and Sweden would develop in such a way that Ukraine would regain its
independence. The Swedes promised to treat Ukraine as an independent
country, but their own strength had been exhausted. Turkey seemed more
promising, especially after Peter and his forces were surrounded by
the Turks near the Pruth. Once again bribery saved the day and the
Turks, who had Peter definitely in their power, released him and signed
a treaty that appeared to satisfy Ukrainian aspirations but which in
reality gave increased power to Russia.
The battle of Poltava and the fall of Mazepa definitely crushed the
hopes of Ukraine and established the supremacy of Moscow, which now
formally and officially accepted Russia as its new name. It was the
last great attempt of the Ukrainians under the Russian Empire to attain
their freedom and it had failed disastrously. Perhaps it hastened the
destruction of the Kozak rights, but these had already been so whittled
away by amendments to the Treaty of Pereyaslav carried through by
imperial edict that the end could not have been long in coming.
More important than that, the Russian government held Mazepa up as an
outstanding example of a traitor. The Russians could carefully edit the
career of Khmelnitsky and give him certain praise for his signing of
the fatal treaty. In Mazepa they had a clear opportunity to vilify the
unfortunate leader and to label all Ukrainians who henceforth sought
freedom for their country as Mazepintsy, followers of Mazepa, with the
definite implication that he was false to the great destiny of the
Ukrainians: to be submerged in the great mass of the Empire and to
abandon all their traditions and ideals.
It is small wonder that the tradition of the hetman has lived on among
the Ukrainians, and that they are willing to glorify him. Mazepa
represented a last phase in Ukrainian development. Unfortunately, he
was unable to solve the problem. The general trend of the seventeenth
century had drawn a constantly wider gulf between the officers and
the masses of the Kozaks and the civilians. Mazepa knew no way of
organizing the country after the disastrous experiences of his
predecessors except by adopting an anti-democratic attitude and setting
himself up as almost an absolute ruler. His environment and his
training had taught him to act by devious paths and he dallied too long
before he took the final step. Had he acted earlier and more firmly in
connection with the Swedes, he might have achieved his goal.
Yet in another sense his doom was necessary. It was not until the
constitution drawn up by Orlyk in exile that there emerged a clear
idea in the minds of the Kozak leaders as to their relationship with
the masses of the Ukrainians. Too long had the Sich and the hetmans
sought to remain purely a military body without political implications.
The need for organizing a Ukrainian state had seemed to them less
immediate than the defending of the military rights of the Kozaks.
In their political inexperience, they had neglected again and again
opportunities that were really priceless. It was not until it was too
late that they grasped the responsibilities of their position and freed
themselves from their narrow political outlook.
If Khmelnitsky was really the architect of Ukrainian conscious
independence, then it was Mazepa and his followers who definitely cast
away all hope of continuing the old ambiguous situation. It would have
been one thing to have done this in the middle of the seventeenth
century. It was quite different to undertake it in the eighteenth
against such a Tsar as Peter. Mazepa’s only hope was to lay a broad
foundation for his movement, to prepare a real basis for a national
revolt. This was not in the spirit of the man; it was not practical in
the face of the agents of Peter and of the murmuring and dissensions
that still lingered on among many of the Kozaks. As a result, Mazepa
became a really romantic figure, risking everything on what was almost
certainly a lost cause, which only a miracle could have turned into
victory. Yet that miracle was near at many moments and it was another
tragedy of the Ukrainian people that they were not able to grasp the
right moment, make the right moves and bring themselves to final
independence.
The fall of Mazepa marks the end of the Kozak wars and of the
political significance of the Kozak Host. It marks within the Russian
Empire the ending of a phase of history, turbulent but romantic and
heroic to the last degree. It marks also the passing of the Ukrainian
movement from a purely military enterprise to the modern political and
economic struggle that it was to be in the future. At the same time
the followers of Mazepa began to raise the Ukrainian question in the
chancelleries and thought of Western Europe.
CHAPTER EIGHT
_THE SPREAD OF KIEVAN CULTURE IN MOSCOW_
At the very moment when Moscow was pursuing its consistent policy of
reducing Ukraine to the level of a Muscovite province, it was falling
just as steadily under the influence of Kievan culture. The monks and
scholars of Kiev flowed in a steady stream to the northeastern capital
and prepared the way for the transformations that were to be brought
to their full fruition by Peter the Great in the early part of the
eighteenth century. It is not too much to say that every scholar or
literary man of Moscow during the eighteenth century was of Ukrainian
origin or had been largely trained in the Academy of Kiev.
The reason is not far to seek. During the period of subjection to the
Tatars, the culture of Moscow and the general mode of life came under
a marked oriental influence. After the liberation of the country,
conditions changed little, despite the marriage of Tsar Ivan III with
Sophia Paleolog of the royal house of Byzantium. Now and then there
might be some slight influence from the west brought in, as was the
case when an Italian architect was employed to remodel the Kremlin, but
such cases were relatively rare and for all practical purposes there
was little interchange of goods or ideas with Europe.
The Muscovites of the day were not desirous of opening their country to
foreign influences. Their national pride had worked out the theory of
Moscow as the Third Rome, the capital of the Christian Orthodox empire
_par excellence_, and they stubbornly believed that any contact
with the outside world or the new learning could only lead to the
development of heresy and the marring of the pristine virtue of their
Orthodox religion. The Patriarch of Moscow was forbidden to dine at the
same table with foreigners, even of the highest rank, and the example
was followed by all classes of the population.
Within the country formal education was at a low ebb. Education had
never taken root at Moscow as it had in Kiev. There were not the direct
connections with the outside world that had made the Grand Princes of
Kiev part of the European family of nations. Moscow was a closed centre
and the ideas of intellectual regimentation had gone so far that in
the religious disputes of the sixteenth century, it could seriously be
advanced that the writing of a book on theology was prohibited by the
Seventh Oecumenical Council and that the preparation of any work was
necessarily heretical.
The Muscovites despised the Greeks, even though they were Orthodox,
and they had little more respect for the scholars of Kiev. There are
very few records of attempts made by the Tsars of Moscow to secure
Greek scholars from Constantinople during these centuries, at the time
when the Ukrainian princes and brotherhoods were only too willing
to have Greek teachers in their schools and were trying to raise
the intellectual level of the clergy and the other classes of the
population. It goes without saying that Moscow regarded Poland and
Lithuania, with their Catholic culture, as worse than pagan and refused
to have any relations with them.
The outstanding example of an attempt to secure a scholar from abroad
was the case of Maxim the Greek, who was invited to Moscow to correct
the Church books in the reign of Tsar Vasily III. The attempt was
disastrous to the poor Greek, for even the slightest change in the
books seemed to be ominous to the Muscovites and Maxim found himself in
prison for many years.
The only city included in the Muscovite Tsardom in which there was any
attempt to develop independent thought was Novgorod, which as a trading
centre had maintained connections with the Hanseatic League; but even
the efforts of the Archbishops of Novgorod were received with little
favor in the self-satisfied Moscow.
Yet everyone in Moscow who went from one Church to another was well
aware that during the ages there had occurred mistakes in the Church
books, errors of copying, slight interpolations, even cases of
corruption which destroyed the sense of the passages. What was to be
done? The recognition of the need for some correction of the books was
blocked by the impossibility of accepting any standard for the work.
For nearly a century there went on a sterile debate on the subject
and at the end of that time there was still no agreement as to the
texts which should be taken as models. The nationalistic Muscovite
leaders absolutely refused to accept any Greek texts, even though
it was generally agreed that the Church Slavonic services had been
translated from the Greek, for in their eyes the fall of Constantinople
had seriously damaged the Orthodox character of even the oldest Greek
texts and it was beneath the dignity of the Third Rome to learn from
outsiders. As the last and greatest of these leaders, Avvakum, proudly
declared at his trial before the Eastern Patriarchs in 1666, it was
their duty to come and learn from Moscow rather than to pass judgment
upon any Muscovites, for they alone possessed the true faith and a
Christian and Orthodox autocrat.
It is impossible to overemphasize this ingrown character of Muscovite
culture and thought in the sixteenth century. Xenophobia was the order
of the day and even such a tsar as Ivan the Terrible who allowed
Germans and other foreigners to come in small numbers to Moscow could
not defy the will of the boyars and the masses and accept foreign
ideas.
The Troublous Times that followed the death of Boris Godunov and saw
the occupation of the Kremlin by a Polish army showed, however, to
some of the intelligent Muscovites that all was not well at home. They
realized that Moscow would sooner or later be compelled to accept some
elements of Western and contemporary culture or the state would be
in serious danger. They realized that it would be impossible to make
progress at the expense of Poland and Lithuania, if they maintained
this deliberate exclusion of all foreign ideas, and a steadily
increasing number of men determined in one way or another to change the
situation.
The leading spirit of this group was Nikon, who was destined in 1652
to become the Patriarch of Moscow. No less overbearing and haughty
than had been his predecessors, Nikon was intelligent enough to know
that something had to be done and done rapidly, if disaster was to be
averted and in this he had the sympathetic backing of Tsar Alexis.
It was only natural that they should turn with sympathetic interest
to Kiev, for the revival of Ukrainian culture appealed to them in
various ways. They were well aware of the bitter feud that was going
on in Ukraine between the Orthodox and the followers of the Union and
they had hopes of bringing Ukraine under their own domination. There
was something attractive in the Orthodoxy of Kiev and they could dream
of Moscow as an Orthodox Slav state accepting support from other
Orthodox Slavs when it galled them to appeal directly to the Greeks.
Besides that, there was a group of the Orthodox in Kiev whose religious
antagonism to the Catholics overshadowed any questions of Ukrainian
patriotism. As early as 1626, some of these monks had broached the idea
of a union with Moscow, and exactly as they in a later time tended
to facilitate the submission of the Kozaks to Moscow, so they dreamed
that they might tap the more abundant resources of that state for
intellectual accomplishments and perhaps for personal aggrandizement.
Yet there was no doubt that any such rapprochement would be stubbornly
contested by the masses of the Muscovite population and by many of the
boyars and nobles. It required all the power of an autocratic monarch
and ruthless force to carry through even the slightest correction of
the books and the introduction of any ideas that were at variance
with the traditional Muscovite mode of life. Throughout the entire
seventeenth century, the Old Believers, as they were called, adopted
the most desperate methods of opposition. Mass suicides of people who
objected to living under the regime of Antichrist took place. The
streltsy, the guards of the tsar, rose in armed revolt and the Don
Kozaks burst out in several waves of destructive fury as they demanded
the preservation of the old faith and the beard. It was undoubtedly
this furious attitude of fanaticism that prevented any close relations
between the Kozaks and the revolt of Stenka Razin or between Mazepa and
the revolt of Bulavin in the days of Peter the Great.
It was probably more than a coincidence, however, that the first
serious invitations to Kievan scholars to come to Moscow coincided with
the beginning of the revolt of Khmelnitsky. In 1649, Tsar Alexis, under
the influence of Nikon, invited the Metropolitan of Kiev to send Arseny
Satanovsky and Damaskin Ptitsky to Moscow to translate the Bible.
Ptitsky went later, but he was replaced on this mission by Epifany
Slavinetsky who remained in Moscow to the end of his life. Nikon and
his friends were undoubtedly as much aware of the possibilities of
securing control of Ukraine, if Poland were to be disintegrated, as
they were of the aid that they would receive in intellectual matters
from the Kiev scholars.
A year before this, in 1648, there had appeared in Moscow an edition
of the grammar of Melety Smotritsky, which had been first published in
Kiev in 1619. This work, entitled _The Correct Construction of the
Slav Grammar_, represented an attempt to purify the Church Slavonic
language from some of the more glaring elements of popular speech
which had been absorbed during the past years, and so represented
exactly that attitude of the Kievan school which was working against
the acceptance of the ordinary speech as the written norm. Yet it gave
the general Ukrainian system of pronunciation and when it was taken
to Moscow, it was used almost exclusively for over a century as the
standard grammar, not only for Ukrainians but also for Muscovites
and Southern Slavs, with notes carefully added so that the Muscovite
scholars could make the necessary corrections to make the language
and teachings of Smotritsky fit Great Russian. The work continued in
popularity and was one of the main models in the eighteenth century
when Lomonosov arranged his grammar.
A little later Pamva Berinda published in 1627 a _Slave-norossian
Lexikon and Interpretation of Names_, which after the work of
Lavrenty Zizany marked the best attempt at a dictionary.
All these books served as a basis for the work of Slavinetsky and
his companions when they appeared at Moscow, for they represented at
least an effort on the part of the Kiev Academy to provide the Church
Slavonic language which they were teaching and using with the same
kind of material aids that existed for Polish and Latin and the other
languages of the West. Nothing of the sort existed in Moscow. It was
not desired by the Muscovite bookmen, who devoted themselves to an
unintelligent repetition of already known data from a purely religious
training.
Year by year Slavinetsky and the other Kievan scholars toiled on in
Moscow against the steadily repeated accusation that their Orthodoxy
was suspicious because they knew Polish and Latin. When Nikon appointed
a Kievan scholar to a commission for reforming the Church books and it
was discovered that the man had once studied at Rome, there broke out
an open torrent of denunciation of Kiev and even of Patriarch Nikon,
for daring to employ for Orthodox purposes a person who had actually
been in a Catholic atmosphere.
Nikon understood that he could not carry through his reforms of the
Church books without the aid of the Kievan scholars, and he made
every effort to attract more and more of them to Moscow. Practically
the entire increase in theological writing there was due to their
assistance, and they colored with their ideas and the Orthodox
scholasticism which had been developed at Kiev all the intellectual
outlook of the Great Russians.
At first these Kievan monks busied themselves in Moscow only with
purely religious writings. Thus Epifany Slavinetsky prepared over 150
works, most of which consisted of translations from the Bible and the
writings of the Church Fathers and also of short introductions to
various sacred writings which he translated. This was all that could be
developed at first in view of the prejudices of the Muscovites.
It was not long, however, before these Kievan scholars gradually
undertook to introduce to the court of Alexis all the various forms of
literature which were practiced in Kiev and elsewhere in Ukraine. As we
have seen, the Kiev Academy had a very limited theological outlook. It
was more interested in maintaining the Orthodox faith and in carrying
on polemical disputes with the Polish Catholics than it was in building
up a high and widely varying secular culture. It imitated and put into
Orthodox form the already antiquated scholasticism of Poland, which was
itself all too often a pale reflection of what had been done in western
Europe a few centuries earlier. The old miracle plays were reworked,
comic and sometimes coarse scenes were added to suit the manners of the
time, little interludes were composed, and there sprang up a rather
uninspired but still active school of drama illustrating biblical
themes and filled with moralizing and didactic teaching. It was in
general a picture of the European literatures in the late Renaissance,
without that spark of life and genius that had lifted English, French
and Italian literatures to the heights of the sixteenth century and it
was far below what had been achieved by the Polish writers of the same
century, and then neglected.
All this literature forms a dreary period but it was infinitely more
advanced than was anything that was found in Moscow. As the various
genres were made available in that capital, they seemed daringly
novel to the younger Muscovites, who were blissfully unaware of how
far Western Europe had advanced in recent decades. As a result there
developed in the latter half of the seventeenth century a craze at
Moscow for the Ukrainian literature of the day and Ukrainian monks and
laymen who made their way to the Russian capital found themselves in
constant demand. Ukrainian scholasticism dominated the reigns of Alexis
and the following tsars, and students of Russian literature and history
have often failed to emphasize the importance of this period as the
first step in the Europeanization of the country.
We can take for example the career of Simeon Polotsky as typical of
this era. He was born in White Ruthenia in 1629 as Simeon Emelyanovich
Petrovsky-Sitnyanovich. Like most of the leading students of the
day he was educated at Kiev and then became a monk in the city of
Polotsk, whence his usual name. In 1664 he went to Moscow as a teacher
and there he won the favor of the Tsar, was appointed tutor to the
various children of the monarch and became practically the court
poet of Moscow. Here he poured out a long and never ending stream of
works, usually destitute of any real inspiration and all based on the
models with which he had become acquainted in Kiev. He even used that
peculiar Ukrainian adaptation of the Polish system of verse in which,
after the French system, more attention was paid to the number of the
syllables than to the accent of the metre or the words. Simeon also
produced various mystery plays, as the _Story of the Prodigal Son_
and the _Tale of Nebuchadnezzar and the Three Children in the Fiery
Furnace_. The very titles give us a good picture of the contents
and show us how far the drama and the poetry of the Kiev Academy were
removed from the average life of the day. The interest in the poems and
dramas of Simeon soon passed but we cannot overestimate his importance
in awakening the minds of the Muscovites, for it was the reading of
these poems well into the eighteenth century that inspired the first of
the native born Russian poets, Mikhail Lomonosov, to undertake his work.
As the Russian hold upon Ukraine grew tighter, the number of educated
Ukrainians who went into the service of Moscow steadily increased.
They formed the overwhelming majority of Russian officials whose
position required something more than dry and formal duties. They
rose to high rank in state and church and it is interesting that the
three outstanding clergymen of the reign of Peter the Great were all
of Ukrainian origin and graduates of the Kiev Academy. They differed
in many ways among themselves and also in their attitude toward Peter
but they represented different sides of the Ukrainian and Kievan
development.
The oldest of the three was Dmytro Tuptalenko, who was born in 1651.
After receiving his education at Kiev, he spent several years in
various monasteries, especially those which were the most rigid in
upholding the autonomy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. It was during
this period that he conceived the idea of writing a book on the lives
of the Saints and of preparing a work to take the place of the older
editions of the Chetyi Minei. After the forced submission of the
Ukrainian Church, Dmytro became friendly with the Patriarch Joachim
and undertook to secure the publication of his work. It was a very
difficult task for there were many troubles with the ecclesiastical
censors, which were not fully settled for over half a century. Finally
he was called to Moscow and in 1703 he was made Metropolitan of Rostov,
where he died in 1709. The writings of Dmytro Tuptalenko, who was
later canonized by the Russian Church, were among the most attractive
of the Kievan School. They included the _Lives of the Saints_,
chronicles, and Christmas and Easter plays and they reveal their author
as a sincere and deeply spiritual man, earnestly trying to do his best
for his people.
The second of the three, Stefan Yavorsky, (1658–1722), was one of
the men who were less interested in the Ukrainian problems and found
it relatively easy to assimilate himself to the new situation which
was confronting him. As Metropolitan of Ryazan and later the locum
tenens for the Patriarch, Yavorsky opposed the reforms of Peter and
his efforts to turn the Church into a mere department of the state; he
even dared to criticize him for divorcing his first wife. On the whole,
Yavorsky defended the traditional teachings of Orthodoxy as it was
understood in Kiev and he represented that stalwart but narrow Orthodox
scholasticism that had been developed by the school of Mohyla.