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.