_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.