when he was about thirty years of age and for a decade he worked and
developed his own gemlike style and his gift of portraiture. The task
of composition was not easy and he toiled over almost every phrase and
paragraph, tearing up copy after copy, until he had found exactly the
right word and the right idea. Then he grew silent and for another
decade, although he was recognized as a master, he produced nothing.
The impact of the war and the temporary liberation of Ukraine roused
him again to write and for the first time he used the word Ukraine and
emphasized the unity of the people in both halves of the country. The
disastrous situation that ensued as a result of the Ukrainian defeat
and renewed division made him again give up writing and return to his
former silence. He died in 1936, just before the new catastrophes were
to overwhelm his country.
He does not reveal himself in his sketches. Far from that. If we
read them carefully, we will find few clues to the author and his
personality. He does not dwell upon any special theme with marked
enthusiasm. He does not comment or give moral judgments upon his
characters from which we could infer his own sympathies or his own
point of view. He simply in a few well chosen sentences sets out a
situation confronting some broken souls and bodies and he objectively
pictures a little incident that explains the situation. It is useless
for us to ask him why these things happen. They simply do and that is
all there is to it.
In the beginning there was a slight touch of symbolism in his works
as in the _Road_, the pilgrimage of a man through life, nameless and
unidentified. He leaves his mother and starts out through the world. He
sees people in their agony and despair. At night they lie like stones
one by the other. His strength rises and wanes again when he finds his
mother’s grave, he sobs with dry eyes. She does not answer him when
he calls. “He ran from grave to grave, as autumn flowers. When he had
passed one hundred graves, the one hundred first was his. He fell down
to it, as he had long ago to his mother’s bosom.”
This was the early phase of Stefanyk’s work but he did not long remain
at this level. His characters speedily become more individualized
and if there is a special symbol that we may deduce from his works
to describe the people whom he presents, it is as fallen leaves
blown along on the autumn wind. No one understands them nor do they
understand themselves.
So in the _News_. “In the village there was the news that Grits
Letyuchy had drowned his little girl in the river. He wanted to drown
the older one, but she begged off. After his wife Gritishka died, he
suffered misfortunes. He could not care for his children without a
wife. No one wanted to marry him, for besides the children there were
also poverty and need. Grits suffered for two full years with his young
children. No one knew about him, how he lived, what he did, although
neighbors were very near. They said only that Grits for a whole winter
never lighted a fire in the hut and he and his children passed the
winter on the stove.” He takes the hungry children to the river and
throws the youngest Dotska in. The older one Handzynya begs off, “Daddy
don’t drown me, don’t drown me, don’t drown me.” He relents but tells
her that Dotska will be better off than she. However she can go to the
first hut and ask to spend the night and then try for a position to
care for a child. He himself starts to ford the river but changes his
mind and goes to the bridge.
There is no moral judgment on the action of Grits. The poor man is at
the end of his physical and moral powers but Stefanyk does not explain
it. He does not condemn him. He merely in plain, unadorned language
describes the course of events.
No one in the village knows how Grits lives, although the neighbors are
very near. The old village spirit has vanished. In the stories of Marko
Vovchok, the peasants are ready to help one another. They sympathize
with the unfortunate. They are ready to share their last crumb with one
another. Here even that spirit is gone. The members of the village are
enemies one to another or at best are impartial and neutral observers
as is the author of the story. We have travelled far from the days when
the chief cause of peasant suffering was the flogging by the arrogant
and haughty lord. The peasants are free but they are free to starve and
Stefanyk is not interested in those who have carved out a secure place
for themselves in the village community.
Or let us take _The Family of Les_. Les steals a sack of barley from
his wife to sell it at the inn and secure something to drink. She
follows him with her two boys, one eight and one ten years old and
makes a scene. Then she knocks him down and orders the children to
beat their father roundly. Finally she goes home with them in mortal
terror that their father will return in the night and take vengeance.
All the tragedy of drunkenness is described, all the pathos and despair
of the poor mother who cannot work enough to take care of her children
and the inn keeper. There is no attempt at presenting a roseate view
of peasant life. Misery, need, want, that is all the unfortunates
know. It is what has been in the past and all that they can expect
in the future. Yet there is more to it than this for again Stefanyk
brings out the complicated psychology of an event which might seem at
first sight simple. Thus the mother realizes that she could receive
assistance from the state if her husband were crippled whereas she
could have no relief, if he were merely drunk. Likewise the father is
willing to suffer at the hands of his children and even takes off his
overcoat so that their light blows can inflict greater pain upon him.
Family feeling has taken a strange turn and the mother appears more
like a female animal defending her young than she does as a member of
a civilized community but Stefanyk gives clue after clue to the varied
reactions of the individuals which are by no means simple.
We have the same sort of peasant cynicism in the _Blue Booklet_ (or is
it really a picturing of the despair that comes when a man is finally
broken?). Antin has lost his wife and his two children and alone in the
world, he has no solace left but drink. He loses his land and then his
little hut and takes the blue employment book to start out in the world
alone. He flaunts his poverty in the village inn and names the people
to whom he has lost everything but he boasts “I haven’t a cent, but I
will drink. I will drink with our people, I’ll go to ruin with them.
Let them know how I have left the village. Go, I have the blue booklet
in my pocket. Now that is my hut and my field and my gardens. I’m going
with it to the end of the world! A booklet from the emperor, I have
all doors opened to me. Everywhere. Among gentlemen and Jews and every
faith.” Antin has ceased to belong. He has passed out as so many of
Stefanyk’s heroes from the normal humdrum life which at best may bring
a normal respectable living or at least a slow starvation.
Death and preparation for death is another favorite theme. Take
_Katrusya_ for example. The poor girl is dying of tuberculosis. With
the last of their money the family take her to a doctor but the comment
they make is “Peasants do not need to go to doctors. He tells you to
drink a lot of milk, or eat some light meat or drink some liquor, or
eat white bread or something like that (all things not obtainable on
a peasant’s income). It can help the gentry, but it won’t help in
our class. Therefore let her die as she is.” A neighbor replies. “Do
you think the doctors give the peasants the same medicine that they
give the gentry or the Jews? Therefore let her die as she is.” They
look at Katrusya and say, “There is nothing on her as on a leaf that
has been torn away from the tree.” So death comes on but this symbol
of the fallen leaf is a favorite one with Stefanyk. Indeed most of
his characters are just that. They are the unsuccessful, the poor
devils who have been torn away from the tree of life and yet there is
something human and touching in their misery and their despair.
For an example of characters drawn from the wealthier classes we have
the _Basarabi_. They had been an old and brutal race which as overseers
had mercilessly driven the peasants in the days of forced labor. One of
them during the Turkish wars had murdered seven little children. Now
in their decline they were little better although they are well-to-do
peasants. The old vitality of the race is gone and with the ill
concealed hatred of the other peasants and the disordered minds of the
family, suicide becomes the rule rather than the exception. Tomas who
has been cut down in time, tells the rest of the family of the pangs of
conscience and of the weird spirits that hang around him and drive him
to his deed. The doctors ascribe it all to nerves but even at this the
gruesome story so impresses another of the clan, Mikolay, that he goes
out into the night to commit the same deed to the consternation of the
others. It is typical of the decline of a family and in the Galician
setting there is something of the studied horror of Edgar Allen Poe and
the other writers who set forth the degeneration of a once tyrannical
family. It is longer than most of the works of Stefanyk, for it
contains more of a story with a perspective over generations. It is
rare that he refers back to the days of the past. For the most part
his stories deal with an event in the present and he assumes as his
background the whole degeneration of a community under the influence
of alcohol, Jewish tavern keepers and grinding poverty. It is highly
significant for Stefanyk’s attitude that he chooses as his horrible
examples no outsiders but one of those Ukrainian families which had
prospered in the past by devious and unmentionable methods.
For a long while Stefanyk gave up writing and then during the exciting
years after the First World War he returned to literature. His later
stories were of the same type as the earlier ones. They had the same
compressed form, the same careful workmanship but there was something
different about them. He had grown during the years of silence and had
come to find more positive qualities in his poor folk. He shows their
sufferings in the war, when the peasants of Western Ukraine came to
feel toward the Russians, the Moskali, what had been mentioned again
and again in the writings of the people from Great Ukraine. Thus in
_Maria_, the old woman comes to meet the Kozaks in the village and she
is surprised that they being Ukrainian also respect Shevchenko. In the
_Sons_, an old peasant realizes that his sons have gone to fight for
Ukraine. On his return from seeing the last one off, he finds his wife
dead before the painting of the Blessed Virgin and in a fit of simple
religion, not without a bitter undertone, he appeals to the Blessed
Virgin to care for his home for he has given not one but two sons for a
great cause.
There has come a new enlightenment in the village, a new feeling that
the people have some part to play other than to be mere hewers of wood
and drawers of water. It is a sign of the deepening of the national
consciousness, of that tendency that Franko had hoped for and in which
he had believed. The Ukraine is now a real thing even to the humblest
and the most underprivileged and along with this there is a growing
tendency of hostility to the Polish landowners and bureaucrats. They
had hardly appeared in the earlier stories where Stefanyk had been
describing merely little sketches of peasant life taken without any
background except the misery and suffering of the village.
It brings about a new atmosphere of hope, a deeper confidence in the
capacity of the peasants. There is more thought, more conscious guiding
of their own affairs. They are no longer satisfied to accept their fate
without questioning and to pass from the scene without a murmur. Yet
they are fundamentally the same people. With the same temptations and
vices.
Take for example, “_She is the Earth_,” where the Bukovina refugees
make their way to the north. Old Danilo has brought his family with
him but his wife is silent. From the time when they abandoned their
little farm before the onrushing armies, she has remained still and
silent. Old Semen, the same type of man, advises the newcomer to go
home. “An old bird must not leave its old nest, for it is not able to
build another. It is better that its head grows cold in its old nest
than in a hollow on a strange road.” He warns against following the
lords and the Jews. “The Emperor has his purse open for them, but the
purse is closed for you....” “Our work is with the earth; you abandon
it, you are lost, you cling to it, it rakes out all your strength from
you, it fills your soul with its hands; you fall down to it, you bend
your back, it fills your veins, for that you have flocks and herds, and
haystacks. For your strength it gives you a hut full of children and
grandchildren, who laugh as silver bells, and bloom like poplars....
Don’t go, Danilo, with the lords and the Jews, don’t seek the tsar,
for you do not need the tsar; there is always someone to come to the
farm to collect the taxes.” And it is only then that the old woman
finds her voice and says,--“Let us go home, Danilo, let us go home.”
“And when the sun rose, the old men parted, they kissed their black
hands, and the red sun threw their shadows across the boundary far
along the earth.”
This is the creed of the peasant, the creed of the earth, and it was
a new note for Stefanyk. It is perhaps too optimistic. It perhaps
shows a narrow conception of life but it is the fundamental essence of
the peasant wisdom put in a simple form. It opens a new vista to the
reader, it gives a psychological motive and a philosophy that had been
hitherto lacking in his work. Now in his later stories he ventures to
give the world and his characters some elements of philosophy other
than the cynical or coldly unmoral picture of human dissolution and
disaster.
Stefanyk was working toward a deeper and a more satisfactory philosophy
of life under the pressure of the events of the World War. Yet his
basis was the impartial observation of the poor material condition of
the average Galician village in the period when the old safeguards had
been removed by the abolition of feudal powers and when the individual
peasant was not yet effectively trained to stand for himself.
He writes of a transition period when the peasant was left almost
entirely alone to stand upon his own two feet and when he was not
prepared to do so. The peasant exists under the implacable rule of the
erstwhile master and the no more tender mercies of the tavern keeper
in the village (usually a Jew) and hence it is that again and again
Stefanyk attacks the gentry and the Jews, the two classes in Galician
society that seemed to get along, while the hard working peasant gave
to both all of his hard earned money. For those peasants who had
solved the problem and who were able to live and get along, Stefanyk
has nothing to say but in his time the refuge for all of these was
ultimately America. The still living ambition to succeed drove the
peasant to sell everything and emigrate to the United States or Canada
where he could be free to become a man and had some prospects of
solving his own problems.
This was the period that Stefanyk described and his knowledge of
the lives and thoughts of the people he set forth in exquisite and
carefully worked out stories in which every word is important. No
writer up to this time in Ukrainian had been so economical in his use
of material. No one had been so compressed in his style and language.
Stefanyk was a supreme artist in a particularly difficult medium. His
stories had the finish of a miniature but they are not to be neglected
because of the brevity of their material. With the exception of Franko,
he was the leading author produced in Western Ukraine during the past
seventy-five years and his sense of literary values, his command of
language and his appreciation of the significant episodes in life
make him an author of whom any literature may well be proud. He dealt
with a restricted field but in this field he knew how to show the
important elements not only for his people but for humanity and he is
one of those authors who under the guise of picturing the down and
downtrodden, the failures and the misfits, have known to show them as
human beings with many a toil and sorrow but still profoundly human
and profoundly worthy of pity and assistance, yet without any attempt
to include any form of propaganda and without adding anything that
conflicts with pure literature in the strictest sense of the word.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
OLES
At the end of the nineteenth century a new poetry spread rapidly over
Europe. Directly or indirectly this traced its source to the French
symbolists and decadents, to Verlaine and Mallarmé and the other
writers of that period. Then came the influence of Maeterlinck and the
movement was in full course. However, as the movement with its emphasis
on aestheticism and beauty and its frequent desire to shock the
bourgeoisie spread among the Slavs, it gradually sought a philosophical
basis for the new developments.
The new authors rapidly advanced the technique of poetry and at the
same time they broadened the range of materials which were regarded as
proper subjects. For a half century there had been predominant a form
of realism which conceived as within its scope only the contemporary
lives of the people. It remained to go outside of the conventional
and to choose subjects from the entire field of recorded history.
Lesya Ukrainka had started this with her dramas and sketches from the
antique world. Even this was not enough and as the symbolistic movement
expanded, the authors flew from the earth to the heavens, to other
planets, to imaginary scenes and they sought in all these areas that
which they considered beauty in their own imaginations. Many schools
of thought arose among the new artists and basking in the light of
self-adulation, they cared little for the old-fashioned social motifs
which had been instrumental in training the people for the last half
century. They cared little more for the enthusiastic admiration of the
great masses who were beginning to appreciate at long last the older
writers and were content to read new and ever new reinterpretations of
the old themes.
Ukrainian literature was no exception to the general rule, and
around 1890 at the very end of the century the new movement made its
appearance. It rapidly forced into the background the older writers. In
the meanwhile life was changing and the symbolists and decadents were
being attacked on all sides. The champions of the old order had not
spared even Franko for his _Withered Leaves_ and they were even more
concerned with the vagaries of the still younger authors.
Yet it cannot be denied that with all their weaknesses, these new men
were doing a great work in the adaptation of Ukrainian literature to
world models. They were rapidly forcing the literature from a narrow
and almost provincial field to a world arena and if in the beginning
they cut themselves off from their less fortunate fellow men, the
greater writers, once they had mastered the forms steadily began a
return to the world which they had formerly scorned. Yet that return
was no mere repetition of the past, no slavish abjuring of the ideas
that they had formerly admired. It was rather a realization of the fact
that literature did have other purposes than the purely photographic
repetition of details of ethnography and social philosophy, that it
could affect the readers by the evocation of various moods, and could
give them a deeper understanding of some phases of human psychology
by the use of symbols more or less easy to penetrate than it could by
plain matter of fact narration and bald statement. In other words there
was again a conscious approach to that method of exposition which had
been unconsciously present in the mind of a great genius as Shevchenko.
His _Great Grave_ is as much of a symbolistic poem as is any work of
the present writers but he did it with the spark of genius and with his
eye directed at the history of his nation even more than at individual
psychology.
The author who was to develop this new poetry to its height was O.
Oles, the pen name of Oleksander Kandyba who was born in Russian
Ukraine in 1878. Like many of the more modern writers, he was well
educated and from 1903 on, he was recognized as the most outstanding
poet since Shevchenko. Yet at no time could he have the appeal of such
a man as Franko, for Oles with all of his talent was still pitching his
works on a level which was inaccessible to the average educated man and
he could be admired and understood in many cases only by a relatively
small audience.
The early years of the twentieth century saw many changes in Ukraine
both in Russia and Galicia. In Russia there were the high hopes at
the time of the Revolution of 1905, when it seemed again as if with
the abolition of the strict rules of the censorship there would be
presented favorable conditions for work. Almost over night there sprang
into existence new journals, new writers, new hopes. Then again the
clouds descended and the reactionary regimes that followed tried to
go back to the old days when Ukraine seemed non-existent. Between
1905 and 1910 many of the new journals again passed out of existence
and the despairing may have thought that all hope was again lost. Yet
much had been gained. The Ukrainians had learned to group themselves
into political parties and other organizations. They had secured a
larger nucleus of a reading public and that public could not be easily
disintegrated again. The time was past when an imperial fiat abolishing
the very name of Ukraine and wiping out the Sich could discourage and
almost destroy the entire movement.
So too in Galicia. The Ukrainian population there was becoming more
self-conscious. The students were demanding more and more vigorously
the introduction of Ukrainian courses in the University of Lviv. The
contacts with the Russian Ukraine were growing stronger and that
exchange of writers and published books which had been going on for
nearly a half century was no longer a tender plant which could be
shattered by the slightest blow.
Then came the stirrings of the First World War and the final collapse
of the two empires of Russia and Austria-Hungary. For a few months
Ukraine was again free. The two republics of Great Ukraine and Western
Ukraine came together with Professor Hrushevsky as the President of the
Rada and there came a rapid flowering of the national culture. The work
of the preceding century had borne fruit. Alas! It was only for a short
time and then with the renewed division of the country, between the
Soviet Union, Poland, Rumania and Czechoslovakia, it seemed as if the
hopes of all had died again.
During all this period Oles continued his work, grouping together words
of encouragement and lamentation, personal lyrics and poems with a
definite social content which had a real meaning for his countrymen.
His moods varied with the political conditions. They were strong and
cheerful when the outlook was hopeful. They were sad and depressed in
moments of adversity but he never lost hope and he never felt that his
work in the service of social ideals bound the wings of his talent
or interfered with the artistic value of his poems. When misfortune
finally came to Ukraine, he withdrew to Galicia and then became one of
that group which moved to Prague and from there he poured out his poems
of despair, of the sadness of the emigré but always with the superb
confidence that Ukraine would rise again and that her sons would some
day be happy and free in their own land.
In moments of encouragement he can sing:
I’ll weep no more. My sorrow I will fetter
In chains of strongest steel.
My people are still burdened with their fetters
Their wounds their woes reveal.
And all my soul
I show forth with their wounds.
I’ll sing no more. And nightly in the struggle
The iron swords sing loud.
The swords cut deep into the people’s vitals
And call a race uncowed.
Then let my sword
Sing for me in the strife.
Or again Oles with his eye upon nature and the same hope in his breast
will sing:
Thou marvelous and wondrous night!
Just yesterday a coverlet of snow was sifting down,
And now to-day a change ... so warm and bright,
With here and there a pushing upward from the frozen ground.
Know this: ’twill be the same with man....
Such miracles there be!... Upon a certain day
Men everywhere, free and of equal rank shall stand
And seize the visions dreamed along the way.
So too with his confidence in man’s power to gain his goal by fighting
and denying even the powers of nature that endeavor to stop him....