influence of Lomonosov carefully adapted to the new Russian literature
the ideals of Boileau and the French scholars who created the high,
low and middle styles of literary language. The low was to form
the language of comedy and of humorous episodes. It was to be free
from those survivals of Church Slavonic that still maintained a
definite position in the odes and tragedies of Russian literature.
There were many burlesques of classical authors being published in
Russian. Ippolit Bogdanovich, a Ukrainian writing in Russian, had
metamorphosized LaFontaine’s _Amours de Psyche_ into a Russian
form. Free adaptation was the order of the day and if an author were to
create humor by the use of the vernacular, how much better it was for a
Ukrainian gentleman to employ the real vernacular and to transform the
characters of Aeneas and his followers into the real Kozaks who were
even then wandering around the Black Sea?
That was one possible source of inspiration but there was another which
was rising with increasing vehemence throughout Europe. For centuries,
the goal of literature was to appeal to the educated and noble classes
by describing in elevated language the feelings and the emotions of the
nobles and the more elevated and developed personalities. The common
people had vanished from literature, except in comic interludes.
A new trend started with the work of Jean Jacques Rousseau who
taught the superiority of the simple and natural man to the pattern
of civilization and sophistication. His ideas were developed in the
literary sphere by Johann Gottfried Herder, who emphasized the value of
folksongs and of the poetry of so called primitive nations. Herder’s
influence resulted in the collecting of folksongs from all the people
of Europe. Among these the gatherings of Serb folksongs were especially
prominent. Thus by the end of the eighteenth century, interest in the
ideas, the poetry and the customs of the various peoples hitherto
ignored had become one of the leading components of the new studies.
It was thus that the _Eneida_ appeared at the psychological
moment when interest in the people was reaching a new high and when
the French Revolution was already disturbing the settled political
situation. The work revealed Kotlyarevsky both as a masterly adapter of
the _Aeneid_ and also as an authority on the manners and customs
of the Kozaks. With its jesting and serious tone, it aroused attention
among many of the descendants of the Kozak officers who had already
become Russianized, and at the same time it fitted so well within the
official and tolerated literary bounds that it was impossible for the
authorities to regard it as revolutionary and administer any punishment
to its bold author.
Still later, in his two comedies, Kotlyarevsky gave examples of
the drama in the vernacular Ukrainian, and in both he drew clear
differentiations between the manners and customs of the Ukrainians and
those of the Moskals. There is still in these no question of political
separation, but the author went back very definitely to the ideas
of the older Kievans who had gone to Moscow and St. Petersburg, and
emphasized the difference in the psychologies of the two peoples.
Whatever may have been the definite purpose of Kotlyarevsky in starting
his work, he succeeded in giving the Ukrainians what they had long
wanted--a definite modern language, and by doing this he laid a sound
basis for a new movement. From the day when he first published the
_Eneida_, Ukrainian literature has not lacked for writers. Of
course in the beginning various people turned their hand to practicing
the new medium for various purposes, but there has been an overwhelming
tendency for all who had any special talent to emphasize the hardships
of the people and to follow Kotlyarevsky in using their influence
on behalf of the people as against the foreign and denationalized
landowners. Thus from the very beginning the revived Ukrainian was not
burdened with that type of aristocratic idealism that so marked the
other Slavonic languages.
Opponents of the modern Ukrainian movement have often spoken slurringly
of this literary movement, because its early writers did not directly
challenge the Russian government and remained merely literary men.
It betrays a curious ignorance, for in all of the Slavonic revival
the process was exactly the same. The emphasis, whether in Ukraine or
among the Czechs or elsewhere, was at first on literary and grammatical
points. The very nature of Kotlyarevsky’s work pushed the Ukrainian
cause much further in the direction of democracy than was the case in
the other languages.
The second stage in the revival was the introduction of Romanticism.
This movement tended to look back toward the past. Its masters, in
Russia and Poland and in all other countries, sought striking episodes
from the past. They looked for outbursts of unbridled passion, of
daring and of excitement and they found it in plenty among the Kozaks.
_The History of the Rus’_ was now printed and it, even more than
Karamzin’s _History of the Russian Empire_, became the source
book for the Romantic writers. Pushkin knew of it in Russian and so
did Kondraty Fedorovich Ryleyev, that stormy petrel of the Decembrist
movement who paid with his life for his participation in the movement
in 1825. Many of his best poems dealt with the exploits of the old
rulers of Kiev, of the Kozaks, of Nalyvayko and Voynarovsky, the nephew
of Mazepa. Even though they tried to keep within the confines of the
lawful type of Russian history, they could not fail to emphasize
those qualities of personal independence which were rarely stressed
in Muscovite tradition. Nikolay Gogol, the son of one of the earliest
writers in Ukrainian, felt the same drive and in _Taras Bulba_ he
pictured the unbridled courage and daring of the old Kozaks in their
struggle against the Poles. The Poles too felt this same influence and
there appeared again a large number of Polish poems with their scenes
located in Ukraine among the Kozaks.
It was to this phase of the revival that Taras Shevchenko, who was to
be the stabilizer of Ukrainian and its greatest master, belongs. In
the _Kobzar_, after dealing with various aspects of Ukrainian life and
legend, all typical of the Romantic movement at its best, he turns
to themes from Kozak history; and in the _Night of Taras_, in _Ivan
Pidkova_, and later in the _Haydamaki_ and _Hamaliya_, he gives us some
of the greatest poems in Ukrainian when he describes the campaigns
of the Kozaks against the Poles and the Turks. It is noticeable that
most of these themes deal with the struggle against the Poles. That
was more filled with the type of episode which suited the Romantic
poet than was the period of conflict between the Hetman state and
Moscow. The grinding force of the Russian steam-roller had prevented
incidents of the old traditional type and we need not wonder that the
Romantic poets in their desire to go back to the distant past paid
more attention to events of the days before Khmelnitsky, when the
Kozaks were the most democratic, the most unrestrained, and the most
successful.
Thus, by the time the rumbles of the Revolution of 1848 began to be
heard, Ukrainian literary and linguistic revival was well under way.
The literature had reached in the works of Shevchenko the level of the
other Slavonic literatures. It had done this despite the disapproval
of the Russian literary critics, especially Belinsky, who affected to
believe that there was no real call for the erection of Little Russian,
as he loved to call Ukrainian, into a literary language. His judgments
on the _Kobzar_ and the _Haydamaki_ are almost ludicrous in
their efforts to prove that Shevchenko was only a peasant trying to
show off before Russian society. A few years late Apollon Grigoryev
unhesitatingly placed him on a level with Pushkin and Mickiewicz, but
he was exceptional in his willingness to follow his own ideas rather
than the official promulgations of the intelligentsia.
In another field the Ukrainian revival went far: the field of ethnology
and of folklore. The Romantic temperament, aided and abetted by the
teachings of Herder, turned its attention to the manners and customs of
the village. There grew up a veritable harvest of investigators who,
whether in fiction form as in the case of Hrihori Kvitka-Osnovyanenko
or in the form of scientific treatises, pictured every aspect of
Ukrainian life. These men, and some of them were to be found among the
Russianized gentry, emphasized the differences that existed in the
manners and customs between the Ukrainians and the Great Russians. They
noted with care the differences in the construction of the village
houses, the arrangements of the houses and the farms, the embroideries,
the legends, the folklore. They collected the popular songs, the dumy,
the historical poems. Anything and everything that marked the life of
the people in all of its manifestations they willingly committed to
paper and step by step they gathered and preserved a picture of life in
a Ukrainian village as it existed in the days of serfdom.
It is easy to overlook this kind of work and to regard it as the mere
product of literary men and scholars. Yet the works of Maksimovich,
of Tsertelev, and of many more served as a preliminary step to the
raising of political aspirations. The study of the past carried on
both by Ukrainians and by the Russian authorities brought to light
much forgotten information. Thus the Governor General Bibikov in 1843
founded the Kiev Archaeological Commission, on which Shevchenko was
for a time employed. This aimed to collect information on the past, to
secure paintings of old buildings, and to supply details of history. It
is highly significant that a firsthand knowledge of the past obtained
in this work brought many of the young scholars and artists to realize
more clearly than they had done before the historical value of many of
the old Ukrainian writings which had existed up to that time only in
manuscript.
A comparison with almost all of the other cultural revivals of the
suppressed nations of Europe shows that such a beginning was the
usual procedure. Even among the Czechs it became necessary to awaken
the country to an appreciation of its past and the earliest leaders
were poets such as Kollar and Jungmann, and historians like Palacky
and Safarik. Among the Serbs it was Obradovich and his friends who
undertook the task of acquainting the people with the achievements of
the past and with modern conditions.
In all cases the political development came later and was not always in
the beginning closely coordinated with the cultural movement. It was
here that the difficulties of the Ukrainians multiplied. During the
eighteenth century, the Estates of the Kingdom of Bohemia had become a
completely moribund institution. They still went through the motions of
existence and the same kind of historical study that called attention
to the language and literature could be applied to searching out the
rights of these long surviving traditions and breathing new life into
them.
So it could have been in Ukraine, had there existed even a rudimentary
form of the Hetman state. When we realize that the Russian Governor
General Repnin could fall into governmental disfavor because his wife
was a relative of the last hetman, Cyril Rozumovsky, we can see what
might have been the consequences of even a paper continuation of the
old order. Catherine had done her work well and she had eliminated
every vestige of the former Hetman state. She had eliminated the
Sich and while she had allowed some of the Kozaks to form a new
organization in the Kuban, there was after fifty years no sense of
continuity anywhere. The nobles had been almost completely Russianized
in outlook. They owed their wealth and position to the ruin of the old
order and while they might sympathize with and be moved by the plea of
Kotlyarevsky, there was no likelihood that they would bestir themselves
and risk their position in any mad adventure. For good or ill, they
were lost to the call of Ukraine.
All they could do was to contribute in some small way to the foundation
of the Universities of Kharkiv and Kiev, which had been started during
the reign of Alexander I, largely through the advice and influence of
Adam Czartoryski, one of the close friends of the Tsar and an ardent
Polish patriot. His influence was rather expended on the problem of
Poland and for this reason he had worked energetically in the revival
of the University of Wilno in the old capital of Lithuania. For the
same purpose he had inspired the foundation of universities in the
Ukrainian cities but he had hoped that these would serve as centres of
a Polish rather than of a Ukrainian revival. He partially succeeded,
for Polish influence in both Kiev and Kharkiv grew rapidly during
the years before the Polish revolt of 1831, even though it was from
these institutions that many of the early Ukrainian song collectors,
archaeologists, and historians were drawn.
Besides this, the Russian system did not contain, as the Austrian
did, any loopholes for the formation of legal parties or political
agitation. Catherine had seen well to this and in fact her attitude was
only a legitimate Westernized expansion of the attitude of Tsar Alexis,
when his delegates refused an oath to Khmelnitsky at the moment when
the Kozaks first accepted the protection of the Tsar at Pereyaslav.
Russia was indeed a monolithic state in which no one possessed any real
rights except the tsar. The Kozak Host had been an anachronism and it
had perished. Now with the Ukrainian revival there was no legal means
of recalling the old rights and privileges for any one, much less the
peasants living as serfs on the lands of denationalized and foreign
masters.
The revival of the Ukrainians was, and was destined to remain, a purely
cultural revival in a monolithic Russia which proudly had annexed
the ancient history of Kiev and considered itself as its legitimate
successor. Little Russia seemed to the authorities merely a part of the
whole and once all distinguishing characteristics had been removed in
law, there was no way of restoring them except as the gift of the tsar
or by the disintegration of the country.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
_THE SOCIETY OF SAINTS CYRIL AND METHODIUS_
It was impossible under Russian rule to have any immediate hopes for
the beginning of definite political activity and this was no more true
for the Ukrainian population than for any of the other nationalities
of the Russian Empire, including the Russians themselves. Even those
scanty means of popular expression which had survived the reforms of
the Congress of Vienna and the growth of reaction in Western Europe
were here excluded.
It was impossible to shut out ideas. The years of conflict with
Napoleon had shown to many of the Russian officers who had entered
Paris with the victorious allies the difference between the situation
in Russia and that in western Europe, and they willingly joined with
the surviving older enlightened thinkers of the eighteenth century to
make certain demands upon the government. The success of the United
States as a republican federation affected many of them, and they began
to dream of reorganizing their own country in the same fashion.
The result was the development of a number of secret societies modelled
on the Tugendbund (League of Virtue) in Germany and the Carbonari in
Italy. Most of them demanded at least the limitation of the power of
the tsar and the granting of more or less definite rights to the rest
of the population. Some even demanded the complete abolition of serfdom.
These societies, which were parallel to secret societies in
Russian-occupied Poland, existed in all important garrisons of the
Russian Empire. The Southern Society formed by Colonel Pestel among
the Russian troops in Ukraine was the most radical of the entire
number. Yet it cannot be said clearly that even this Society thought
much of any special rights for Ukraine. It was composed largely of
Russians or Russianized Ukrainians who had acquired rank and wealth in
the Russian service, and they were not disposed in any numbers to do
anything to harm the national unity. They made no effort to reach the
masses of the people and win them over to any special cause. In a word
these secret societies, instead of building on the past, sought rather
to create something new and theoretically ideal.
Conditions came to a head on the occasion of the death of Alexander I,
when there ensued a dynastic tangle. The succession should have gone
to the next younger brother Constantine, but he had abdicated under
confusing circumstances. Finally on December 14, 1825, when it became
certain that he was not going to assume the power, the third brother
Nicholas ordered the troops to swear allegiance to him. When part
of the Guards Regiments in Petersburg refused, under the leadership
of members of these societies, he suppressed the recalcitrants by
military force. It is interesting that the only serious fighting was
in Chernihiv, where the regular garrison revolted under the influence
of Colonel Pestel and was almost wiped out by loyal troops. Yet it is
difficult to say that this was a manifestation of a Ukrainian desire
for independence, since it was closely tied up with the movement in
St. Petersburg and there is little evidence that the leaders of the
movement had given any thought to the nature of the decentralization
which they wished to introduce.
The Decembrist movement was, however, a prelude to other action. On the
one hand it increased the determination of the tsar to maintain order
and the autocracy at all costs. On the other, it drove from active
leadership in political movements the representatives of the higher
aristocracy, who were without exception the foremost representatives
of Russian influence in Ukraine and the best educated people of the
day. It thus cleared the way for newer groups to appear upon the scene.
It settled nothing in reality.
There came a new tendency for autocratic control of everything and the
new measures still more infuriated the Poles, who had already begun
the work of active organization of secret societies. More and more, in
places like Wilno, these societies became very active. Finally they
burst out in a great Polish revolt in 1831 and its failure thrust down
the hopes of the Poles for a restoration of their country. It is to be
noted that Taras Shevchenko, as a young serf, was shortly before this
time in Wilno and could not fail to have heard of the preparations for
the revolt. Because of the danger, his master Engelhardt left Wilno and
went to the capital and the young Shevchenko with his inquiring mind
had the opportunity to make the acquaintance of several of the leaders
of the revolt. Instead of winning him to the Polish cause, they seem to
have sharpened his interest in his own people and to have revived in
him an appreciation of the rights of Ukraine, even if those rights had
been abolished by the decrees of Catherine the Great.
It was at this moment that the poem of Jan Kollar, _The Daughter of
Slava_, began to circulate throughout the Slavonic world. Kollar, a
Slovak Protestant, went to Jena in 1817 to study. There he was greatly
impressed by the sentiments of the students calling for a unification
of Germany and the introduction of a republican form of government. It
set him to thinking and when he fell in love with a German girl from
the south, he transformed her in his own poetic way of thinking into
a descendant of the Germanized Slavs. He published in 1821 his first
collection of _Sonnets_ and then in 1824 he increased this to the
book, _The Daughter of Slava_, in which he called for a great
Slavonic union on liberal principles.
It was probably as a result of this that there appeared a Pan-Slavic
Society in Ukraine about the time of the Decembrists, but so few
details have been preserved that it deserves little more than a passing
mention, for we know very little of the actual development in Ukraine
at this time, except among the officers of the Russian army who took
part in the secret societies.
With the suppression of the Russian movement, there came the Polish
revolt of 1831, and then the poems of Pushkin, who, under the influence
of Kollar and Russian imperialism, declared that all the Slavonic
rivers had to flow into the Russian sea or they would dry up. This was
the special Russian brand of imitation of Kollar and in this connection
we can see how closely Pushkin follows the attitude of Tsar Alexis,
Peter the Great and Catherine.
Yet outside of Russia, Kollar found quite a different interpretation.
The Southern Slavs, especially the Serbs, and the Czechs became
enthused with his ideals and began to dream of a great Slavonic
brotherhood in which Russia might play a leading but not a dominant
role. Soon after there appeared such books as the _History of the
Slavonic Language and Literature_ by Pavel Josef Safarik, in which
the author attempted to give an introduction to all the writing in the
various Slavonic languages. It is true that his remarks on Ukrainian or
Little Russian are very scanty, but he does mention Kotlyarevsky and
comments on the small amount of work that had been done in the study
of this “dialect.” He alludes to the still more confused condition of
knowledge of the language of Galicia. All this was just the beginning
and more and more Czech students began to appear in Kiev and make known
around the University of Kiev the recent discoveries and ideas of Czech
scholarship.
In the forties, the era of romantic idealism was not yet over. There
was stirring already that ferment which was to lead to the revolutions
of 1848 and there were high hopes that by some form of popular miracle
the millennium would be speedily achieved. How or by what means were
relatively unimportant questions to many of the young idealists, but
these were no longer to be found among the ranks of the gentry or the
army officers but in the universities.
It was then no chance happening that the young men at Kiev became
tremendously interested in the new movements, which were still
wavering between dreams of a general Slavonic union and agitation
for the recovery of the liberty of each individual people. The ideas
were ardently discussed and it was only natural that those who were
interested should form themselves into the traditional pattern of a
secret society.
At some time, perhaps in 1846, there was organized at Kiev the Society
of Saints Cyril and Methodius. This may well be regarded as the first
formulation of the dream of a self-governing Ukraine as part of a
general Slavonic federation. The men who took part were the keenest
thinkers and the outstanding characters of the Ukrainian movement for
many years. Foremost among them was Taras Shevchenko. He had already
made a name for himself as the author of the _Kobzar_ and the
_Haydamaki_ and as a promising painter in St. Petersburg. Now
he was in Kiev, attached to the Archaeological Commission, with a
commission to paint the churches and the ruins from the times of the
Kozaks and Khmelnitsky. Not only that, but his travels had given him
the opportunity to see the wretched conditions of the Ukrainian people
and the evil that serfdom and dependence was doing to them.
Another of the group was Nikolay Kostomarov, a Russian by birth, but a
close student of the history of Ukraine. He was becoming convinced in
his own mind of the differences between the ancient culture of Kiev and
of Moscow. Here too was Panteleimon Kulish, also a collector of folk
songs and a historian. Others of the group were Vasil Bilozersky and
Prof. Mikhail Maksimovich.
These men were all familiar with the existing condition of Ukraine,
with the difficulties of the common people and with the work that was
being done abroad for popular education. As a result they worked out a
purely idealistic program for the future of the Slavs in general and
the Ukrainians in particular.