APPENDIX C Shevchenko and the Muslims

although the common Ukrainian/Russian terms for a Muslim, Musul- man, or in literary Ukrainian Musulmanyn, do not occur in Shevchenko's poetry, the (today) disparaging term Busurman and the related Busur- manskyi (“Muslim” in its noun and adjectival forms) do, but very rarely indeed.

Tataryn (Tatar) and Turchyn (Turk) appear more frequently in our poet's works, reflecting his interests in Ukrainian history, in which both Turks and Tatars, especially Tatars, played major roles. See, for example, his two great poems on the Cossack naval expeditions to free the slaves from Ottoman captivity: “Ivan Pidkova” (1840) and “Hamaliia” (1844). These po­ems were inspired in part by some of the Cossack Tales (1837) of Mykhailo Chaikovsky/Michal Chajkowski/Sadyk Pasha, published in Paris, and Cam­paign of Zbaraz (1839), a poem by Jozef Bohdan Zaleski, the ukrainophile Polish bard from central Ukraine, as well as by Ukrainian folk and other sources, such as the duma or reflective song “Lament of the Poor Slaves in Turkish Captivity.” (On this, see Valeriia Smilianska, “Hamaliia,” in Shevchenkivska entsyklopediia, vol.

But this “Turkish slavery” theme does not say much about the poet's views of Islam in general, which seem to have evolved and were never re­ally hostile, unlike some of his contemporaries. As a young student of the famous Russian painter Karl Briullov, for example, Shevchenko was influ­enced by his master's interest in the “Orient.” Briullov had toured Greece and Turkey and painted several “Orientalist” canvases, and it was proba­bly under his influence that Shevchenko painted In the Harem (1843). The Ukrainian writer Petro Kraliuk (“Taras Shevchenko i musulmanskyi svit,” in his Taras Shevchenko: Nezauvazhene [Kyiv: knt, 2015], 218-28) wrote that the poet's “Kavkaz” (The Caucasus) even compared Russia's Ortho­dox Christianity unfavourably to Islam, and that this attitude showed later during his central Asian exile. For example, in Son (The Dream, 1847-48), written during his exile, in the land today called Kazakhstan, he compares the free life of the “Kirghiz” nomads, only superficially Muslim, with the oppression of the Orthodox Russian Empire:

Blukav ia po svitu chymalo,

Nosyv i svytu i zhupan...

Nasho vzhe lykho za Uralom Otym Kyrhyzam, otzhe i tam, Ei zhe Bohu, luchshe zhyty, Nizh nam na Ukraini.

A mozhe tym, shcho Kyrhyzy

Shche ne Khrystiiany!

(Around this world I have wandered about,

Wearing my cloak and zhupan out.

But why is it for the Kirghiz

Across the Urals, so very bad?

God, they've got more

Than we in Ukraine ever had!

Maybe, that's the very reason

Why the Kirghiz aren't yet Christian?)

(Lines 80-8, in my rather loose translation from

- Tvory u 6 tomakh [Kyiv: Vyd. an UkSSR, 1963], II, 43)

So for Shevchenko here, perhaps a bit obliquely, a free and relatively happy life on the Kazakh Steppe, which he associates with Islam, preserves liberty, while the political and social slavery associated with the empire promotes Christianity!

Shevchenko took a lively interest in the varied peoples of that central Asian region, both Muslim and non-Muslim, and he painted them often.

Moreover, certain sharp cultural differences with the “East” did not shock the poet. For example, continues Ushakov (“Asia,” 118-19), Shev­chenko, like Briullov and many other artists in his time (as mentioned above), attempted to paint harem women, and in his poem Saul, on the biblical king, he did not outright condemn the custom of keeping harems: “Saul, ne buduchyi durak, / Nabrav harem sobi chymalyi / Ta i zakhodyv- sia tsariuvat” (Saul, not being a dumbell, collected a substantial harem, and prepared himself to rule as a king). Kraliuk too points out (“Taras Shevchenko,” 226-7) that the poet actually began work on a literary piece called Satrap i dervish (The Satrap and the Dervish), to be set somewhere in the East. In approaching this piece, he tried to avoid romanticizing Oriental women, but still wished to acknowledge their role in private life: “I do not know quite how to handle the matter of women. In the East, women are silent slaves. But in my poem they must be as they really are: silent, a soul­less but key factor of the visible action [bezdushnymy rygachamy pozornogo deistviia].” Most probably, although he sketched a few, and could see their great beauty, he never got to know well a real “Oriental” woman, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Tatar, or other.

While acknowledging such problems, Shevchenko was far less patroniz­ing of “Orientals,” the various “conquered peoples,” than were many of his contemporaries. And, of course, he was never an apologist for the Russian Empire, as was Pushkin or Lermontov. Kraliuk (“Taras Shevchenko,” 226) remarks that he admired the Muslim view of paradise so often criticized by Westerners, though based only on one suggestion, perhaps in jest, about how pleasurable that highly sensual paradise must be! Moreover, he never became a Muslim, always retained a certain Christian identity, and always felt himself a member of the community of Ukrainian artists and intel­lectuals, who firmly acknowledged their Christian heritage, problematic though at times it was. Ushakov (“Asia,” 13-16) states that the poet shared many of the “Eurocentric” ideas of his time, and sometimes contrasted Eu­ropean civilization to the ostensible “barbarism” of “the East.” Within the general context of his time, however, Taras Shevchenko, the foremost poet of his country in the nineteenth century, was, in his sympathetic view of the Muslims with whom he came into contact or about whom he had heard or read, or painted or sketched, more open-minded than most.