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.