the Kozaks from Russian control, persuaded Catherine to renew the
institution under the name of the Kozaks of the Black Sea and settle
them in the area of the Kuban to the east. This brought together under
Anton Holovaty a large number of the Kozaks who continued to take part
in the Russian wars, and finally, early in the nineteenth century, a
considerable number returned from Turkey on the outbreak of another war
between Turkey and Russia.
With the Sich and the eastern areas properly consolidated, Catherine
turned her attention to the Hetman state, which had continued quietly
under the iron rule of Count Rumyantsev. In 1780 Catherine issued a
new order, completely abolishing this and dividing its territory into
three provinces which were to be administered on the Russian pattern.
This was done the next year and serfdom was introduced exactly as
in Russia proper. In 1783, even the old regiments were dissolved as
military units and those who wished to continue service were enrolled
in new regiments of carbineers. Nothing was left which would preserve
the memory of the Hetman state or of the heroic past of the Zaporozhian
Kozaks. Finally in 1786 even the last remnants of autonomy in the
Church were abolished and the property of the individual churches and
monasteries was taken over by the state and placed in the same pool
with all the property of the Church in Russia.
Then in 1793, with the second division of Poland, the largest part of
right bank Ukraine was also brought into the Russian Empire and those
of the Ukrainians who had remained under Poland found themselves again
united with the Ukrainians of the left bank under the new conditions.
Their position had been hard enough before, but the masters were given
even more power under Russian law than they had had under the rule of
Poland and the condition of the helpless peasants grew steadily worse.
The only people who profited were some of the officers, for the
complete abolition of all Ukrainian rights and privileges moved them
into the status of Russian landowners and nobles. Some of them had been
striving to achieve this for a long while. To accomplish it they had
broken down the democratic ideas of the Sich and throughout a troubled
century, they had sought in every way to separate themselves from the
mass of the Kozaks. Now they had at last succeeded, but at the cost of
all of those special privileges which they had so long valued.
The ruin was overwhelming. There was left not a vestige of that
independence or of those traditions which had endured in the Dnyeper
valley since the days of Prince Volodymyr. The spirit of Moscow had
conquered and its will to unity had been achieved. Nothing could be
left except the songs sung by despairing serfs. The written records
were preempted by the conquerors and the official Russian history
whereby Moscow was the legitimate descendant of Kiev had no one to
contradict it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
_UKRAINE AT THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY_
The Zaporozhian Sich was destroyed by the forces of Catherine the Great
of Russia on June 5, 1775 and on August 3 of the same year the Empress
by an edict abolished the very name of the Zaporozhian Kozaks. This
was the symbolic ending of the old Ukraine, of the old struggle for
liberty and independence. More than the Hetman state with its shadowy
hetmans and its confused Russianized Little Russian Board, the Sich
had embodied the ideals and aspirations of the Kozaks. Around it had
gathered the memories and the traditions of the days when the Kozaks
had formed an independent body of free men, administering their affairs
and choosing their enemies in popular assemblies. It had typified the
Kozak spirit of individual daring and of individual resource. Now
its destruction meant that all that was past and that the autocratic
sovereign of Russia felt it had no place in her domain.
It is interesting and significant that this took place barely two
months after the outbreak of the American Revolution at the battles
of Lexington and Concord. It took place just two weeks before the
battle of Bunker Hill, when for the first time the American army
met a determined attack from British regular forces. It took place
just a month before George Washington assumed at Boston his post
as Commander-in-Chief of the American Army. The eleven years that
followed, during which the Empress methodically eliminated every trace
of Ukrainian independent rights, were the same that saw the successful
carrying on of the American Revolution and the beginning of plans
for the forming of the American Constitution. The year 1783, which
witnessed the definite recognition of the independence of the United
States, saw the elimination of the Kozak regiments from the already
defunct Hetman state. In a word the old Ukraine passed away just as the
new United States was coming into existence.
It would be easy to draw sentimental parallels between these two events
but there is something even more important that this, for it was only
three years after the final liquidation of Ukraine that the French
Revolution broke out and an era opened when all of the intellectual
ferment of the eighteenth century turned into political activity. The
new Europe, the new Europe of the nineteenth century, was in the making
and Ukraine by the narrowest of margins missed being included in it.
The new current of nationalism was beginning to run its course. In
ten years more, Kotlyarevsky with the _Eneida_ was to create the
modern Ukrainian literary language. The various nations and peoples
included within the Hapsburg Empire were to begin their agitation for
national recovery by the simple expedient of linguistic revival, and
by the demand for the restoration of old and forgotten rights and
privileges that had fallen into disuse, though they had never been
officially abrogated.
In the ferment that was to come, the very existence of the Sich would
have served as a rallying point for Ukrainian national sentiment. All
those classes of people who could appreciate the meaning of the new
movements would have found a definite centre, and even though the Sich
had lost its old time power and independence, it would still have been
a living connection with the great past. With the Sich gone, the link
with the great days was broken and the new movement was compelled to
start from the beginning without any existing juridical basis.
For this reason it may be well to pause a moment and look at the
conditions as they existed in Ukraine at this crucial period.
For all intents and purposes the noble class had either been
Russianized or Polonized. In the sixteenth century a large part of the
old noble families had definitely adopted Polish culture and the Roman
Catholic Church. The newer nobles and landowners who had arisen from
the ranks of the Kozak officers had nearly all been Russianized. They
felt that it was beneath them to use the language of their peasants
and serfs and they endeavored to carry on their daily activities
in either one of the more fashionable languages. Many of them used
French almost exclusively in their relations with members of their own
class. These people sometimes preserved some relics of the past. They
dearly loved to have serfs and attendants dressed in Kozak costume,
as did the Engelhardts, the owners of the young Shevchenko, early in
the nineteenth century. They enjoyed hearing Ukrainian folksongs sung
by peasant choirs but they looked upon them as an inferior form of
amusement and had that superior attitude that was so bitterly attacked
by Shevchenko in his introduction to the _Haydamaki_. All in all,
these people found the present situation to their personal interest
and they did not care to jeopardize their own fortunes by challenging
the power of the government or to injure their social standing by
associating with people of the lower classes.
In the same way the townsmen who had played such a large part in
the cultural revival of the sixteenth century were no longer so
influential. The towns had lost much of their importance, the leading
classes, like the landowners, had fallen under the spell of the
conquering cultures and those who still maintained the Ukrainian
tradition had been so subjected to political disabilities that they
were unable or indisposed to play their old role.
The Ukrainian language and Ukrainian traditions were then largely
restricted to the peasantry. Their lot had always been hard but as they
approached the modern period, their burdens were increased by the law.
They had lost the power of changing their homes, even though this had
been rather closely restricted, and the vast majority were mere serfs
on the estates of masters who were either of foreign origin or had been
completely denationalized. They were overwhelmingly illiterate and
could not be presumed to know much of the history of their country.
Yet they were wiser than might easily be thought. The villagers had
their rich and varied folksongs and there was hardly an occasion of
the religious or secular year, hardly an event of public or private
commemoration and festivity, when there did not appear some kobzar
or bandurist to sing them songs of the exploits of the Kozaks or to
retell some narrative of the past. These kobzars were often blind
bards, accompanying themselves with a form of stringed instrument,
something of the type of a banjo. They knew large numbers of songs,
especially historical songs and dumy, which would serve to remind the
peasants of other tales which had been handed down by their fathers.
When we remember that scarcely a half century had passed since the last
desperate revolts, we can understand that there was hardly a village
where some old man or woman did not remember the stirring tales of the
past and tell them to the young during the winter evenings or in the
scanty hours of leisure. Shevchenko’s account of his grandfather’s
tales of the Koliishchina can be paralleled again and again and allows
us to see how the oral tradition of the village handed down much that
was ignored or forgotten in the manor house.
It was in this wealth of peasant tradition and of vague and indistinct
memories that there lurked the dying sparks of Ukrainian consciousness.
It was easy to see that the hard conditions of life were tapping this
supply. Without literacy or writing, each generation knew less than
had the preceding of what had gone before. The death of one old man
might mean the irreparable loss of much that was valuable and true.
With each decade there remained fewer and fewer accounts of the history
of the past. Had the conquering classes thought of such a trifling
subject, they would have realized that time was on their side and that
the unpleasant and disturbing nightmares of the past would pass away
and leave them in peace. The time was surely coming when the peasantry
too would lose their consciousness, exactly as had the nobles and the
upper classes who had been won over to the new and fashionable culture
and accepted a new nationality!
Of course there were some manuscripts that told the ancient history,
but these were rarely printed and they remained hidden in the various
archives and libraries. Thus there was the _Istoria Rusov, the
History of the Rus’_, probably by Hrihori Poletika, who had prepared
an appeal for the old rights of the Kozaks for presentation to
Catherine the Great. Later this work was to have considerable influence
on the development of the study of Ukrainian history. It was to inspire
Kostomarov, Kulish and Shevchenko, but it was still an unknown work
collecting dust in the archives and not valued even by the few people
who stumbled upon it.
The condition of the language was still more tragic. No one thought of
using the vernacular speech, the language of the folksongs and the dumy
in writing. The burden of Church Slavonic lay as a heavy weight upon
the people and even a man like Skovoroda did not venture to challenge
this spectre.
After all, Church Slavonic had served a noble purpose in the past.
It had been the distinguishing work of Orthodoxy. It had contributed
to the splendid culture of Kiev in the beginning, but it was now
outmoded. Even so, the Church Slavonic of the day was not the language
of the early Chronicles. It had been brought from the Balkans by the
first Christian monks that had penetrated the country. The people had
received it at the time of the baptism of the nation and it was hoary
with age and sacred from its many traditions. It required a man of
genius to defy the centuries of reverence that it had acquired.
In the early days, the old Balkan Church Slavonic had been modified to
make it more intelligible to the people. There had been no attempts to
translate it into the popular speech, but step by step popular words
crept in and within the old framework there had come something that
was well on its way to being the speech of the people. The cultural
revival of the sixteenth century, with its emphasis upon religion
and Orthodoxy, with its attempts to purify the national faith and
consciousness, looked askance at these innovations. Patriotic and
intelligent men had believed that the advance of Polonization and
of the Roman Catholic Church could only be checked by a more rigid
adherence to the old standards. As a result, with the best intentions
in the world, the scholars of the sixteenth century and of the Kiev
school worked directly against the popularization of the language.
Their program was strikingly similar to that of the Ciceronian
Latinists of the Renaissance who tried to make their Latin purely
classical in scope, vocabulary and grammar and who only succeeded in
making Latin truly a dead language.
It was they who did so much to insure the triumph of the vernaculars
of Western Europe, but then Latin was so different even from French
and Italian that it was impossible to confuse the old and the new.
The case with Church Slavonic was different. It had entered in large
part into the phraseology of the peasants, it had colored the speech
of the villages, and while it was not flexible and not adapted to the
needs of the population as a medium of expression, it was too close
to it to be cast off without regret and without remorse. Muscovite had
already freed itself and become a modern language. The similarities
between Muscovite Great Russian, Ukrainian and Church Slavonic were
such that Russianizing influences could argue that there was no need
to adapt Ukrainian to every-day literary use and that if the Church
Slavonic were to be abandoned, Russian should be used in its place.
The very unnational and religious attitude of the Kievan School all
too often seemed to bear out this interpretation, and with each
succeeding decade, the doom of the native speech seemed to be more
surely impending. The action of the Russian ecclesiastical censorship
after the destruction of the independence of the Ukrainian Orthodox
Church seemed to be working in the same way, for the Church books were
henceforth to be remodelled on the Russian Church Slavonic, even though
that had been at one time really reformed on the Ukrainian pattern
by the scholars who had gone from Kiev to Moscow in the seventeenth
century.
On the other hand, the Uniat Church did preserve the old Ukrainian
Church Slavonic books. The result was the same, for their conservatism
led them to preserve the old as a sacred tradition and to the devout
members of the Uniat Church, it likewise seemed almost heretical to
change the accepted forms and to seek to bring them in touch with the
language of the uneducated people. The pride of these poorly educated
priests in their superior knowledge worked as well as the conceit of
the nobles and the censorship of Moscow to put apparently insuperable
barriers in the way of adapting the ordinary language to practical and
literary purposes, and added to the general conviction of the educated
that the Ukrainian language was finished as a potent factor in the
educated life of the day.
Yet we would be much mistaken if we regarded this as a purely Ukrainian
problem. Wherever the Church Slavonic liturgy had penetrated, whether
in communion with Constantinople or with Rome, the same problem
inevitably arose. The language question, the burning discussion as to
whether the written language was to be that of the people or of the
Church, was actively considered everywhere. Russia was the first to
solve the problem and to restrict the Church language to the Church.
The Serbs in the Balkans and the Bulgarians were destined to have the
same conflict.
More than that, they were faced with the same situation and even with
the same books. Peter the Great had sent to the Balkans men educated
in the Kiev tradition. He had sent down the same grammar of Smotritsky
that had served for a century to teach the Russian grammar from the
Ukrainian Church Slavonic standpoint. The same books appeared at
Belgrade and Sofia that had vanished from Kiev and Chernihiv under
Russian influence. During most of the eighteenth century, there was
used among the Serbs exactly that same mixture of Church Slavonic,
Muscovite and Ukrainian that was preventing the revival of the
Ukrainian spirit. It had the same effect elsewhere. The Russian Church
Slavonic that mastered Serb and Serb Church Slavonic blocked for nearly
a century the cultural revival in the Balkans.
The Russian rulers played heavily on the theme of the linguistic unity
of Slavonic Orthodoxy. When it was necessary to check a dissent, they
ignored the language and demanded the unity of the Orthodox Church.
They stressed the religious unity as opposed to the Catholic West.
At other moments, they were ready to ignore this and to emphasize
the linguistic similarities and to argue that there was no need for
linguistic reform among the Slavs, since Russian had already been thus
favored and there was no need to have two literary Slavonic languages.
They emphasized with a bland disregard of facts that it would be
child’s play to remodel all the languages on the Russian basis and to
combine into one Russian language all the varied tongues. It was no
wonder that they aroused in the Balkans the same reactions that they
did in Ukraine. The more rigid monks refused to listen to their demands
and there was repeated on a small scale something of that revulsion of
feeling that had come when the Kiev scholars first appeared at Moscow.
We can parallel the Ukrainian situation with that of the Czechs and
Slovaks. From the time of the Thirty Years War to the end of the
eighteenth century, there was hardly a book of any value published
in Czech. There was nothing as important as the _History of the
Rus’_, for here it was Latin and German that took the lead as the
permitted and encouraged languages. We must never forget that the great
work of Dobrovsky which began the Czech revival was itself written in
Latin, exactly as the few surviving scholars of Ukraine wrote in the
archaic form of Ukrainian Church Slavonic.
It is of interest that the only two Slavonic languages which were in
a more or less healthy condition were Russian and Polish. In both
cases, the upper classes had not been denationalized. They were still
willing to use the popular language, even if in a refined or revised
form. They were still able to produce literature such as it was and
to secure access to printing presses to make their works known. They
still maintained a historical culture, even though Peter had completely
overturned Russian life and had started his new creation off on a
Polish-Ukrainian-Western European tack. It gave the two peoples a
tremendous advantage which they were not slow to recognize and it added
tremendously to the burden of the other Slavonic peoples, who had not
lost all hope and ambition of recovery. Even the dismemberment of
Poland had not had time to damage the dreams of the Poles and to take
away the advantages that centuries of political life had given them.
The special burden of the Ukrainians was rather to be found in the
nature of the Kozak Host. As we have seen, the Host did not in the
beginning think of taking over civilian administration. It had been a
brotherhood of fighting men. Its remains, the tales of its exploits,
looked very little to territorial control and much to heroic deeds.
Where a Czech, whether he were writing in Czech, Latin or German, could
not fail to know of the achievements of the Kingdom of Bohemia, the
Ukrainian could not look back easily to the Ukrainian state of two or
three centuries before. He had to go back to Kiev and those traditions
were torn and confused by the tragedies of seven hundred years. The
Kozaks gave him much but not what was most important in a national
revival.
The people had confused ideas of the Kozaks but not of their valor.
They could admire the songs of the fearless raiders; they could draw
from them very little of political education. There was needed a long
series of scholars and of thinkers to delve into the annals of the
past and to draw the proper conclusions, before an intelligent and
clear theory could be put before the average peasant serf. There was
needed a work of study and of synthesis and it seemed clear under the
conditions of the eighteenth century that that could not take place. As
Catherine the Great looked out on the reorganized Ukraine, now turned
into typical Russian provinces in Little Russia, she could be sure that
there was no danger, that the last sparks of the Ukrainian idea had
been quenched and that her work had been a success.
She was startlingly incorrect, for all that the eighteenth century
could not imagine suddenly happened. The intellectual changes of the
world in one or two decades laid the basis for a Ukrainian revival
in a form that would have seemed incredible to the leaders even a
half-century earlier.
CHAPTER TWELVE
_THE AWAKENING IN EASTERN UKRAINE_
In 1798 there suddenly appeared in St. Petersburg, a volume entitled
the _Eneida_, written by one Ivan Kotlyarevsky. It was a travesty
on Virgil’s Aeneid, in which the Trojans were depicted as the wandering
Kozaks who had been expelled from the Sich less than twenty-five years
before. Furthermore the volume was written in the popular dialect of
the province of Poltava where the author was serving as an official of
the government. The revival of the Ukrainian spirit had commenced.
All possible honor must be paid to Kotlyarevsky for his audacious
effort which was crowned with so much success and it would have been
a godsend for Ukraine, had any one a century earlier had the courage
and the intellectual independence to have made the same attempt.
The tragedy of Ukraine had been, as we have seen, largely caused by
the fact that the scholars of Kiev had adopted only a reactionary
attitude toward the language question. They had striven so hard for
the preservation of Church Slavonic that they had ignored the revival
of the vernacular in both Poland and Russia. Even Skovoroda with all
of his inspired teachings as to the rights of the individual had not
ventured to break this old and stultifying tradition. Kotlyarevsky did
and the results were at once visible.
Yet there was more to this innovation than the mere publishing of a
book in the Ukrainian language. The spirit of Europe had been changing
for over a quarter of a century and consciously or not Kotlyarevsky was
a reflection of that change. Not only he among the Ukrainians but such
men as Dositey Obradovich among the Serbs and Dobrovsky for the Czechs
reflected the new attitude.
All of these men were products of the Enlightenment, that interesting
movement of the eighteenth century which endeavored to apply the
rule of reason to human affairs. They were often well trained in the
classical languages and their cool intellectual powers fitted well
with the powdered wigs and the stately manners of the courts of the
enlightened despots. There was much in the writings of the Kievan
school which encouraged a man like Kotlyarevsky. The various comedies
produced in the school, the comical intermezzos, and all the varied
performances which had dragged on at weary length in pseudo-Church
Slavonic, all could be cited as prototypes for a whimsical treatment of
a classical theme.