Chapter 14 The Books of the Genesis

The Ukrainian national anthem begins with the words “Ukraine has not yet perished,” hardly an optimistic beginning for any kind of song. But this is not the only anthem whose words do not inspire optimism.

Like many other anthems, the Polish one was originally a marching song written for the Polish legions fighting under the command of the future emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, in his Italian campaigns. The song was originally known as the “Dąbrowski mazurka,” named for a commander of the Polish troops, Jan Henryk Dąbrowski. Many of the Polish legionnaires, including the commander himself, had taken part in the Kościuszko Uprising, and the lyrics were meant to lift their spirits after the destruction of their state by the partitioning powers. The song’s second line asserts that Poland will not perish “as long as we are alive.” By associating the nation not with the state but with those who considered themselves its members, the Polish anthem gave hope not just to the Poles but also to representatives of other stateless nations. A new generation of patriots in Poland and Ukraine refused to accept the disasters of the previous century as the final verdict on their nations. Both Polish and Ukrainian activists promoted a new understanding of a nation as a democratic polity made up of citizen patriots rather than a territorial state.

In the first decade of the nineteenth century, Napoleon and his soldiers brought the ideas of nation and popular sovereignty to the rest of Europe in their songs and at the points of their bayonets.

In 1815, when entering the University of Vilnius, the fifteen-year-old Mickiewicz gave his name as Adam Napoleon Mickiewicz. By that time, Polish hopes of having “our Republic again” had been crushed. Napoleon, Dąbrowski, and their French and Polish troops had retreated from the Russian Empire in defeat. Slightly more than a year later, Russian troops took Paris, while Napoleon went into exile on the island of Elba. But not all was in vain. The Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), which decided the fate of post-Napoleonic Europe, restored Poland to the map of the continent. On the ruins of the Duchy of Warsaw created by Napoleon, with the addition of some territory previously annexed by Austria, the congress established the Kingdom of Poland. It was to have the same ruler as its mighty neighbor, the Russian Empire, and in Russian it was called a tsardom, not a kingdom. Tsar Alexander I granted it rights of autonomy and privileges that no other part of the empire could have dreamed of.

Catherine’s Age of Reason, entailing imperial unification and the standardization of administrative and legal practices, was over; the era of special arrangements was back.

Among the Ukrainians prepared to fight Napoleon with arms in hand was the founder of modern Ukrainian literature, Ivan Kotliarevsky. A native of the Poltava region in the former Hetmanate, he formed a Cossack detachment to join the struggle. The son of a minor official, Kotliarevsky studied in a theological seminary, worked as a tutor of children of the nobility, and served in the Russian imperial army, taking part in the 1806–1812 Russo-Turkish War. In 1798, while on military service, he published the first part of his poem Eneďda, a travesty based on Virgil’s Aeneid, whose main characters were not Greeks but Zaporozhian Cossacks. As one would expect of true Zaporozhians, they spoke vernacular Ukrainian. But the choice of language for the poem seems logical only in retrospect. In late eighteenth century Ukraine, Kotliarevsky was a pioneer — the first to write a major poetical work in the vernacular.

Why did he do so? We have no indication that he was trying to make a political statement of any kind. In fact, his choice of the genre of travesty indicates that he was playing with the language and subject rather than attempting to produce a work of high seriousness.

Kotliarevsky wrote the first part of Eneďda when the shell of Church Slavonic, which had dominated Russian imperial literature of the previous era, was crumbling and falling apart, allowing literatures based in one way or another on the vernacular to make their way into the public sphere. Russia found its first truly great poet in Alexander Pushkin; Ukraine got its own in the person of Kotliarevsky. Whatever his original motives for using Ukrainian, Kotliarevsky never regretted his choice. There would be five more parts of Eneďda. He would also author the first plays written in Ukrainian, among them Natalka-Poltavka (Natalka from Poltava), a love story set in a Ukrainian village. The language of Kotliarevsky’s homeland, the Poltava region of the former Hetmanate, would become the basis of standard Ukrainian for speakers of numerous Ukrainian dialects from the Dnieper to the Don in the east and to the Carpathians in the west. With Kotliarevsky, a new literature was born. The language received its first grammar in 1818 with the publication of the Grammar of the Little Russian Dialect by Oleksii Pavlovsky. A year later, the first collection of Ukrainian folk songs by Mykola (Nikolai) Tsertelev appeared in print.

Kotliarevsky and his writings might have remained a footnote to literary history, a mere curiosity, if not for the work of dozens and then hundreds of talented authors. Not all of them wrote in Ukrainian, but most of them were romantics, sharing the early nineteenth-century fascination with folklore and tradition and its emphasis on emotion rather than the rationalism of the Enlightenment. The birthplace of Ukrainian romanticism was the city of Kharkiv, where the imperial government opened a university in 1805, inviting professors from all over the empire to fill vacant positions. Being a professor at that time often meant taking an interest in local history and folklore, and Kharkiv had a rich tradition. It served as the administrative and cultural center of Sloboda Ukraine, settled by Ukrainian Cossacks and runaway peasants in the times of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this land was often referred to as “Ukraine.” Not surprisingly, the first literary almanac that began to appear there in 1816 was titled the Ukrainian Herald. Though published in Russian, it also accepted texts in Ukrainian, and many of its authors discussed themes in Ukrainian history and culture.

The centrality of the Cossack past to romantic literary interests, already manifested by Kotliarevsky’s Eneďda, was further evidenced by the Kharkiv romantics’ readiness to embrace and popularize by far the most influential Ukrainian historical text of the period, Istoriia rusov (The History of the Rus’). Authorship of this history of the Ukrainian Cossacks was attributed to eighteenth-century Orthodox archbishop Heorhii Konysky, but the real author (or authors) came from the ranks of descendants of Cossack officers in the Starodub region of the former Hetmanate. Whoever wrote the History was concerned about the inequality among the Cossack officers and the Russian nobility and argued more broadly for the equality of Little and Great Russia — an old theme sounded in Cossack writings of the eighteenth century but now presented in a way that fitted the sensibilities of the romantic age.

The History portrayed the Cossacks as a distinct nation and glorified its past with descriptions of the heroic deeds of the Ukrainian hetmans, their battles, and their deaths at the hands of their enemies. Those enemies, and the villains of the narrative, were generally representatives of other nationalities — Poles, Jews, and Russians. The History of the Rus’ ignited the imagination of romantic writers and poets all over the empire. In St. Petersburg, these included Kondratii Ryleev, Alexander Pushkin, and Nikolai Gogol; in Kharkiv, the main promoter of the mysterious text was a professor at the local university, Izmail Sreznevsky. Like Macpherson before him, he was not above creating his own folklore. But whereas Macpherson used Irish myths for that purpose, Sreznevsky found inspiration in the History of the Rus’. The work, which became extremely popular in the former Hetmanate in the 1830s and 1840s, made an all-important step toward the creation of a modern Ukrainian nation, turning a history of the Cossack social order into an account of a rising national community.

The former Hetmanate provided a key historical myth, a cultural tradition, and a language as building blocks of the modern Ukrainian nation. It supplied the architects as well. Ivan Kotliarevsky, author of Eneďda, Mykola Tsertelev, publisher of the first collection of Ukrainian folk songs, and Oleksii Pavlovsky, author of the first grammar of Ukrainian, all came from the Hetmanate. The reason for such prominence or even dominance of Hetmanate elites in the early stages of Ukrainian nation building was quite simple: the territory of the former Cossack state was the only region of nineteenth-century Ukraine where the landowning elites shared the culture of the local population. Catholic Poles or Polonized Ukrainian nobles dominated the political and cultural scene in Austrian Galicia and Russian Volhynia, Podolia, and Right-Bank Ukraine. In the southern steppes, colonized during the era of Catherine II, the ruling elite was either ethnically or culturally Russian. The scions of the old Cossack nation of the Hetmanate ended up in the forefront of battles for the new nation almost by default. Not surprisingly, the Cossack lands gave that nation not only its language but also its name, Ukraine.

While the beginnings of modern Ukrainian nation building — some scholars call it the heritage-gathering stage — came during and immediately after the Napoleonic Wars, the Polish uprising of 1830 influenced the next stage, which led to the formulation of the political program of the nascent national movement.

The uprising was long in the making. According to the resolutions of the 1814–1815 Congress of Vienna, Alexander I, the liberal ruler of Russia who had now added to his title of emperor of Russia that of tsar of Poland, provided his new possession with one of the most liberal constitutions in Europe. But the tsar soon proved that he was an emperor not only in name. Alexander’s liberalism ran its course soon after the European powers recognized his sovereignty over the kingdom. His representatives often ignored the Polish parliament, curtailed freedom of the press, and disregarded other civic liberties the tsar had originally granted. When dissatisfied young Poles formed clandestine organizations, the police began hunting them down.

The situation only worsened after the Decembrist Uprising of 1825, which saw Russian military officers, some of them descendants of prominent Cossack families, lead their troops in revolt, demanding the adoption of a constitution. The revolt was crushed, inaugurating thirty years of conservative rule by Emperor Nicholas I. In November 1830, a mutiny of young Polish officers in Warsaw soon turned into an uprising that engulfed the rest of the kingdom as well as former Polish territories in today’s Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. A Polish military corps was sent to Volhynia, and Polish nobles rebelled in Volhynia, Podolia, and Right-Bank Ukraine. They called on the Ukrainian peasants to join them, sometimes promising emancipation from serfdom. The empire used its military superiority to put down the uprising. Many of its leaders, participants, and supporters, including Adam Mickiewicz, fled Poland, most of them to France. Less fortunate ones ended up in Russian prisons or in exile.

The November Uprising not only mobilized Polish patriotism and nationalism but also prompted a strong nationalist reaction from the Russian side. Russian imperial patriotism, which had developed clear anti-French overtones during the Napoleonic Wars, now became fiercely anti-Polish. People of the caliber of Alexander Pushkin led the ideological assault on the Polish rebels and their French backers. One of his poems, “To the Maligners of Russia,” called on the French defenders of the Polish cause to leave the solution of the Russo-Polish conflict to the Slavs themselves. In the Polish insurrection, Pushkin saw a threat to Russian possessions far beyond the Kingdom of Poland. In his view, it was a contest for Ukraine as well. In a poem on the Russian takeover of rebellious Warsaw, Pushkin wrote,

Where shall we shift the line of forts?

Beyond the Buh, to the Vorskla, to the [Dnieper] Estuary?

Whose will Volhynia be?

And Bohdan [Khmelnytsky’s] legacy?

Right of rebellion recognized,

Will Lithuania spurn our rule?

And Kiev, decrepit, golden-domed,

This ancestor of Russian towns —

Will it conjoin its sainted graves

With reckless Warsaw?

During the November Uprising, Pushkin even contemplated writing a history of “Little Russia.”

The defense of Ukraine and other former Polish possessions against Western and, in particular, Polish influence became the leitmotif of Russian policy in the region in the decades following the uprising. The empire of the Romanovs was now ready to “go native” and employ Russian patriotism and nascent nationalism to defend its territorial acquisitions. At that point the imperial minister of education, Count Sergei Uvarov, formulated the foundations of the new Russian imperial identity: autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality. If the first two elements of Uvarov’s triad were traditional markers of imperial Russian ideology, the third was a concession to the new era of rising nationalism. Uvarov’s “nationality” was not general but specifically Russian. He wrote that his three principles formed “the distinctive character of Russia, and belong only to Russia.” They “gather into one whole the sacred remnants of Russian nationality.” That nationality included Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians.

While historians still argue about the exact meaning of Uvarov’s triad, its clear and simple structure provides a good framework for the discussion of imperial policies in the Western borderlands from the 1830s on. The ideal subject of the Romanovs had to be not only loyal to the empire (that had sufficed during the Age of Reason) but also Russian and Orthodox. The Polish November Uprising had called into question the Ukrainian peasantry’s loyalty to the empire. In the eyes of the imperial authorities, the peasants were definitely Russian but often not Orthodox — most in the newly acquired territories remained Uniate. Thus, to ensure loyalty to the empire and create an ideal subject of the tsars, they had to convert the Uniates to Orthodoxy to break the religious solidarity between Catholic nobles and Uniate peasants. The tactic used to achieve that goal essentially reversed the method of the Union of Brest. Instead of proselytizing among Uniates on an individual basis, the government and its supporters among the Uniate clergy would turn the entire church over to the Orthodox, more or less as the Polish authorities had done for the Uniate Church in the late sixteenth century and then again in the early eighteenth.

In 1839, a Uniate church council, convened with the support of the government, declared the “reunification” of the Uniates with the Russian Orthodox Church and asked for the tsar’s blessing. The emperor approved the request and moved the army into the region to ensure that the union in reverse would not meet with a new revolt. More than 1,600 parishes and, by some estimates, over 1.5 million parishioners in Ukraine and Belarus were “returned” to Orthodoxy overnight. In Belarus, Volhynia, Podolia, and a good part of the Right Bank, Orthodoxy and nationality were brought together in the service of autocracy. It was the beginning of a long process of “Orthodoxization” of former Uniates, accompanied by their cultural Russification. Since Orthodox seminaries used Russian as their language of instruction, the intellectual elite of the church was being converted not only from Uniate Catholicism to Orthodoxy but also from Ukrainian or Ruthenian to Russian nationality.

Much more complex and difficult was the battle for the “hearts and minds” of the secular elites in territories threatened by the Polish uprising. At first the empire adopted its usual tactic: integration of the Polish nobility into the empire with no detriment to its legal status or landowning rights. Emperor Alexander made use of Polish aristocrats and intellectuals to promote his liberal reforms. Especially useful were Polish contributions in the realm of education, where Poland had made significant progress before being crushed by its neighbors in 1795.

The scion of a Polish aristocratic family, Prince Adam Andrzej Czartoryski, played a key role in creating a new educational system in the Ukrainian provinces of the empire. During the first decade of the nineteenth century, he served as an advisor to Alexander and, for a few years, was the de facto head of Russian foreign policy. Alexander also put Czartoryski in charge of the Vilnius educational district, centered on Vilnius University, which had jurisdiction over a good part of western Ukraine. Another Polish aristocrat, Seweryn Potocki, head of the Kharkiv educational district, with its center in Kharkiv University, supervised the rest of Ukraine. The founding of both universities and the development of a public school system throughout the region were among the main achievements of the reform, which the first minister of education of imperial Russia, Kyiv Mohyla Academy alumnus Petro Zavadovsky, supervised.

If there was any nationality policy in St. Petersburg in the early nineteenth century, it rested on the idea of the Slavic unity of the Russians (understood as including Ukrainians) and the Poles. That changed with the November Uprising. Adam Czartoryski, who remained in charge of the Vilnius educational district until 1823, became the leader of the Polish revolutionary government in December 1830. Later, from his suite in the Hotel Lambert in Paris, he led the activities of the “Great Emigration,” the term for the members of the uprising who fled west. The alliance between the Russian autocracy and the Polish Catholic nobility came to an end. So did the advancement of education, which relied on Polish participation and loyalty. The imperial government picked up the gauntlet of cultural war thrown down by the leaders of the November Uprising, instituting measures to Russify Ukraine and the other former Polish territories of the empire. Count Uvarov was eager to develop Russian-language education and culture as counterweights to the dominant Polish culture of the borderlands.

Vilnius University, which rivaled the University of Oxford in enrollment for some time, was closed in 1832. The government had no more patience with a school it considered a hotbed of Polish nationalism. Other Polish-run educational institutions in the region also shut their doors, among them a lyceum in the town of Kremianets in Volhynia. The government transferred the lyceum’s rich library, collection of sculptures, and trees and shrubs from the botanical garden to Kyiv, where it created a new imperial center of learning to replace Vilnius University in 1834. The Polish language was banned there; Russian was the only language of instruction. The new university was named after Prince Volodymyr (Vladimir) the Great — the first Orthodox autocrat and a Russian to boot, as far as official historiography was concerned.

The imperial authorities set about turning Kyiv, a city of only 35,000 inhabitants that Pushkin called “decrepit” in comparison with Warsaw, into a bastion of empire and Russianness on the European cultural frontier. They restored Orthodox churches according to the imperial taste of the time and banned Jews from the city. They built new boulevards and streets, and new names appeared on the map of the ancient city. One of them was Gendarme Way, reflecting the symbolic and practical importance of police for the regime and its stability in the borderlands. In 1833, the new governor of Kyiv, Podolia, and Volhynia, sent to Kyiv with instructions to “merge” the Right Bank with the rest of the empire, suggested building a monument to Prince Volodymyr. Tsar Nicholas I personally examined the proposal. He loved the idea. It took twenty years to realize the project, but in 1853 the city got its statue. It stands today not near the university, as originally planned, but on the bank of the Dnieper, its ideological meaning and historical legacy open to a range of interpretations, from symbolizing Russo-Ukrainian religious and ethnic unity to memorializing the founder of the first Ukrainian state. Few people realize today that the statue was originally meant to assert an imperial claim to former Polish possessions on the Right Bank of the Dnieper.

The founding of the new university in Kyiv (the third one in the Ukrainian lands after the universities in Lviv and Kharkiv) was an important turning point in the history of the region. The university’s main goal was to educate local cadres to serve as agents of Russian influence and promoters of Russian identity. The government also created a historical commission with the task of collecting and publishing manuscripts and documents to establish that Right-Bank Ukraine, Podolia, and Volhynia were historically Russian lands. It all began as planned. The local talent, mostly descendants of Cossack officer families and sons of priests and junior officials from the former Hetmanate, came to Kyiv to join the new institutions and engage in intellectual combat with the traditional Polish enemies of the Cossacks. But by the end of the 1840s, the imperial authorities found themselves in a precarious situation: the university and the historical commission, envisioned as bastions of struggle for Russian identity against the Polish challenge, had become hotbeds of a new identity and a new nationalism.

In february 1847, a student of law at Kyiv University named Aleksei Petrov turned up in the office of the Kyiv educational district to denounce a secret society that aimed to turn the Russian Empire into a republic. The investigation launched into Petrov’s allegations uncovered the clandestine Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, named for the Christian missionaries who had enlightened the Slavs not only with a new religion but also with a new language and alphabet. Its members included a professor of history at Kyiv University, Mykola (Nikolai) Kostomarov — he would later become the founder of modern Ukrainian historiography — and a newly appointed drawing instructor, Taras Shevchenko. Born to the family of a Russian noble in Voronezh province on the border with Sloboda Ukraine, Mykola Kostomarov often stressed that his mother was a Ukrainian peasant woman. Whether that was true or not, mid-nineteenth-century Kyiv intellectuals prized peasant origins — they all wanted to work for the people and be as close to them as possible.

No member of the brotherhood had better populist credentials than Kostomarov’s coconspirator Taras Shevchenko. Born in 1814 into a family of serfs in Right-Bank Ukraine, the young Shevchenko joined the household of a rich Polish landlord and first went to Vilnius and then to St. Petersburg as a member of his court. There Shevchenko showed his talent as an artist. A Ukrainian painter in St. Petersburg discovered him while he was drawing in the city’s famous Summer Garden. Shevchenko was introduced to some of the leading figures of the Russian cultural scene of the time, including Russia’s best-known poet before Pushkin, Vasilii Zhukovsky, and a founder of Russian romantic art, Karl Briullov. Shevchenko’s work, personality, and life story made such an impression on the artistic community of St. Petersburg that its members decided to free the young serf no matter what. They bought his freedom with 2,500 rubles, an astounding sum by the standards of the time; the funds were the proceeds of the auction of a portrait of Zhukovsky, painted specifically for that purpose, by Briullov.

Shevchenko became a free man at the age of twenty-four. He turned out to be not only a talented artist but also an outstanding poet. In 1840, two years after acquiring his freedom, Shevchenko published his first collection of poems, titled Kobzar (Minstrel). This would become his second name for generations to come. Though published in St. Petersburg, the collection’s language was Ukrainian. Why did Shevchenko, who left Ukraine as a teenager and matured as an individual, artist, and poet in St. Petersburg, decide to write in Ukrainian and not Russian, the language of St. Petersburg’s streets and artistic salons?

The immediate reasons included the influence on Shevchenko of his Ukrainian acquaintances in St. Petersburg who helped set him free. One of them, a native of Poltava named Yevhen Hrebinka, was completing a Ukrainian translation of Alexander Pushkin’s poem about the Battle of Poltava (1709) when he met Shevchenko. Hrebinka clearly believed that Ukrainians should have a literature, including works in translation, in their own language. In 1847 Shevchenko explained his reasons for writing in Ukrainian in a preface to a new edition of Kobzar:

A great sorrow has enveloped my soul. I hear and sometimes I read: the Poles are printing, and the Czechs and the Serbs and the Bulgarians and the Montenegrins and the Russians — all are printing. But from us not a peep, as if we were all dumb. Why is this so, my brethren? Perhaps you are frightened by an invasion of foreign journalists? Do not be afraid; pay no attention to them.... Do not pay attention to the Russians. Let them write as they like, and let us write as we like. They are a people with a language, and so are we. Let the people judge which is better.

Shevchenko specifically took issue with Nikolai Gogol, a native of the former Hetmanate who became a founder of modern Russian prose with his books on Ukrainian themes, including Taras Bulba. “They give us the example of Gogol, who wrote not in his own language but in Russian, or Walter Scott, who did not write in his own language,” wrote Shevchenko. He was not convinced by these examples. “Why have not V. S. Karadžić, Šafarik and others become German — it would have been so convenient for them — but instead remained Slavs, true sons of their mothers, and gained good fame?” he wrote about the major figures of the Serbian and Slovak cultural movements. “Woe to us! But do not despair, my brethren, and work wisely for the sake of Ukraine, our ill-fated mother.”

Shevchenko wrote these words after he had left St. Petersburg and moved to Ukraine, where his friends included the members of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius. If we do not know why Ivan Kotliarevsky, the founder of modern Ukrainian literature, wrote in Ukrainian in his preface to Kobzar, Shevchenko left no doubt about his own motives and those of his friends and coconspirators. They came out of the pan-Slavic movement of the early nineteenth century, which took shape in response to the pan-Germanic movement of the era. They believed that Ukraine was lagging behind in the development of its own language, literature, and culture, but they also assumed that it had much to offer the rest of the Slavic world, if only her sons such as Gogol would turn their talents to serve their country. They envisioned Ukraine as a free republic in a broader Slavic union.

Mykola Kostomarov wrote the brotherhood’s programmatic document, titled The Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People. One inspiration for Kostomarov’s work came from the Books of the Polish People and the Polish Pilgrimage, in which Adam Mickiewicz presented Polish history as a story of the messianic suffering of the Polish nation. According to Mickiewicz, the Polish nation would rise from the grave and save all enslaved nations. Kostomarov reserved that role for Ukraine, whose Cossack origins had made it democratic and egalitarian: unlike the Russians, the Ukrainians had no tsars, and unlike the Poles, they had no nobility. The members of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius cherished the Ukrainian Cossack past, aspired to the abolition of serfdom, and advocated the transformation of the empire into a federation of equal republics, one of which would be Ukraine.

The society had a small membership and did not last much longer than a year. Its members were soon arrested — Kostomarov a few days before his wedding and Shevchenko on his arrival in Kyiv, where he had come to take part in his friend’s marriage. Some imperial bureaucrats discerned the beginnings of a new and potentially dangerous trend in the brotherhood’s activities. They described the suspects’ ideas as “separatist,” and the emperor himself called them the result of Paris (meaning exile Polish) propaganda. But others believed that the members of the brotherhood were loyal subjects of the empire, true defenders of Rus’ against Polish influence, who had pushed their local Little Russian patriotism too far and should not be punished too harshly. Ultimately, government officials decided to impose relatively mild sentences so as not to attract too much attention to the brotherhood and drive the Ukrainophiles — the term came into existence in government circles in the mid-nineteenth century — into an alliance with the Polish national movement.

The Russian authorities described the brotherhood’s aspirations as the unification of the Slavs under the scepter of the tsar. They kept its true program a secret even from the highest officials of the empire. Kostomarov was sentenced to a year in prison. Other members of the brotherhood received prison sentences of six months to three years or were sent into internal exile, usually working at bureaucratic jobs in the more distant provinces. Emperor Nicholas I gave the harshest sentence to Shevchenko, sending him to serve as a private in the imperial army for ten long years without the right to draw, paint, or write. The emperor was appalled by the personal attacks on himself and his wife in Shevchenko’s poems and drawings. Shevchenko held the autocracy responsible for the plight of his people and his land, which was not Russia but Ukraine. His work thus attacked two of the three elements of Uvarov’s “official nationality”: autocracy and nationality. Nor was his Orthodoxy of an imperial kind.

Through their writings and activities, Kostomarov, Shevchenko, and other members of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius had initiated what we would now call a Ukrainian national project. For the first time, they used the findings of antiquarians, folklorists, linguists, and writers to formulate a political program that would lead to the creation of a national community. In the course of the next century, the ideas advocated by the members of the brotherhood and presented to a broad audience in Shevchenko’s impassioned poetry would profoundly transform Ukraine and the entire region. The most obvious sign of that change today is the Shevchenko monument in front of the main building of Kyiv University. It replaced a statue to the university’s founder, Emperor Nicholas I.