is far removed from the glorification of the Kozak wars in the poems
of the _Kobzar_ and the more romantic dreams of a free Ukraine, but
Shevchenko in his life and thinking had passed from the right bank of
the Dnieper to the Hetman state and he realized the many conflicting
elements that had wrecked Ukrainian existence. He saw now that they
were more serious and more complicated than he had once believed and
from this time on he rarely alluded to those old battles and never
with the anger against the Poles that had once been so manifest. It
is however interesting that he never relented in his distrust of and
hostility to the Russians and in his condemnation of the tsars for
their destruction of the rights of the Sich and the free Kozaks.
On his release from captivity, Shevchenko dashed off in a few days one
of his great poems, the _Neophytes_, a tale of ancient Rome and the
persecution of the early Christians, dedicated to his friend Shchepkin.
We can hardly fail to see in this as in the other poems of the ancient
world the influence of his old master Bryulov, who had laid the basis
for his fame by his scenes from classical antiquity. Yet the story
of the young Christian whose heroic martyrdom for the faith finally
converted his mother to Christianity and faith in the Crucified was
perhaps a symbol of the spreading power of Ukrainian self-confidence.
The comparison between the tyrannical Nero and the Russian tsar was
so evident that it terrified some of the poet’s friends as Kulish who
feared that new misfortunes would come upon the poet. None did but it
is a tribute to the courage and unbending loyalty of Shevchenko to his
ideals that he never wavered in them even at the most critical times.
His message of freedom and of kindness he would not dilute or hide, no
matter what it might cost him personally or how more timid men might
take to cover.
Nevertheless Shevchenko had returned a broken man. He produced one more
long poem, _Maria_, a story of the Blessed Virgin which differs in some
ways from the ecclesiastical tradition. For this he was denounced as
irreligious. Yet that is hardly the word to be used, for there is a
deep religious feeling in the work and if he has violated the sacred
story to make more poignant the character of the Blessed Virgin and to
equate her life history with that of the suffering Ukraine, the poem
does not deserve the severe abuse that has been directed against it by
the more literal minded. He aimed to show the apparent overwhelming of
the right and the temporary triumph of evil but he never had in his own
mind any doubt as to the final outcome, whether the time of waiting and
of suffering were long or short.
The vast majority of his poems after his return, however, are either
adaptations and imitations of the Psalms and the Old Testament or they
are pathetic expressions of his hope for a little home on the banks of
the Dnieper and for at least a few years of happy family life. He was
weary of the struggle that he had waged for his people for his entire
life. He had succeeded in freeing his own family from serfdom and the
broken and exhausted man felt that he could now hope for something for
himself. It was not to be and an untimely death struck him down just a
few days before the tsar had definitely abolished that serfdom against
which he had fought so violently.
The importance of Shevchenko cannot be overemphasized. He was the
greatest of the Ukrainian poets and he was more than that. He was the
first writer who was purely and thoroughly Ukrainian, who dared to
dream of a Ukrainian language and literature that would be completely
separate from Russian and would have an independent place in the world.
He had started his career with the romantic dream of perpetuating
the memory of the conflicts between the Kozaks and the Poles and of
reviving the old days when the free Kozaks were able to carve out a
precarious liberty for themselves and their people. Experience and
observation taught him that that was impossible. He always valued
the positive ideals of the old days, he realized the courage and the
heroism of the leaders and still more of the ordinary man of the time.
But he soon saw that that was not enough and that those days would not
return. It was necessary to build for the future and he considered
all that had passed since that fateful treaty of Pereyaslavl the
unfortunate consequences of a mistake.
That led him to differences of opinion with many of his most intimate
friends, for some of them were hoping against hope that there could be
some settlement on the lines proposed by the great Bohdan. Shevchenko
did not believe it possible and he dared to express his beliefs. To
him a free Ukraine meant exactly what it said, a Ukraine that would be
completely independent in every sense of the word, that would not be
subject to interference by any foreign ruler, especially the Russian
tsar. That was a more immediate danger than the old feuds with the
Poles for after the division of that country and the failure of the
revolt of 1831, Shevchenko saw that the Ukrainians, particularly those
on the right bank and in the Hetman state had nothing to fear from the
ruined Poland.
He had an ardent democratic and revolutionary faith in the common
people and he recognized that they were the very backbone of the
Ukrainian stock. In his lifetime he was friendly with many of the more
enlightened members of the Ukrainian nobility and with many of the
conservative writers of Russia. Never did he compromise his beliefs
that the new order was to be founded upon the rights of the common man
who must be educated to enjoy his new privileges. His ideas were often
in close agreement with those of the Russian radicals but he did not
have much personal contact with them for his belief in a liberal and
radical solution of the Ukrainian question on its own territory shut
him off from their refusal to recognize the Ukrainians as distinct from
the Russians and their attempts to create in Russia an ideal system
based only on western ideas and ideologies.
He was a peasant but he realized also that all was not well within
the peasant communities and in the peasant way of life. They were
cruel and merciless to one another, for example, in their dealings
with girls who had transgressed the moral code and it was impossible
to blame all this upon the external oppression to which they were
subjected. It was perhaps a result of serfdom and of self protection
but it was an attitude that needed to be changed, if Ukrainian life
was to be enlightened. He felt from his own experience what the
people could achieve, if they were awakened to a sense of their own
responsibilities and he worked in every way to help them. He understood
the need of education and of progress and he did not try to conceal
what he felt with the result that he gave us realistic pictures
of peasant life, avoiding both undue idealization and excessive
condemnation of the people’s weaknesses, for he knew that much of these
was due to ignorance.
Born a serf and later a soldier in the Russian army, he accomplished
with few opportunities for formal education an amazing amount. He took
the Ukrainian language as it had been developed by Kotlyarevsky and his
followers and by the force of his own genius made it into a language
capable of expressing the most refined emotions and fully adequate to
all the needs of modern literature. He voiced in that language and in
no other the thoughts and aspirations of his people. He had completely
separated Ukrainian from Russian and started it along an independent
course and he had made himself its greatest literary master. Taras
Shevchenko, the son of a serf with his fanatical faith in the victory
of democratic ideals and despite all obstacles, made himself one of
the great poets of the Slavonic world and his fame will live as long
as that of any of his contemporaries in the other literatures. No one
of them believed more firmly or voiced more clearly an unyielding and
uncompromising belief that democracy, truth and freedom would win the
day and no one worked harder or suffered more to bring it about.
CHAPTER SIX
PANTALEIMON KULISH
Shevchenko was a poet by the grace of God and a genius who set the path
for the Ukrainian people. Endowed with an iron will and firmly devoted
to the principles in which he believed, he was able to undergo all the
hardships of his sad life without giving way or varying the course on
which he had embarked. Not so with Pantaleimon Kulish who was great in
his positive activity but unfortunately equally great in his defects
and errors. He devoted himself to the cause of Ukraine but over and
over again some peculiar mode of thinking cast over his reputation a
shadow which was easily avoidable. It makes his figure unusual and
pathetic rather than tragic. He stood the buffets of fate but it is
always difficult to discover exactly what he sought from life.
Kulish was born of a small landowning Kozak family in the district of
Hlukhiv in the government of Chernihiv July 27, 1819 and was thus only
five years younger than Shevchenko. He first learned to read in Church
Slavonic from a young cousin and as a child he was greatly influenced
by a neighboring landowner Ulyana Muzhikovskaya who impressed him as a
highly superior being and almost a god.
He was sent to school but was not allowed to finish the gymnasium
because of the prejudices of his father. Despite this he succeeded in
entering the University of Kiev and paid his way by acting for months
at a time as tutor on various estates. It was from this period that
he first became interested in peasant poetry and folksongs and some
of his stories based on folk motifs were published in the collection
_Kievlyanin_, edited by Prof. Maksimovich in 1840. In 1843 he published
a collection of poems, _Ukraina_, based largely upon folksongs with
some additions of his own, and he dreamed of combining them to form a
Ukrainian _Iliad_ but he did not have the opportunity or the poetical
ability to undertake it. He was not a natural poet like Shevchenko and
seemed to avoid direct comparison with him.
On the other hand the historical novel always interested him. While he
was in the university, he had become acquainted with the works of Sir
Walter Scott and he instinctively realized that the exploits of the
Kozaks lent themselves to the same kind of treatment. Yet even then
some impulse kept him from achieving in that line the perfection which
he might have had.
At Kiev he became friendly with Kostomariv and Shevchenko and was with
them in the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius. He very soon was
called to St. Petersburg by Pletnev to teach in the University there
and also to conduct classes in Russian for foreigners. He married the
sister of Bilozersky, another of the members of the Society, and had
just received a stipend to study abroad, when the blow fell upon the
Society. Kulish was arrested in Warsaw, as he was preparing to leave
the country, and was brought back to St. Petersburg for the trial.
He fared better than most of the others and was only sentenced to
two months in prison, perhaps through the intercession of Pletnev
who warmly recommended him as a young man of high mind and religious
principles. He was then exiled to Tula with the prohibition of writing
but the supervision over him was not so strict as that over Shevchenko
and he was able to continue his literary work by publishing under
various pen names.
On his return to St. Petersburg in 1850 he was able to resume anonymous
writing and he published the first of his studies on Gogol, the money
for which was furnished by the distinguished Slavophile Sergey Aksakov.
For a while he held a small job in the government service and then his
friends bought for him 120 desyatins of land in Ukraine and he and his
wife went there in an effort to earn his living by agriculture.
After the accession of Alexander II, he was granted an amnesty and the
permission to publish under his own name. He rapidly brought out his
_Memoirs on South Russia_ (1856), prepared the first edition of his
_Grammar_ and in 1857 he published in both Ukrainian and Russian his
main historical novel, the _Black Council_.
In his _Grammar_ Kulish set the standard for the orthography of the
Ukrainian language and his decisions were accepted as final for many
years. He made himself the authority on all kinds of linguistic and
grammatical and stylistic questions, and hoped that his work would be
employed in the proposed Ukrainian school system. He followed this book
with simpler writings intended for the common people.
The _Black Council_ was his chief work of fiction. It dealt with the
period immediately after the death of Khmelnitsky, when the various
Kozak colonels were competing for the hetmanship and when Poland and
Moscow had divided the country between the right and left banks of the
Dnieper. He emphasized the vivid contrasts between the manners and
customs of the officer class and the more unruly and undisciplined
members of the Zaporozhian Sich as Kyrylo Tur, and although he pays
tribute to their loyalty and fidelity to Kozak traditions and to the
bravery and heroic conduct which they demonstrated on all occasions,
there is always a lurking feeling in the mind of the reader that Kulish
did not after all consider these Kozaks of the Sich as the real bearers
of a national culture of a very high type.
With the love affair between Petro Shramenko and Lesya Cherivanivna,
Kulish remained true to the type of the romantic novel as it was then
understood in Europe. There are the usual scenes of adventure for
the hero, the battles, the feasts, the feats of arms, that we are
accustomed to expect. There is also a certain democratic tinge to the
novel. On the whole it is a good piece of work and it was only at the
very end in an epilogue in the Russian translation that he alluded to
the certainty that it was the undisciplined actions of the Kozaks that
had precipitated the loss of Ukrainian independence and had ruined the
country.
In 1861 his brother-in-law Bilozersky secured permission to publish a
Ukrainian journal at St. Petersburg, the _Osnova_, and Kulish, while
forbidden by the censor to take over control of the publication, was
its main contributor. It gave him an opportunity for sociological and
ethnographical studies and it also gave opportunity to his enemies
to criticize him, for in one unfortunate article, he declared that
the hetmanate was a tree rotten internally and he asserted that the
Ukrainians should not regret its destruction. Kostomariv, an infinitely
more careful and better scholar, agreed in part with Kulish but he
emphasized that the method of its destruction was the important factor
and that this had been more harmful to Ukraine than the destruction
itself.
There were other difficulties with the _Osnova_. Kulish still remained
close to the ideals of the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius which
had been suppressed fourteen years earlier but at the same time he did
not feel free to include in the periodical the extremely iconoclastic
views on federalism which had precipitated the arrest of its members.
He was little more friendly to the radical social views of some of the
younger generation who had been influenced by the Russian radicals
of the late fifties. As a result the journal languished and finally
came to an end before the repressive measures taken by the Russian
government after the Polish revolt of 1863.
For a few years after the ending of the _Osnova_, there came a period
when severe restrictions were put upon the printing of Ukrainian books.
During this time Kulish was in the Russian service in Poland and then
in 1869 he went to Eastern Galicia in Austria-Hungary to establish
closer relations with the Western Ukraine and arrange to have his books
published in Lviv.
Here his unfortunate disposition again got him into trouble with the
leading Ukrainian circles. In 1882 in the _Krashanka_ he used certain
expressions that convinced the Ukrainians of the West that he was
taking sides with the Poles against them and he suffered again severe
criticism.
The fact was that Kulish had more or less fundamentally changed his
views during the passing years. In his younger days he had noted in
his travels that the Ukrainian customs and language had been better
preserved in the villages than in the urban centres and on the large
estates. He had already realized that this peasant culture was on a
relatively low level and he became convinced that it was largely the
result of the turbulent manners of the Kozaks. He did not take into
account the other factors of denationalization that had swept from the
Ukrainian population the bulk of the gentry and the educated class
who had been drawn off into other fields. He expounded his ideas in
the _Unification of Rus_ in 1874-7, and also in the _Falling Away of
Little Russia from Poland_ in 1889. Both of these books aroused violent
antipathy to his views and in the minds of many people they outbalanced
the work which he had done for the upbuilding of the movement.
To tell the truth, Kulish had become gradually a violent Kozakophobe
and he could hardly speak of those doughty warriors without applying to
them all kinds of opprobrious epithets, despite the fact that it was
in their camps that the Ukrainians had survived foreign pressure for
two centuries. The whole theme of many of his later poems as in the
_Village Sparks_ can be well summed up in these lines,
For thou hast perished, Ukraina mother,
Amid Kozaks and all the worthless rabble.
In blood and ruins dies the fairest flower
Of thine abundant nature.
Yet this is from the pen of the same writer who first tried to unite
Eastern and Western Ukraine and who had written interesting and
sympathetic studies of the Kozaks of the preceding centuries.
He had returned to poetry after the death of Shevchenko with his
collection _Dosvidki_ (_Experiences_) in 1862 and he brought out several
other volumes. They were good poems but they were sadly lacking in that
especial spark of genius which alone marks the great poets of the world.
At the same time and despite his unmitigated opposition to the
Kozaks and all that they stood for, Kulish continued to work at the
translation of the masterpieces of the world into Ukrainian. He
translated many of the plays of Shakespeare, the poems of Byron, and
much of Goethe and Schiller. On a more ambitious scale during his
residence in Lviv he translated the Books of Moses and then in 1870
he brought out the Four Gospels and the Book of Psalms. He continued
to work on this after his return to Russia and by his death he had
completed twenty-nine books of the Old Testament. All this was in
addition to a constant stream of journalistic work.
Kulish continued to work to the very end and often in the greatest
poverty. For long periods of time, he and his wife were compelled to
live on almost the same fare as those peasants whom he affected to
despise and for whom he was expending all his energy. Illness did not
stop his working and he continued almost to the very end which came on
February 2, 1897.
His was a sad fate. One of that brilliant group that had suffered so
much for the cause of Ukraine in 1847, he gradually drifted towards a
point of view that could benefit no one but the enemies of his people.
Yet with it all he continued his work, sacrificing more and more to
it, without being able to see the inherent contradictions between his
goal and his philosophy. With his ability and his personal integrity,
he could have been a far more attractive figure, had he ever reached
a proper balance but even without that, he has left his mark upon the
development of the language and literature and he was one of the first
to grasp the possibilities of contact between Eastern and Western
Ukraine and to act upon it. In evaluating his work we must agree with
Yefremiv that he was great in his positive achievements but also
great in his mistakes. Then and only then can we see him in his true
perspective.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MARKO VOVCHOK
The stifling bureaucratic regime of Nicholas I offered a poor
opportunity for the development of a new generation. The collapse of
the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius was a heavy blow to the older
school of Ukrainian authors and it weighed still more heavily upon the
next generation which would have been attracted to it. At the same time
throughout Russia the old Romantic school vanished and a new era of
prose came into being. It was now the period of Turgenev and Belinsky
and it was only natural that the new tendencies would make their
influence felt upon the still weak Ukrainian literature.
There was another factor that was extremely important. Up to this time
the authors had had a personal connection with the old Ukraine in its
last phases. Shevchenko knew from his grandfather many details of the
Koliivshchina. In his youth there were still living men and women who
remembered that revolt, the Sich and the Hetman state. What would be
the spirit of the writers who had been born too late to have that
personal contact with the actors of the last scenes? That question was
still to be answered.
By the time that Alexander II had ascended the throne, Russia and all
Europe had passed out of the Romantic period. The new school of writing
paid attention not to the past but to the present, to the hardships
and difficulties of daily life rather than to the stirring deeds of
even the recent past. This was particularly true in Russia where for
nearly half a century all the writers devoted themselves exclusively to
the contemporary scene and to the movement for the liberation of the
peasants and the improvement of the conditions of the present.
Kvitka had in a way directed the attention of the Ukrainian authors
to the rich stores of material that were to be found there but his
characters were too idealized, too perfect to suit the next generation.
Besides that the predominant idea may well be called the belief in
the republican philosopher in homespun. The type appeared in France,
in England, in America, and in Russia and of course it would appear in
Ukraine. This was a school of thought that definitely emphasized the
humanity and the clear thinking of the uneducated peasant. The authors
believed sincerely that most, if not all of the evil of life, came
from the misthinking and errors of the upper classes. They saw in the
peasants, despite their rudeness, a vigor and an intelligence that only
required the possibility of free use and development to solve most of
the troubles and abuses of the day.
And those abuses were heavy. The rights of the nobles were construed
so as to deny to the peasants the most elementary human rights and
the serfs in Russia were probably never more bitterly oppressed than
they were in the last decades of serfdom. The economic pressure of
progress upon the nobles was so great that many of them, to satisfy
their supposed financial needs and to keep up with the procession of
culture, found it necessary to squeeze the last drop of income out of
their serfs and the more the landowners desired the comforts of the
nineteenth century, the more they were forced to inhuman devices to
collect the wherewithal.
Shevchenko in his last works keenly felt this oppression. He had passed
through the school of experience and after he had been able to compare
the life in the capital with the hardships of the peasants, he spoke
out strongly against this oppression. His was not the only voice that
was raised but it carried him over from the Romantic period to the age
of realism.
The author that was to be the spokesman of this new period in prose was
Maria Vilinskaya, who was born in 1834 of a Ukrainian landowning family
which had moved from Ukraine to Orel in Russia. She was educated in the
Kharkiv pension, one of the fashionable girl’s schools of the period.
When she returned to Orel, she met and married Opanas Markovich, who
was there in exile as a former member of the Society of Saints Cyril
and Methodius. The newly married couple returned to Ukraine in 1851
and for about a decade they lived in Chernihiv, Kiev, and Nemiriv. She
became interested in ethnography and began to study the peasant life,
customs, and language. Naturally the young wife became convinced of the
evils of serfdom and it was this that launched her into literature.
In 1852 Turgenev had published in book form his _Memoirs of a
Sportsman_ and these tales of peasant life speedily became the standard
for the new realistic treatment of the peasant existence. The Tsar
Alexander II read and reread them and it was often said that they
inspired him to issue the decree of emancipation. Yet it is to be noted
that Turgenev had contented himself with picturing the peasants as
human beings and had not laid stress upon those phases of life that
were most repulsive to the human conscience. He had secured his effects
by emphasizing the humanity of the peasants rather than the brutality
of the landowners and thereby he had definitely reached the higher
level of literature which many of his followers failed to attain.
In 1857 Maria Markovich sent to Kulish two stories on Ukrainian peasant
life which he read with enthusiasm and published under the pen name
of Marko Vovchok. The real identity of the author was not ascertained
for some time but the stories themselves attracted a great deal of
attention as soon as they were published. The next year, 1858, a
full volume appeared under the title of _Narodni Opovidaniya_ (_Folk
Sketches_) and it was warmly acclaimed by Shevchenko as the writing
of a prophet sent to the Ukrainian people to rouse them to opposition
against serfdom. Turgenev translated some of these tales into Russian
and Maria Markovich soon finished the translation herself.
She soon published another series in Russian under the title of
_Stories from the Folk Life of Russia_ which attracted attention. The
Russian critic Dobrolyubov used this latter work as a text for one
of his longer essays on the real strength of the peasant character,
after he had criticized her Ukrainian works on the ground that it was
impossible and undesirable socially to endeavor to create a literary
vocabulary in what was essentially an uncouth peasant dialect, an idea
which he stoutly maintained along with most of the Russian radicals and
a large part of the reactionary bureaucracy.
In 1859 she and her husband went abroad and while she was away she
published in 1862 another volume of Ukrainian stories. He returned to
Russia without her and died in 1867. During these years she became very
friendly with the radical leaders Herzen, Ogaryev, and Bakunin, and
from this time on she practically ceased to write in Ukrainian. Later
she married again and shortly before her death in 1907 brought out a
few more stories but apparently most of these had been written during
the few years when she was active.
Yet her fame really rests upon her stories in Ukrainian. As in the case
of Kvitka, her Russian works were really mediocre and this is the more
remarkable as Ukrainian was probably not really the language spoken
in her family. So striking is her mastery of Ukrainian in these days
that many critics have believed that the role of her husband in their
production was greater than has been often supposed.
The appearance of the first volume of her _Ukrainian Sketches_ was the
sensation of the year and they added to the overwhelming disgust at
serfdom which was growing among all thinking classes of society. Their
one theme was the abominable way in which the serfs were treated and
she emphasized especially the hard lot of the women who were thwarted
by the cruelty of the masters in their desires to lead a normal,
decent existence. In this they agree in style with the _Memoirs of a
Sportsman_ by Turgenev but they differ in that Marko Vovchok does not
hesitate to present shocking examples of the abuse of the peasants
by their masters, instead of merely indicating the humanity of the
peasants. Thus in _Horpina_ the peasants are compelled to work three
days on their master’s estates for him, two days for the poll tax,
and the fifth and sixth days for grinding grain, and the young master
drives his people harder than he does his cattle.
In the same story the mother takes a sick child to work in the fields
with her, because there is no one in the village to care for it, and
the master orders the overseer to take the child back and leave it
alone in her empty house, because she takes time from her labor to look
after it. In order to stop the child from crying, while it is alone,
she gives it an opiate. When the child dies as a result, the mother
from a sense of guilt goes insane.
Marko Vovchok does not hesitate to draw such stories of the callousness
of the masters and to emphasize the differences between the small
free proprietors and the serfs. Thus in the _Kozak Woman_, the girl
Olesya is the daughter of a wealthy farmer but she falls in love with
Ivan Zolotarenko, a serf. The leaders of the village express their
opposition to this union of a free woman and a serf but she insists and
submits to bondage for his sake. She spends all her money and sinks
down to the level of her companions. Then her husband is taken away
to the city by his master and dies there. At this moment she neglects
to recover her freedom because of her children and almost at once her
oldest son is taken away to serve as a companion and servant to the
son of the master. He fails to make good and dies. When she too passes
away, the master of the estate is even unwilling to bury her and the
expense of this is left to the already over-burdened serfs, who have
that sense of decency which is lacking in the master, a Russianized
Pole.
In the _Institutka_, we have another picture of a cruel and abusive
woman who has received the best education that her family can give her
and who returns from school only to abuse her mother and to wreak her
vengeance on every one that crosses her, including her husband and her
peasants. It is a lurid story of human meanness which spares no one.
The story is told by a peasant woman Ustina, a maid of the Institutka,
who has seen her husband forced into the army for a long term of years
because he had endeavored to protect her when she was being unjustly
flogged. Ustina is compelled to go to the city and work as a servant
but even this is preferable to life on the old estate under the iron
hand of the inhuman mistress.
Marko Vovchok’s understanding of the emotions and the feelings of the
peasant women struck a new note in Ukrainian and Russian literature.
Her feminine instincts told her how they reacted to the hardships of
their lives and perhaps no author has better expressed the disastrous
effects of serfdom upon the women who suffered from it and the women
who profited by it.
In addition to these tales of human suffering and brutality, she also
wrote a number, setting out in narrative form some of the Ukrainian
folktales and superstitions. Thus in the _Chary_, (_the Charms_) a
sorceress succeeds in changing her rival into a bird and marrying the
abandoned husband. Later when the bird returns to the old home, she
persuades her innocent husband to shoot it and the dying bird changes
back into the wife. The story is told simply and the author succeeds
in imparting to it that unreal atmosphere that makes us regard it as a
real event.
So too in _Lemerivna_. A rich, young Kozak loves a girl and woos her.
The girl refuses to love him in return but her mother, who is mindful
of the qualities of the young man, finally forces her into the wedding.
After it is over and he starts with her for her new home, she commits
suicide and he goes off and is never heard of again.
Marko Vovchok is easily the outstanding prose writer of her period,
the age just before the liberation of the serfs. She was one of the
group that cooperated in producing the state of mind that reformed the
evil and deserves all credit for it. It is only a pity and a great
loss to Ukrainian literature that she gave it up almost as soon as
she had achieved success. She was another of those talents that were
so frequent in Russian Ukraine who were swept from the vernacular
literature of the land into the colossal sea of Russian and who then
never justified their work, either by the quality of their productions
or the benefit that they may have hoped to give to the people.
CHAPTER EIGHT
IVAN LEVITSKY-NECHUY
With the abolition of serfdom, there vanished from Ukrainian life the
worst abuses which the earlier writers had experienced and described.
The ruthless floggings were mitigated or abolished. It was no longer
possible for the master to separate husband and wife or parents and
children to suit a passing fancy or to indulge a mad caprice. A more
humane spirit grew up in the villages and the old system gradually
changed. The millenium was not reached, however, and new difficulties
were added to the peasant lot, because with the abolition of the
almost autocratic power of the landlord, the economic position of the
peasant often became more complicated. Where he had formerly worked
out his obligations, often at terrific cost to his well being, now it
was necessary for him to secure by his labor the necessary money to
pay his new obligations to the state and the land owner. The reform
had not been far-reaching enough to put all the peasants on the road
to material prosperity and the new conditions demanded a new type of
literature.
The author who handled this new period was Ivan Levitsky, better known
under his pen name of Nechuy. He was born in 1838, the very year when
Shevchenko received his freedom and four years after the birth of Marko
Vovchok. He was educated in the theological academy at Kiev, the very
school which had been made famous in the seventeenth century by Peter
Mohyla, and then he became a teacher of the Russian language, history
and geography in the higher elementary schools. Here he toiled until he
was able to retire on a pension. He still continued to live in Kiev and
gradually became almost a recluse. He drifted away from active contact
with his fellow men and gradually slid into an obscurity which was
aided by his devotion to his own theories of what Ukrainian literature
should be. Finally the Central Rada of the free Ukrainian Republic gave
him a pension in 1918 as its first gift to a needy writer, but it was
too late for it to be of service and he died in a very short time.
Levitsky was induced to write in Ukrainian through his reading of
Shevchenko’s _Kobzar_ and also by the influence of the _Osnova_, the
journal which Kulish had founded in 1861. These models determined the
course of his life and led him to prose and the social novel. In a few
cases he attempted to deal with the life of the peasants under serfdom
as in _Mikola Dzherya_ but that period was definitely passed with the
ending of serfdom and he turned his attention to the contemporary
post-abolition scenes.
His first works were published in 1867 in the _Pravda_, a journal
appearing in Lviv, and for many years during the time when the
Ukrainian language could not be used in Russia for the publication of
books, his works appeared regularly in the Galician capital.
The great bulk of his works dealt with the unjust and burdensome
conditions of life immediately after the liberation of the serfs. Thus
for example in _The Baba Paraska and the Baba Palashka_, we have a
picture of the ignorance and lack of education that was hindering the
economic development of Ukraine. The _Buried Alive_ is another example
of the hardships of the people and in general most of his characters
are completely overwhelmed by existence and represent the failures who
are unable to master life and work out their own salvation.
It is not for nothing that in one of his tales, the _Zaporozhians_, he
represents the return of one of the old time women after a lapse of a
century to the same village where she had formerly lived. She finds
that life has become even more intolerable than it had been in the days
of the Hetman state, when at least there was the possibility for a
determined character to break away and live on the steppes a wild and
tempestuous but free existence.
Levitsky also noted the beginning of the growth of factories in
Ukraine, especially in the _Burlachka_. In these conditions were worse
than in the villages. Long hours, utter lack of protection, miserable
pay and impossible living conditions marked the life of the poor
unfortunates whom need had driven to the new life. It was worse than
the old slavery which had been abolished with serfdom, for in the
industrial communities there were not even those safeguards and that
healthy atmosphere and fresh air that had existed in the village.
He noted too the other evils as militarism and the effect of army
service that were weighing heavily upon the people as in the _Two
Moscow Women_, but the thing that concerned him the most was the gap
between the intelligentsia and the people and the great dangers which
the former ran of being absorbed and remade by the two “aristocratic”
cultures, the Polish and the Russian. There seemed to be a constant
stream of young and vital forces sapped away from the people by the
insidious power of example and of material reward.
Thus in the _Prichepa_ (_The Caviller_), Levitsky shows us pictures
of Polish social influence in the neighborhood of Kiev and of the
disastrous results that follow the attempts of the Ukrainians to adapt
themselves to the Polish standards. Hanya, the daughter of the Orthodox
priest, Father Fedir, marries a young Pole, Jan Seredynski. He is
really of Ukrainian stock but his family has been Polonized for some
generations. The young people get along well and improve their position
financially, until the husband becomes infatuated with a Polish woman
Zosya who offers him those superficial advantages that mark the Pole
in the average Ukrainian story. For her he is willing to neglect his
simple but wholesome wife. It breaks her heart. Finally her father
thrashes him soundly and takes his daughter home but she pines away
and dies and then her son dies and the unworthy husband is left alone
without a position, for he has been discharged in the mess. The girl
Zosya Przepinska is the daughter of a petty Polish aristocrat but a
steward on an estate. She marries young Lemishka. This boy, the son
of a prosperous Ukrainian trader, has been educated in Kiev and there
has acquired a superficial Russian polish. Then as he comes under
Polish influence he changes his name to its Polish form Lemishkovsky.
He marries Zosya and for her sake and to keep up in her society, he
sells his parental farm and goes to Kiev where he wastes his entire
fortune. Then he comes back to a poor job as a steward and is ridiculed
consistently by her aristocratic Polish friends, while she flirts
unpardonably with Seredynski. Finally the whole family is engulfed in
ruin, although she remains with him to secure her support while she
continues her affairs with other men. Levitsky abhors the so-called
aristocratic mode of life of the Polish nobles and of the Polonized
Ukrainians which he contrasts to the simple existence of the ordinary
peasants.
He bewails in _Prichepa_ the lack of a true enlightenment among
the Ukrainians and he summarizes the situation in the following
passage (p. 110ff), “Who in Kiev does not remember the time before
the Sevastopol war? It was a heavy time for Ukraine, it was its bad
time. The ordinary people groaned in heavy slavery under the _pans_,
compelled to be silent and suffer, worse than before Khmelnitsky. And
for every groan it was tortured in the Muscovite manner. Ukraine had
forgotten its historical tradition and could not by knowledge reach
its lost thoughts. On both sides of the Dnieper they were overwhelmed
by foreign customs, in foreign skins, they heard a foreign tongue and
forgot their own. Knowledge perished, education fell, remaining only
in the scholastic Latin theological schools. The university knowledge
was only the alphabet of European culture, cut on the official measure.
This knowledge wished to train the people into Muscovites, for the
army, for the administration. From the Ukrainian university and other
schools came out bribers, grafting officials, unjust judges, who
made the innocent guilty and the guilty innocent, those conservative
teachers and professors, who twisted history on the Moscow orders,
those Moskal officers who forgot their own people for profit. And the
people were at forced labor, and the Polish and Muscovite landowners
were stripping the last hide from Ukraine, at that time when our
sincere Ukrainians for their young Ukrainian idea were sitting in
slavery, in the distant Muscovite north. It was a hard time, may it
never return!”
In the _Clouds_ which first appeared in 1874, Levitsky tried to show
something of this period and of the evil results that attended the
Russianization of the scholars of the day. Here the situation is
reversed. The learned professor Dashkovich, entering the Theological
Academy of Kiev as the only Ukrainian amid a group of Russians,
lives an idealistic life but he becomes finally so interested in his
philosophical studies that he forgets his native Ukraine and loses
touch with his native village. Meanwhile as an adherent of Pan-Slavism,
he talks incessantly about the Slavonic question in the Balkans but
cannot see that there is anything to do at home. His daughter, a
beautiful Ukrainian girl, is sent to fashionable Russian schools
and comes out as a wilful and cynical Russian aristocratic girl who
is perfectly satisfied to make a loveless marriage with a rich and
distinguished colonel. She has been in love with a young and patriotic
Ukrainian Radyuk, who wears Ukrainian costumes and speaks in public
and private the Ukrainian language and who even tries to convert his
beloved to the Ukrainian cause, but she rejects him because he is not
fashionable enough and frivolous enough for her, despite the fact that
she really loves him.
In 1890 he added several chapters to the novel to carry on the fate of
Radyuk still further but they add little to the novel and still less to
the character of the young man, for the hero finally submits to social
pressure and takes a governmental position in the Caucasus where no one
will know him and his past.
In other words the new man is no more effective than the old and the
problem of how the Ukrainians were to secure a real understanding
of European culture and such subjects as would be useful to them
remained unsolved. Of one thing, Levitsky is absolutely sure. The
teachers and all of those groups that stand for European culture are
mere caricatures of what they should be. They have no appreciation of
the deeper aspects of human life, the higher qualities of mankind,
and they are really parasites on society. They and their institutions
of learning are chiefly interested in the denationalization of the
Ukrainians and they have no interest in true education, in truth, or in
scholarship.
There are very sympathetic pictures of the life in the Theological
Academy where Levitsky had studied himself in the dark days before the
liberation of the serfs and he gives even more delightful pictures
of some of the old Ukrainian landowners and business men who were
continuing the old customs without bothering with the new fangled
European notions and culture.
The novel shows some of the finest and some of the weakest points of
Levitsky’s style but it has been generally considered his masterpiece
and marks a definite epoch in the history of the Ukrainian novel.
Levitsky well represented the situation as it existed in his lifetime.
He had grasped the fact that the final solution of the Ukrainian
question was not so simple as the mass of the intellectual leaders
might think. It was one thing to declare that Ukrainian culture should
be kept inviolate. It was something else to modernize and develop it
without falling under the temptation to abandon the solid virtues for a
superficial polish which could profit no one. By this time it was clear
that even the liberation of the serfs had not released the new spirit
or produced a new and better life for everyone. The accomplishment of
this was a task that called for the highest abilities and limitless
self-sacrifice and the orators and the intelligentsia were not able
to make these contributions. In a way his works were a condemnation
of that educated class which in the name of a misunderstood European
culture were cutting themselves off from all that was best in their
people and who would not listen to reason, because they could not
find it in the European garb that they envied. For the years after
the liberation of the serfs, Levitsky was a good guide but his later
avoidance of life led him to an isolation that marred the value of his
works. However in his early years, he was a forcible and interesting
writer and the Ukrainians need still to ponder the problems which he
raised, even though he was unable to give a thorough and complete
answer.
CHAPTER NINE
CHANGING CONDITIONS
With the opening of the reign of Alexander II and the amnestying of the
leaders of the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius, a new era seemed
to have opened for Ukraine. The authorities were not unsympathetic to
the use of the Ukrainian language and while they were sternly resolved
to resist and suppress any movement toward separation and toward the
demand for the restoration of the ancient rights of Ukraine, they did
not seem averse to the development and use of the Ukrainian language
among the people. Steps were taken to print text books in Ukrainian for
Ukrainian schools. Institutions for the education of the people were
planned and some were started and it looked as if a new and happier era
was dawning.
It was possible to think of establishing Ukrainian journals openly
without resorting to subterfuges that they were intended for
archaeological and ethnographical purposes. Now was the time when
Bilozersky and Kulish founded the _Osnova_ in St. Petersburg and in
Kiev and Kharkiv and elsewhere in Ukraine other papers were speedily
called into existence.
It was a false dawn. In 1863 came the Polish revolt and although
Ukraine took no part in it as a whole and many of the Slavophile
leaders were cooperating with them in their endeavors, the idea spread
throughout the official circles that the Ukrainians were somehow
involved in the Polish movement, an idea carefully fostered by the
Poles. The result was the beginning of a far-reaching policy of
repression which was to nullify many of the gains that had already been
made.
The Sunday Schools that had been established in Kiev and other points
in Ukraine were suppressed and the various journals were compelled to
suspend. Then in 1863, Count Valuyev, the Minister of the Interior,
issued a statement that there never was, is not, and cannot be any
separate Ukrainian or Little Russian language. He ordered the censors
to prevent the publication of anything in it that had a spiritual
content, textbooks or books intended for elementary instruction. This
allowed only works of belles-lettres to be published and even this was
a mere subterfuge, for it was not long before the censors were able to
consider these too as popular books and under that clause of the order,
the way was open to silence entirely the Ukrainian writers.
The new literature seemed destined to be crushed in its cradle. Even
though for a time in the early seventies there was a slight lessening
of the restrictions, the tsar in 1876 issued a more far-reaching order
which forbade the printing of Ukrainian books except in the Russian
spelling, the importation of books printed abroad, and theatrical
performances in Ukrainian, and even the printing of musical texts with
Ukrainian words. Of course the term Little Russian was constantly used,
for every mention of Ukraine was to be banned.
This was a death blow to literature, and although at various times
during the next thirty years before the Revolution of 1905, many of
these provisions were quietly shelved, yet the Ukrainian authors in
Russian Ukraine were effectively debarred from publishing their works
at home. They had only one possibility left, and that was to turn to
Galicia as Kulish and his friends had been doing from the end of the
sixties.
The situation there had also changed greatly. At the time of the Union
of Brest in the sixteenth century, the Kozaks and the Brotherhoods of
the various cities had fought stubbornly against the establishment of
the Uniat Church, for they regarded it as a forerunner of Polonization.
They feared from practical experience that the division in the Orthodox
ranks would lead only to increased pressure from the government to
give up their special characteristics. They were essentially correct
in this idea. During the remaining centuries of independent Poland,
the Ukrainians in that country lost most of their gentry and educated
classes and only the parish clergy remained to plead the cause of the
people.
After the fall of Poland, the situation changed. Western Ukraine
under the rule of the Hapsburgs underwent a special development.
The Emperor Joseph II, one of the enlightened despots of the day,
decided it would be proper to improve the low educational level of
the Galician intelligentsia which was chiefly represented by the
clergy. As a result, immediately after the occupation of Galicia,
Maria Theresa opened in Vienna a seminary for Uniat priests. She had
earlier made certain arrangements for education among the Ukrainians
in the Carpathian sections of Hungary. Now in various mild ways, she
endeavored to improve the conditions and the educations of all the
Ukrainians in her territory. In 1784 there was established a University
in Lviv and it was ordered that certain subjects be taught in the
native language, that is the mixture of Church Slavonic which was
commonly employed before the time of Kotlyarevsky.
It was not long before the Polish magnates were able to renew their
control and increase their influence at the court of Vienna and
this led to ever new restrictions on the life of the Ukrainians or
Ruthenians, as they were consistently called in Austria-Hungary.
Yet the germ of a national renaissance had been established and the
hopelessness that had prevailed was steadily mitigated. Willing or not,
the leaders of the Uniat Church saw themselves forced into an attitude
of loyalty to the Hapsburgs and of opposition to Polish domination in
the province of Galicia. That very movement which in the sixteenth
century had meant Polonization now at the end of the eighteenth came to
stand for opposition to Polish influences and this shaped the entire
life in Galicia for the next century.
There was still the language question to be solved. There was no
agreement among the Ukrainians as to what form they should use. Many of
the more conservative classes and the clergy and devout laity insisted
upon continuing the ecclesiastical language which had been handed down
from their fathers and they dreaded any innovation. Another group of
the younger and more progressive elements read Kotlyarevsky and the
writers in the Ukrainian vernacular and argued strenuously for its
adoption. A third group, completely disillusioned with the rule of
the Hapsburgs and the Poles became convinced that the future of the
province lay in union with Russia and they endeavored to remodel the
language on the basis of Great Russian with reference to the work that
was being done in the Russian Ukraine.
There was a sort of a grim humor in this struggle. There were few or
no relations between the average village in Galicia and one in Russia.
Thus many of the Russian Ukrainians looked more or less with envy
through rose-colored glasses at the scanty signs of recognition given
to the Ruthenians in Austria-Hungary. At the same time, a large number
of the Ruthenians looked with equal envy at every sign of progress in
Russia and sought to join themselves to the dominant party in the great
Empire.
The controversy was long and bitter, for there was really a three-sided
debate among the Galician leaders themselves. There were the old
conservative adherents of the Church language, there were the
Ukrainian nationalists, and finally there were the Moscophiles who
gained influence in every period of Hapsburg repression. Yet in their
relations with the outside world all three groups were faced with the
same task of supporting the Hapsburgs in Vienna and of resisting Polish
domination in the province of Eastern Galicia.
From the time of Markian Shashkevich (1811-1843) in Galicia and Osip
Fedkovich (1834-1888) in Bukovina there was a constant stream of
young men working to develop the language on the lines laid down by
Kotlyarevsky. In 1848, Count Stadion as Governor of Galicia gave the
Ukrainians many privileges to thwart the danger of Polish revolt. Jakov
Holovatsky, a Ukrainian, became Professor of Ukrainian Literature at
the University of Lviv. There was established a General Council of
the Ukrainians in Galicia and on May 15 of that year appeared the
first newspaper in the vernacular, the _Zorya Halitska_ (_The Star
of Halich_). A Society for Enlightenment was organized on the model
of the Czech Matica and Ukrainian was introduced into many schools.
Serfdom was abolished and this was a long step forward. Yet it was
not long before the Emperor came to an understanding with the Polish
aristocratic leaders and as soon as this was done, measures were taken
to check the growing Ukrainian movement and a period of repression
again set in.
In the sixties, the Galicians began to find themselves and were at
least in a position to organize their own journals and literary papers,
even though there was a very strong Russophile party in the province.
It was to these papers that the Ukrainians in Russia were forced to
turn when the period of repression began there and from this time on
for a half century the heart of the Ukrainian movement was to be found
in the Western Ukraine in Lviv and not in Kiev and Kharkiv where the
modern revival had started.
The key to the work can be found in the Society of Shevchenko which was
first established in 1875 but it was more than a decade before this
secured enough funds to enable it to commence publishing operations.
In 1892 it was renamed the Scientific Society and in 1898 it was again
reorganized as the Shevchenko Scientific Society and became for all
practical purposes the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.
Thus the movement in Western Ukraine, although it started later,
was able to catch up and even to surpass in self-consciousness the
movement in Russia but as we have mentioned before, the word Ukraine
was always more or less suspicious to the Austro-Hungarian authorities
and for a long while the people were compelled to call themselves
Ruthenians. Even to the most recent times, the Poles have emphasized
this difference between Ruthenians and Ukrainians and have sought to
foster a division between the two groups. So have the Hungarians in
their domination of Carpatho-Ukraine, where the movement after 1848
languished in the isolated valleys of the Carpathian Mountains.
Thus this well-dismembered race finally succeeded in some small degree
in establishing spiritual contacts about the middle of the nineteenth
century. For the first time in centuries, the scattered groups
became aware of their mutual relationships, despite the religious
differences. The people in Russian Ukraine were still Orthodox. Those
in Austria-Hungary were primarily Uniat but the modern trend toward
secular thinking and the diminution of the bitterness of the religious
conflicts allowed them to work together. They could have small hope
of political freedom and of political union, but there was a profound
sense of social solidarity and in the peaceful years of the nineteenth
century, the task of education and of social development took
precedence over the old dreams of attaining liberty and freedom on the
field of battle.
CHAPTER TEN
IVAN FRANKO
In the sixties the writers from Great Ukraine had begun to find
shelter in Lviv and to seek opportunities for publishing there which
had been denied to them in their native land. Yet, when they reached
Galicia, they were passing into another atmosphere and another society.
There were some like Kulish who tried to reconcile the Ukrainians
and the Poles in the province of Austria-Hungary. There were others
as Levitsky, whose works dealt only with the Russian Ukraine and who
described the problems there as they saw them with their own eyes.
They undoubtedly contributed much to the desire on the part of the
people of Western Ukraine to remodel their lives and to commence
social and national work. Yet they themselves were not at home in the
complicated problems of Austro-Hungarian politics and the different
social institutions and they rarely interested themselves in the many
questions that were raised by the existence of Vienna and the Hapsburg
monarchy and the obligations and possibilities that existed in Western
Ukraine as a result of being a part of a great multilingual and
confused area.
If literature in Western Ukraine was to find itself, it could do so
only through the efforts of some one who was born and reared there and
who understood the situation and the lives and thoughts of the people
as a native and a true son of the country. Just as the literature
of Great Ukraine had been responsive in some degree to the moods of
Russian literature, so in Western Ukraine similar influence would be
exerted by the various schools of Polish literature and the changing
literary fashions of Vienna. No one from the outside could steer a
direct course amid this confused and confusing situation. The language
in the two sections might be identical but the overtones and the
connotations would be very different, for even the presence of a few
leaders from Great Ukraine in Galicia had not yet spun together all the
threads that had been torn apart so completely centuries before. The
man who was to found this literature and do more than his share in
bringing together the two Ukraines was Ivan Franko, who is undoubtedly
after Shevchenko the outstanding Ukrainian author.
It is hardly necessary to point out the differences between them.
Shevchenko was a natural genius. Franko was far from that and in his
works, talented and excellent as they are, there is not that supreme
perfection, that incomparable greatness that there was in the older
man. Their lives too are markedly different in every way. Shevchenko,
the self-educated son of a serf, was born in the period when the
Romantic movement was at its height. He was old enough to have thrilled
in his youth to the tales of the men who had taken part in the last
armed revolts of the Ukrainians and his mind often harped back to the
heroic days of the past. There was something romantic and tragic in his
life story. His liberation from serfdom, his service in the Russian
army, his association with many of the broadminded aristocrats of his
day, all lend themselves to the dramatic and the unusual.
There was none of this in Franko. He was more than well educated and
his life is singularly empty of startling episodes. It is a prosaic
record of duty recognized and executed, of articles written, of
difficulties surmounted. If he ever had visions of riding into battle
beside the great hetmans of the past, he did not bring himself to
describe them. He offers us merely the commonplace spectacle of a
hardworking journalist and editor winning his way by the sweat of his
brow and the burning of the midnight oil. It was his task to remake
the moral fibre of his people, to rebuild a shattered edifice and to
expend superhuman energy in the process. All that does not lend itself
to thrilling and unusual episodes but it is none the less valuable both
for the man and his people. It is none the less important because it is
not decked out with gaudy colors and with feats of physical daring and
spectacular sufferings and endurance.
Ivan Franko was born August 15, 1856, in the little village of
Nahuyevichi, in the foothills of the Carpathians only five years before
the death of Shevchenko. He was the son of a poor farmer-blacksmith.
The boy was not deprived of the opportunity of a formal education.
Quite the reverse. He early learned to read and write Ukrainian, Polish
and German and he received most of his early education in a German
speaking school conducted by the Basilian Fathers. His father died
when he was eight years old and his mother soon married again but his
stepfather treated him kindly and helped him with his education.
On finishing the elementary schools, he entered the gymnasium in
Drohobych and during his entire course he stood almost continuously at
the head of his class. His clothes may have been ragged and tattered
and he may have been shy and retiring, but he showed clearly that
he had an acute mind and a great deal of endurance. He dabbled in
literature along with many of his fellow students but there was still
something youthful about his works and they did not appear in all of
their later perfection.
In 1875 he entered the University of Lviv at a time when practically
all the lectures were given in Polish and he was at once plunged into
the frenzied academic debates about the problems of Galicia and the
fate of the Ukrainians there. He listened for hours to the bitter
partisanship over the form of the language to be used in the province
and soon realized the sterility and artificiality of the entire
controversy.
In his first period at the University, he drifted into the Academic
Circle, a group of students that were rather Moscophile in tendency.
At least this group had access to a journal which could publish his
writings, and besides it appeared to be more serious and less devoted
to society and frivolity than some of the groups that were more purely
nationalistic.
It was about this time that he became interested in the writings of
Mikhaylo Drahomaniv, (1841-1895) who was the leading Ukrainian scholar
of the day. Drahomaniv, a great democrat, had taken a relatively
advanced position and was frowned upon as a radical in many quarters.
Yet he held firmly to the idea that the Ukrainians in both sections
should cooperate closely and in order to work more freely in this
connection he moved to Geneva, from which point he found it easier to
communicate with the leaders on both sides of the Russian-Galician
border, and later he was professor in the University of Sofia, Bulgaria.
Drahomaniv used his influence definitely against the Galician
Moscophiles and he had no difficulty in pointing out that this group
was an artificial and insincere creation, for at the very moment when
its members were talking of adapting themselves to the Great Russian
point of view, they were taking little interest in understanding
what that point of view was and they were almost equally innocent of
the achievements of Russian literature. In fact many could not even
use Russian well. This policy brought Franko and Drahomaniv together
and the younger man commenced a correspondence with Drahomaniv that
continued until the latter’s death.
In 1877 Franko had his first taste of Austrian justice. He was arrested
with many of his friends on the charge of being involved in political
conspiracies with Drahomaniv and sentenced to nine months in prison.
When he was finally released, much of the Ukrainian society of Lviv
declined to meet him. He was forbidden to enter many of the gathering
places and was treated as if he had been an ordinary criminal. The
immediate result was a strengthening of his desire to pursue a direct
course for the welfare of his people, as he saw it, and in 1878 with
money which he received from Drahomaniv, who was supported from the
Russian Ukraine, he commenced the publication of the _Hromadsky Druh_
to spread his ideas. The journal lasted about a year but was constantly
in trouble with the censor. The work, however, brought Franko in
contact with the socialists of the province. This had its good and bad
sides. It brought him into contact with the Polish liberal journals and
on the other hand it alienated from his influence many of the people of
the conservative classes. The mood of the young poet can be well seen
in the last stanza of the _Stone Cutters_, which he wrote at this time--
And so we moved ahead, united as one man
By sacred thought, with hammers in our hands.
Let us be cursed by all, forgotten by the world,
But we will break the rocks and build a proper road
And happiness will come for all from our lost bones.
The immediate result of all this activity was a second arrest in 1880
when he was travelling through the country and after three months in
prison he was ordered sent back to his native village, but before he
arrived, he was taken ill and after extreme privations and a long
illness, he was allowed to return to some of his friends. In 1889 he
was arrested a third time and kept in jail for three months without any
formal charges being preferred against him.
During all this time he continued to write and in fact in the early
eighties, he did much of his most significant work. He was not,
however, satisfied and in 1885 he made a trip to Kiev to establish
personal contacts with the Ukrainian leaders there and to arrange for
the publication of their works in Lviv. The following year he returned
to Kiev and there married Olha Khorunzhinska, a marriage which turned
out very happily until his wife was taken ill in his later days.
For the next ten years he made his living by writing for various Polish
liberal papers but he steadily became more disillusioned as to the
possibility of creating a working harmony between the socialist parties
of the two peoples. He came to believe that the ideal of socialism as
preached by the Polish socialists toward the Ukrainian working people
was not deep enough to bind the two peoples together. In 1897 in a
review of _Konrad Wallenrod_, a poem by Mickiewicz, he criticized the
idea that a man could become a national hero solely because of his
treachery. Some of the Poles regarded this as an attack on their whole
nation and it cost him most of his Polish friends and more seriously
yet, his position as correspondent for various Polish papers but he did
not change his opinions to better his financial status.
In 1892-1894 he studied at the University of Vienna and in 1894 he
received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy with a dissertation on Ivan
Vishensky, a Ukrainian publicist of the early seventeenth century. He
had high hopes of securing the chair of Ukrainian Literature at the
University of Lviv and the faculty approved his candidacy. The governor
of the province, however arbitrarily cancelled the nomination in view
of his three arrests.
Then for a while he dabbled in Galician politics and would have won an
election to the Diet in Vienna as the representative of the Radical
Party, the first party of the Galician Ukrainians to be organized on
a definite economic program, had he not been defeated by the most
unashamed chicanery and cheating. After that he avoided politics in
the strict sense of the word and continued his activities as writer,
critic, scholar, and teacher of his people.
The response on the part of the people of Galicia and the respect
which he had won were fully shown in the reception accorded him on the
twenty-fifth anniversary of his entrance into literature in 1898 and
again on the fortieth anniversary on the eve of the First World War,
when the Shevchenko Scientific Society awarded him a yearly pension and
the Ukrainians in Russia, Galicia and the United States raised for him
the sum of 30,000 Austrian crowns.
His health began to fail in 1908 and he almost lost the use of his
hands but he continued to work without any relaxation. The World War
was an even more serious blow. His sons were mobilized in the Austrian
army. The Russians penetrated into Lviv and Galicia and endeavored to
put an end to all Ukrainian activities. Finally he died on May 28,
1916, just about two years before the collapse of Austria-Hungary and
the temporary independence of Ukraine. His funeral was arranged by the
Shevchenko Society and despite the restrictions of the war, over 10,000
people were in his funeral procession.
It is the simple story of a life devoted to the service of his people.
Most of the controversies that Franko had with other Ukrainian leaders
and the periods when he fell in disfavor were connected with that most
severe problem of a leader, how to guide his people in a democratic
spirit and at the same time not be so far ahead of them that he loses
touch with their feelings and their beliefs and preaches to them real
truths which they cannot and do not wish to comprehend. He summarized
his obligations as he saw them in the preface to the Polish translation
of the _Galician Sketches_:
“Before all I confess it as a sin, that many patriots regard me as
destructive; I do not love the Rusins. Compared with that burning
love, which comes often ‘for a brother race’ from the pen of Polish
conservative journalists, my confession may seem strange. What is to
be done, if it is true. I am not one of those naive and blind lovers
and I can speak soberly about such a tender subject as love. I affirm
again: I do not love the Rusins. I have found so few among them of
righteous character, and so much pettiness, narrow material egotism,
duplicity and pride, that I really do not know for what I could love
them, remembering constantly the thousands of greater and lesser darts,
that they have planted in my skin, often with the best ideas. It is
understood that there are exceptions, many pure personalities, worthy
of all respect among the Rusins (I am speaking of the intelligentsia,
not the villagers), but these exceptions unfortunately only confirm the
general statement.
“I accept it as a great sin; even our Rus I do not love at least as our
patented patriots do or pretend to do. What is there to love in it? To
love it as a geographical conception, I am a foe of empty phrases and
I have seen too much of the world to be able to say that there is no
such beautiful nature as in Rus. To love its history, I know it well
and I love too warmly the general human ideals of justice, brotherhood,
and freedom not to recognize how few examples there are in the history
of Rus of real community spirit, just sacrifice, true love. But it is
important to love this history, for at every time it is necessary to
weep over it. Why can I love Rus as a race--this race which is hard,
intractable, sentimental, a race without temper or strength of will,
so little adapted for political life on its own behalf, and so fertile
in producing renegades of every kind? How can I love the bright future
of this Rus, which I do not know, when I cannot see any basis for this
bright future?
“But if on the other hand, I feel myself a Rusin and with all of my
strength I work for Rus as the honored reader will see, it is not from
reasons of a sentimental nature. I am guided before all by a feeling
of a canine obligation. The son of a Rusin peasant, reared on black
peasant bread, the work of stout peasant hands, I feel myself bound by
the labor of my whole life to repay those coins which a peasant hand
has expended, so that I can ascend to the heights, where one can see
clearly, where freedom is poured out richly, where universal ideals
shine. My Rusin patriotism is not sentiment, not national pride, but
a great yoke placed by fate upon my shoulders. I can protest, I can
quietly curse my fate, for placing that yoke upon me, but I cannot
throw it off, I cannot seek another country, or I would be base against
my own doubts. And if anything lightens for me the burden of this yoke,
it is the sight of the Rusin people, that, although bent, deafened
and demoralized for long centuries, although today poor, awkward, and
joyless, yet is gradually advancing and perceives somehow in the widest
circles the feelings of light, truth, justice and is seeking approach
to them. It is worth while to work for this people and no honorable
work for it is lost.”
We can well understand how such plain speaking aroused criticism
against Franko among those Ukrainians who were flattering the people
and at the same time hindering their educational advance and the
improvement of their social conditions. From the very beginning of
his work Franko took as his goal the good of the people. He realized
that it was no easy task and that his path would not be strewn with
roses. He realized the opposition that he would encounter not only from
his opponents but also from those whom he was trying to help. Yet he
approached his task with the coldly realistic manner of the end of the
century when the hopes of decisive and rapid changes had practically
vanished from the minds of most people and when it was fully understood
that only hard work and slow social reform could benefit the people.
Yet it did not curb his enthusiasm or his belief in the undying spirit
of liberty and the good in man. He summed it up in his poem _The
Eternal Revolutionist_,
A revolutionist eternally
Man’s spirit, driving him to fight
For progress, liberty and right.
It lives, it cannot die.
(Translated by Arthur P. Coleman)
This theme runs through all of his collections, especially of the
early days and the titles are themselves suggestive. _From the
Heights and Depths_, _Sad Songs_, _Night Thoughts_, _The Thoughts of a
Proletarian_, _Ukraine_, _Prison Sonnets_, _Galician Sketches_, _Jewish
Melodies_. The overwhelming mass of his poems especially in his early
years and until about 1893 dealt with various social problems. They
pictured the hardships of society, of the common man and of the poet
himself in his aspirations to do something before the people. They run
through all forms of lyrical verse, sonnets, _et cetera_, and form a
good poetic picture of conditions as they were in Western Ukraine with
the constant struggle against the Polish lords.
It is very rare that Franko creates a true narrative poem and the
best example is the _Nobleman’s Pranks_, a picture of peasant life in
Galicia on the eve of the abolition of serfdom. Pan Mihucki, a strong
willed Polish landlord, could not believe that this liberation would
ever take place. He could not believe either that the peasant had any
rights, even those which were guaranteed by the law. When the devoted
priest on his estate endeavored to preach temperance and to teach the
children to read and write, the autocratic master ordered him to be put
to work in the fields like a common peasant despite the laws of the
land which exempted priests from such labor. The priest was compelled
to work until he dropped dead. The imperial commissioner, an Austrian
German, tried in vain to moderate the lord’s wrath when he learned that
serfdom had been abolished and when all remedies were useless, and
the new order was introduced, he placed the Polish landlord in jail.
It was an overwhelming shock to Pan Mihucki and though he was soon
released, his time was over and within a year he died abroad. His widow
returned but she was entirely in the power of the Jewish agent who held
the mortgages on the estate and soon she too disappeared, “And Moshko
bought the village.” It was a grim warning of a situation that was far
too common in Galicia and not generally recognized.
The priest is one of those types that Franko particularly appreciated
and to which he returns again and again. He is a man who does all that
he can for his fellows and perishes in his attempts to aid them but at
the time he is so conscious of how much more he could have done, that
he feels no self-satisfaction even amid the plaudits of others.
This type of a lost leader appears in a poignant form in the _Death of
Cain_. Old Cain who has struggled with the curse of God for centuries
finally learns that the way to a peaceful and quiet life is through the
virtues of a man’s own heart. He returns to men to tell them of the new
truth and his great grandson Lamech, old and blind, shoots him with
an arrow directed by a little child. Ignorance and misunderstanding
prevent Lamech from learning the message that the old sufferer had
wished to give him.
Of his lyrical collections perhaps the most musical are the _Three
Garlands of the Fallen Leaves_ which appeared between 1893 and 1896.
They are personal poems dealing with the emotion of love and pain. In
the first Garland they emphasize disappointment. In the second pain
is treated as a cult and in the third, Franko glorifies a feeling
of detachment from sensation, a lack of feeling, with a tendency to
glorify Buddha and to approach Nirvana even through suicide. Some of
his critics accused him of accepting the philosophy of the decadents.
He repudiated the idea but these poems strike an unusual note in
Franko’s general attitude of eternal confidence in the human spirit.
Still they are among his best work and together with the collection _My
Emerald_, written during a period of illness, they are among his most
deeply musical creations.
Perhaps the greatest of his longer poems is _Moses_ which he wrote in
1905, and we cannot fail to see in it a certain hidden autobiographical
touch and to regard the Hebrews as types of the contemporary
Ukrainians. Moses, the great prophet, has led his people into the
wilderness with the promise of a happier and a more abundant life. Yet
the new world is not forthcoming and the people whom he has aroused to
action, murmur against him and prefer the advice of the false prophets.
Moses defies them and wins but he withdraws from them to go alone and
by himself to the Promised Land. Yet hardly has he left when doubts
begin to assail him. Can he be sure that he has been on the right path?
Can he be sure that he has acted properly in rousing the people in
the beginning? He grows more and more discouraged and finally loses
faith in God. While the evil spirit mocks him, he curses Jehovah and
can therefore not enter the Promised Land. Yet the people without him
willingly obey the call of Joshua and press on to their destined goal.
His sufferings have not been in vain but that one moment of unbelief
has wrecked his chance to go with them to happiness.
Franko in the last years of his life had many such moments of
discouragement. He shows it clearly in the preface to _Moses_, when
he proudly asserts that there will come a time when his people will
achieve their goal and be masters in their house from the Caucasus to
the Beskids, even though the way seems dark and hopeless at the time.
He realized that with his failing health he could not be the leader
until the struggle for freedom would reach a victorious ending. He
knew that there was no one else to take his place at the time, but he
never lost hope that the right man would appear and like Joshua carry
the cause to triumph.
In addition to his original poems, he enriched Ukrainian literature
with many translations, especially from English and German. He early
published lengthy translations from Byron, Goethe, Heine, and other
writers and he commented extensively on the literature of his own
country and that of Western Europe.
Yet poetry was not his only mode of literary expression. He was a
prolific writer of novels and short stories. All of these aimed to show
forth by example the great truths which he felt in his poetry and which
he expounded in his journalistic writings.
Let us take for example _Zakhar Berkut_, a historical novel of the
Ukrainian people in the Carpathian Mountains in the thirteenth century,
which he wrote in 1882 and for which he received a prize offered by
the journal _Zorya_. The Boyar Tuhar Vovk was given domains by Danilo
the Prince of Halich. There he exercised certain rights and powers in
opposition to the peasant tradition and he refused to submit them to
adjudication before the council of the villagers under their chosen
head, Zakhar Berkut, a peasant of some ninety years of age whose
mind was still keen, even if his body was aging. All the efforts of
the Boyar to assert himself against the wishes of the people came to
naught. As one man they stood together and thwarted all his schemes.
Even when the Boyar became a traitor to his people and allied himself
with the Tatar invaders, it did no good, for the villagers were able to
flood the path over which the attackers had to move. The love affair
between Berkut’s son and the daughter of the Boyar is rather colorless
and stereotyped. The novel reads well and even the editors who awarded
him the prize did not grasp the obvious moral that the people would
be invincible, if they would but unite under a rational and sane
leadership to defend their rights. Power and legality cannot come from
mere words. They rest upon concerted action and that is the one thing
that the villagers of his day did not wish to see.
He returns again and again to this same theme and in one of his latest
novels, the _Crossed Paths_, he unites this theme with the same
lesson which could be drawn from the _Nobleman’s Pranks_. The scene
is in Galicia of the present day and the young lawyer Dr. Rafalovich
is surprised to learn that the great landowners are as hopelessly
in debt to the Jewish money lenders as are the peasants to their
tavern keepers. This lawyer has decided to devote himself to the
cause of the people and so has developed a laborious practice among
the Ukrainians instead of seeking a more lucrative one among the
Poles. In that region one of the big estates was being sold at auction
and Dr. Rafalovich realizes how easy it would be for the villagers
to secure their own land. Yet not one peasant is willing to trust
another to cooperate in the transaction. One and all want the land,
they realize that they cannot be prosperous without it but they will
not work together or trust one another, in order to secure it. They
much prefer to grumble rather than to show a modicum of common sense
and win. On the other hand the romantic part of the story is equally
sad. Rafalovich has loved a girl in Lviv. Now he finds her married to
a drunken sadist who is insanely jealous of her and does everything
to make her life unbearable. Both she and her husband die. Rafalovich
is arrested, and though he is cleared of all charges and released,
something has gone out of him and he is tormented by doubts as to the
sense of the course which he has followed.
Franko realized that the new conditions after the abolition of serfdom
were not ideal and in one of his early stories the _Boa Constrictor_ he
pictured the evils of the growing industrialization of the neighborhood
of Borislav and the consequent fate of the workers who are kept in an
economic serfdom which was as bad as that of the enslaved villagers.
This was another theme that he treated again and again throughout his
life.
Another subject that interested him was the inhumanity of one man
to another especially as regards family life. Thus in _For the Home
Hearth_ the hero Captain Anharovich returns from Bosnia to Galicia
only to learn that his wife has been trapped into recruiting girls
for the purposes of prostitution. When she is finally unmasked, she
commits suicide and her husband is thus allowed to continue his career
and maintain his honor as an army officer, although the rumors of his
wife’s disgrace have led him into a duel with his best friend and
broken his own heart.
Questions of peasant marriage also concerned him greatly and in
his best play, _Stolen Happiness_, which won a second prize in a
competition at Lviv he criticizes the arbitrary way in which such
unions were arranged. A soldier returns from his army service to find
that the girl whom he loved and who loved him had been forced into
marriage with another man. Such happenings were relatively common and
they aroused the enmity of Franko as much as did the abuse of his
people by outside oppressors.
It would be too long to list all of his stories and collections which
range from autobiographical studies as in the _Sweat of the Brow_,
stories taken from adventures and incidents in his whole life, to
studies of peasant customs in every form. In all of them Franko was
willing to see the good as well as the bad and he gave invaluable
pictures of Galician life in the period from 1880 to 1914.
Yet it is to be noticed that in many of these stories as in the
_Nobleman’s Pranks_, he has kind words for the representatives of
the Austrian government at Vienna, who were mostly Austrian Germans,
although some were of Slavic origin.
This was only natural for Franko rarely left his native land except for
the two years in Vienna. During his lifetime the Poles had a strangle
hold on the government of Galicia. They were the direct oppressors of
the people and the Viennese government in many cases tried to mitigate
the iron hand of the provincial administration, partly from a feeling
of justice and partly from self-interest. The Hapsburg policy had
always been to allow a relatively free hand to the dominant group in
a province and then to favor and help in minor ways the oppressed
sections of the province. In this way they hoped to maintain a policy
of “Divide and Conquer” and to facilitate their own control of the
entire area.
Almost universally also he refers to his people as Rusins or
Ruthenians. The name of Ukraine was taboo for political purposes in the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Franko would merely have been courting
trouble and injuring his own work, had he not followed the usual
practice. At times as in his poem _Ukraine_, he uses the word for the
larger entity. At the same time he worked steadily for the promotion
of closer relationships with the people in Great Ukraine. He did not
regard it possible that the two groups, the one in Austria-Hungary and
the other in Russia would be able to cooperate freely until the two
great Empires met with shipwreck and thus permitted the establishment
of a united and independent Ukraine. In both sections there were the
same economic problems of an oppressed agricultural race struggling
against a dominant aristocracy, largely composed of persons who had
risen out of their own soil and adopted a more aristocratic language
and mode of life. The danger of assimilation was however greater in
Russia than in Galicia where the process had largely slowed down some
centuries before, and so many of the themes which had stirred Levitsky
and others seem to pass unnoticed by Franko.
In the same way his literary models were those of Western Europe rather
than those of Russia. From his youth he was well educated in German and
he wrote for German as well as Polish papers. He was affected by the
types of writing common there, even more than by the developments in
Russia.
Despite all of the persecutions and the hardships that he had to meet,
he had still more abundant opportunities to express himself freely
on the political and social theories which he advocated than did
the authors who wrote in Russia, but he had to adapt himself to the
framework of the Hapsburg empire. Within that he struggled long and
strenuously for the welfare of his people. At times he was very popular
and his ideas caught public fancy. At times he stood alone and felt to
some degree that which Moses and his other lost leaders realized, that
he was ahead of his time, that he was not accomplishing all that he had
intended, that his words were not being interpreted in the sense in
which he meant them.
He suffered from discouragement but long before his death men of all
parties recognized that he was the chief teacher, poet, and novelist
of the province. They realized his incorruptible character, his
wide knowledge and his literary talent. He was not the peer of the
incomparable Shevchenko but next to him he stood out as the most
important talent in Ukrainian literature, the greatest scholar, and the
one man who could see the problems of his people and the path on which
they should go. His enormous funeral bore token to the esteem in which
he was held and to the work which he had done during the unremitting
years of journalism. Franko worked hard. His life was uneventful. It
was not filled with surprising and unusual episodes but as scholar,
critic, poet, novelist and teacher he deserved well of Ukraine and was
the glory of the Shevchenko Scientific Society.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
LESYA UKRAINKA
The age of realism gradually gave way to neo-romanticism. After a
period of time in which literature was bound within the strict limits
of a photographic reproduction of nature and of social life, the
authors gradually came to demand the liberty of expressing their
thoughts in their own way and of choosing such subjects as they
desired. There came a renewed emphasis on poetry and a higher technical
skill in its production. New devices in metrics and in rhythm were
introduced and there appeared authors with the proper talents to master
the new devices.
Nowhere was this more true than in Russia. The eighties had been a
time of discouragement to the Russian intelligentsia but toward the
middle of that decade, some of the writers against the opposition of
most of the liberal elements demanded for themselves the same liberties
that were being claimed in other countries. There came a broadening of
themes and an endeavor to get outside the narrow range of contemporary
subjects that had preoccupied the literature for forty years.
The same influences were working on Ukrainian literature, although the
authors who had never bowed the knee to that peculiar type of Russian
liberalism which had discounted the Ukrainian right to exist did not
have to pass through all the phases of pessimism that their conquerors
did. Besides that, the influence of men like Franko and contact with
the Ukrainian renaissance in Galicia had to some extent opened direct
channels to western Europe which were lacking in St. Petersburg.
Yet most of the older writers had been either primarily scholars or
provincial writers. Few of them had travelled abroad and most of them
had confined their works to the contemporary life of Ukraine, to the
recording of national customs and to direct attempts to solve the
most pressing problems of the day. It gave a narrowness to Ukrainian
literature which prevented it from taking its rightful place in the
literature of the world. There was needed a new type of writer who
would be no less patriotic, no less devoted to the national cause, but
who was familiar with the world, with modern literary developments, and
with the aspirations of other peoples, especially in Western Europe.
The person who was to exercise that influence upon Ukraine was the
poetess who wrote under the pseudonym of Lesya Ukrainka.
Larisa Kosacheva, for that was her real name, labored under no
less difficulties than her predecessors. Yet these were strikingly
different, since her greatest handicap was ill health. For practically
the whole of her adolescent and adult life, she was a hopeless invalid.
She never knew a healthy day, and it was the power of her mind and her
own spiritual resources that kept her alive and allowed her to triumph
over all obstacles and to express her faith and confidence in a better
day to come. The careful reader can see the effects of her illness
upon her outlook on life and yet no author has more carefully hidden
her personal burdens in her devotion to a great cause. It is much
harder to connect her poems and her biography than it is in the case of
most writers, for in reality her mind and body were separated and the
courage of the one has little relationship to the weakness of the other.
She was born on February 25, 1871, in Russian Ukraine. She came
of a prominent intellectual family, for her uncle was none other
than Mikhaylo Drahomaniv, who was at that time at the height of his
influence and was working actively to bring the Ukrainian movement in
line with the other democratic movements of the world. Her childhood
friends were children of similar families and formed a group that was
decidedly precocious and superior.
As we might expect, she was given a good education, chiefly at home,
with particular emphasis on the study of modern European languages.
By the time that she reached maturity, she had a good knowledge of
Russian, English, German, French, Italian, Latin and Greek, and later
she learned Spanish. She naturally read and knew the works of the
older Ukrainian authors but she was also familiar with such writers as
Goethe, Schiller, Victor Hugo, and Byron. She was thoroughly acquainted
with the writers of the Romantic school and she was therefore better
prepared to bring about that adaptation of their ideas that was
beginning to take shape in the world. Her first poem written at the
age of twelve was a translation of a poem of Heine and her first
independent poem began about the same time with the phrase, “I have no
freedom nor fortune, there is left only hope.”
At almost the same time she was stricken down with tuberculosis of
the bones of the hand and was compelled to stay in bed for months at
a time while her young friends were enjoying the pastimes of youth.
Finally this seemed to yield to treatment but it was not long before
the disease reappeared in her feet. From then on, her life was merely
the passage from one system of medical treatment to another. In 1892 at
the age of twenty she brought out her first book of poems _On the Wings
of Songs_ and this was followed by other volumes, _Thoughts and Dreams_
in 1896, and _Echoes_ in 1902.
Meanwhile she lived most of the time in Kiev except during the winters
and the long trips necessary for medical treatment. She had to go to
the south and she spent her winters in the Crimea, the Caucasus, in
Bulgaria where her uncle was professor at the University of Sofia, and
in Egypt. She travelled in Italy and Germany and in 1900 underwent a
serious operation in Berlin. In 1907 during a period of relief from
suffering, she married K. M. Kvitka but the disease soon came on again.
The doctors in Berlin advised against further operations and sent her
to Egypt but finally even the climate there ceased to have a favorable
effect upon her and she passed away in 1913. It was really her iron
will that had kept her alive to the age of forty-two and had allowed
her to accomplish so much.
It was a heroic record of resistance to suffering and disease and
undoubtedly her linguistic talents and her love of literature helped to
vary the monotony of those months of suffering when she was confined
to her bed and was unable to move around freely. Yet with it all she
never lost her interest in life and if many of her later works show a
preference for exotic and literary subjects, we can well understand it
from the nature of her affliction. She was constantly in touch with
the leading people of the day and was actively interested in all the
reforming movements of the period. Her poems appeared in radical and
progressive papers and showed that despite her physical isolation, she
was not isolated in mind and thought.
The preface of her first book of poems is suggestive of her attitude
throughout life.
To thee, O my Ukraine, my dearest, unfortunate mother,
My songs will be raised first of all.
They will be solemn and quietly sounding.
Each song will flow forth from my heart.
Naturally it is possible to find in this first collection poems that
show the influence of the authors whom she had read and there are
slight touches of regret that she cannot do more for her country.
There are moments of disillusionment and of weakness but more and more
she found herself and expressed her desires to be useful to her country
in whatever way was possible. There is little direct mention of her
personal afflictions but we can to some extent imagine that they had
much to do with her fits of pessimism.
It was not long before she became more interested in social problems
and she thought hard and earnestly about the position of Ukraine. She
was aware of the fact that all was dark and confusion around her and
that the future of the country could not be secured by words alone.
Thus she writes,
The fellahin and pariahs are happy.
Their minds and thoughts are swaddled in repose.
In us the fire of a Titan burns....
For we are paralytics with fierce blazing eyes,
Are great in spirit but in strength are frail,
We feel the wings of eagles on our backs,
While fetters binding us to earth ne’er fail.
That was her judgment on most of the intellectuals of her day and on
the fate of Ukraine. Yet she never wavered in her words of hope and
consolation and the very titles of such poems as _Contra spem spero_,
(_I hope against hope_), show the confidence that she had that right
would finally conquer and they refer to the fate of her people as well
as to her own physical condition.
Yet even in her first volumes we find specimens of that kind of song
which she was to do more as time went on. Thus in the _Iphigenia in
Tauris_ she makes the priestess say that she is willing for the glory
of her country to live “without glory, without family, without a name”
if only she can assist in its triumph. Here Lesya Ukrainka turns to
literature to find illustrations that might be impossible to draw from
the present conditions in view of the censorship. It is often forgotten
that the scene of the play of Euripides was laid in the Crimea. Orestes
and his friend had come to Ukraine and its neighborhood to recover the
statue of Artemis and undoubtedly the poetess was thinking of this in
choosing her theme.
Ukrainian literature had long dealt with Ukraine and Ukraine only. The
writers of the past half century had neglected other subjects but there
was a movement away from this narrowness and in dealing with classic
antiquity and the ancient world, she was following after decades in
the steps of Shevchenko with his poems as the _Neophytes_ and _Maria_.
So Lesya Ukrainka with her more abundant erudition and her acquaintance
with the Black Sea and the Mediterranean south knew by study and
observation the life of other regions and saw how these ideas could
illustrate the psychological, moral and social lessons which she wished
to convey.
Her English reading gave her the idea of Robert Bruce and she pictured
the well known story of the Scottish king who accepted the throne only
on the condition that he could use his power to keep his people free.
That was his claim to fame and the fact that he lived up to his promise
gave him everlasting glory.
After 1902 the nature of her works gradually changed. They ceased to
be predominantly lyrical in character and gradually assumed the form
of poetic dramas and dialogues in which by preference she treated some
subject connected with the downfall of a people and the efforts that
they had to make to win back their independence.
Many of these as the _Babylonian Captivity_ and _On the Ruins_ dealt
with the sufferings of Israel under the yoke and immediately after the
return to Palestine. Lesya Ukrainka understood well that death or shame
were the only alternatives to a courageous struggle for independence.
Even in _Three Moments_ which dealt with the French Revolution the
Girondist who is able to save his life by escaping realizes that he
cannot be happy while his companions are facing death and prison for
the cause in which he believes.
Thus for example in _Ioanna, Wife of Khusov_, we have the story of a
woman of Palestine who has left her husband to follow in the train of
Jesus of Nazareth. When she returns after the Crucifixion, she finds
her husband busily engaged in gaining the favor of some Roman visitors.
There is obvious misunderstanding on both sides, an obvious attempt on
his part to deny his own traditions in order to curry favor with the
new rules of the land and to secure an invitation to Rome, and to do
this, he is willing to break all the rules of native etiquette, and
imitate the strangers. Ioanna is thoroughly unhappy and feels herself
more isolated than ever before because of her grasp of higher ideals.
Yet she is compelled to go through with her role, even though it leaves
her unhappy and miserable. The parallel to the Ukrainian situation is
obvious and we can be sure that it was in the mind of the poetess,
even though there are no definite statements that might apply to the
situation.
In the _House of Slavery_ we have still another study of the same
problem. The scene is Egypt but the Hebrew slave and the Egyptian
slave cannot work together and be friends. Both desire freedom but the
one wants it to continue the culture that has enslaved him. The other
desires it as ardently but that freedom would be meaningless unless
it gave him the power to shatter and destroy all that had overpowered
him and reduced him to his present situation. There are differences in
slavery as well as in masters and he who would forget that does so at
his peril.
Thus at almost every turn Lesya Ukrainka chooses some subject which can
have at least an indirect significance for Ukraine and the cause of its
people. Yet the connection is never too obvious. For its understanding
it required deeper thought and a clearer insight into the nature of the
problems which were facing the country.
There was also required a better understanding of the psychological
nature of man. The earlier authors had treated this in a casual way
when they saw fit to mention it at all. They had taken a rather
simple view of human nature and the problems of their characters
could be expressed in terms of external injustice and oppression.
In such writings of Lesya Ukrainka as _Tristan and Isolda_, where
the one Isolda represents spiritual love and the other earthly, we
have a clearer representation of the problems of human nature than
we have had hitherto. Even in the poems of Shevchenko we do not meet
such representations of human life with its manifold aspects and the
problems that come from the various elements of human nature.
All this marks the entrance of Ukrainian literature into a more mature
stage and heralds its approach to the great literatures of the world in
their modern form. Of course it annoyed many of the representatives of
the older school, who could not see that this deepening of themes was
anything but a betrayal of the sacred cause. They were ready to condemn
the poetess and lament that she did not continue in the old vein.
The same thing happened when the various theatres attempted to produce
her plays. The troupes of actors were in many cases experienced and
able to represent the old fashioned type of characters and the old
fashioned problems. They were hardly prepared by training or outlook
to give a good exposition of this new kind of problem. It is true
that her writings were more literary and not so well adapted to
theatrical presentation as those of the older writers. She had not had
that experience with the theatre that was possessed by many of her
predecessors but under proper auspices some of her sketches contain
striking dramatic scenes.
Thus Lesya Ukrainka used her very isolation from the world and the fact
that she was obliged to live in a literary atmosphere with books as her
chief friends to increase her power to write a Ukrainian literature
in a modern and more cosmopolitan style. She was typical of the newer
intelligentsia who were none the less patriotic, none the less zealous
for Ukraine, because they were able to present its case in forms that
were being developed abroad. In a sense her work marked the end of
that old ethnographical-political period which had been so necessary
in the first stages of arousing the people to a consciousness of their
past. She assumed that that had been achieved, and on that basis she
started for the younger generation a new literature which was to
adapt the general ideas of modern Europe to Ukraine and to bring the
intelligentsia into a new world.
Surrounded by those friends whom she knew and liked and isolated
from the worst storms of the day, she often felt the oppression of
loneliness and solitude. She could not hope for wide popularity and it
is probably not too much to say that the wider circles of Ukrainian
society began to appreciate her only after her untimely death. Since
then there has been a steadily widening circle of her admirers who have
recognized in her one of the great masters of the Ukrainian language.
Her native talent and her industry made her works masterpieces. She
won many imitators for the new style of writing. The universality of
her themes and the careful treatment that she gave to various human
emotions have made her more than the poet of a passing era and she is
one of those authors who gain a steadily increasing number of readers
and admirers as time passes. Yet with it all her desire for the
cosmopolitan never led her away from her native land and in her Ukraine
found a devoted patriot and a great understanding soul.
CHAPTER TWELVE
MIKHAYLO KOTSYUBINSKY
During the greater part of the nineteenth century it was the task of
the Ukrainian authors to arouse and educate their people. The nation
in its darkest hour had lost to Russia or to Poland practically the
whole of its educated class and the national habits and characteristics
were preserved in the villages among the illiterate peasants. The
first and most pressing duty was to form a new educated class, to
give a knowledge of the past of Ukraine to those people who were but
dimly conscious of their existence as a separate entity and to lay the
foundation for a deeper study of their own traditions and habits. At
the same time the harsh censorship and the regulations, especially of
the Russian government, practically required that this work be carried
on under the guise of the study of ethnography and archaeology. The
very names of the journals that appeared in Russia as _Bulletin of the
Archaeological Commission_ and the _Kievskaya Starina_, (_Antiquities
of Kiev_) the only ones that were allowed to appear during the periods
of repression show the truth of this statement and it was only natural
accordingly that the writers who were compelled to work with one eye
on the censorship tended to exploit these possibilities. There grew up
in Ukrainian literature a definite ethnographic school and the writers
with pleasure and profit gave long descriptions of the manners and
customs of the villagers. The time, however, had to come, when the
authors would no longer be content with these self-imposed limitations
and would branch out into a broader field. The author who was to do
this in prose was Mikhaylo Kotsyubinsky, one of the greatest artists in
this field.
Kotsyubinsky was born at Vinnitsa in Podolia in 1864. His father was a
poor official but during his father’s lifetime he was able to study in
the bursa and the theological academy. He did not finish the course and
after his father’s death he made his living for a while as a private
tutor. He continued his own studies especially of literature and
finally entered the government service. In the early nineties he was
attached to the commission for the elimination of the phyloxera which
was ruining the vineyards in the south and he passed several years in
Bessarabia and the Crimea, where he had extensive opportunities to
study the lives of the villagers. He then served in the statistical
office in Chernihiv. During this time the Revolution of 1905 broke out
and Kotsyubinsky became very friendly with Maxim Gorky and many of the
leaders of the Social Democratic party of Russia. He finally retired
on a pension in 1911 to devote himself entirely to literature. He went
to Italy and lived near Gorky on the island of Capri. His heart grew
steadily worse and he returned to Kiev for a long period of treatment
but it did no good and he passed away in 1913 at the age of forty-nine.
Kotsyubinsky started to write in the same ethnographic realistic style
that had been popularized by Levitsky-Nechuy. He had been inspired to
write in Ukrainian by the _Kobzar_ of Shevchenko and the stories of
Marko Vovchok but he very soon broadened his literary range by the
diligent reading of later Russian authors such as Chekhov and also by
the careful study of the French and Scandinavian naturalists as Zola,
Maupassant, and Hamsun. All of these affected his style in passing
but he gradually worked out his own attitude toward literature and
developed that individual style in which his main works were written.
As he developed, he came more and more to understand the importance
of beauty in writing. He realized that there was always one correct
word artistically for every situation and he made great efforts to
find that right word, so as to secure the maximum effectiveness of his
work. He had a lyric and almost a sentimental appreciation of nature
and his power of casting a roseate glow over a scene and giving a
poetic picture in a few simple words of prose is marked. Perhaps of
his contemporaries only Korolenko shares that power and he too was
of Ukrainian origin, although he wrote in Russian. The ability to
transfigure an unpleasant and sordid scene and make of it a thing of
beauty without preventing the reader from realizing its real character
is a marked feature of Kotsyubinsky’s style. It definitely advances
him above the level of the great majority of the Ukrainian authors and
makes him a European writer in the best sense.
Side by side with this is a delicate appreciation of human psychology.
In his short stories with a remarkable economy in means, he is able to
penetrate the human heart and to express the most poignant feelings and
the most secret ambitions of a man or woman.
These characteristics are most clearly seen in his last collection
published just about the time of his death and especially in the
_Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors_, a story of peasant life in the Beskid
Mountains which he visited in 1911. It is the account of the life of
the shepherd boy Ivan Paliychuk. We see the young boy under the shadow
of the family feud with the Gutenyuk family in which his father is
killed, and his love for young Marichka of the rival clan. There is
a really idyllic picture of the young love of these two children of
nature, but Ivan is compelled by poverty to take a position as herdsman
for the summer in the mountains and during that summer Marichka is
drowned. Later he marries the wealthy Palagna and all seems to prosper
but there is not that affection and sincerity between them that had
existed between the young Ivan and his first love. His wife misbehaves
shamefully with the sorcerer Yura and the two plan to kill Ivan by
magic but he, broken hearted and in despair, wanders off into the woods
and mountains, lured on by a spirit, a Nyavka that took the form of
his beloved Marichka. Finally he fell over a precipice and was killed.
Then came the funeral rites, the entertainments and the games that
were customary while all through the neighborhood resounded the death
strains of the Hutsul pipes. How far at this moment Kotsyubinsky is
from the cold realism of the earlier authors can be seen from the way
in which he enters into the realm of the peasant superstitions and
makes plausible the appearance to Ivan in his despair of all those
supernatural beings, the Nyavka and the Chugaystyr. He carries his
readers into the spirit of the mountains not in any cold archaeological
sense but as a living world apart from the ordinary affairs of men.
If this was the culmination of the work of Kotsyubinsky, he had covered
a long path in his creative development. He had started with little
sketches and it was only in the pictures of the south in _Under the
Minarets_ and _In the Paths of the Devil_ that he had begun to work out
this finely chiseled style, the success of which depends so much upon
his ability to evoke the beauty and the artistry of untutored nature.
The style is still only partially developed in such tales as _At a
Great Price_ published in 1902. It might easily be a historical novel
for it refers back to those days when the persecuted and oppressed
Ukrainians were seeking to escape into Turkey in the hopes of founding
there a new Sich after their own had been destroyed. Ostap starts on
the difficult journey and his wife, the devoted Solomeya, overtakes him
and goes with him and shares his hardships. They try once to cross the
border but the Cossack guards intercept them. A little later Ostap is
badly wounded in another attempt and is nursed back to life by the care
of his wife. They are helped and plundered by the Gypsies and finally
Ostap is rescued by his wife and a friend from the hands of the Turks,
but she is drowned in the Danube in the attempt. So he lives alone, and
he shows his bare back to those who will listen and look at the marks
left by the cruel floggings which he had received in his lifetime.
“Here on my back is a memory from my master, and in front between my
ribs is my present from the Moskal. Well placed ... with them I will go
to God.... I paid well for my liberty, I paid a bitter price. Half of
me lies at the bottom of the Danube and the other is waiting and cannot
wait to join it.” Here is the germ of the later development with its
appreciation of nature and of the undying call of liberty and democracy.
Kotsyubinsky was keenly aware of the wave of unrest that was sweeping
Ukraine along with the rest of Russia just prior to the Revolution of
1905 and in the _Fata Morgana_, he gives us the first rumblings of the
coming storm in the picture of the poor peasant Andriy and his wife
Malanka and his daughter Hafiyka. The father has long since given up
the struggle to become independent. His wife has married him for want
of a better suitor and they have one daughter, beautiful as a picture
but still with no dowry and faced with the possibility of a joyless
life. The father dreams that a factory may be built, so that there can
be work. The mother still has the unsatisfied craving of the Ukrainian
peasant for the land. She muses “How splendid thou art, O earth. It is
pleasant to sow thee with grain, to adorn thee with green, to decorate
thee with flowers. It is pleasant to work thee. Only thou are not good
in this, that thou art not kind to the poor man. For the rich thou
glowest with beauty, the rich thou pleasest, thou clothest him, and the
poor man thou receivest only in a grave.... But our hands are waiting
to work our meadows, our cities, our gardens.... They will divide thee,
O land, and ‘our benefactor’ will come to the plough. Oh, God, God,
even in my old age grant me this happiness to bring out my child among
people.” Into this environment come the first students who are arrested
by the police, the first outbursts of hostility against the established
order. Kotsyubinsky had planned a trilogy on this theme but he only
finished two parts and the whole remained a mere skeleton.
There are many other stories dealing with the Revolution and the
revolutionary movement and Kotsyubinsky tries in each to illustrate
the psychology of the various participants, as the _Birthday Present_
where the bureaucratic father decides to give his son the pleasure of
seeing a hanging but the boy fails to appreciate the honor which is
shown him. He interferes, and at the end, the father fears that he
will be put out of the service, that the boy will be excluded from the
school, while the young Dorya is thinking for his part that he must
somehow punish the people responsible for such an outrageous act. Or
_The Horses are not to Blame_ gives us the reactions of a family on the
very eve of the time when the peasants demand from them their land.
Yet perhaps the best stories of Kotsyubinsky are not those that have
this kind of content but those where an ordinary man faces some sharp
crisis. Thus in _What is written in the Book of Life_, an old peasant
woman feeling herself in the way and wearied that death does not come,
persuades her son to take her out into the woods to leave her to die.
He does so, but at the very moment when she is determined to leave this
world, she shows so much interest in the chatter about her neighbors,
that the son finally changes his mind and goes back for her. He thinks
of all the rites and customs that surround the average funeral, the
drinking, and the entertainment and these things done for the good
opinion of the neighbors are almost as potent in making him change his
mind as is the actual sorrow for the fate of the poor old woman whom
death has forgotten. Or there are such stories as the _Letter_ where
a young and idealistic boy is brought face to face on his return home
with the killing of a little pig for his dinner. The stain of blood
separates the family and without knowing why, he loses all contact
with them. He is horrified by the church and its services and he looks
perfectly calmly at the fighting and the drunken brawls that go on
around him for blood will have blood.
One of his most striking stories is the _Dream_, and here we see one of
the underlying ideas of our author. The scene is the prosaic life of
an ordinary family. When they were young and first married, Antin and
Marta had something to live for. They had love and affection but the
dull routine of life had carried all that away and now they were living
well but uninterestingly. There were the prosaic facts of daily life,
the ordinary cares and petty household and office activities. Marta was
unconscious of the loss. Antin was and in his dreams which he tells his
wife, he resurrects the past and imagines a new romance with a girl
in Italy. There is beauty, there is love, there is passion, and it is
all a dream. At first the mere idea that her well-known husband could
become a problem to her, that there were in his being elements that
she had effectively stifled in herself was too much for her. Yet at
the end it did rouse her to make an attempt to bring back something of
that past, and “She did not know whether she would have the strength,
whether storms would rage at some future time, but now oftener than
before roses adorned their dining table.”
It was the fault of routine. “She had not known to guard life, to
preserve its beauty. Daily she had been throwing it away in trifles,
in the useless filth of existence, until she had turned it into a foul
pit. Poetry cannot live in such an atmosphere, and without it, life is
a crime.”
That is the real gist of the work of Kotsyubinsky. In his memoirs Gorky
emphasizes this quality of the author and it takes precedence over all
other aspects of his work. Life can be made interesting. Life can be
made good. Sympathy and love and kindness can be universal and perhaps
they are so natural to man that they can even pass over into the
consciousness of dogs and other animals that are near to man. It is a
law of life and he who neglects does so at his infinite peril.
It is this spirit that moved and inspired all of his writings. It gave
him the feeling and the desire to penetrate the human heart and mind
to understand man as he really can be. Humanity, beauty, the people,
Ukraine--these were the things for which Kotsyubinsky lived and about
which he thought and wrote and dreamed. Between him and Levitsky and
the older novelists there was a great gulf. They had been as eager to
help the people as he was. They were as self-sacrificing as he was,
but they did not try to take into account those other values which he
regarded so highly.
Like them in style he was realistic and naturalistic. He endeavored
to deal with life as it was in the rough and the unmild as in the
_Intermezzo_, where life among human beings is like that among the
wolves for the people ruined by syphilis, poverty, alcohol, and
illiteracy, know nothing better than to fight and destroy one another,
but there was something more, for he wished not only to tell a story
to impress the minds and hearts of his readers, but he wanted also to
evoke a mood so as to stir their emotions and to rouse their sense of
beauty.
Beauty and harmony appear in all the later works of Kotsyubinsky. It
is a deliberate beauty and a deliberate harmony, not like that natural
spark of the genius Shevchenko who seemed from the very beginning to
know what to say and how to say it. With Kotsyubinsky it was something
acquired. The feeling was natural to him. He had that finely balanced
character that was favorable to its growth but there was a conscious
training of that feeling. It is small wonder that Kotsyubinsky was
not a voluminous writer. It was impossible to imagine him combining
literature and journalism or entering the rough and tumble arena of
life. It is impossible to picture him careless or indifferent. The
very methods that he borrowed from impressionism and grafted on to
his realistic settings are those which are the results of a real
understanding of the finer points of culture. Without poetry, life is
a crime. It is a new note in Ukrainian literature, a note of a growing
maturity, a greater refinement, a sign that Ukrainian literature is
taking its place as one of the culture literatures of the world. The
problems of Ukraine are still as pressing, they have not been solved
but Kotsyubinsky feels that it is no use to harp only on the external
and the immediate. The Ukrainians still have souls and if they are
to be really civilized people, they must share the emotions and the
sensations of civilized people. They must deepen their life as well as
broaden it. From his earliest efforts Kotsyubinsky steadily deepened
and broadened his range of subjects. He did for prose what Lesya
Ukrainka and others had done for poetry and when he died in 1913, he
could look at the world and say, as he had always thought, that life
was good, that mankind had enormous potentialities, and that he had
done his part in making them available and accessible for literature.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
VASIL STEFANYK
A new realism appeared in the twentieth century but this was
significantly different from the older form that had been handled with
so much success by Marko Vovchok and Levitsky. Its centre of gravity
was different. Where the older authors had indulged in stories of
peasant life that had the avowed intention of awaking the educated
classes to a realization of the problems confronting the Ukrainian
people, the new authors sought to give pictures of the conditions
as they existed at that period when the old patriarchal order was
definitely breaking down. There is not the constant harping on the
theme that changes in the social order might produce important results.
Rather there is a representation of people who have been broken by
life and we are asked to look at them as they are in their misery and
despair.
It is definitely the underprivileged who are described. We are not told
how or why they have become that way. The fact is that they exist and
they form a sad spectacle for the keen observer. An atmosphere of fate
broods over the whole and there is nothing that they or we can do to
change their lot. Life has dealt them many blows. It has taken away
their power of resistance and man becomes an individual, no longer one
of a group that is bound together as a class, a family, or a member
of society. He stands out by himself with his own problems with which
he cannot grapple and if he has a family or friends beside him, they
cannot do much to ease his solitude. We are born alone and we die alone
and compared with those great truths, our petty human attempts to
understand one another are doomed to futility, try as we will.
Gone are the days when we feel that the peasant, the serf, has within
himself abundant resources of mental and moral and physical strength.
Gone are the days when we are led to believe that these oppressed and
insulted people are the backbone of society and can be led and taught
to live a better and a more abundant life. The tide has turned and is
running strongly toward other phases of existence. If there is to be a
brighter future, we cannot expect it to come from the actions of the
impoverished, drunken, broken peasants. We must seek it elsewhere, if
we can.
The new style perhaps took its rise in French naturalism but it was
certainly influenced by Dostoyevsky’s interest in broken souls, by
the misunderstandings of Chekhov, and by the revolutionary heroes of
Gorky. It was influenced to some extent by the teachings of Marxism
and the growth of radical political parties which clustered around the
factories and the cities.
The phenomenon was not confined to the Slavonic countries. We can
trace it in English and American literature, in the almost unconscious
efforts of the more modern writers to turn away from the picturing of
virtuous peasants and farmers and to see in the country characters
who possess all possible vices and perversions. The old view that the
city is the source of corruption and decay and the rural districts
are the home of virtue is looked upon as old-fashioned and the newer
psychology endeavors to analyze, to explain or at least to picture
almost photographically the warped and helpless types that are found
everywhere.
The same movement made its appearance in Ukrainian and the great
master of this school was Vasil Stefanyk, a consummate artist and a
miniaturist in words. His pictures are short and concise. In a few
phrases and a few paragraphs he pictures the sad state of the average
Galician village and the strange creatures that inhabit it.
He had a good opportunity to study these people for he lived almost his
whole life among them. He got to know the inner life of the village,
the sorrows and the scanty joys of the people of a community where
prosperity rarely occurs and where misery and disease are universal.
Vasil Stefanyk was born in 1871 in Western Ukraine in the foothills
of the Carpathian Mountains. He received a good education at Krakow
and for a while studied medicine but he left the university without
completing his course. In the meantime he had become friendly with
some of the leaders of the Young Poland movement and shared with them
their infatuation for the life of the common people. Wyspianski and the
others of the group were actuated by a new interest in the life of the
ordinary Polish peasant and were trying to understand the psychology
of the average villager. Stefanyk applied the same technique to the
life of his own people. As a result he went back to his own village
and settled down as a farmer among them. He got to know them and their
modes of thought and expression. He studied their local and untutored
dialect, he learned to appreciate the difficulties with which they
were confronted and he began those stories of peasant existence that
have made him one of the greatest prose artists of modern Ukrainian
literature.
He was not a voluminous writer. He began to produce his masterpieces
when he was about thirty years of age and for a decade he worked and
developed his own gemlike style and his gift of portraiture. The task
of composition was not easy and he toiled over almost every phrase and
paragraph, tearing up copy after copy, until he had found exactly the
right word and the right idea. Then he grew silent and for another
decade, although he was recognized as a master, he produced nothing.
The impact of the war and the temporary liberation of Ukraine roused
him again to write and for the first time he used the word Ukraine and
emphasized the unity of the people in both halves of the country. The
disastrous situation that ensued as a result of the Ukrainian defeat
and renewed division made him again give up writing and return to his
former silence. He died in 1936, just before the new catastrophes were
to overwhelm his country.
He does not reveal himself in his sketches. Far from that. If we
read them carefully, we will find few clues to the author and his
personality. He does not dwell upon any special theme with marked
enthusiasm. He does not comment or give moral judgments upon his
characters from which we could infer his own sympathies or his own
point of view. He simply in a few well chosen sentences sets out a
situation confronting some broken souls and bodies and he objectively
pictures a little incident that explains the situation. It is useless
for us to ask him why these things happen. They simply do and that is
all there is to it.
In the beginning there was a slight touch of symbolism in his works
as in the _Road_, the pilgrimage of a man through life, nameless and
unidentified. He leaves his mother and starts out through the world. He
sees people in their agony and despair. At night they lie like stones
one by the other. His strength rises and wanes again when he finds his
mother’s grave, he sobs with dry eyes. She does not answer him when
he calls. “He ran from grave to grave, as autumn flowers. When he had
passed one hundred graves, the one hundred first was his. He fell down
to it, as he had long ago to his mother’s bosom.”
This was the early phase of Stefanyk’s work but he did not long remain
at this level. His characters speedily become more individualized
and if there is a special symbol that we may deduce from his works
to describe the people whom he presents, it is as fallen leaves
blown along on the autumn wind. No one understands them nor do they
understand themselves.
So in the _News_. “In the village there was the news that Grits
Letyuchy had drowned his little girl in the river. He wanted to drown
the older one, but she begged off. After his wife Gritishka died, he
suffered misfortunes. He could not care for his children without a
wife. No one wanted to marry him, for besides the children there were
also poverty and need. Grits suffered for two full years with his young
children. No one knew about him, how he lived, what he did, although
neighbors were very near. They said only that Grits for a whole winter
never lighted a fire in the hut and he and his children passed the
winter on the stove.” He takes the hungry children to the river and
throws the youngest Dotska in. The older one Handzynya begs off, “Daddy
don’t drown me, don’t drown me, don’t drown me.” He relents but tells
her that Dotska will be better off than she. However she can go to the
first hut and ask to spend the night and then try for a position to
care for a child. He himself starts to ford the river but changes his
mind and goes to the bridge.
There is no moral judgment on the action of Grits. The poor man is at
the end of his physical and moral powers but Stefanyk does not explain
it. He does not condemn him. He merely in plain, unadorned language
describes the course of events.
No one in the village knows how Grits lives, although the neighbors are
very near. The old village spirit has vanished. In the stories of Marko
Vovchok, the peasants are ready to help one another. They sympathize
with the unfortunate. They are ready to share their last crumb with one
another. Here even that spirit is gone. The members of the village are
enemies one to another or at best are impartial and neutral observers
as is the author of the story. We have travelled far from the days when
the chief cause of peasant suffering was the flogging by the arrogant
and haughty lord. The peasants are free but they are free to starve and
Stefanyk is not interested in those who have carved out a secure place
for themselves in the village community.
Or let us take _The Family of Les_. Les steals a sack of barley from
his wife to sell it at the inn and secure something to drink. She
follows him with her two boys, one eight and one ten years old and
makes a scene. Then she knocks him down and orders the children to
beat their father roundly. Finally she goes home with them in mortal
terror that their father will return in the night and take vengeance.
All the tragedy of drunkenness is described, all the pathos and despair
of the poor mother who cannot work enough to take care of her children
and the inn keeper. There is no attempt at presenting a roseate view
of peasant life. Misery, need, want, that is all the unfortunates
know. It is what has been in the past and all that they can expect
in the future. Yet there is more to it than this for again Stefanyk
brings out the complicated psychology of an event which might seem at
first sight simple. Thus the mother realizes that she could receive
assistance from the state if her husband were crippled whereas she
could have no relief, if he were merely drunk. Likewise the father is
willing to suffer at the hands of his children and even takes off his
overcoat so that their light blows can inflict greater pain upon him.
Family feeling has taken a strange turn and the mother appears more
like a female animal defending her young than she does as a member of
a civilized community but Stefanyk gives clue after clue to the varied
reactions of the individuals which are by no means simple.
We have the same sort of peasant cynicism in the _Blue Booklet_ (or is
it really a picturing of the despair that comes when a man is finally
broken?). Antin has lost his wife and his two children and alone in the
world, he has no solace left but drink. He loses his land and then his
little hut and takes the blue employment book to start out in the world
alone. He flaunts his poverty in the village inn and names the people
to whom he has lost everything but he boasts “I haven’t a cent, but I
will drink. I will drink with our people, I’ll go to ruin with them.
Let them know how I have left the village. Go, I have the blue booklet
in my pocket. Now that is my hut and my field and my gardens. I’m going
with it to the end of the world! A booklet from the emperor, I have
all doors opened to me. Everywhere. Among gentlemen and Jews and every
faith.” Antin has ceased to belong. He has passed out as so many of
Stefanyk’s heroes from the normal humdrum life which at best may bring
a normal respectable living or at least a slow starvation.
Death and preparation for death is another favorite theme. Take
_Katrusya_ for example. The poor girl is dying of tuberculosis. With
the last of their money the family take her to a doctor but the comment
they make is “Peasants do not need to go to doctors. He tells you to
drink a lot of milk, or eat some light meat or drink some liquor, or
eat white bread or something like that (all things not obtainable on
a peasant’s income). It can help the gentry, but it won’t help in
our class. Therefore let her die as she is.” A neighbor replies. “Do
you think the doctors give the peasants the same medicine that they
give the gentry or the Jews? Therefore let her die as she is.” They
look at Katrusya and say, “There is nothing on her as on a leaf that
has been torn away from the tree.” So death comes on but this symbol
of the fallen leaf is a favorite one with Stefanyk. Indeed most of
his characters are just that. They are the unsuccessful, the poor
devils who have been torn away from the tree of life and yet there is
something human and touching in their misery and their despair.
For an example of characters drawn from the wealthier classes we have
the _Basarabi_. They had been an old and brutal race which as overseers
had mercilessly driven the peasants in the days of forced labor. One of
them during the Turkish wars had murdered seven little children. Now
in their decline they were little better although they are well-to-do
peasants. The old vitality of the race is gone and with the ill
concealed hatred of the other peasants and the disordered minds of the
family, suicide becomes the rule rather than the exception. Tomas who
has been cut down in time, tells the rest of the family of the pangs of
conscience and of the weird spirits that hang around him and drive him
to his deed. The doctors ascribe it all to nerves but even at this the
gruesome story so impresses another of the clan, Mikolay, that he goes
out into the night to commit the same deed to the consternation of the
others. It is typical of the decline of a family and in the Galician
setting there is something of the studied horror of Edgar Allen Poe and
the other writers who set forth the degeneration of a once tyrannical
family. It is longer than most of the works of Stefanyk, for it
contains more of a story with a perspective over generations. It is
rare that he refers back to the days of the past. For the most part
his stories deal with an event in the present and he assumes as his
background the whole degeneration of a community under the influence
of alcohol, Jewish tavern keepers and grinding poverty. It is highly
significant for Stefanyk’s attitude that he chooses as his horrible
examples no outsiders but one of those Ukrainian families which had
prospered in the past by devious and unmentionable methods.
For a long while Stefanyk gave up writing and then during the exciting
years after the First World War he returned to literature. His later
stories were of the same type as the earlier ones. They had the same
compressed form, the same careful workmanship but there was something
different about them. He had grown during the years of silence and had
come to find more positive qualities in his poor folk. He shows their
sufferings in the war, when the peasants of Western Ukraine came to
feel toward the Russians, the Moskali, what had been mentioned again
and again in the writings of the people from Great Ukraine. Thus in
_Maria_, the old woman comes to meet the Kozaks in the village and she
is surprised that they being Ukrainian also respect Shevchenko. In the
_Sons_, an old peasant realizes that his sons have gone to fight for
Ukraine. On his return from seeing the last one off, he finds his wife
dead before the painting of the Blessed Virgin and in a fit of simple
religion, not without a bitter undertone, he appeals to the Blessed
Virgin to care for his home for he has given not one but two sons for a
great cause.
There has come a new enlightenment in the village, a new feeling that
the people have some part to play other than to be mere hewers of wood
and drawers of water. It is a sign of the deepening of the national
consciousness, of that tendency that Franko had hoped for and in which
he had believed. The Ukraine is now a real thing even to the humblest
and the most underprivileged and along with this there is a growing
tendency of hostility to the Polish landowners and bureaucrats. They
had hardly appeared in the earlier stories where Stefanyk had been
describing merely little sketches of peasant life taken without any
background except the misery and suffering of the village.
It brings about a new atmosphere of hope, a deeper confidence in the
capacity of the peasants. There is more thought, more conscious guiding
of their own affairs. They are no longer satisfied to accept their fate
without questioning and to pass from the scene without a murmur. Yet
they are fundamentally the same people. With the same temptations and
vices.
Take for example, “_She is the Earth_,” where the Bukovina refugees
make their way to the north. Old Danilo has brought his family with
him but his wife is silent. From the time when they abandoned their
little farm before the onrushing armies, she has remained still and
silent. Old Semen, the same type of man, advises the newcomer to go
home. “An old bird must not leave its old nest, for it is not able to
build another. It is better that its head grows cold in its old nest
than in a hollow on a strange road.” He warns against following the
lords and the Jews. “The Emperor has his purse open for them, but the
purse is closed for you....” “Our work is with the earth; you abandon
it, you are lost, you cling to it, it rakes out all your strength from
you, it fills your soul with its hands; you fall down to it, you bend
your back, it fills your veins, for that you have flocks and herds, and
haystacks. For your strength it gives you a hut full of children and
grandchildren, who laugh as silver bells, and bloom like poplars....
Don’t go, Danilo, with the lords and the Jews, don’t seek the tsar,
for you do not need the tsar; there is always someone to come to the
farm to collect the taxes.” And it is only then that the old woman
finds her voice and says,--“Let us go home, Danilo, let us go home.”
“And when the sun rose, the old men parted, they kissed their black
hands, and the red sun threw their shadows across the boundary far
along the earth.”
This is the creed of the peasant, the creed of the earth, and it was
a new note for Stefanyk. It is perhaps too optimistic. It perhaps
shows a narrow conception of life but it is the fundamental essence of
the peasant wisdom put in a simple form. It opens a new vista to the
reader, it gives a psychological motive and a philosophy that had been
hitherto lacking in his work. Now in his later stories he ventures to
give the world and his characters some elements of philosophy other
than the cynical or coldly unmoral picture of human dissolution and
disaster.
Stefanyk was working toward a deeper and a more satisfactory philosophy
of life under the pressure of the events of the World War. Yet his
basis was the impartial observation of the poor material condition of
the average Galician village in the period when the old safeguards had
been removed by the abolition of feudal powers and when the individual
peasant was not yet effectively trained to stand for himself.
He writes of a transition period when the peasant was left almost
entirely alone to stand upon his own two feet and when he was not
prepared to do so. The peasant exists under the implacable rule of the
erstwhile master and the no more tender mercies of the tavern keeper
in the village (usually a Jew) and hence it is that again and again
Stefanyk attacks the gentry and the Jews, the two classes in Galician
society that seemed to get along, while the hard working peasant gave
to both all of his hard earned money. For those peasants who had
solved the problem and who were able to live and get along, Stefanyk
has nothing to say but in his time the refuge for all of these was
ultimately America. The still living ambition to succeed drove the
peasant to sell everything and emigrate to the United States or Canada
where he could be free to become a man and had some prospects of
solving his own problems.
This was the period that Stefanyk described and his knowledge of
the lives and thoughts of the people he set forth in exquisite and
carefully worked out stories in which every word is important. No
writer up to this time in Ukrainian had been so economical in his use
of material. No one had been so compressed in his style and language.
Stefanyk was a supreme artist in a particularly difficult medium. His
stories had the finish of a miniature but they are not to be neglected
because of the brevity of their material. With the exception of Franko,
he was the leading author produced in Western Ukraine during the past
seventy-five years and his sense of literary values, his command of
language and his appreciation of the significant episodes in life
make him an author of whom any literature may well be proud. He dealt
with a restricted field but in this field he knew how to show the
important elements not only for his people but for humanity and he is
one of those authors who under the guise of picturing the down and
downtrodden, the failures and the misfits, have known to show them as
human beings with many a toil and sorrow but still profoundly human
and profoundly worthy of pity and assistance, yet without any attempt
to include any form of propaganda and without adding anything that
conflicts with pure literature in the strictest sense of the word.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
OLES
At the end of the nineteenth century a new poetry spread rapidly over
Europe. Directly or indirectly this traced its source to the French
symbolists and decadents, to Verlaine and Mallarmé and the other
writers of that period. Then came the influence of Maeterlinck and the
movement was in full course. However, as the movement with its emphasis
on aestheticism and beauty and its frequent desire to shock the
bourgeoisie spread among the Slavs, it gradually sought a philosophical
basis for the new developments.
The new authors rapidly advanced the technique of poetry and at the
same time they broadened the range of materials which were regarded as
proper subjects. For a half century there had been predominant a form
of realism which conceived as within its scope only the contemporary
lives of the people. It remained to go outside of the conventional
and to choose subjects from the entire field of recorded history.
Lesya Ukrainka had started this with her dramas and sketches from the
antique world. Even this was not enough and as the symbolistic movement
expanded, the authors flew from the earth to the heavens, to other
planets, to imaginary scenes and they sought in all these areas that
which they considered beauty in their own imaginations. Many schools
of thought arose among the new artists and basking in the light of
self-adulation, they cared little for the old-fashioned social motifs
which had been instrumental in training the people for the last half
century. They cared little more for the enthusiastic admiration of the
great masses who were beginning to appreciate at long last the older
writers and were content to read new and ever new reinterpretations of
the old themes.
Ukrainian literature was no exception to the general rule, and
around 1890 at the very end of the century the new movement made its
appearance. It rapidly forced into the background the older writers. In
the meanwhile life was changing and the symbolists and decadents were
being attacked on all sides. The champions of the old order had not
spared even Franko for his _Withered Leaves_ and they were even more
concerned with the vagaries of the still younger authors.
Yet it cannot be denied that with all their weaknesses, these new men
were doing a great work in the adaptation of Ukrainian literature to
world models. They were rapidly forcing the literature from a narrow
and almost provincial field to a world arena and if in the beginning
they cut themselves off from their less fortunate fellow men, the
greater writers, once they had mastered the forms steadily began a
return to the world which they had formerly scorned. Yet that return
was no mere repetition of the past, no slavish abjuring of the ideas
that they had formerly admired. It was rather a realization of the fact
that literature did have other purposes than the purely photographic
repetition of details of ethnography and social philosophy, that it
could affect the readers by the evocation of various moods, and could
give them a deeper understanding of some phases of human psychology
by the use of symbols more or less easy to penetrate than it could by
plain matter of fact narration and bald statement. In other words there
was again a conscious approach to that method of exposition which had
been unconsciously present in the mind of a great genius as Shevchenko.
His _Great Grave_ is as much of a symbolistic poem as is any work of
the present writers but he did it with the spark of genius and with his
eye directed at the history of his nation even more than at individual
psychology.
The author who was to develop this new poetry to its height was O.
Oles, the pen name of Oleksander Kandyba who was born in Russian
Ukraine in 1878. Like many of the more modern writers, he was well
educated and from 1903 on, he was recognized as the most outstanding
poet since Shevchenko. Yet at no time could he have the appeal of such
a man as Franko, for Oles with all of his talent was still pitching his
works on a level which was inaccessible to the average educated man and
he could be admired and understood in many cases only by a relatively
small audience.
The early years of the twentieth century saw many changes in Ukraine
both in Russia and Galicia. In Russia there were the high hopes at
the time of the Revolution of 1905, when it seemed again as if with
the abolition of the strict rules of the censorship there would be
presented favorable conditions for work. Almost over night there sprang
into existence new journals, new writers, new hopes. Then again the
clouds descended and the reactionary regimes that followed tried to
go back to the old days when Ukraine seemed non-existent. Between
1905 and 1910 many of the new journals again passed out of existence
and the despairing may have thought that all hope was again lost. Yet
much had been gained. The Ukrainians had learned to group themselves
into political parties and other organizations. They had secured a
larger nucleus of a reading public and that public could not be easily
disintegrated again. The time was past when an imperial fiat abolishing
the very name of Ukraine and wiping out the Sich could discourage and
almost destroy the entire movement.
So too in Galicia. The Ukrainian population there was becoming more
self-conscious. The students were demanding more and more vigorously
the introduction of Ukrainian courses in the University of Lviv. The
contacts with the Russian Ukraine were growing stronger and that
exchange of writers and published books which had been going on for
nearly a half century was no longer a tender plant which could be
shattered by the slightest blow.
Then came the stirrings of the First World War and the final collapse
of the two empires of Russia and Austria-Hungary. For a few months
Ukraine was again free. The two republics of Great Ukraine and Western
Ukraine came together with Professor Hrushevsky as the President of the
Rada and there came a rapid flowering of the national culture. The work
of the preceding century had borne fruit. Alas! It was only for a short
time and then with the renewed division of the country, between the
Soviet Union, Poland, Rumania and Czechoslovakia, it seemed as if the
hopes of all had died again.
During all this period Oles continued his work, grouping together words
of encouragement and lamentation, personal lyrics and poems with a
definite social content which had a real meaning for his countrymen.
His moods varied with the political conditions. They were strong and
cheerful when the outlook was hopeful. They were sad and depressed in
moments of adversity but he never lost hope and he never felt that his
work in the service of social ideals bound the wings of his talent
or interfered with the artistic value of his poems. When misfortune
finally came to Ukraine, he withdrew to Galicia and then became one of
that group which moved to Prague and from there he poured out his poems
of despair, of the sadness of the emigré but always with the superb
confidence that Ukraine would rise again and that her sons would some
day be happy and free in their own land.
In moments of encouragement he can sing:
I’ll weep no more. My sorrow I will fetter
In chains of strongest steel.
My people are still burdened with their fetters
Their wounds their woes reveal.
And all my soul
I show forth with their wounds.
I’ll sing no more. And nightly in the struggle
The iron swords sing loud.
The swords cut deep into the people’s vitals
And call a race uncowed.
Then let my sword
Sing for me in the strife.
Or again Oles with his eye upon nature and the same hope in his breast
will sing:
Thou marvelous and wondrous night!
Just yesterday a coverlet of snow was sifting down,
And now to-day a change ... so warm and bright,
With here and there a pushing upward from the frozen ground.
Know this: ’twill be the same with man....
Such miracles there be!... Upon a certain day
Men everywhere, free and of equal rank shall stand
And seize the visions dreamed along the way.
So too with his confidence in man’s power to gain his goal by fighting
and denying even the powers of nature that endeavor to stop him....
Make sport of us, ye winds, and mock us, thunder,
Unswerving we tread a beckoning pathway,
Our young breasts we raise to defy the wind’s power,
Thunder we deafen with paeans of victory.
Only he wins his goal who, unmoved, presses forward,
Who burns with a passion that never consumes.
Life’s carpet spread out lures his youthful steps onward,
The crown Death shall weave him immortally blooms.
More faith in our cause! Raise higher our banner!
Tears, groans, and misgivings ... begone from the fray!
Life rides a winged charger,
Spreading flowers on our way.
(Translated by A. P. Coleman)
In his early poems as _Anxiety and Joy Embraced_, Oles harps on that
theme which was so dear to the early symbolistic authors in all
European countries that sorrow and joy are closely connected, that in
nature the extremes meet and that it is the duty of the individual
to embrace both as parts of the great existence of the universe. In
moments of depression he returns to the same theme with an almost
pantheistic interpretation of nature as but an external manifestation
of what is within the human heart.
It was an age of symbolism. In Russian literature it was the time of
Aleksander Blok with his symbolic dramas and of Leonid Andreyev with
such grim and disillusioning plays as _The Life of Man and Anathema_
where the characters are universal types as man and woman. Oles follows
in the same traditions and produced many lyrical and symbolistic plays
as _On the Road to a Legend_ and the _Tragedy of the Heart_. They are
really literary dramas better suited to be read than produced.
Very rarely are the characters personalized. There is He and She
and a Girl, a Gentleman and a Lady. They are merely symbols for
Oles to indicate the involved and contradictory, self-including and
self-excluding universe and man. They deal with the memories of
the past and the hopes for the future but Oles realizes that there
is no clear line of demarcation and that no one of the alternating
and contradictory emotions of the human heart and emotions and mind
can ever win a clear and definite triumph. Man and the universe are
mysteries and we can only hope to approach their underlying meanings
by indirection and symbols. All of this makes them very difficult for
theatrical representation but they easily belong in the masterpieces of
Ukrainian literature.
Again following the tastes of the day, Oles translated into Ukrainian
Longfellow’s _Hiawatha_. It was one of the many translations of this
poem that were made early in the twentieth century into the Slavonic
languages. Of all the masterpieces of American poetry, not one has
taken a firmer hold on Slavonic thought and feelings than has the story
of the Indian chief and lawgiver. Hiawatha became almost a symbol
of America and Oles in making his translation marked an enormous
step in the placing of his native literature on the basis of a world
literature, in which the world masterpieces existed in adequate and
poetical translations.
Oles belongs to the greatest masters of his people’s literature but
he can never be popular in the sense of a Shevchenko or a Franko. He
will always be a poet’s poet, a man whose art requires sympathy and
understanding. At times in the height of national indignation or of
national jubilation, he emerges from his cultured seclusion and his
study of human moods to express something clear and definite. For the
most part he remains within the mystic shrine of pure art and deep
thinking and feeling as one of those poets who represent the higher
aspirations of modern civilized man.
The recognition of Oles as a great poet by his people is a sign of the
growing maturity of modern Ukrainian literature. It is a sign that the
people are securing a new intellectual class, are acquiring a modern
culture, are thinking in modern ways, and sharing modern emotions.
It is a sign that Ukrainian culture is deepening constantly and that
with favorable conditions it would include all those gamuts of emotion
and thought that have been fitted into those literatures which have
developed naturally and freely over long periods of time.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
AFTER 1918
The brief independence of the Ukrainian National Republic and its fall
could not fail to have catastrophic results upon the literature. The
whole trend of Ukrainian literary development had been to develop along
those lines on which the other literatures of the world had travelled.
There had been a constant effort to establish close contact between the
Ukrainians in Russia and those in Austria-Hungary. Finally there had
come with Franko, Lesya Ukrainka, and the later authors at the very end
of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, a group
of writers and critics who were familiar with what was going on abroad
and had striven to acclimate at home the new methods and ideas as they
were rising to prominence.
All that was changed. New barriers were erected between the different
parts of the dismembered country and these barriers were even more
impenetrable than those which had been erected by the severe decrees of
Russia at the middle of the nineteenth century. Then it was possible
for the Ukrainian authors in Russia to print in Galicia and have their
works smuggled back into Russian Ukraine. Now the censorship was
ruthless and efficient. Some of the authors as Oles, the last of the
great names who remained alive, emigrated to Prague to live the sterile
life of an emigré. Lesya Ukrainka had died just before the war, Franko
had died before the collapse of Austria-Hungary. Stefanyk soon returned
to silence.
The early enthusiasm for independence produced a large number of
promising and talented young writers who eagerly were adapting futurism
and imaginism and the most modern literary movements to the Ukrainian
scene. Such authors as Pavlo Tychyna (b. 1891) attracted more than
favorable mention and the leading historian of literature, Serhey
Yefremiv, in 1923 could speak glowingly of the groups of younger
authors who were bidding fair to herald a new and still more glorious
period. All this was soon changed.
In Poland some scientific and literary work was still possible. The
Shevchenko Scientific Society was able to continue. A Ukrainian
Scientific Institute was established in Warsaw in 1929 and accomplished
a great deal. Such writers as Bohdan Lepky (b. 1872), professor of
Ukrainian literature at the University of Krakow, was able to continue
writing and a number of promising young authors as Ulas Samchuk
appeared. At the same time the Czechoslovak government encouraged the
formation of a Ukrainian University and Institute in Prague. But it
was hardly the time for fruitful work. The dark shadow of Fascism was
beginning to appear upon the horizon and threatening an overturn of
life as it had long been known.
In the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic the problem of communism
forced itself ever more to the foreground. It became imperative for the
authors to write on those themes and in that manner which was regarded
as politically reliable by the authorities. At first for errors
recantation was regarded as sufficient punishment, but from about 1928,
the Soviet critics denounce in scathing language as bourgeois Ukrainian
nationalists all those authors who went beyond the appointed line and
that line varied with the exigencies of Soviet politics in Moscow.
Some of the writers as Tychyna made their peace with the Soviets
and the Soviet Encyclopedias can speak of his growing revolutionary
optimism in his later works. He had been one of the masters of the
younger generation with his melodic songs on the rebirth of Ukraine.
Now he became another of the Communist poets writing in praise of the
Party and sharply condemning their foes.
On the other hand, Mikola Khvylovy (b. 1893), one of the more talented
of the prose writers, passed on an opposite course. Khvylovy had been
far to the left and had counted himself one of the first Ukrainian
proletarian writers. As the pressure grew, he sought and sought in vain
to establish in Ukrainian literature a reliance and a contact with
Western culture in contrast to the ever increasing dependence upon
Moscow. This was interpreted as a Fascist plan for the development
of Ukraine. Thus A. Khvylya, a Soviet critic, wrote about Khvylovy’s
novel _Wood Snipes_, “Khvylovy carries his heroes on a literary horse
to prove that Soviet Ukraine is not Soviet, that the dictatorship
of the proletariat is not the dictatorship of the proletariat, that
the national policy is only deceit; that the Ukrainian people is
exclusively a benighted, unfree people, that a rebirth is coming, that
finally the party itself is an organization of hypocrites. Khvylovy in
a very talented way sets forth these ideas in the _Wood Snipes_ and
having made such an analysis of our reality proves that the one hope,
which can enkindle millions, bring to the height of a pathos for the
struggle for Ukraine, for the people is national rebirth, the rebirth
of the nation.... In the beginning it is necessary to create firm
cadres of a new Ukrainian tempered intelligentsia. In the beginning
there must come a tempered Ukrainian Longfellow, to lead the Ukrainian
people to the state of another great social movement, and only after
this can there be new economists, new workmen, to lead the economies
and social life of our country to other days.... The only means of
safety is nationalism. It is necessary to see to it, that Thermidor
develop to the creation of a powerful Ukrainian national state. And
there is no doubt that if a Ukrainian ‘communist’ does not do it, a
Russian ‘communist’ will do it, for he will act against him, against
the Ukrainian, in order to hand over to his own Fascist ‘a single
indivisible’ (land). In the minds of the heroes of Khvylovy, the
questions are either for a Russian or a Ukrainian fascism. There is no
third course.”
Confronted with such attacks on his novels and publicistic works,
Khvylovy shot himself on May 13, 1933, and he was only one of a
large number that passed from the literary scene. Serhey Yefremiv,
the literary historian, was liquidated as a writer. Prof. Mikhail
Hrushevsky, the historian and former President of the Ukrainian
National Republic, died in exile. Many others were shot or committed
suicide because the Marxists and the Communists who had hoped for the
development of some independent intellectual physiognomy within Soviet
Ukraine were regarded as equally hostile to the state as were the
bourgeois and the anti-Marxians.
The language was allowed to exist. No one ventured to repeat the words
of Valuyev in the sixties that there never was, is not, and never
will be a Ukrainian language. It was clear, however, that there never
was, is not, and never will be a Ukrainian culture distinct from the
general Soviet culture within the Soviet Union. The measures taken in
the twentieth century go further than any in the nineteenth. At that
time supervision and censorship were primarily of the external form.
Now they are of the internal content. The modern ideological state
cannot tolerate the diversity, the privileges that were granted by the
old fashioned despots, no matter how cruel and tyrannical they were.
Everything must be standardized, must be run strictly according to
pattern, and most of the younger Ukrainian authors in Eastern Ukraine
have learned it to their cost and have been silenced or have submitted.
The Second World War has swept the entire area into its vortex. The
Ukrainians of all groups and classes in both sections of the Ukrainian
lands have learned that the Nazis are but carrying out on a broader
and more terrible scale the same policy that the Germans did in 1918,
the using of Ukraine as a mere granary, and that they have no more
intention than in the past of allowing any human rights or liberties
to the Ukrainian population. Fire and sword, famine and disease are
destroying the population as they did twenty-five years ago. Yet that
period was followed by the brief outburst of the national spirit that
accompanied the brief moment of independence. Then amid the ruined
conditions of the land there suddenly appeared, poets, prose writers,
scholars, men of every intellectual calling. They left their imprint
upon Ukrainian culture and the events of the past years have not been
able to destroy all that they accomplished. Ukrainian literature which
under adversity has developed so well during the past century and a
half cannot have been brought to an untimely end. Its revival depends
upon victory and the triumph of the human spirit over regimentation.
When that moment comes, Ukrainian literature will take its next step
and march hand in hand with the other great literatures of the world.
The only guide to the future is the experience of the past and the
century and a half during which Ukrainian literature has developed into
being the chief expression of the Ukrainian people leads us to expect
even more in the future and to look with confidence at the Ukrainian
genius.
It was a happy instinct that led Kotlyarevsky at the close of the
eighteenth century to put into literary form the speech of millions
of serfs and to revamp the old archaic Church Slavonic so as to form
a modern literary language. It was still more fortunate that he gave
to the new development a democratic flavor and a sympathy for the
downtrodden and the oppressed which have ever since remained as the
fundamental message and keynote of Ukrainian literature.
A half century later, one of the greatest of all Slavonic poets, Taras
Shevchenko, set to work and added to it his own noble conceptions
of the human spirit. Devotion to the cause of his people and to the
highest ideals of human liberty was his especial contribution to the
language which he molded into being, a true poetic language.
From that time Ukrainian literature has not lacked authors of varying
degrees of excellence and of vision to comment from generation to
generation on the aspirations of their people and of humanity. They
have followed the various social movements of the times and they have
broadened their range of interests from the narrow area in which they
lived to include every land where the Ukrainian people have been living
under alien rule.
More than that, they have realized that no literature can live and
develop for itself alone. They have come more and more into contact
with the great movements of world literature. They have felt themselves
a part of the international world of culture, of that brotherhood of
mankind that has been so brutally attacked in the last years. With
each generation the outstanding authors have gained a broader outlook
on life, a closer contact with and a fuller understanding of the best
that was being done in the world. They have worked hard and have
succeeded in placing Ukrainian literature on an equality with the other
literatures of the Slavonic nations and of Europe as a whole.
There is a direct and unswerving line of service to the democratic
ideals of humanity and to the cause of the people from Kotlyarevsky
through Shevchenko and Franko and Lesya Ukrainka to the present time.
It is a line of which the Ukrainian people may well be proud and we
can be sure that their ideals will not die but that in the newer and
better world after the war the goals for which they have struggled
will be realized and that Ukrainian literature and culture will play a
prominent part in the development of the coming centuries.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
GENERAL
Ukrainian Literature--“The Atheneum,” London, Aug. 29, 1874, No. 2,
444. “Saturday Review,” London, Vol. 39, June, 1875.
Songs of Ukraine--(translations of Ukrainian songs with notes) by F.
F. Livesey, New York, J. M. Dent & Sons; 1916. 175 pp.
Old Folk Songs (translations of Ukrainian songs) by F. R. Livesey,
“Poetry,” Vol. 14, pp. 24-29 (April, 1919).
Ukraine and its Songs, by F. R. Livesey, “Poetry,” Vol. 14, pp.
36-40. (April, 1919).
Ukraine in Literature--“Literary Digest.” Vol. 58, pp. 29-30 (Aug.
31, 1918), reprinted in “Living Age,” Vol. 298, pp. 752-755 (Sept.
21, 1918).
Our Little Ukrainian Cousin by Clare V. Winlow. Page & Co. Boston,
1925.
The Story of Ukraine, by Marie S. Gambal. Ukrainian Workingmen’s
Association, Scranton, Pa., 1932; 102 pp. ill.
Ukrainian Songs and Lyrics, by Honore Ewach, Winnipeg, Canada, 1933.
A Short History of Ukrainian Literature, by Rev. Mikola Kinash,
translated by Stephen Shumeyko, “The Ukrainian Weekly,” issues Feb.
9, 1934 to April 18, 1936, incl.
A Bird’s Eye View of Ukrainian Literature, by Stephen Shumeyko.
Jubilee Book of the Ukrainian National Association, Jersey City, N.
J., 1934, pp.
Spirit of Ukraine (contains chapters on Ukrainian Literature), by D.
Snowyd, New York, 1935, 152 pp. illus.
Brief Survey of Ukrainian Literature, by Arthur Prudden Coleman,
Ukrainian University Society, New York, 1936, pp. 23.
Masha, the Little Goose Girl (stories about Ukraine), by Marguerita
Rudolph, New York, Macmillan, 1939, 64 pp.
INDIVIDUAL AUTHORS
1. Ivan Kotlyarevsky.
The Aeneid of Kotlyarevsky, by Clarence A. Manning, “Classical
Weekly,” Pittsburgh, Pa. Vol. 36. (Dec. 7, 1942)
2. Hrihori Kvitka.
Marusia (a novel) translated by F. R. Livesey, with introduction by
Lord Tweedsmuir: New York, E. P. Dutton & Co. 1940, pp. 219.
3. Taras Shevchenko.
Life--
A South Russian Poet, by Charles Dickens, Jr. (Morfil) “All Year
Around Weekly,” London, May, 1877. Vol. 18, pp. 224-230, No. 440.
Out of a Kozak They Made a Valet, and Out of a Valet a Genius was
Born, by Van Wyck Brooks, “The Freeman,” Vol. 3, Aug. 10, 1921, pp.
526-527.
Taras Shevchenko, Bard of Ukraine (biographical outline with
some translations by Voynich, Semenyna, Hunter) by Prof. Dmytro
Doreshenko of Prague, with preface by Prof. Clarence A. Manning.
United Ukrainian Organizations of the United States, New York,
1936, pp. 59.
Shevchenko and Women, by Dr. Luke Myshuha (translated by W.
Semenyna). New York, 1940, 94 pp.
Taras Shevchenko by Ivan Franko, “Slavonic Review” London, Vol.
III, pp. 110-116.
Works--
Six Lyrics from the Ruthenian of Taras Shevchenko, translated by E.
L. Voynich, London, 1911. E. Mathews, pp. 64.
The Kobzar of Ukraine, by A. J. Hunter, Winnipeg, 1922, 144 pp.
illus.
Taras’ Night, translated by S. Volska and C. E. Beechofer.
Preface of the Hajdamaki, translated by Clarence A. Manning,
Columbia University Course in Literature, New York, 1928, Vol. 10,
pp. 486-489.
’Tis all the Same to Me; Each Day Goes By. The Roaring Dnieper;
Ukraine Today. At the Roadside, and other verses by Shevchenko,
translated by Waldimir Semenyna, “The Ukrainian Weekly,” 1933-1936.
Thoughts of an Exile, translated by Helen Lubach, “Ukrainian Life,”
August, 1940.
4. Panteleimon Kulish.
Orisia (short story) translated by Helen Kinash Siegler, “The
Ukrainian Weekly,” December 5, 1936.
Black Council (Historical Novel of the 17th century), translated by
Stephen Shumeyko. “The Ukrainian Weekly,” August 8, 1942 to September
18, 1943, incl.
5. Marko Vovchok.
Limerivna (short story), translated by T. L. Wissotsky-Kuntz. “The
Ukrainian Weekly,” Dec. 12-19, 1936.
6. Ivan Franko.
Life--
A Voice from Ukraine (biographical sketch and translation of a
number of poems) by Percival Cundy, Roland, Manitoba, 1932, 74 pp.
Ivan Franko, by Prof. Clarence A. Manning. Ukrainian University
Society, New York, 1938, 33 pp.
Life and Works of Ivan Franko, by Stephen Shumeyko. “The Ukrainian
Weekly,” May 11 to August 24, 1940 incl.
Works--
Taras Shevchenko. “Slavonic Review.”
Doctor Bessedwisser (satiric short story) translated by Waldimir
Semenyna, “The Ukrainian Weekly,” July 11, 1936.
Naimyt. Eternal Revolutionist. Great Anniversary and other poems
translated by Waldimir Semenyna, “The Ukrainian Weekly,” Sept.
3,-Oct. 1, 1938, incl.
Moses, (epic poem) translated by Waldimir Semenyna with
biographical sketch by Stephen Shumeyko. New York, 1936, 93 pp.
In the Blacksmith Shop, (short story), translated by John Panchuk,
“The Ukrainian Weekly,” April 3-May 1, 1937.
Abu Kassim’s Slippers (poem) translated by Waldimir Semenyna, “The
Ukrainian Weekly,” Sept. 3-Oct. 1, 1938.
Thorn in the Foot (novelette). Patrimony (novelette). The Legend of
Pilate (sketch). Little Myron (short story). Constitution for Hogs
(short story). The Blue Fox (short story). The Education of Hrytzko
(short story), translated by Stephen Shumeyko. “The Ukrainian
Weekly,” 1940.
The Jay’s Wing (novelette), translated by R. L. Wissotsky-Kuntz.
“The Ukrainian Weekly,” Jan. 10-Feb. 7, 1941.
7. Lesya Ukrainka.
The Babylonian Captivity (drama), translated by S. Volska and C. E.
Beechofer, “Five Russian Plays with one from the Ukrainian,” London,
Trubner & Co.
8. Mikhaylo Kotsyubinsky.
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (novelette), Written in the Book of
Life (short story), translated by Stephen Shumeyko, “The Ukrainian
Weekly,” Jan. 27-March 16, 1940 incl.
Out of the Depths. Praised be Life (short stories), translated by C.
A. Andrusyshen. “The Ukrainian Weekly,” March-April, 1940.
By the Sea (short story) translated by R. V. Orlans, “The Ukrainian
Weekly,” May 2-May 23, 1941, incl.
9. Vasil Stefanyk.
Stefanyk’s Own Story (autobiographical sketch) translated by Stephen
Shumeyko, “The Ukrainian Weekly,” May 20, 1939.
The Burglar. Novel Incident. They Took Him Away. (Short stories),
translated by Stephen Shumeyko, “The Ukrainian Weekly,” Jan. 7-14,
1937, Feb. 27, 1937, Sept. 23, 1939, respectively.
Suicide (short story) translated by C. A. Andrusyshev, “Ukrainian
Life,” June, 1940.
His Sons. Children of War (short stories) translated by Waldimir
Semenyna, “The Ukrainian Weekly,” Oct. 14, 1939, and Nov. 20, 1943,
respectively.
Maple Leaves (short story), translated by R. L. Wissotsky-Kuntz, “The
Ukrainian Weekly,” Feb. 14, 1941.
Their Land (short story), translated by Marie S. Gambal, “Ukrainian
Life,” Sept. 1941.
The Dew (short story) translated by Stephen Davidovich, “The
Ukrainian Weekly,” Jan. 19, 1942.
10. Bohdan Lepky.
A Peaceful Death (short story) translated by Stephen Shumeyko. “The
Ukrainian Weekly,” Oct. 15, 1938.
The Old Man (short story) translated by Stephen Shumeyko. “The
Ukrainian Weekly,” July 23, 1939.
The Flower of Fortune (short story) translated by Stephen Shumeyko,
“The Ukrainian Weekly.”
Visits from the Dead. Ready to Go (short stories) translated by J.
A., “Ukrainian Life,” April and June, 1941, respectively.
Transcriber’s Notes
Spellings of proper nouns have been left as-is save as noted.
Inconsistent spelling of “folksongs”/“folk songs”/“folk-songs” has
been retained.
Use of “as” for “such as” has been retained.
Added Foreword and Introduction to Table of Contents.
p. 8 changed “indefencible” to “indefensible”
p. 12 changed “,” to “.” in “Poland. At about”
p. 12 changed “sucesses” to “successes”
p. 15 changed “innnovations” to “innovations”
p. 17 changed “right” to “rights” in “rights and privileges”
p. 19 changed “prentensions” to “pretensions”
p. 20 the close of the quote beginning “The greatest truth...” has
been left as-is
p. 21 changed “.” to “,” in “_one’s self_, _A friendly_”
p. 25 changed “Poltave” to “Poltava” in “theatre at Poltava”
p. 27 changed “the” to “that” in “forget that Kotlyarevsky”
p. 28 changed “Kotylarevsky’s” to “Kotlyarevsky’s”
p. 28 changed “naivite” to “naivete”
p. 28 added period to end of quoted stanza
p. 31 changed “Shakhovoskoy” to “Shakhovskoy” in “Shakhovskoy did not
know”
p. 32 changed “Shakhovoskoy” to “Shakhovskoy” (twice)
p. 35 changed “Kotleyarevsky” to “Kotlyarevsky”
p. 35 changed “penname” to “pen name”
p. 36 changed “countryment” to “countrymen”
p. 37 changed “skilfull” to “skillful”
p. 42 changed “appointd” to “appointed”
p. 43 changed “introuced” to “introduced”
p. 43 changed “Bulmer-Lytton” to “Bulwer-Lytton”
p. 44 changed “incluring” to “including”
p. 47 italicized “_Perebenda_”
p. 47 changed “These” to “There” in “There is less of”
p. 47 changed “,” to “.” in “passing of time. Shevchenko”
p. 52 changed “earliier” to “earlier”
p. 55 changed “awakend” to “awakened”
p. 60 added “in” before “1862”
p. 61 changed “?” to “.” in “That question was still to be answered.”
p. 68 changed “Russiian” to “Russian”
p. 72 changed “fougth” to “fought”
p. 72 changed “opening” to “opened” in “Maria Theresa opened in
Vienna”
p. 73 added “of” in “before the time of Kotlyarevsky”
p. 75 changed “desipte” to “despite”
p. 79 changed “one” to “on” in “on the other hand”
p. 86 changed “Franco” to “Franko”
p. 87 changed “time” to “times” and “poems” to “poem” in “at times as
in his poem _Ukraine_”
p. 92 italicized “_I_” in “_I hope against hope_”
p. 92 removed “.” following “without a name”
p. 92 changed “Artenis” to “Artemis”
p. 98 changed “Sketches” to “sketches”
p. 98 changed “finally chiselled” to “finely chiseled”
p. 100 changed “,” to “.” in “loses all contact with them. He”
p. 101 changed “seeemd” to “seemed”
p. 104 changed “tooks” to “took” in “took its rise”
p. 106 changed “Stefanik” to “Stefanyk”
p. 107 changed “an” to “a” in “like a female”
p. 119 changed “Czechslovak” to “Czechoslovak”
p. 119 removed comma following “Mikola Khvylovy”
p. 120 changed “physiogonomy” to “physiognomy”
p. 121 changed “down trodden” to “downtrodden”
p. 123 removed “1.” from “GENERAL” header
p. 123 changed “,” to “.” following “(April, 1919).”
p. 123 changed “Ukrzinian Natiokal” to “Ukrainian National”
p. 123 page range is missing for “A Bird’s Eye View of Ukrainian
Literature”
p. 124 added close quotes to “The Ukrainian Weekly”
p. 125 changed “.” to “--” following “Life” and “Works”
p. 126 added close quotes to “Five Russian Plays with one from the
Ukrainian”
p. 126 changed “Michael” to “Mikhaylo”
p. 126 removed “Life” header before “By the Sea (short story)”
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