her plays. The troupes of actors were in many cases experienced and
able to represent the old fashioned type of characters and the old
fashioned problems. They were hardly prepared by training or outlook
to give a good exposition of this new kind of problem. It is true
that her writings were more literary and not so well adapted to
theatrical presentation as those of the older writers. She had not had
that experience with the theatre that was possessed by many of her
predecessors but under proper auspices some of her sketches contain
striking dramatic scenes.
Thus Lesya Ukrainka used her very isolation from the world and the fact
that she was obliged to live in a literary atmosphere with books as her
chief friends to increase her power to write a Ukrainian literature
in a modern and more cosmopolitan style. She was typical of the newer
intelligentsia who were none the less patriotic, none the less zealous
for Ukraine, because they were able to present its case in forms that
were being developed abroad. In a sense her work marked the end of
that old ethnographical-political period which had been so necessary
in the first stages of arousing the people to a consciousness of their
past. She assumed that that had been achieved, and on that basis she
started for the younger generation a new literature which was to
adapt the general ideas of modern Europe to Ukraine and to bring the
intelligentsia into a new world.
Surrounded by those friends whom she knew and liked and isolated
from the worst storms of the day, she often felt the oppression of
loneliness and solitude. She could not hope for wide popularity and it
is probably not too much to say that the wider circles of Ukrainian
society began to appreciate her only after her untimely death. Since
then there has been a steadily widening circle of her admirers who have
recognized in her one of the great masters of the Ukrainian language.
Her native talent and her industry made her works masterpieces. She
won many imitators for the new style of writing. The universality of
her themes and the careful treatment that she gave to various human
emotions have made her more than the poet of a passing era and she is
one of those authors who gain a steadily increasing number of readers
and admirers as time passes. Yet with it all her desire for the
cosmopolitan never led her away from her native land and in her Ukraine
found a devoted patriot and a great understanding soul.
CHAPTER TWELVE
MIKHAYLO KOTSYUBINSKY
During the greater part of the nineteenth century it was the task of
the Ukrainian authors to arouse and educate their people. The nation
in its darkest hour had lost to Russia or to Poland practically the
whole of its educated class and the national habits and characteristics
were preserved in the villages among the illiterate peasants. The
first and most pressing duty was to form a new educated class, to
give a knowledge of the past of Ukraine to those people who were but
dimly conscious of their existence as a separate entity and to lay the
foundation for a deeper study of their own traditions and habits. At
the same time the harsh censorship and the regulations, especially of
the Russian government, practically required that this work be carried
on under the guise of the study of ethnography and archaeology. The
very names of the journals that appeared in Russia as _Bulletin of the
Archaeological Commission_ and the _Kievskaya Starina_, (_Antiquities
of Kiev_) the only ones that were allowed to appear during the periods
of repression show the truth of this statement and it was only natural
accordingly that the writers who were compelled to work with one eye
on the censorship tended to exploit these possibilities. There grew up
in Ukrainian literature a definite ethnographic school and the writers
with pleasure and profit gave long descriptions of the manners and
customs of the villagers. The time, however, had to come, when the
authors would no longer be content with these self-imposed limitations
and would branch out into a broader field. The author who was to do
this in prose was Mikhaylo Kotsyubinsky, one of the greatest artists in
this field.
Kotsyubinsky was born at Vinnitsa in Podolia in 1864. His father was a
poor official but during his father’s lifetime he was able to study in
the bursa and the theological academy. He did not finish the course and
after his father’s death he made his living for a while as a private
tutor. He continued his own studies especially of literature and
finally entered the government service. In the early nineties he was
attached to the commission for the elimination of the phyloxera which
was ruining the vineyards in the south and he passed several years in
Bessarabia and the Crimea, where he had extensive opportunities to
study the lives of the villagers. He then served in the statistical
office in Chernihiv. During this time the Revolution of 1905 broke out
and Kotsyubinsky became very friendly with Maxim Gorky and many of the
leaders of the Social Democratic party of Russia. He finally retired
on a pension in 1911 to devote himself entirely to literature. He went
to Italy and lived near Gorky on the island of Capri. His heart grew
steadily worse and he returned to Kiev for a long period of treatment
but it did no good and he passed away in 1913 at the age of forty-nine.
Kotsyubinsky started to write in the same ethnographic realistic style
that had been popularized by Levitsky-Nechuy. He had been inspired to
write in Ukrainian by the _Kobzar_ of Shevchenko and the stories of
Marko Vovchok but he very soon broadened his literary range by the
diligent reading of later Russian authors such as Chekhov and also by
the careful study of the French and Scandinavian naturalists as Zola,
Maupassant, and Hamsun. All of these affected his style in passing
but he gradually worked out his own attitude toward literature and
developed that individual style in which his main works were written.
As he developed, he came more and more to understand the importance
of beauty in writing. He realized that there was always one correct
word artistically for every situation and he made great efforts to
find that right word, so as to secure the maximum effectiveness of his
work. He had a lyric and almost a sentimental appreciation of nature
and his power of casting a roseate glow over a scene and giving a
poetic picture in a few simple words of prose is marked. Perhaps of
his contemporaries only Korolenko shares that power and he too was
of Ukrainian origin, although he wrote in Russian. The ability to
transfigure an unpleasant and sordid scene and make of it a thing of
beauty without preventing the reader from realizing its real character
is a marked feature of Kotsyubinsky’s style. It definitely advances
him above the level of the great majority of the Ukrainian authors and
makes him a European writer in the best sense.
Side by side with this is a delicate appreciation of human psychology.
In his short stories with a remarkable economy in means, he is able to
penetrate the human heart and to express the most poignant feelings and
the most secret ambitions of a man or woman.
These characteristics are most clearly seen in his last collection
published just about the time of his death and especially in the
_Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors_, a story of peasant life in the Beskid
Mountains which he visited in 1911. It is the account of the life of
the shepherd boy Ivan Paliychuk. We see the young boy under the shadow
of the family feud with the Gutenyuk family in which his father is
killed, and his love for young Marichka of the rival clan. There is
a really idyllic picture of the young love of these two children of
nature, but Ivan is compelled by poverty to take a position as herdsman
for the summer in the mountains and during that summer Marichka is
drowned. Later he marries the wealthy Palagna and all seems to prosper
but there is not that affection and sincerity between them that had
existed between the young Ivan and his first love. His wife misbehaves
shamefully with the sorcerer Yura and the two plan to kill Ivan by
magic but he, broken hearted and in despair, wanders off into the woods
and mountains, lured on by a spirit, a Nyavka that took the form of
his beloved Marichka. Finally he fell over a precipice and was killed.
Then came the funeral rites, the entertainments and the games that
were customary while all through the neighborhood resounded the death
strains of the Hutsul pipes. How far at this moment Kotsyubinsky is
from the cold realism of the earlier authors can be seen from the way
in which he enters into the realm of the peasant superstitions and
makes plausible the appearance to Ivan in his despair of all those
supernatural beings, the Nyavka and the Chugaystyr. He carries his
readers into the spirit of the mountains not in any cold archaeological
sense but as a living world apart from the ordinary affairs of men.
If this was the culmination of the work of Kotsyubinsky, he had covered
a long path in his creative development. He had started with little
sketches and it was only in the pictures of the south in _Under the
Minarets_ and _In the Paths of the Devil_ that he had begun to work out
this finely chiseled style, the success of which depends so much upon
his ability to evoke the beauty and the artistry of untutored nature.
The style is still only partially developed in such tales as _At a
Great Price_ published in 1902. It might easily be a historical novel
for it refers back to those days when the persecuted and oppressed
Ukrainians were seeking to escape into Turkey in the hopes of founding
there a new Sich after their own had been destroyed. Ostap starts on
the difficult journey and his wife, the devoted Solomeya, overtakes him
and goes with him and shares his hardships. They try once to cross the
border but the Cossack guards intercept them. A little later Ostap is
badly wounded in another attempt and is nursed back to life by the care
of his wife. They are helped and plundered by the Gypsies and finally
Ostap is rescued by his wife and a friend from the hands of the Turks,
but she is drowned in the Danube in the attempt. So he lives alone, and
he shows his bare back to those who will listen and look at the marks
left by the cruel floggings which he had received in his lifetime.
“Here on my back is a memory from my master, and in front between my
ribs is my present from the Moskal. Well placed ... with them I will go
to God.... I paid well for my liberty, I paid a bitter price. Half of
me lies at the bottom of the Danube and the other is waiting and cannot
wait to join it.” Here is the germ of the later development with its
appreciation of nature and of the undying call of liberty and democracy.
Kotsyubinsky was keenly aware of the wave of unrest that was sweeping
Ukraine along with the rest of Russia just prior to the Revolution of
1905 and in the _Fata Morgana_, he gives us the first rumblings of the
coming storm in the picture of the poor peasant Andriy and his wife
Malanka and his daughter Hafiyka. The father has long since given up
the struggle to become independent. His wife has married him for want
of a better suitor and they have one daughter, beautiful as a picture
but still with no dowry and faced with the possibility of a joyless
life. The father dreams that a factory may be built, so that there can
be work. The mother still has the unsatisfied craving of the Ukrainian
peasant for the land. She muses “How splendid thou art, O earth. It is
pleasant to sow thee with grain, to adorn thee with green, to decorate
thee with flowers. It is pleasant to work thee. Only thou are not good
in this, that thou art not kind to the poor man. For the rich thou
glowest with beauty, the rich thou pleasest, thou clothest him, and the
poor man thou receivest only in a grave.... But our hands are waiting
to work our meadows, our cities, our gardens.... They will divide thee,
O land, and ‘our benefactor’ will come to the plough. Oh, God, God,
even in my old age grant me this happiness to bring out my child among
people.” Into this environment come the first students who are arrested
by the police, the first outbursts of hostility against the established
order. Kotsyubinsky had planned a trilogy on this theme but he only
finished two parts and the whole remained a mere skeleton.
There are many other stories dealing with the Revolution and the
revolutionary movement and Kotsyubinsky tries in each to illustrate
the psychology of the various participants, as the _Birthday Present_
where the bureaucratic father decides to give his son the pleasure of
seeing a hanging but the boy fails to appreciate the honor which is
shown him. He interferes, and at the end, the father fears that he
will be put out of the service, that the boy will be excluded from the
school, while the young Dorya is thinking for his part that he must
somehow punish the people responsible for such an outrageous act. Or
_The Horses are not to Blame_ gives us the reactions of a family on the
very eve of the time when the peasants demand from them their land.
Yet perhaps the best stories of Kotsyubinsky are not those that have
this kind of content but those where an ordinary man faces some sharp
crisis. Thus in _What is written in the Book of Life_, an old peasant
woman feeling herself in the way and wearied that death does not come,
persuades her son to take her out into the woods to leave her to die.
He does so, but at the very moment when she is determined to leave this
world, she shows so much interest in the chatter about her neighbors,
that the son finally changes his mind and goes back for her. He thinks
of all the rites and customs that surround the average funeral, the
drinking, and the entertainment and these things done for the good
opinion of the neighbors are almost as potent in making him change his
mind as is the actual sorrow for the fate of the poor old woman whom
death has forgotten. Or there are such stories as the _Letter_ where
a young and idealistic boy is brought face to face on his return home
with the killing of a little pig for his dinner. The stain of blood
separates the family and without knowing why, he loses all contact
with them. He is horrified by the church and its services and he looks
perfectly calmly at the fighting and the drunken brawls that go on
around him for blood will have blood.
One of his most striking stories is the _Dream_, and here we see one of
the underlying ideas of our author. The scene is the prosaic life of
an ordinary family. When they were young and first married, Antin and
Marta had something to live for. They had love and affection but the
dull routine of life had carried all that away and now they were living
well but uninterestingly. There were the prosaic facts of daily life,
the ordinary cares and petty household and office activities. Marta was
unconscious of the loss. Antin was and in his dreams which he tells his
wife, he resurrects the past and imagines a new romance with a girl
in Italy. There is beauty, there is love, there is passion, and it is
all a dream. At first the mere idea that her well-known husband could
become a problem to her, that there were in his being elements that
she had effectively stifled in herself was too much for her. Yet at
the end it did rouse her to make an attempt to bring back something of
that past, and “She did not know whether she would have the strength,
whether storms would rage at some future time, but now oftener than
before roses adorned their dining table.”
It was the fault of routine. “She had not known to guard life, to
preserve its beauty. Daily she had been throwing it away in trifles,
in the useless filth of existence, until she had turned it into a foul
pit. Poetry cannot live in such an atmosphere, and without it, life is
a crime.”
That is the real gist of the work of Kotsyubinsky. In his memoirs Gorky
emphasizes this quality of the author and it takes precedence over all
other aspects of his work. Life can be made interesting. Life can be
made good. Sympathy and love and kindness can be universal and perhaps
they are so natural to man that they can even pass over into the
consciousness of dogs and other animals that are near to man. It is a
law of life and he who neglects does so at his infinite peril.
It is this spirit that moved and inspired all of his writings. It gave
him the feeling and the desire to penetrate the human heart and mind
to understand man as he really can be. Humanity, beauty, the people,
Ukraine--these were the things for which Kotsyubinsky lived and about
which he thought and wrote and dreamed. Between him and Levitsky and
the older novelists there was a great gulf. They had been as eager to
help the people as he was. They were as self-sacrificing as he was,
but they did not try to take into account those other values which he
regarded so highly.
Like them in style he was realistic and naturalistic. He endeavored
to deal with life as it was in the rough and the unmild as in the
_Intermezzo_, where life among human beings is like that among the
wolves for the people ruined by syphilis, poverty, alcohol, and
illiteracy, know nothing better than to fight and destroy one another,
but there was something more, for he wished not only to tell a story
to impress the minds and hearts of his readers, but he wanted also to
evoke a mood so as to stir their emotions and to rouse their sense of
beauty.
Beauty and harmony appear in all the later works of Kotsyubinsky. It
is a deliberate beauty and a deliberate harmony, not like that natural
spark of the genius Shevchenko who seemed from the very beginning to
know what to say and how to say it. With Kotsyubinsky it was something
acquired. The feeling was natural to him. He had that finely balanced
character that was favorable to its growth but there was a conscious
training of that feeling. It is small wonder that Kotsyubinsky was
not a voluminous writer. It was impossible to imagine him combining
literature and journalism or entering the rough and tumble arena of
life. It is impossible to picture him careless or indifferent. The
very methods that he borrowed from impressionism and grafted on to
his realistic settings are those which are the results of a real
understanding of the finer points of culture. Without poetry, life is
a crime. It is a new note in Ukrainian literature, a note of a growing
maturity, a greater refinement, a sign that Ukrainian literature is
taking its place as one of the culture literatures of the world. The
problems of Ukraine are still as pressing, they have not been solved
but Kotsyubinsky feels that it is no use to harp only on the external
and the immediate. The Ukrainians still have souls and if they are
to be really civilized people, they must share the emotions and the
sensations of civilized people. They must deepen their life as well as
broaden it. From his earliest efforts Kotsyubinsky steadily deepened
and broadened his range of subjects. He did for prose what Lesya
Ukrainka and others had done for poetry and when he died in 1913, he
could look at the world and say, as he had always thought, that life
was good, that mankind had enormous potentialities, and that he had
done his part in making them available and accessible for literature.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
VASIL STEFANYK
A new realism appeared in the twentieth century but this was
significantly different from the older form that had been handled with
so much success by Marko Vovchok and Levitsky. Its centre of gravity
was different. Where the older authors had indulged in stories of
peasant life that had the avowed intention of awaking the educated
classes to a realization of the problems confronting the Ukrainian
people, the new authors sought to give pictures of the conditions
as they existed at that period when the old patriarchal order was
definitely breaking down. There is not the constant harping on the
theme that changes in the social order might produce important results.
Rather there is a representation of people who have been broken by
life and we are asked to look at them as they are in their misery and
despair.
It is definitely the underprivileged who are described. We are not told
how or why they have become that way. The fact is that they exist and
they form a sad spectacle for the keen observer. An atmosphere of fate
broods over the whole and there is nothing that they or we can do to
change their lot. Life has dealt them many blows. It has taken away
their power of resistance and man becomes an individual, no longer one
of a group that is bound together as a class, a family, or a member
of society. He stands out by himself with his own problems with which
he cannot grapple and if he has a family or friends beside him, they
cannot do much to ease his solitude. We are born alone and we die alone
and compared with those great truths, our petty human attempts to
understand one another are doomed to futility, try as we will.
Gone are the days when we feel that the peasant, the serf, has within
himself abundant resources of mental and moral and physical strength.
Gone are the days when we are led to believe that these oppressed and
insulted people are the backbone of society and can be led and taught
to live a better and a more abundant life. The tide has turned and is
running strongly toward other phases of existence. If there is to be a
brighter future, we cannot expect it to come from the actions of the
impoverished, drunken, broken peasants. We must seek it elsewhere, if
we can.
The new style perhaps took its rise in French naturalism but it was
certainly influenced by Dostoyevsky’s interest in broken souls, by
the misunderstandings of Chekhov, and by the revolutionary heroes of
Gorky. It was influenced to some extent by the teachings of Marxism
and the growth of radical political parties which clustered around the
factories and the cities.
The phenomenon was not confined to the Slavonic countries. We can
trace it in English and American literature, in the almost unconscious
efforts of the more modern writers to turn away from the picturing of
virtuous peasants and farmers and to see in the country characters
who possess all possible vices and perversions. The old view that the
city is the source of corruption and decay and the rural districts
are the home of virtue is looked upon as old-fashioned and the newer
psychology endeavors to analyze, to explain or at least to picture
almost photographically the warped and helpless types that are found
everywhere.
The same movement made its appearance in Ukrainian and the great
master of this school was Vasil Stefanyk, a consummate artist and a
miniaturist in words. His pictures are short and concise. In a few
phrases and a few paragraphs he pictures the sad state of the average
Galician village and the strange creatures that inhabit it.
He had a good opportunity to study these people for he lived almost his
whole life among them. He got to know the inner life of the village,
the sorrows and the scanty joys of the people of a community where
prosperity rarely occurs and where misery and disease are universal.
Vasil Stefanyk was born in 1871 in Western Ukraine in the foothills
of the Carpathian Mountains. He received a good education at Krakow
and for a while studied medicine but he left the university without
completing his course. In the meantime he had become friendly with
some of the leaders of the Young Poland movement and shared with them
their infatuation for the life of the common people. Wyspianski and the
others of the group were actuated by a new interest in the life of the
ordinary Polish peasant and were trying to understand the psychology
of the average villager. Stefanyk applied the same technique to the
life of his own people. As a result he went back to his own village
and settled down as a farmer among them. He got to know them and their
modes of thought and expression. He studied their local and untutored
dialect, he learned to appreciate the difficulties with which they
were confronted and he began those stories of peasant existence that
have made him one of the greatest prose artists of modern Ukrainian
literature.