The half century before Taras Shevchenko began to write saw the
beginning of those tendencies which were to develop to their full
power at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth
centuries. It was a period of transition in which the principles and
ideas which had dominated Europe for centuries were being steadily
shaken and losing all authority over the minds of men. They were
questioned logically by the leading thinkers of the day but they were
with equal vigor attacked by the uneducated masses who were vaguely
hoping for better conditions of living. At the same time these new
ideas with a few exceptions had not been translated into effective
political and economic action and the resulting situation was the
despair of both the reformers and the conservatives. There was an
uneasy stalemate which differed from land to land and even from
district to district.
On the positive side the successful revolt of the American colonies
and the establishment of the Republic of the United States left a
deeper imprint upon European thought, even in the east of Europe, than
we usually think. There is no need to exaggerate this but for good or
ill the ideas of federation, as shown by the new country in the West,
penetrated into distant lands and was hailed as a substitute for the
centralizing policies of the autocratic monarchs who were working
to destroy on paper as well as in practice the local liberties and
traditions which had existed for centuries.
This had been followed by the French Revolution and then the Napoleonic
Wars. The confusion and hostilities had aided the ambitious plans of
such rulers as Catherine II of Russia who had used the preoccupation
of Europe with the West to finish the dismemberment of Poland and the
annihilation of the last Ukrainian organizations. It comes as something
of a shock to realize that the Zaporozhian Sich, long reduced to only
a shadow of its past greatness, was not destroyed until 1775, and the
last vestiges of the Hetmanate, which had been practically turned into
an aristocratic regime, were wiped out in 1783 and the territory was
divided into governments and ruled on the Russian pattern. Thus so far
as Ukraine was concerned, the final extinction of the old liberties
came precisely at the period of the American Revolution. In 1792, with
the division of Poland, Russia took over the region of Kiev, the
area where Shevchenko was later to be born, incorporated that into
its grandiose structure, and reduced the population to the status of
Russian serfs.
The final end of local liberties was thus hardly carried into practice
when Russia was compelled to face the Napoleonic Wars. The officers
of the aristocratic and Europeanized classes were brought face to
face with the new ideas which they met definitely in Paris and in the
contact with their allies during the campaigns and they began to dream
of introducing into their native country some of the modern practices
which they had seen in the West.
These men were however too weak and too scattered to combine their
influence for an effective movement and when they attempted it in the
short-lived Decembrist revolt of 1825, they were decisively checked,
and their leaders were executed or exiled to Siberia. The Polish
revolt of 1831 fared little better and by the time that Nicholas I was
securely established on the throne, he could in his own imagination
breathe easily and forget that there had been such turmoils in the
governmental organization.
Thus in the Russian Empire, it seemed as if the powers of the reaction
had been definitely established. The ideas of the Holy Alliance and of
Prince Metternich seemed as solid as the monolithic structure erected
in Moscow by Peter the Great. On the political side the conservative
and reactionary factions were in full control and the rulers no longer,
as in the days of Catherine, played with new ideas, even if they had
no serious intention of practicing them. There were peasant disorders
but there were no more such convulsions as that led by Pugachov and
his Cossacks which seriously menaced the established order and which
demanded the use of large military forces to save the regime.
In the meanwhile every step forward in the Europeanization of the
Russian aristocracy meant an increase in the exactions demanded of the
serfs. This was a process that had been continuing especially since
the reforms of Peter the Great, when there was inserted a steadily
deepening wedge between the manorhouse and the peasant. Long hours of
forced labor on the nobleman’s lands and the ever diminishing size of
the serf allotments because of an increase of population made the life
of the poor unfortunates more and more miserable. This was especially
marked in those areas where the Russian system had been but recently
introduced and where traditions of an older and happier time still
lingered on in the minds of the older inhabitants.
Along with this political and economic stagnation and retrogression
went a new intellectual and artistic development. This made itself
felt throughout the whole of the Empire. It had both its good and its
bad sides. On the positive side, there was in Russia the appearance of
a new art, a new literature which tried to imitate and then to adapt
the French pseudo-classic culture of the eighteenth century. Nobles
who had previously known little but the traditional Church Slavonic
conceptions, handed down from antiquity, were fascinated by the new
innovations. New methods of literary composition were introduced. A new
language was devised. New influences from Western Europe came in.
All this could not fail to draw away a large part of the intellectually
alert landowners from their original moorings. During the eighteenth
century the Ukrainian educated class tended more and more to accept
the Europeanized Russian culture. This was the easier, because the
Ukrainian centres, as the old Academy of Peter Mohyla in Kiev, had
busied themselves entirely with Church Slavonic and theological
subjects. The system of education had not included any of the results
of Western development, the language used was artificial and differed
markedly from the colloquial speech of the villagers, and even such
a man as Skovoroda in the eighteenth century had not taken any
definite step to assault the entrenched system except by the power
of his own personal refusal to bend himself to its demands. Where
in the seventeenth century the Kiev schools had sent scholars to
reeducate Moscow, now after the absorption by Russia, they contented
themselves with a continuation of the old policies. As a result
there was a growing exodus of the young men to the dominant center
of St. Petersburg and there was a consequent fall in the culture and
educational resources of the Ukrainian lands and a rise in Russian
influence.
These tendencies were again counterbalanced by a new series of
developments in Western Europe which could not fail to create a
reaction throughout the whole of the continent. On the one hand,
Rousseau in France developed his theories that the natural man had a
higher moral virtue than the man of civilization and culture. There
started a return to the primitive which could not fail to turn people’s
attention to the condition of the serfs, while at the same time the
renewed theories of the rights of man attracted attention to their
misfortunes.
Side by side with this there were the doctrines of Herder as to the
superiority of the folk song as a form of literature and the focussing
of the attention of the educated on the speech of the common people and
on their poetic productions and artistic practices. Those tendencies
which had manifested themselves in Percy’s _Reliques_, a collection of
Scotch ballads, which had continued with a desire to collect German
folksongs, in which even Goethe took part, and the later interest in
the Serb popular ballads naturally spread into Russia and resulted
not only in the discovery of the _byliny_ in the far north but in a
revaluation of the Ukrainian folk songs which had passed unnoticed
outside of the villages or which had been treated with amused disdain
by the polished noblemen. A new wave of interest was therefore set into
motion and it came so soon after the disintegration of the old order
that parts of it could be easily absorbed into the new movement.
It was in this environment that Ivan Kotlyarevsky published in 1798 the
_Eneida_, the first work to be written in the Ukrainian vernacular. It
is to be noticed that the author in his humorous adaptation of the old
Latin story to the Ukrainian scene rested rather on the old classical
traditions of the eighteenth century and the practices of the Kiev
Academy than on the newer ideas which were beginning to appear on the
intellectual horizon. Yet the work appeared at a critical time and it
showed to the people still smarting under the newly imposed yoke that
it was possible to develop the vernacular and to produce outstanding
works of literature in it. This was all to the good and it in a way
corresponded to the revival of the Czech language which was being
started by the philologically inclined Josef Dobrovský.
Yet before the vernacular literature could take a firm foothold,
some other idea was necessary. This was found in the beginnings of
Romanticism which swept with startling rapidity throughout Europe. This
was a complicated movement and its form varied with the individual
countries.
It made its appearance in Russia largely through the influence of
Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky, who was for nearly half a century
the leading critic and adviser of the young aristocratic poets who
developed at the Lycée of Tsarskoye Selo at the imperial court of
Alexander I. This circle included Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, the
greatest of Russian poets, although in his composition there was always
more of the older classical ideas and practices than it was fashionable
to admit at the time.
Zhukovsky, who was an excellent translator, acclimatized in Russia
the whole apparatus of the weird, the supernatural and the mediaeval
that was being developed in Germany. He early translated Bürger’s
_Lenore_, the story of the dead lover returning to claim his living
bride. He gave his people poems and stories of mediaeval chivalry and
he translated many of the ballads of Goethe and Schiller. Very soon he
added to this movement the influence of Byron and for some fifteen or
twenty years the gilded youth of the Russian capital not only imitated
Lord Byron’s poems in their writings but they acted out his ideas in
real life and considered themselves to be wanderers persecuted by the
world.
With it all, the twenties and the thirties were the Golden Age of
Russian poetry. Pushkin especially soon outgrew the narrow imitation
of Byron. He added to the influences to which he was subjected those
of Sir Walter Scott and Shakespeare. He wrote historical poems
conceived in a profound admiration for Peter the Great as _Poltava_
but at the same time in _The Captain’s Daughter_ and other works he
showed a strong appreciation of the career of that doughty old rebel
Pugachov. Yet during the last years of his life he expressed more
sympathy as in the _Brazen Horseman_ with the sufferings of the poorer
class of the people. The collapse of the Decembrist movement and the
silencing of the reforming elements among the aristocracy gave rise
to the beginnings of a more critical literature based on an attempted
understanding of Western ideas and sharply divided Russian thought
between the Slavophiles who were primarily conservative and attempted
to find differences between Russian development and that of Western
Europe to the advantage of the former and the Westerners, conservative
and liberal alike, who sought to emphasize the backwardness of Russia
and to demand the remodeling of the country on western lines. By 1840
these men, led by the furious Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky, had
secured the ear of most of the literary journals and were well on
their way toward the formation of a realistic school and the radical
intelligentsia.
The Romantic movement therefore had but a short life in Russia. This
is not to be wondered at, for the Russian mediaeval history was not of
a character that lent itself easily to the glorification of the past
and of the feudal period that was so effective in German. Chivalry as
an organized movement had not taken root in mediaeval Moscow with its
strong Tatar and Asiatic influences and Russian Romanticism always
lacked a certain basis which was found in the Western European
countries where for centuries the lords and barons had waged petty
warfare with many deeds of individual daring.
A special position in this movement was held by Nikolay Vasilyevich
Gogol, the son of one of the early writers in Ukrainian. In his
_Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka_ and later in _Mirgorod_ and
especially in his powerful Cossack tale of _Taras Bulba_, he pictured
the romantic side of Ukrainian or Little Russian tradition (to use the
name which he gave it himself) and he told tales of the happier side
of the life of the region where he had been born. His works really
introduced into Russian literature a Russianized Ukrainian school of
writing which by its color and charm attracted wide attention.
On the other hand in Poland, even after the division, there was the
same outpouring of the Romantic spirit. Adam Mickiewicz who had started
his brilliant poetical career in Wilno and Kaunas and had then been
exiled to Russia and had finally gone abroad was the leading figure.
One of that group of Polish patriots which had gathered around the
University of Wilno, he had raised Polish literature to a new level
of excellence. He was ably seconded by other writers as Juljusz
Slowacki and Zygmunt Krasiński, the two other Romantic poets who were
also forced into exile. The writings of this group were more in the
conventional Romantic style and exercised an even stronger influence on
Poland than did the Russian Romanticists in the narrow sense. Many of
the writers of this time as Antoni Malczewski were familiar with the
picturesque aspects of Ukrainian life, its rich supply of folksongs and
its elaborate peasant rituals. As a result they introduced so-called
Ukrainian themes into Polish literature and relying upon their Galician
experiences, they made the Ukrainians or Ruthenians as they called them
really popular.
In the meanwhile the energetic young group at Wilno were preparing for
revolt which finally took place in 1831. Despite initial successes, the
Russian Tsar speedily got control of this as he had of the Decembrist
uprising among the Russian aristocrats. He suppressed it as brutally
and for some decades the Poles were compelled to maintain abroad in
France their chief literary activity, which continued to emphasize the
principles of Romanticism with a strong feeling for their dismembered
country.
Finally we cannot overlook the first halting steps of that movement
which was destined to be labelled Pan-Slavism or the Slavonic
brotherhood. It was really launched in Bohemia by the Slovak Jan
Kollár who in 1824 published a collection of sonnets, the _Daughter
of Slava_, in which he pleaded for a brotherhood of all the Slavonic
races. His work set the key for much of the later Czech literature
and his ideas expanded in more prosaic form by Pavel Šafařík and
others slowly permeated all classes of thinking Slavs. To Kollár and
his friends this undoubtedly meant a free brotherhood with Russia as
the most powerful member and protector against the Germanic world. To
the Russians it meant the absorption of the other Slavs by Russia and
the Slavophiles easily took many of the current ideas of the German
philosophers and crossed them with conceptions of the Russian Orthodox
Church to create a theory for their new nationalism.
All of these various impulses combined to influence the newly born
Ukrainian literature. There was much that directly appealed to the
writers. For example the Ukrainians were conscious of their past, at
least those who were conscious of anything. They knew that the exploits
of the Kozaks were exactly the sort of thing that had attracted the
attention of the Romantic poets of both Russia and Poland. They knew
the wealth of their folklore, the number of weird themes that they had
at their disposal. They realized the potentialities of the description
of their folk customs. Besides, tales of the unhappy peasant, the
seduced girl, the serf were common in the Romantic literature and the
everyday life around them gave them countless examples to illustrate
their writings.
It required the work of a master to put the new modern Ukrainian
literature on its feet. Kotlyarevsky had made a start in fashioning
the language in which they could work. Kvitka-Osnovyanenko had carried
on the work with his prose tales but there was needed an outstanding
author who was sincerely devoted to the Ukrainian cause and was at
the same time a master of the language, to weld together the various
elements and to produce in Ukrainian works which would be on a par with
those of the two conquering cultures which were then at their highest
stage of poetic development. With the loss of most of their educated
classes and with the hard conditions and the scanty opportunities
offered to the peasants and the serfs, it might seem as if the man
could not be found and as if the Ukrainian start was from the beginning
foredoomed to failure. To the surprise of even the most optimistic, a
great poet suddenly appeared, Taras Shevchenko.
_CHAPTER TWO_