A Clash of Discourses

THE public discourse of hegemony, 1861-1917

In the second half of the nineteenth century Ukraine commanded a less prominent place in Russian literature than it had in the first.

Language and Literature

Throughout this period the issue of limiting the functions allowed the Ukrainian language polarized intellectuals. The journal Osnova (Foun­dation) was published in St Petersburg (1861-62) by Kulish, Kostomarov, and Mykhailo Bilozersky, former members of the Cyrillo-Methodian Brotherhood, during a brief period of liberalised censorship in the early years of Alexander II’s reign. In retrospect this publication appears to be a final attempt to publicly confront the discourse of empire with the emerging counterdiscourse of national opposition.

This was an argument for self-determination couched in the rhetoric of deference. Thejournal’s stance was defined by the desire to dem­onstrate Ukraine’s unique history and identity and Russia’s need to learn from it. This position is evident in Kostomarov’s essay “Two Russian Nationalities,” in the first issue of Foundation,² and in his historical and literary work as a whole. Kulish made a similar argument for the complementary characteristics of the two civilizations in his epilogue to the Black Council (Chorna Rada, 1857). The demand for cultural self-determination within a federation of Slavic states had already been formulated in the 1840s by the Cyrillo-Methodians, the Romantic Ukrainian “Slavophiles.” They differed from the Russian Slavophiles in their insistence on the distinction between Ukraine and Russia and on the right of all Slavic peoples to cultural development.

In spite of the deferential rhetoric and the argument that the development of Ukrainian literary and political life would serve to strengthen the empire, the journal was condemned in conservative Russian circles. Writing in journals like the Russian Herald (Russkii vestnikj, Day (Den) and the Kyiv Telegraph (Kievskii telegraf), some authors ridiculed the idea of writing in Ukrainian as misguided and considered the attempt to create a significant literature in a “peasant” language as completely absurd. Others called upon the police to keep a close eye on what they considered to be a group of Russophobes with separatist intentions. Liberal journals like Notes of the Fatherland and Contemporary welcomed in Foundation the appearance of another voice critical of the government and reactionary Slavophiles. They too were opposed, however, to the idea of federalism and Ukrainian autonomy. Chernyshevsky openly attacked these positions. He pre­ferred to see the Ukrainian movement simply as a protest against administrative measures and subordinated it to the general movement for political reform, refusing, of course, to see in it any national dimension. In an article of 1861 entitled “National Tactlessness” he even chided Ukrainians for not supporting the Poles in their struggle with the Austro-Hungarian regime. By making this argument, he revealed a lack of understanding of the class-national conflicts in Galician society, where the Polish gentry was in large part motivated by the desire to maintain its privileges over the Ukrainian peasantry.³ Although he admitted the right of Ukrainian literature to exist and decried the fact that Russians had in the past dismissed it and ridiculed its enthusiasts, he was adamant that it should limit itself to providing an elementary education for peasants. Anything beyond this he con­sidered superfluous and doomed to failure. Chernyshevsky’s article on the first issue of Foundation contains a long digression on the size, strength, and superiority of Russian literature and suggests that edu­cated Ukrainian society will opt for complete assimilation.⁴

Dobroliubov, like Chernyshevsky, was prepared to grant the exist­ence of a Ukrainian language and a powerful folk-literature.

To be sure, this approach represented a more tolerant and respect­ful attitude than the outright rejection of the thirties and forties. It was not quite the equivalent of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s remark that a single shelf of European literature was worth all the books of India and Arabia, but neither was it entirely unlike such assertions. Like the Orientalists, Russian intellectuals disparaged contemporary intellectual productions of the indigenous society and deemed its cultural heritage unworthy of development along independent lines. Their arguments were refinements of earlier statements. Nikolai Polevoi had described educated Ukrainians in similar terms in 1838. Because they had discovered a rich folklore, he wrote, they mistakenly thought that they could develop a literature of their own:

Even we Russians read Kotliarevsky’s Aeneid (Eneida) as a witty prank. But the imitators and followers [of Kotliarevsky] then discovered their mistake of [try­ing to create] the so-called Little Russian literature, which is simply an anach­ronism in our contemporary life...

The issue in 1861, as it had been in 1839, was the folk character of the language and the limits to be set on its literary development.

The liberal position toward Ukrainian writing could be described as respect for cultural diversity within unity. Aleksandr Pypin expressed this position in his History of Slavic Literatures (Istoriia slavianskikh literatur) of 1879, in which he urged that the literature be seen as a legitimate expression of identity.⁸ He rejected the notion that it had failed to develop due to internal weakness, arguing that it had expressed itself powerfully both in the early modern period and, after incorporation into empire, on the “neutral ground of the Church Slavic language.” Moreover, its “thread” of development was never broken; it continued to be driven by its own internal dynamic and to express its own individuality.⁹ Pypin was a refreshingly reasonable and scholarly voice. He lamented the fact that for most Russians the Ukrainian nationality was terra incognita, sympathized with the aspi­rations of the literature to express a unique identity, tempered the passions of its “infuriated opponents,” and argued against proscrip­tion. He too, however, spoke of Ukrainians as a branch of a unified Russian “national organism” or “race” (plemia) and of Ukrainian liter­ature as part of a broader “national life,”¹⁰ repeating the position earlier expressed by Polevoi and Belinsky that the conditions for an independent Ukrainian literature did not exist. Consequently, like Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov, he insisted that it should severely restrict its functions, serve exclusively the needs of the peasantry, and not attempt to compete with Russian literature.

The idea that contemporary Ukrainian writing might have anything to teach Russian writing was generally dismissed. Nikolai Petrov, another early historian of Ukrainian literature, considered it entirely derivative of Russian. In his opinion all the writers who belonged to the nineteenth-century Ukrainian school in Russian literature, whether they wrote in Ukrainian or Russian, were to be considered a part of Russian literary development. They all viewed Ukraine as merely a part of a greater Russia, and their literature lacked any independent dynamic.¹¹ Petrov’s views were answered by Nikolai (Mykola) Dashkevich, who argued in a long article that Ukrainian literature had originated within its own society, had built upon previ­ous traditions, and was motivated by a love of the local nationality and a desire for greater self-consciousness - in short, that it was driven by an internal motive force.¹² The debate illustrates that even a limited role for Ukrainian literature was hotly contested.

Throughout this period from 1863 to 1905, when restrictions on Ukrainian publications remained in force, attitudes in the press and the broader Russian society often condoned them. In 1875, for exam­ple, Aleksandr Miliukov insisted, as Belinsky had done, that Ukrainian was a provincial dialect that should not be allowed a literature. He too called Shevchenko a poor writer and a retrograde phenomenon and wrote defiantly, “Russia is one, and she can have only one literary language, one Russian science and one Russian literature.”¹³ The debate on whether there even was a Ukrainian language surfaced occasionally in belles lettres. In Ivan Turgenev’s Rudin (1855), the boorish Pirogov makes fun of Ukrainian poetry, which he considers the naive, insipid imitation of folklore. He says that he would sooner beat his best friend in a butter churn than admit Ukrainian as an independent language. Although Dobroliubov and Chernyshevsky rejected this kind of obscurantist and ignoble attitude, there is every reason to believe that such a supercilious treatment of the “peasant” language was the norm. Hrinchenko's Sunlight (1892) portrays vio­lently hostile views among reactionary landowners who consider the use of Ukrainian seditious and the reading of Shevchenko to peasants a form of separatist agitation. The contrast with Austrian Galicia, where the language was used in all aspects of public life, could only fuel a growing sense of outrage among young Ukrainians.

The language issue caused a public clash at the Eleventh Archaeo­logical Congress in Kyiv, which took place in 1899 and in which scholars from various Slavic countries participated. Professor Hrushevsky, the head of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lviv, approached the congress with a request that scholars from Galicia be allowed to present papers in Ukrainian. The Kyiv organizing committee turned for advice to the Imperial Archaeological Society in Moscow and obtained permission. Members of the Russian press, however, ridi­culed this decision and participants complained indignantly that they were forced to listen to the language in doorways and on staircases, called it a “jargon,” and insisted that its use went against “common sense.”¹⁴ The Galicians, as a result, were not permitted to speak.

In the aftermath of this incident a debate took place in the press that in 1904 resulted in the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Universities of Kyiv and Kharkiv officially acknowledging that Ukrai­nian was a language and petitioning the tsar for a repeal of the ban on Ukrainian publications enforced by the Valuev memorandum of 1863 and the Ems edict of 1876. The academy pointed out in its report that the ban had led to dissatisfaction among educated Ukrai­nians and to the growth of a hostile literature published in Galicia. It recommended that Ukrainians be given the right to speak in public and to print works in their native language. The academy found no evidence of separatist intentions among Ukrainians. The Council of Ministers, however, refused to lift the proscription until the impending revolution of 1905 forced its hand. On 28-31 December 1904 it decided that the ban had been a mistake. It had “severed the fraternal link between Russian and Ukrainian writing,” denied both literatures the “common ground upon which their mutual relations had been defined,” and “morally damaged the Russian people and their litera­ture by cutting Ukrainian literature off from them.”¹⁵ Although restric­tions were reimposed with the onset of reaction in 1906, the official recognition and brief lifting of publishing restrictions were an impor­tant, precedent-setting victory for the national movement.

Hegemony in Textbooks

Russian hegemony was reflected in educational literature, which drew on the elements of the public discourse to depict Ukraine as a fully assimilated “Little Russia.”¹⁶ In textbooks mandated for use in all imperial schools from i860 to 1917, many of the anthropological, historical, and cultural views that have been observed in the wider literature were codified into descriptions that stereotyped peoples.¹⁷

As might be expected, the Russian people are always presented as the empire’s dominant race. A geography text by A. Baranov and N. Gorelov, for example, which went through numerous editions, informs students that the “Great Russians constitute the dominant and most active population in all parts of the Russian empire.”¹⁸ P. Belokha’s geog­raphy textbook of the 1860s similarly characterizes the Russians as the “dominant nation” and goes on to say: “All Russians are Orthodox and speak one language; they are distinguished by their physical strength, enterprising character, industriousness; besides agriculture they work in other occupations, and in manufacturing, trade and education they sur­pass all other native inhabitants of the Empire.”¹⁹ Ukrainians are always presented second, symbolizing their position in the hierarchy of “peo­ples.” In contrast to the Russians, they receive a much briefer charac­terization. The Belokha textbook, for example, offers the following definition: “Little Russians are Orthodox. Their main occupation is agri­culture and animal husbandry, but other trades are also spread among them fairly successfully.”²⁰ Through similar comparative characteriza­tions (Great) Russians emerge as the agents of history by virtue of their superior substance, which has been formed in favourable climatic and geographic conditions, while other peoples reveal deficiencies.

The subordination of Ukrainians is described as the inevitable result of defects in their nature. D. Ilovaisky’s history textbook, which was regularly republished from the 1860s to the revolution and became a standard text in all schools, makes the connection between national essence and state-building. The thirty-sixth edition of 1912 reads: “The rather warm climate and rich expanses of black earth.. facilitated the development of a predominantly agricultural way of life among the South Russian or Little Russian population; the close proximity of the steppe and of wild hordes prevented the consolidation of a strong state structure and successful civil society there. Meanwhile, the Great Russian tribe, which occupied a land with a rather severe climate. developed an enterprising, energetic character and talents for various activities. Our state structure grew and strengthened here.”²¹

Besides encoding hegemonic views, textbooks officially inculcated the anthropological stereotypes that were widespread in the travel literature and in belles lettres in the first half of the century. N. Zuev’s geography book of 1887 comments: “Little Russians are a gentle people, good-natured, but lazy and apathetic, although distinguished by intelligence and comprehension. In spite of their apathy and tar­diness, Little Russians are capable of long, hard labour. They unwill­ingly submit to innovations, preferring ancient ways.”²² Such expositions constantly reinforced the distinction between active and passive natures, subject and subordinate peoples. Only an occasional phrase, such as the description of “unwilling submission” in the last quotation, hints indirectly at state violence and resistance to assimila­tion. The same points, using almost identical phrasing, were made in all similar texts. In Baranov and Gorelov, for example, one reads that “Little Russians have a peaceful and good-natured temperament; they are closely tied to their native land and do not easily part with it. At first sight lazy and slow, Little Russians are capable of long, hard labour. A tendency toward obstinacy, an attachment to antiquity and a dislike for innovations can be noticed in Little Russians.”²³

Not only were these textbooks, it should be noted, republished from decade to decade with few substantial revisions, but because of the stress on rote learning in imperial schools, they were quite literally memorized by entire generations of schoolboys, who went on to become imperial civil servants. By the end of the century, of course, they could draw on a formidable tradition for supporting commentary, a discourse spanning belles lettres, journalism, and scholarship. The striking parallels with Belinsky’s historiography demonstrate how mainstream his views on Ukraine had become. Ilovaisky, like Belinsky, held the view that “Little Russian” history was only a prehistory and had ended with its “successful” incorporation into the empire at the end of the seventeenth century. Although “Mazepa attempted to return Little Russia again to Polish subjection,”²⁴ from the onset of the imperial age announced by 1709, the country had been “finally” and permanently united with Great Russia, and henceforth its history could only be portrayed as a branch of the latter’s. Any suggestion that imperial absorption might have had a dark side is vigorously opposed in all accounts. The historian Sergei Solovev, for example, found even mentioning the idea of Ukraine’s persecution under tsarist rule so distasteful that he blamed the brutalities of imperial rule in the post-Mazepa period on the Ukrainians themselves: “The Little Russian people really did suffer greatly, not, however, from Muscovite tyranny but from their own Cossack starshyna.”²

Instructional texts assumed that “Little Russia” had accepted the metaphysical notion of a superior Great Russian character and destiny, that it had willingly identified with Great Russian culture and preferred to use the Russian language. Zuev’s textbook informed students, that in “Little Russia the Russian language is dominant. It is accepted in society, the press, in education, business, and the legal system.”²⁶ In this and similar descriptions Ukraine is encapsulated as the quintes­sential subaltern; it is voiceless, and its history, language, and culture are now part of a greater identity that has been gratefully and willingly embraced in the name of enlightenment and progess.

The foundation myth of a transnational Russian-Ukrainian identity required the appropriation of Kyivan history in order to establish an ancient lineage for Muscovy and to bolster the claim of consanguinity. The most influential Russian historians from Vasilii Tatishchev (whose five volumes were published from 1768 to 1818), through Nikolai Karamzin, Mikhail Pogodin, Sergei Soloviev, and Vasilii Kliuchevsky developed theories to support Moscow’s claims to the earlier heritage. They tend to deny evidence of cultural differences between the histo­ries of Russia and Ukraine. As Paul Magocsi has pointed out: “The confirmation of such differences not only would undermine the idea of a single Russian people, but also might threaten the link between medieval Kiev and Moscow and thus render precarious the whole framework upon which the Russian imperial conception of history was built.”²⁷ A serviceable history, anthopology, and ethnography had, therefore, to be developed out of the denial of difference.

Popular literature reinforced and perpetuated the idea that Ukrai­nians had no claims to national independence. A lubok (cheap, pop­ular) version of Grebenka’s (Hrebinka’s) story “The Nezhin Captain Zolotarenko” (the original was written in 1842) was published in 1915 because it expressed the sentiment that “In 1654 the struggle for the faith in Little Russia ended happily with its adherence to Russia. The people began to rest easy.”²⁸ The Adventures of the Cossack Ataman Urvan, a 1901 lubok version of Gogol’s Taras Bulba, expressed a sense of Russian proprietorship over a vast land threatened on all sides by aggressive neighbours. The story begins, “It was necessary for the people living there to stand up for their native land and to preserve it from the invasions of wild hordes of Tatars, regiments of Poles, and the insatiable Jews.”²⁹ In his study of popular Russian literature Jeffrey Brooks has pointed out that

When Ukrainians were mentioned specifically as an ethnic group, it was as defenders of the southern borders of Russia, or they were stereotyped as lik­able, thick-headed clowns. In one of Evstingeev’s dialogues, a Ukrainian wants to buy pig fat and asks for hair grease instead, which, he finds, smells worse than the lard they make at home. In another, a general finds that a good- natured Ukrainian peasant, a khokhol, has been assigned to him as an orderly.

The fellow’s entire face is obscured by his enormous moustache and sideburns. He cannot remember the name of his regiment and has difficulty making himself understood in Russian. The general does not lose patience but remarks good humoredly, “It is not your fault you are not a fellow from Iaroslavl.³⁰

Lubok publications from the end of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries demonstrate how hegemonic notions were dis­tilled or reinterpreted from earlier literary publications, then recycled, simplified, and popularized in the penny press. It was an ideological manipulation of literary classics that often reflected the ideological import of educational textbooks.

Petr Struve, Pavel Miliukov, and Vasilii Shulgin

The right to use Ukrainian in public or in print was widely discussed in the years leading up to the Revolution of 1917. As the Ukrainian movement for cultural rights grew and became politicized, the attacks on it increased correspondingly, particularly in the period of reaction following 1906. Two of the most outspoken critics were the liberal Petr Struve and the conservative monarchist Vasilii Shulgin. Both were staunch supporters of the idea of a single pan-Russian culture and nation, and both linked any demands for Ukrainian cultural rights with political separatism. Following the loss to Japan in the war of 1904-5, the revolutionary upheaval of 1905-6, and the humiliation of Austria’s annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, a Russian nationalist orientation with overtly xenophobic, racist, and chauvinist attitudes moved to centre stage in political life. Such an orientation appealed to many members of the Third Duma, the lower house of parliament that began sitting in 1907, and particularly to the gentry from the southwestern borderlands of the empire. This region had registered the highest number of disturbances per capita in the agrar­ian revolts of 1905 and 1906. In 1909 the gentry from this region organized the Nationalist Party, shifting the centre of gravity in the Duma to the right. It articulated its goals as the unity of the empire, the protection of Russians in all parts of the empire, and Russia for the Russians.³¹

Russian liberalism was also affected by this shift to the right. One of its leaders, Petr Struve, welcomed the assimilation of minorities and devalued their cultures. In his essay “Great Russia” of 1908, he reas­serted the organicist views of the Romantics, arguing that a state was not merely a system of relationships but a living thing, a personality, and that strong healthy states strive for power and weak ones fall to predators. He called upon Russia to emulate the vigorous imperial policy of Britain and Germany in order to stimulate national energies and cohesion.³² In 1911 he drew a distinction between two national­isms: one free, creative, and open, “conquering in the best meaning of the term,” the other inhibited, passive, and insecure. The first, according to him, was Anglo-Saxon, the second Jewish. A “great” Russia, he argued, should emulate the assimilatory nationalism of the “conquering” Anglo-Saxons. The other, defensive nationalism in his view attempted to prevent this progressive, expansionary growth of the Russian nationality and Russian culture, which Struve compared to the American melting pot: “The ideal to which the Russian nation­ality in Russia ought to strive, in my deep conviction, can only be such a free and organic hegemony, which the Anglo-Saxon element has confirmed for itself in the United States of North America and in the British Empire... Only an open, masculine, conquering nationalism, proclaiming and realizing the free competition of nationalities is morally fitting and in the health interest of a great people, the creators of a mighty state.”³³ Struve felt that Poland and Finland could preserve some peculiarities of their culture, but “in all the rest of the empire” assimilation to Russian culture was a “step up” for the subject people.³⁴

He believed that the creation of a “great” Russia could occur through expansion in “all the European and Asiatic countries” that bordered on the Black Sea. The basis for what he called “our unde­niable economic domination” was to be found in the “people, coal and iron” of this region. After culturally assimilating it, the state would have the wealth and “labour energy” to economically conquer its Pacific colonies.³⁵ There could, in his mind, be no question of a separate Ukrainian culture. The hegemony of Russian was entirely natural and the product of historical development, and he called upon “Russian progressive social thought” to engage in a struggle with the Ukrainian movement, which threatened to undermine the great achievement of Russian history, the “common Russian culture.”³⁶ One of Struve’s apocalyptic fears appears to have been the splitting in two of the entire Russian culture (from “alphabet books” to scientific texts to translations of “Ovid, Goethe, Verlaine and Verhaeren ”) by the emergence of a mature Ukrainian culture. In response to this per­ceived threat he put forward the slogan “Capitalism speaks Russian.”³⁷

The other major figure of Russian liberalism, Pavel Miliukov, described Struve’s thought as an attempt to link Russian patriotism to the imperial idea of a “Great Russia.” In Miliukov’s view, Struve “fell between the two stools” of ethno-cultural and state nationalism.³⁸ The confusion of the two had allowed mystical ideas of Russian ethnic supe­riority to be linked, yet again, with an argument for the progressive nature of state expansion. Miliukov rejected any idea of the state as an organism or personality, viewing such ideas as a product of chauvinism. In his Studies of Russian Culture (Ocherki po istorii russkoi kultury), which went through seven editions from 1896 to 1918 and became the most widely read interpretation of Russian history since Karamzin’s, he dismissed an essentialist understanding of nationality, arguing instead that it was a product and not a cause of historical processes. Miliukov accepted that once national consciousness had spread to the masses, as was the case in Ukraine, it became an irre­versible phenomenon. He therefore rejected the notion of Russia as a single-nation state, seeing it as a state of nationalities, like Austro- Hungary, and argued that administrative districts ought to be consti­tuted along national lines. He was prepared to accept the use of non­Russian languages in schools and lower courts, but only “up to the point where high culture begins.” Russian, in other words, was still to remain the language of public administration and cultural life. A just nationality policy, Miliukov thought, would succeed in preserving the integrity of the empire. It is noteworthy, however, that during the First World War, he became obsessed with extending imperial boundaries by capturing Constantinople and the Dardanelles. Moreover, after the Revolution, he was united with Struve and other emigres like the Eur­asianists in his devotion to maintaining the integrity of the “all-Russian” state, and he resisted the concept of a federal state or the loss of Ukraine. Nonetheless, Miliukov did play an important role in restraining the “liberal imperial” politics that engulphed Struve and other Kadets (Constitutional Democrats), and he was the only head of a Russian political party to speak out publicly on behalf of Ukrainian culture.³⁹ He criticized the government’s ban on commemorating the day of Taras Shevchenko’s birth and spoke out in the Duma concerning the disregard for constitutional guarantees. In Russia, he said, “old state acts” contained “a whole cemetery of broken promises. Little Russia is there, so too are Georgia and the Baltic provinces, not to mention Poland... For us to break promises seems in the nature of things.”⁴⁰

In the prerevolutionary years, as Russian nationalism intensified, both antisemitic and anti-Ukrainian views were often heard. The Black Hundreds were formed in 1905, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion began circulating in 1903-7; pogroms, assassinations, and attacks on liberals and radicals intensified. Panslavist views advocating a Russia “from the Nile to the Neva, from the Elbe to Cathay” accompanied calls for the Russification of both Slav and non-Slav minorities through­out the empire. During the First World War speculation concerning the greatness of the Russian soul reached a peak and Dostoevsky’s journalism was particularly influential. One observer commented, “Dostoevsky’s fame was not caused by his prison sentence, not by The House of the Dead, not even by his novels - at least not primarily by them - but by The Diary of a Writer. It was the Diary that made his name known to all of Russia, made him the teacher and idol of youth, yes, and not only of youth but of all those tortured by the questions that Heine called “accursed.”⁴¹ From 1917 to 1919 Vasilii Shulgin, a noble land­lord from Volhynia, a leader of the Nationalist Party, and a leading apologist for Denikin’s cause, used the pages of the influential news­paper Kyivite (Kievlianin) to attack both Jews and Ukrainians. He rid­iculed the idea of a Ukrainian culture and opposed granting it any rights. When, following the collapse of tsardom, Ukrainian leaders pro­claimed political autonomy and began a policy of Ukrainianization, Shulgin was one of their most vociferous opponents. Throughout the revolutionary period he waged a campaign against the new Ukrainian government, the Central Rada, and its leaders. Under his slogan Against the Forcible Ukrainianization of Southern Rus he regularly printed lists of signatories to his letter of protest in the Kyivite.

The editorial of 11 April 1917 complained of the “Ukrainian hyp­nosis” that had overtaken citizens. In it Shulgin suggested that the Ukrainian identity in Galicia had been created by the Austrian gov­ernment, which had “artificially” prevented the Russian language from penetrating the territory. He too scoffed at any thought of competition between Russian and Ukrainian cultures: “We do not believe in the victory of Ukrainianism - the struggle of cultures takes place in quite particular realms and we cannot imagine that Shevchenko alone, no matter how uniquely marvellous, could topple Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoi and all the rest of the Russian classics.” The Ukrainian language appeared to him so incomprehensible and unnatural that he reprinted part of the program of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers Party in the issue of 10 April as a linguistic joke.

Shulgin’s mantras were the emotional claims of a historical identity. Kyiv was for him “the mother of Russian cities” and “the cradle of Rus­sian civilization.” He therefore found it unthinkable that Russia should renounce its own identity and become a “haidamak, without legitimate family or race.”⁴² He obstinately described Ukrainian as the “South- Russian language” (iazykom iuzhno-russkim) and acknowledged only a pan-Russian language and culture (obshe-russkii iazyk, obshche-russkaia kultura). He refused to be called a Ukrainian, even signing one of his articles “the non-Ukrainian Shulgin,” and demanded that the “Little Russian” nationality be recognized as an alternative way for fellow citi­zens to identify themselves. In no doubt that things would eventually return to the old arrangement, on 1 December 1917 he wrote in the Kyivite. “in one or another form there will be a second Pereiaslav Treaty. Rus will be gathered together again in exactly the same way as the endless number of German principalities were gathered into a united Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century.”⁴³

Ukrainian society, however, had changed profoundly since the first half of the nineteenth century, when similar views had been voiced with no overt opposition. The newspaper Ukrainian Life (Ukrainskaia zhizn), which appeared in Moscow in Russian from 1912, printed forceful refutations of such colonialist views. In 1914, under the title The Ukrainian (Question, it published a book in Russian that challenged this cultural imperialism.⁴⁴ In Kyiv, of course, Ukrainian newspapers such as New Council (Nova Rada) published answers to anti-Ukrainian attacks written by leading intellectuals. Shulgin’s name became a by­word for anti-Ukrainianism, anti-Semitism, and all that was associated with the reactionary slogan “Russia one and indivisible.” After the Revolution he continued to argue that communism would pass and that the same “indivisible” Russia would survive within its old imperial boundaries. Later in life he returned to his “Little Russian homeland.” Dziuba has written that in the 1960s, as an old man, he still wandered about the country that was “so close to his heart.. happy to see that in spite of its new industrial landscape it has remained Little Russia,” and he continued to philosophize “amiably on the eternal theme of Ukraine as one of the provinces, one of the ‘borderlands’ of Russia.”⁴⁵ Dziuba associated Shulgin’s return with a neo-Stalinist reassessment of values in the sixties and an attempt in some quarters to “rehabilitate” Russia’s colonial heritage.

Such attitudes are evidence of an “uncrystallized” single-culture con­sciousness among Russian intellectuals. In the years leading up to the Revolution, the majority of Russian writers and readers seemed unaware that the nature of Ukrainian writing and consciousness had altered and that a new “horizon of expectation,” as Grabowicz has argued, had emerged.⁴⁶ Ukrainian literature was still considered an aesthetically degraded medium and Ukrainian consciousness a mani­festation of provincialism. The scholarly discourse concerning Ukraine had penetrated Russian literature only feebly, and the most forceful articulation of the counterdiscourse remained largely unavailable. As a consequence, Russian intellectuals marginalized Ukrainian issues. In literary portrayals Ukrainian characters were almost never allowed any depth, nor were their cultural concerns treated seriously. Ukrainians did appear in Russian realist fiction in the second half of the century (embodied, for example, in the various horse-grooms, gardeners, and rank-and-file soldiers identified as Ukrainians in Tolstoi’s works), but they were distinguished from Russians only by their “dialect.” Although Anton Chekhov and Ivan Bunin jokingly identified themselves as khokhly, they assigned no political importance to this characterization. Bunin, for example, was clearly aware of a separate Ukrainian identity. His long connection with Ukraine and knowledge of its theatre, liter­ature, and popular songs, its geography and history, all contributed to a sense of cultural distinctiveness with which he identified passionately. Nonetheless, it was a Ukrainian identity spliced onto a Russian identity. In his major emigre publication, the fictionalized autobiography Life of Arteniev (Zhizn Arteneva; completed in 1933, first full edition pub­lished 1952), he records without comment the following words of one character: “That’s Shevchenko, a truly brilliant poet! There is no coun­try in the world more beautiful than Ukraine. And the most important thing is that she has no history now - her historical life ended long ago, and once and for all. There is only the past, songs and legends of it, a kind of timelessness. That is what delights most of all.”⁴⁷

This, once again, is the image of a civilization that failed to mature - the same “immutable” image that delighted Belinsky and whose immortalization he ascribed to Gogol. Significantly, although he describes Ukrainian theatrical friends singing “their own Marseillaise,” quotes Shevchenko, and admits to reading Drahomanov’s anthology of folk songs, it is to quotations from Gogol that Bunin repeatedly turns when conceptualizing Ukraine. The cultural developments that interested Russian intellectuals were generally described in a manner that effaced any separate Ukrainian narrative. Korolenko commented explicitly on this in his memoirs when he wrote that “Nekrasov con­quered Shevchenko in my soul.”⁴⁸

During the Revolution prominent writers like Illia Erenburg contin­ued to attribute an amateurish character to the Ukrainian literary and cultural revival. In 1919 he wrote that although contemporary Ukrai­nian poets were attempting to “free themselves from the anonymous folk song, they had not yet created an individual poetry.” He dismissed Ukrainian cultural activists as “political adventurers” who demanded the “creation of a Ukrainian culture in twenty-four hours.”⁴⁹ Leading Bol­sheviks made analogous comments in this same period. The discourse of Russian hegemony seemed to be, therefore, not only entrenched but so broadly based as to appear unanimous.

Early in the twentieth century, partly in response to the national movement’s growing assertiveness, Ukrainians began to be portrayed in literature as treacherous villains. The double agent Lippanchenko, “the crafty Ukrainian type” in Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (Peterburg, 1916, 1922), who is eventually murdered, is one such type.⁵⁰ A simi­larly sinister political atmosphere accompanies the portrayal of Ukrai­nians in later works like Olga Forsh’s “Suitcase” (Chemodan, 1921) and Bulgakov’s Days of the Turbins (Dni Turbinykh, 1926) and White Guard (Belaia Gvardiia, 1924).

Ignorance of a Ukrainian counterdiscourse made even relatively sympathetic Russian emigre writers like Fedotov, who struggled with the issue of imperial violence, accept the requirement of integrating Ukraine as a junior partner into a quasi-imperial structure. In 1929 he wrote candidly of the prevailing attitudes among Russian intellec­tuals: “We somehow missed the fact that the largest empire of Europe and Asia was built by a national minority that imposed its culture and state will upon a whole ethnographic continent. We asserted with justi­fiable pride that the hegemony of Russia was a happy destiny for almost all its people (except for the Western), that it gave them the possibility of acquaintance with a universal culture, which Russian culture was.”⁵¹ The euphemistic language here repays scrutiny: “somehow missed,” “ethnographic continent” (one seventh of the earth’s surface), “justi­fiable pride,” “happy destiny.” Most telling, however, is the fact that Fedotov excludes Ukraine from those Western cultures that did not require Russian mediation to become “acquainted with universal cul­ture.” He proposes a triple identity structure as a means of retaining Ukraine within a “Russian” consciousness:

Our national consciousness ought to be... simultaneously Great Russian [velikorusskim], Russian [russkim] and state [rossiiskim]... For Little Russians, or Ukrainians, who have not lost a consciousness of their Russianness, this formula would appear as follows: Little Russian, Russian and state. The task of safeguarding Little Russian traditions in an all-Russian culture is above all the task of those born in southern Russia who have retained loyalty to Russia and a love of Ukraine. In the struggle with political separatism, in the defence of the Russian idea and of Russian concerns in Ukraine, one should not confuse the Russian cause with the Great Russian and impede the growth of other Russian (i.e., Little Russian) cultures.⁵²

This argument once again rehearses and reconfigures the nineteenth­century idea of Ukraine as a loyal member of the empire and an integral force in a unitary Russian culture.

THE last romance: Grigorii danilevsky

The writer Grigorii Danilevsky (Hryhorii Danylevsky in Ukrainian) was very much in vogue in the second half of the nineteenth century. His works went through numerous editions, culminating in the posthu­mous, twenty-four volume eighth edition of 1901. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century his novels were translated into French, Ger­man, Polish, Czech, Serbian, and Hungarian. He gave up a successful career in the St Petersburg bureaucracy in 1857 in order to return to his estate near Kharkiv and devote himself to writing. In the following decades he conducted research into ancient manuscripts and historical sites on behalf of the Ministry of Education and into the settlements on the Black Sea coast on behalf of the Ministry of Naval Affairs. He worked for the emancipation of the peasantry and for the educational and economic development of the Left Bank. In 1865 he was elected to the Kharkiv zemstvo (district council), and in 1881 he became editor of the Government Herald (Pravitelstvennyi vestnik) in St Petersburg.

Although Danilevsky wrote in Russian, more than half his works are either set in Ukraine or take as their subject the imaginative integra­tion of Ukraine into the imperial narrative. The vocation of writer was taken seriously by him, as is evident from a letter of 1857 explaining to his mother his reasons for quitting the capital: “The writer is higher than any civil servant,” he wrote, and the writer’s creations “touch the hearts of many and teach the minds of millions.”⁵³ Among his most important fictional works dealing with Ukraine are Fugitives in Novorossiia (Beglye v Novorossii, 1862), the first part of a trilogy dealing with the settlement of the Ukrainian steppes by runaway serfs; The Ninth Wave (Deviatyi val, 1873), which describes the struggle between conservatives and reformers in the sixties; Mirovich, which focuses upon the events of Peter III’s reign (completed in 1875 but published only in 1880, when it was given the empress’s personal stamp of approval); The Princess Tarakanova, 1775-1776 (Kniazhna Tarakanova, 1775-76, 1882), which describes events of Catherine the Great’s reign; Potemkin on the Danube, 1790: A Historical Novel (Potemkin na Dunae, 1790 g.: Istoricheskii roman, 1876), which focuses on Potemkin’s relations with the Zaporozhians; and The Uman Massacre, The Last Zaporozhians, 1768­1775: A Historical Novel (Umanskaia reznia, Poslednie zaporozhtsy, 1768-1775: Istoricheskaia povest, 1878). In addition to these major novels, Danilevsky published collections of tales, travel sketches, pieces of journalism, and memoirs on Ukrainian subjects. He died in 1890. Although dismissed today by most literary historians as a second-rate talent, he warrants attention for his portrayals of the steppe Ukraine’s integration into empire. His work trades in stereotypes of Ukraine but simultaneously challenges these commonplaces and raises historical grievances and issues of identity that in the years of reaction following 1905 became unpalatable reminders of resistance to empire-builders. The reasons for Danilevsky’s neglect in the twentieth century can therefore be sought not only in a deficient literary technique but also in the content and ideological import of his works.

Danilevsky’s accounts of the Left Bank’s settlement draw on descrip­tions of the American South and abolitionist literature. One of his best novels, Fugitives, describes how in the years leading up to the emancipation of 1861, the runaway serfs were mercilessly exploited by a new, heartless breed of plantation owner that had recently arrived from Russia. This class is represented by Colonel Panchukovsky, who describes himself as a “Columbus and a Cortes,” the colonizer of a “wild, empty land,”⁵⁴ and who makes enormous profits by shipping grain and wool through the newly opened Azov Sea ports to Western Europe. Having in a few short years extracted his millions, he plans to live a life of luxury and debauchery in European capitals. It is also made clear that these territories of the Black Sea littoral formerly belonged to the Zaporozhian cossacks. Some have now been settled by Russian landowners who have forcibly moved hundreds of serf families from the Russian interior. In other cases the settlers are Mennonites, Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbs, or members of other nations. The labour power is, however, most often provided by runaway Ukrai­nian serfs. These fugitives live without any rights and in constant fear of exposure, arrest, and deportation. The landlords, who need the labour of the people they call their “white negroes,” often turn a blind eye to their labourers’ past and protect them.⁵⁵ Some landowners, like the Mennonites, are described in positive terms. The more ruthless, however, use their power arbitrarily and cruelly, capturing and confin­ing women as concubines, for example. In his home Panchukovsky imprisons Oksana, an orphan who has been raised by the Orthodox priest as his own daughter.

Colonel Panchukovsky sings the praises of the new frontier land, which he describes as an “Eden” and a “paradise” in which he has untrammelled freedom to enjoy pleasures that are forbidden in the “old cities.”⁵⁶ He compares old Ukraine unfavourably with this new, unbridled colony: “That old Ukraine was once beautiful! It is still today a delightful, but already sad and deserted grave... Life is here, not there; here in our Novorossiia! This is where all the hopes of the South are. From here will come its future.”⁵⁷ The mistreated runaways even­tually rebel. Oksana’s fiance Levenchuk and his friend Milorodenko become outlaws and escape abroad. The colonel is exposed as a cheat and a fugitive in his own right: he has absconded with his wife’s money, abandoning her with a child in Russia.

The conflict between colonizers and serfs is exacerbated by a clear national division with racial overtones. The colonel interprets the imprisoned Oksana’s resistance to him, her attempts at escape fol­lowed by her apparent submission, as evidence of a stereotype - the bestial, but “trainable” nature of Ukrainians: “Are those Ukrainian women, perhaps, really like cattle?” he muses.⁵⁸ Revolts and insubor­dination are suppressed by him with brutal beatings normally reserved for the treatment of animals: “A khokhol isjust like a dog,” he says, “sometimes you cannot even distinguish them.”⁵⁹

The character of the steppe people is constructed as a duality. On the one hand, the serf population is described as disciplined, freedom­loving, and just as industrious as Puritan colonists. On the other hand, it is made clear that when abused they will rise up and exact a violent vengeance. This duality permeates the book, even extending to descriptions of the weather: the coming of winter suddenly transforms the “South Russian Italy” into a “stern Scythia.”⁶⁰ Written at the time of the American emancipation and drawing on Harriet Beecher-Stowe and other abolitionist writers, the story can be read as a cautionary tale aimed at curbing the rapacity of colonists. The message is rein­forced in the next two volumes of the trilogy, in which the new capitalists of Novorossiia are described as interlopers and foreigners who have been attracted to the new frontier solely by the thirst for profit and acquisition. They are “not tied by any other interests to the land, which does not hold for them the significance of a motherland; they first view it as a place of temporary banishment, then as a way of improving their circumstances before returning home - to Germany, Greece, France, and the Russian interior.”⁶¹

Danilevsky’s attitude to the frontier settlers is, however, not without its complexities. In another story, “Pennsylvanians and Carolinians” (Pensilvantsy i karolintsy, i860), he compares the practical-minded newcomers - the “Pennsylvanians” - to Yankee traders and capitalists. By contrast, the “Carolinians” represent a conservative and largely reactionary force aligned with outdated Ukrainian traditions:

Secretive and gloomy patriots, the Carolinians for the most part rest on the examples of traditional, old-fashioned Little Russia. These people are our southern Cossackophiles, although in the old Cossackdom there was more freedom than in their requirements. Their external signs are a reverence for pork fat and potato dumplings [varenyky]. Their ideals - a return of the steppes to Khmelnytsky’s times. They have nothing in common with the small circle of our favourite national [narodnykh] writers. They weep over the poems of Skovoroda, considering that mystic a poet, weep over the weakest stories of Kvitka and do not recognize Gogol. Our days, our beliefs, are not for them. In other words, here, as everywhere, the mind works, while folly places obsta­cles in its way.⁶²

From this perspective the new people of the new lands represent the future: a place where the most enterprising Ukrainians can be success­ful by reinventing their culture, retaining the best of the past while shedding the ballast of outdated customs and views. It is a vision of a reborn, progressive Ukrainian society that has been improved by the rigours of frontier life. Significantly, it is a place where sterotypes, some of which Danilevsky appears to have accepted as accurate reflections of reality, can be overcome. In his first collection of stories, Inhabitants of Sloboda: Little Russian Tales (Slobozhane: Malorossiiskie rasskazy, 1854) he lists some of these now familiar received images of Ukraini­ans: they are indolent, wild, and backward; they can be simple, even stupid, and may occasionally be malicious; their rural existence is excruciatingly boring, populated by ignorant neighbours and rather attractive women; they live in an Italy that will never be visited by Rus­sian readers because the road there is too long and arduous.⁶³ As the last phrase indicates, this is a playful and ironic treatment of a stereo­type that appears to partially accept its verisimilitude. In the trilogy and other writings of the fifties and sixties he emphasizes the practical and industrious “southerner” in order to counteract the dominant por­trayal of Russians, or “northerners,” as the more businesslike people, on account of their racial qualities and geographical and climatic con­ditions. In the words of one critic, the trilogy aimed at convincing the “superfluous” man who was unhappy with reality that the only means of salvation was escape from St Petersburg to the provinces, into the depths of the untouched and uncultivated lands of Russia, where wide vistas opened for ardent and enterprising activity.⁶⁴

Danilevsky’s attitudes to Ukraine’s historical involvement with Russia were similarly ambiguous. From the late sixties, his writings exhibit an interest in metaphors and narrative patterns that would express the symbiotic interdependency of capital and province, north and south. His well-researched historical novels of the seventies and eighties are written in this key. Mirovich describes the career of an imperial army officer in the 1760s. Peter the Great, the reader learns, had stripped the family of its estate and gentry status and deported it to Siberia following Mazepa’s revolt. After returning from exile the family obtains the help of Aleksei Razumovsky, the Empress Elizabeth’s con­sort, whose marriage to the sovereign has always been kept a secret. Through Razumovsky’s intervention, the young Vasilii Iakovlevich Mirovich obtains an education and embarks on a military career. Unable to have his gentry status or the family estate returned and rejected by his ambitious fiancee, the officer harbours resentment. His opportunity for advancement arrives suddenly when the new tsar, Peter III, notices him. Mirovich plans to serve the tsar loyally. When Catherine the Great deposes her husband, Mirovich attempts to orga­nize a revolt by freeing an imprisoned claimant to the throne. He fails and is executed.

The fate of Mirovich can, of course, be seen as emblematic of Ukraine’s powerlessness. Lacking real political influence, Ukrainian courtiers can only attach themselves to imperial pretenders or to other political players, in the hope of eventually winning favours. Although individual Ukrainians do play important roles in the corridors of power and achieve personal prominence, they are not capable of effecting significant political change or improving the status of their homeland. Hetman Kirilla Razumovsky (Kyrylo Rozumovsky in Ukrainian), Aleksei’s brother, is part of the conspiratorial group that elevates Catherine to the throne. However, Kirilla is unable to obtain the domestic reforms, described as the “Swedish project,” which are his aim. The powerless­ness of Ukrainians is exemplified by Mirovich’s fruitless attempts to assert his family’s claims of service to the imperial throne. In one scene Grigorii Orlov ridicules these claims: “You khokhols, you archival sperm!... you are all, forgive me, forever petitioning and cadging! You never labour patiently, wait modestly, serve. Your fellow-countrymen are always contriving some case and advancing it. Do you really think that on account of you we are going to burrow through your ancient khokhol jottings and documents?”⁶⁵

This passage can be read as a broad reference to tsarism’s refusal to countenance Ukraine’s political claims. Aleksei Razumovsky’s secret marriage is symbolically significant. Ukraine’s imperial “marriage” and contributions to the union remain unacknowledged in public. As individuals, Ukrainians can attempt to influence imperial politics, but collectively their status and rights will not be recognized. Ironically, upon coming to power Catherine compels Aleksei Razumovsky to immediately surrender all documentation concerning his clandestine marriage to Elizabeth, lest it should cause any future political compli­cations. In this case, Catherine’s advisers show great alacrity and pur­pose in discovering and, presumably, destroying all documentary evidence. The portrait of a tearful, devoted, and ineffectual Aleksei, utterly devoted to Elizabeth, conforms to the rather pathetic image of loyal, harmless, and undemanding Ukrainian collaboration with and support of the empire builders. The juxtaposition of this figure with Mirovich only emphasizes the misguidedness, selfishness, and naivety of the latter’s revolutionary hopes. Nonetheless, Mirovich also provides a reminder of unfinished business and unresolved grievances. The last pages of the novel mention, almost as an afterthought, the liquidation of the Hetmanate and the appearance abroad, in Venice, of the Princess Tarakanova, the daughter of the deceased Empress Elizabeth and Aleksei Razumovsky, who will become a pretender to the throne. These muted references to a marriage that has produced rebellious offspring signal, rather ominously, the return of a repressed history and politics. They explain why the book could not be published without the empress’s approval.

Danilevsky’s entire reuvre might, in fact, be viewed as a circumspect and understated form of petitioning on behalf of his homeland, in which claims of loyal service alternated with warnings of violent con­sequences should the “petitioning” go unheeded. His portrayal of the Zaporozhian contributions in the war with Turkey, described in Potemkin on the Danube, or of the old soldier Galaida in “Catherine the Great on the Dnieper, 1787” (Ekaterina Velikaia na Dnepre, 1787, 1858) are pleas for recognition of military services rendered. Danilevsky’s works in the 1860s dealing with the mistreatment of the peasantry might similarly be considered pleas for the abolition of serfdom and for the improvement of conditions in agricultural labour. One of the best examples of the alternating, threat-of-violence structure is The Uman Massacre, which recounts the events of 1768. The causes of this bloody and tragic uprising are placed within a social and political context. The oppression of the peasantry at the hands of Polish landlords in Right Bank Ukraine has created a population of outlaws who inhabit the no-man’s land in Dyke Pole (the “Wild Lands”) on the lower reaches of the Dnieper and from there attack Polish settle­ments. Many of these outlaws are former Zaporozhians who have been thrown out of the Sich for their unruly behaviour and either cannot or refuse to find employment in Left Bank Ukraine. The narrator mentions the religious conflict between the Catholic Poles, who are supported by theJewish tradespeople, and the Orthodox Ukrainians, as a factor exacerbating the class-national tensions. A further compli­cation is the Confederacy of Bar, a union of Polish magnates that has itself risen up in revolt against the Polish king. The narrator’s sympa­thies are with the oppressed peasantry: “Dyke Pole heard the groan of its oppressed co-religionists, and for a long time afterwards left a bloody memory in the bordering Polish frontierlands.”⁶⁶ While the unsuspecting Polish gentry continues to feast in the town of Uman, the predominantly Ukrainian guardsmen under Ivan Gonta go over to the side of the rebel leader Maksym Zalizniak. The town is sacked, and an appalling massacre of Polish and Jewish inhabitants occurs. After the uprising is put down, the rebels are executed en masse in an equally brutal manner. Danilevsky understands the causes of the rebellion but does not condone its cruel violence, which he shows to be anarchic and pointless.

As the scene shifts to St Petersburg, it becomes clear that the empire fears a similar revolt being directed against itself. Potemkin values the Zaporozhian contribution to the Turkish campaigns and admits that the Sich Cossacks did not participate in the Pugachev rebellion of 1772 that followed shortly after the Uman events. However, the imperial authorities continue to view the Sich as a hostile and dangerous force. Potemkin tells Holovaty, the Sich emissary, “You all have the same idea: we have weakened the Turk and Pole, now we will turn our attention to that idiot the Muscovite.”⁶⁷ The empire conducts a deliberate policy of transferring Zaporozhian lands to Serbian and other non-Ukrainian settlers, and in 1775 an army is dispatched to destroy the Sich. Although most of the Zaporozhian cossacks manage to slip out of the encirclement and make their way to Turkey, the famous encampment on the Dnieper ceases to exist. The tsarist strategy of weakening and liquidating Zaporozhian autonomy has been accomplished.

In an epilogue, as the narrator surveys developments over the follow­ing century, he rejoices in the economic progress that has taken place throughout the region and in the return in 1828 of the Zaporozhians from their exile in Turkey - an event that symbolizes their reconciliation to imperial policies. The returning Zaporozhians are embraced as core­ligionists who never fought for a foreign faith or turned their weapons against Russia in vengeance. In his concluding remarks, the narrator points out that “The steppe Ukrainian people, unexpectedly enserfed under Catherine and [subsequently] subjected to eighty-five years of servitude, has its own narrative of the Sich’s end.” A local legend speaks to the defiance of the local people. According to it, Potemkin, the Sich’s destroyer, was challenged to a duel by his own general and was wounded and died abroad, forsaken by God and humanity. The duel took place on the very spot on which Peter the Great buried a stone engraved with the words, “Do not touch the Zaporozhians.” The narrator continues: “The spectre of Pugachev, who until his escape to the Volga lived close by here in the village of Kabanie... never troubled Ukrainians. The heroes of the Don and Volga schismatics, Razin and the impostor Pugachev, had no followers here.”⁶⁸ We are left to infer from this that Catherine’s policies, particularly the enserfment of the population, were the root cause of social unrest but that this did not lead to antit- sarist rebellions on the part of the Zaporozhians, at least not on the scale of those led by Razin and Pugachev. In this way the author ban­ishes the nightmarish vision of a full-blown Ukrainian revolution, while simultaneously suggesting its frightening possibility.

Danilevsky’s fiction negotiates the uncomfortably large discrepancy between two images of Ukrainians: on the one hand, a freedom-loving, enterprising, and irrepressible people with legitimate grievances against the imperial government and on the other hand, a loyal imperial citizenry. Both images were acceptable to tsarist censors and the general reading public in the nineteenth century, insofar as they rehearsed already familiar patterns. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the Russian readership had lost interest in the romance of a freedom-loving, still-dangerous South and considered the territory fully assimilated. The Ukrainian intelligentsia, for its part, had developed a counterdiscourse that contradicted the kind of loy- alism found in Danilevsky and the optimistic message of imperial progress and harmony.

polarization: Panteleimon kulish, Mykhailo drahomanov, borys Hrinchenko, and ivan franko

In the second half of the nineteenth century the major Ukrainian social novels written by realist writers challenged Russian hegemonic attitudes, particularly in Ivan Nechui-Levytsky’s Clouds (Khmary, 1874), By the Black Sea (Nad chornym morem, 1890) and Madwoman (Navizhena, 1891); Panas Myrny’s Ruined Strength (Propashcha syla, 1880), which also went by the title Do Oxen Bellow When the Manger Is Full? (Khiba revut voly iak iasla povni?), and Loose Woman (Poviia, 1884); and Borys Hrinchenko’s Sunlight (Soniachnyi, 1892). Russian attitudes were satirized in Mykhailo Starytsky’s dramas, such as the popular After Two Hares (Za dvoma zaitsiamy, 1875), which was an adaptation of a play by Nechui-Levytsky. In the early twentieth century these attitudes were more explicitly and pointedly attacked. Lesia Ukrainka’s The Boyar’s Wife (Boiarynia, 1910), and Volodymyr Vynny- chenko’s I Want: A Novel (Khochu: Roman, 1914), Between Two Forces (Mizh dvokh syl, 1919), and To the Other Side (Na toi bik, 1919-23) increasingly connected literary modernism to the political expression of nationalism and anticolonialism. The Ukrainian-language counter­discourse in this period steadily took on its own dynamic, progressively distancing itself from the Russian discourse. That evolution can be traced through examining four key figures: Panteleimon Kulish, the leading intellectual of the 1850s and 1860s, Mykhailo Drahomanov, the outstanding figure of the 1870s and 1880s, and two dominant figures of the 1890s, Borys Hrinchenko and Ivan Franko. The first, as has been observed, was still able in the sixties to discuss his views in Ukrainian publications permitted by the censors. In the century’s last three decades, however, most Ukrainian writings could be published only in Galicia or further abroad.

Panteleimon Kulish

Kulish, the most prominent Ukrainian writer of the fifties and sixties, contributed extensively to both Russian and Ukrainian literature and

was also a dominant force in scholarship, journalism, and literary criticism. He was not afraid to express unpopular views; indeed he delighted in challenging accepted notions, scoffing at “public” opin­ion, which, he said, was always formed in the “community of passive minds.” His is a particularly arresting voice in any discussion of the discourse of empire, on account of several controversial essays. Two late pieces written in 1882 stand out in particular: “A Letter of Appeal to the Ukrainian Intelligentsia” and An Easter Egg for the Rusyns and Poles on Easter, 1882.⁶⁹ They are interesting, in the first place, because they challenge populist assumptions, demonstrating by this very fact a growing maturity and self-reflexiveness in the counterdiscourse. Second, they proved intellectually stimulating to others and stand at the head of a list of self-critical, anticolonial voices, such as those of Ivan Franko, Lesia Ukrainka, Petro Karmansky, Mykola Khvylovy, and Ievhen Malaniuk.

It is perhaps best to approach Kulish as a prime example of an intellectual caught in the crossfire of discourses, constantly evaluating and shifting his position, leaning first toward one tradition then another, mapping the boundaries of discursive conflicts. At times this makes him contradict himself. He had begun as a Romantic nationalist in the 1840s, juxtaposing an exploitative, degenerate metropolitan civilization to the robust, honest one of the homesteads. At that time he viewed Russia’s influence on Ukraine as a destructive levelling. In 1850 Iu. F. Savarin summarized the message of Kulish’s Story of the Ukrainian People (Povest ob ukrainskom narode, 1846) as follows: “Ukraine could have become independent, if not for the treason of its gentry and the overlordship of Muscovy.”⁷⁰ Writing for Foundation in 1861, Kulish continued to develop the idea of Ukraine’s national distinctiveness and its forcible colonization:

Mazepa’s bold enterprise opened Peter’s eyes to a terrible perspective for his state, which he could not forget his entire life. The possibility of the destruc­tion of the empire created by his mind and so close to his heart affected his imagination too strongly, and, with a genius peculiar to himself, he devised a plan to gradually destroy the Hetmanate. We do not regret the destruction of this corporation of the general starshyna, who with the hetman chosen by the tsar together divided among themselves the military’s possessions, showing no concern for the good of the people... However, we cannot fail to grieve over the hard circumstances. The distribution to Great Russians of the lands gathered by Mazepa and his supporters, in contravention of old Little Russian law, was accompanied by the unheard of enserfment of free peasants, which led to countless examples of oppression of the common people and the robbing of cossacks by the new rulers. sent to Little Russia as to a conquered land. The introduction into the Little Russian tribunal of Great Russian members led to scenes of violence and terror that are enough to make one’s hair stand on end. The systematic weakening of the cossack military and their use in exhausting labour on earth removal in the Finnish marshes quickly depopulated the land and filled it with invalids. The billeting of Great Russian soldiers in Little Russia without any limits on their arbitrary behaviour... often led to the impoverishment and destruction of entire villages. Not only the chronicles, but the archives themselves from that period are full of descrip­tions of the terrible tyranny of each bureaucrat, each commander and each courier that appeared in Little Russia.⁷¹

This line of argument was developed in Kulish’s fiction. In the novel The Major (Maior, 1859), which was written in Russian, a leading member of the gentry, Sahaidachny, turns his back on St Petersburg high society and marries a local “Cossack girl” Parasia. Salvation, he believes, is to be found in the common people, whom he calls “the only independent society among us. Only in that society, in spite of its underdevelopment, our basic mores have survived, unadulterated by anything foreign, uncharacteristic of our Slavic nature.” He con­cludes that the local Ukrainian gentry ought “to live with the common people, to intermarry with them.”⁷² It is a local society still deeply rooted in tradition, with a historical memory and a strong moral code. The account given of Zaporozhian society, purportedly a retelling from personal recollections, challenges depictions in Gogol and Shevchenko. It describes Zaporozhian cossackdom as a settled pioneer society with its own economy and system of education, which engaged in military activities only for part of the year. Kulish’s portrays it as a prosperous, self-regulating community that has been laid waste by foreign invasion: “The Zaporozhians suffered a disaster: the Sich was surrounded, their wealth was taken from each company, the silver and gold, both that which belonged to the church and that owned by the brotherhoods, was taken out of the churches, even the wax candles were not left for God. They fell upon the Sich like hungry locusts. That is how our father described it to us.”⁷³

The contemporary indigenous culture must struggle to avoid being entirely effaced by a constant media barrage: “newspaper announce­ments giving promotions in rank, journal articles devoted to the practical value of a common nationality [obshchenarodnosti], learned evidence against all that leading Ukrainians treasured, novels and stories about the life and activities of what are termed respectable people - in sum all those things that together are called gentry life and gentry literature.”⁷⁴

This passage deconstructs the rhetoric and ideology of affiliation, demonstrating its coerciveness and intrusiveness. The upper crust of St Petersburg society is portrayed in the novel with pointed irony as venal and uncouth. Sahaidachny, as one of its leading lights, has conducted an “endless battle with the horde of barbarians and plun­derers who daily move upon the honest and unarmed part of soci- ety.”⁷⁵ The corrupt, dissolute, and incompetent prince represents all that is worst in the metropolis. He attempts to take over the old major’s estate upon which Sahaidachny and Parasia plan to live. When Sahai- dachny informs his messenger that there are laws against the acquisi­tion of ancient cossack lands by nonfamily members, “war” is declared. The prince, it is said, by plying contacts with “ministers, senators,” and other influential family and friends who are “above the law,” will inevitably get his way. Sahaidachny, however, stands firm, relying on “the power of things that keep in check such people as his highness,”⁷⁶ an ambiguous phrase that could be interpreted as a reference to the restraining of the prince’s arbitrary behaviour by either the monarch or popular opposition. In the end, the reader is led to understand that the prince does not obtain the estate, nor does he succeed in replacing its beautiful cossack homestead with the planned Gothic castle. Dispossession is averted and the road cleared for a new rap­prochement of the Ukrainian gentry and the common people.

One of the more interesting aspects of the novel is how psychic dependency on high society is portrayed. The major, although he never meets the prince, has constructed an image of the man as a paragon of honour and virtue, and he even wills him his estate. Another char­acter, Ivolgin, the prince’s flunkey, is similarly deluded. He suffers from a class-national inferiority complex. While disparaging his own peasant, Ukrainian identity, he admires the prince’s thoroughly disreputable behaviour as befitting the latter’s elevated social standing.

Kulish wrote devastating critiques of the spiritually crippled gentry leadership of Ukraine, which he accused of abandoning the national language and identity. He maintained this position until the mid­seventies, when his earlier “cossackophilia” was replaced by an outspo­ken critique of popular revolts and an apologia for the political elite. The condemnation of Muscovy, however, remained constant. He even denied the inevitability of the union with Muscovy, suggesting that, had the lower cossack orders and popular masses shown enough political wisdom and maturity, Muscovy would not have been able to overrun Ukraine. The year 1882 was particularly controversial. Since the mid-seventies, when the Ems edict came into force, Kulish had published almost exclusively in Galicia. He travelled there in the winter of 1881 and renounced Russian citizenship with the intention of settling in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and, with Polish help, opening a printing shop. The writings he produced in the year he spent there were conciliatory gestures toward Polish society calculated to garner its support.

While in Lviv, Kulish arranged the publication of the collection Homestead Poetry (Khutorna poeziia, 1882). In it he calls Ukrainians a “Nation without direction, without honour or respect,” “barbarians” who like to boast of their fierce nature, but neglect cultural values.⁷⁷ In the essay attached to this collection, “A Letter of Appeal,” he charges the Ukrainian intelligentsia with forsaking its own people over the cen­turies in order to adopt the culture and identity of politically powerful overlords - either Polish or Russian. Those countrymen who had tried to climb the “Russian Helicon” had turned their back on the treasures of a national folklore and popular language that surrounded them. Such apostasy had enabled Russians to strike Ukrainians “from the book of living nations” without applying “any violence.”⁷⁸ The present imperial administration was continuing the same policy of denational­izing Ukrainians and attempting to entirely “extinguish” the people’s “spirit” by completely suppressing its press and schools.⁷⁹ A poem in the collection, entitled “The Slavic Ode,” was perhaps his most outspo­ken denunciation of imperial rule. It described Russia as building “a universal and inescapable prison” for all Slavs, while spilling their blood “like water.” True to his Romantic nationalist beliefs, Kulish pre­dicted that the national spirit could not be crushed but would eventu­ally find expression as the people once again threw up their own religious leaders, nobility, and intelligentsia. Kulish’s form of Romantic nationalism (or Ukrainophilism, as it was then generally known) stressed the primacy of culture. By developing its language, literature, and scholarship, he believed that the nation would win back the prom­inent cultural position it had once held and subsequently failed to protect against politically more powerful neighbours.

“Easter Egg” makes a gesture of apology and good faith toward the Polish people. It describes the ignorance and prejudice of Rus, the often senseless violence of the cossack rebellions, and the destructive hatred that had laid waste to both Poland and Ukraine. It bitterly reproaches the clergy for fomenting popular discontent and spreading slanders against the gentry. Departing from his earlier, Romantic enthusiasm for Ukrainian folklore (when, for example, he saw the dumy as reliable interpretations of national history), he attacks the “blind kobzars,” for spending their time “drinking with the cossacks” and composing dumy that often dreamed up abuses supposedly suf­fered at the hands of the Poles.⁸⁰ Cossack youth, claims the author, had been educated on the “chaos of medieval civic life”⁸¹ and were encouraged to blame everything they disliked in Ukraine on the established order, to believe any story of gentry abuse against them, while ignoring their own savage acts. Ukraine, as a consequence of the prolonged strife that followed Khmelnytsky’s revolution, had fallen into ruin, torn apart by the “drunken revolt” of the cossacks, on the one hand, and the gentry’s government-sanctioned “right of robbery” on the other.⁸²

Kulish points to the collapse of the educational system and the decline of literature as primary factors in the loss of nationhood. It is in their restoration that he forsees the guarantee of a revival. In the postcript to this essay he urges the Poles in their turn to allow the development of a Ukrainian literary, educational, and cultural movement, to permit “Rusyns to be Rusyns” and not to force them to become Poles. He accuses contemporary Poles, whether “humanists,” “progressives,” or “liberals,” of practising the same despotic behaviour toward Galician Ukrainians that the repressive Nicholas I had exhibited toward “Little Russians” in the first half of the century and of searching for a rationale to justify what “neither a Christian heart, nor political sense” could condone.⁸³

The self-critique was, however, widely seen as an embarrassing attempt to compromise with pro-Polish views, and his overture was, in any case, rebuffed. The harsh response from all sides and the simulta­neous announcement that Ukrainian Uniate monasteries would be transferred to Polish Jesuit control produced a deep disenchantment and led to a shamefaced return to Russia, where he was placed under police observation.⁸⁴ Ukrainians, naturally, criticized him for opportun­ism, for downplaying socioeconomic issues, for refusing to rely on the evidence of the Ukrainian chronicles, archival sources, and dumy that he had earlier recognized, and for accepting the equally suspect evi­dence of Polish eyewitnesses and sources. Nonetheless, these essays raised several painful issues for Ukrainians: their self-indugent victim complex, their frequent ignorance of historical facts, the intelligentsia’s low level of education and its inferiority complex. In Homestead Poetry and the two essays, “A Letter of Appeal” and “Easter Egg,” he shifts much of the blame for the country’s colonial status onto the ignorant populace and opportunistic national leadership, both past and present, initiating an argument that would resonate with future generations.

Kulish’s comments exposed the lack of autonomy of the national discourse. Convinced that cultural production was of primary impor­tance, he worked to create a national high culture - one that was not an alien imposition but drew on indigenous sources. His efforts to discover the “spirit” of the nation through the study of its folklore, history, ethnography, and literature were guided by this goal. His translation of the Bible and European classics were meant to aid the construction of a high culture by supplying the required great books in the contemporary vernacular. There was, of course, a contradiction here between the desire to discover the unique character of the national spirit and the need to imitate foreign examples. It is a typical dilemma for the nationalisms of subject peoples that, unlike their pace-setting “Western” neighbours, sense a lack of linguistic, educa­tional, and professional skills and therefore feel the need to transform the nation by “reequipping” it culturally. The “Eastern” intelligentsias have, typically, embarked on campaigns to regenerate their national cultures by adapting them to the requirements of progress, while attempting simultaneously to retain their distinctiveness.⁸⁵ Kulish’s attraction to global standards set by the advanced nations of Western Europe and to examples of international success enjoyed by some Polish and Russian writers led him both to admire them as models and reject them as intrusive influences. As a national enlightener and awakener, Kulish felt this dilemma acutely.

Kulish’s attitude to the brutality of popular uprisings illustrates the clash of discourses within his thinking. An intellectual shaped by post­Enlightenment trends, he rejected extremist politics and violence, indicating the dangerous potential of primitive superstition to ignite nationalist rage. At the same time his Romantic nationalism (Ukraino- philism) expressed a “rhetoric of the heart” that valorized the inno­cence, power, and beauty of popular culture and the justice of the national democratic struggle against colonial domination and exploi­tation. Kulish reconciled this contradiction by holding the position that the atavistic in the national culture had to be eliminated and the culture reshaped through rationalist, secular, Westernizing influences. The contemporary national culture, of course, frequently failed to live up to his ideals of the secular and modern; the popular and democratic could be “traditional and fanatically anti-modern.”⁸⁶ Kulish’s attitude to the popular and national, therefore, embraced a paradox: as a West­ernizing intellectual he was at times profoundly hostile to popular tra­dition, while as a Romantic nationalist he was prepared to believe in its capacity to reflect the nation’s unspoilt inner “spirit” or “soul.” The fear of violent popular uprisings was, perhaps, at the root of Kulish’s search for administrative backing for educational and cultural reforms. Although his criticism of popular ignorance was to be picked up by some later writers, his later fear of the volcanic power of agrarian revolts was not to be shared by Franko, Karmansky, Khvylovy, and Mala- niuk, each of whom in his own way came to accept the inevitability, if not the necessity or desirability, of revolutionary violence.

In the last years of his life Kulish wrote a novel in the Russian language titled Vladimiria (Vladimiriia). It was completed in 1894 but not passed by the censorship and remained unpublished until 1998.⁸⁷ The book explores the reasons for the separation of Western from Eastern Ukraine and suggests that Galicia can become the Ukrainian Piedmont. In the conclusion, the main character, Andrii Nezlia- kailenko, repents his defection to Uniate Catholicism and returns to the Orthodox faith. In this ending Kulish makes it clear that he thinks a rejection of the Uniate Church and a return to what he considers a national faith - Ukrainian Orthodoxy - will bring about Ukraine’s spiritual and political reunification. In conformity with his conviction that spiritual resistance and cultural work outweigh the value of polit­ical action, he proposes the concept of a single national church as a key to national revival and social progress. Although the book’s ending includes a call for the unification to occur within imperial borders, this was an obvious requirement if the text was to have any hope of passing the censors, and Kulish had hopes that it would indeed be published within the empire. The empire, however, is clearly a minor issue. The focus of the book is on the regeneration of Ukraine. Kulish criticizes both Uniate Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy as central­ized, authoritarian, regimented, and beyond the control of the lay community, suggesting an autonomous or autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodoxy as the ideal. Such a position is in alignment with his conviction that Ukrainian spirituality differs markedly from Russian and that pre-imperial Ukrainian Orthodoxy manifested the best and traditions of Eastern Christianity. Vladimiria bears witness to Kulish’s return to traditional Ukrainian Orthodox values after various and many intellectual infatuations.

Kulish’s stubborn struggle to define a Ukrainian spirituality with deep roots in the past, his recognition of the need for high culture, and his complex and often hostile relationship with popular nation­alism were not viewed sympathetically by populists in the seventies and eighties. However, these aspects of his thought were rediscovered by the modernist generation that followed, whose pursuit of high culture led it to echo many of his concerns and, as he did, to demand autonomy for the national discourse.

Mykhailo Drahomanov

Historiography became a contested subject in the second half of the nineteenth century as Ukrainian scholars and writers challenged the imperial version of history. Not only Panteleimon Kulish but Mykhailo Maksymovych, Mykola Kostomarov, Volodymyr Antonovych, and Viacheslav Lypynsky debated Russian historians concerning the origins and development of Ukrainian society. One of the most influential voices in these discussions belonged to Mykhailo Drahomanov, who from his exile in Geneva (from 1876) and Sophia (from 1889 to his death in 1895) exhorted Western and Russian intellectuals to consider Ukraine’s claims to a historical identity and cultural rights. In what is perhaps his best essay, “Historical Poland and Great Russian Democ­racy” (1881), he put forward the case that Ukraine had been the victim of the imperial contest between Russia and Poland.⁸⁸ His argument is summarized here as a classic example of how the Ukrainian counter­position sought to undermine the tenets of imperial historiography.

Drahomanov began by arguing that the Slavic peoples, having set­tled on their respective territories in Central and Eastern Europe, found themselves cut off from the shores of the Baltic and Black Seas, which they had begun to colonize before the fourteenth century. In the middle of the fourteenth century the Poles, having lost the Baltic littoral and Oder basin to German expansion, began to search for compensatory territory in the east. This development destabilized the existing Lithuanian and Belarusan-Ukrainian state on their eastern border. Ukraine (Rus) was incorporated in 1569 by the Union of Lublin into Poland “without any regional, or national, autonomy, or representation that recognized its integrity.”⁸⁹ This unfortunate polit­ical union was followed in 1596 by a disastrous attempt at a union of churches, whose intention was the Catholicization of the population. Drahomanov argued that Poland lacked the strength to effectively rule such an enormous territory with a social system that was quite different from its own. Polish society recognized only two classes, the gentry and the common people, and was therefore unable to deal with the dominant Ukrainian estate, the cossacks. Both the failure of the state to incorporate the Ukrainian cossacks into the gentry and the frustra­tion felt by those Ukrainians who had not been allowed to enter the cossack estate led to the Polish-cossack wars of the late sixteenth and seventeenth century. In the course of these conflicts Ukrainian society turned for support to Muscovy and recognized the protection of the tsar in 1654.

The despotic behaviour of Muscovy, however, immediately caused alienation. Four years after the agreement of 1654, a visiting Serb observer reported the widespread “political heresy that life under the famous Muscovite tsardom was worse than Turkish torture and Egyp­tian labour.”⁹⁰ Drahomanov pointed out that Russian historians, in reviewing Ukrainian history, have consistently attributed every success to the tsar and centralization, while simultaneously condemning every opposition to them. In this way “the fault for all the bloodshed from Bohdan Khmelnytsky to the fall of Mazepa, in their opinion, lay with Ukrainians, especially with the cossacks, who were [depicted as] accus­tomed to instability and unruly behaviour.”⁹¹ Unable to subdue the Ukrainian cossacks and Belarusan townspeople, Muscovy cooperated with Poland in dividing their territories and suppressing opposition. In the seventeenth century Russia, Poland, and Turkey even desig­nated half of Right Bank Ukraine as an empty buffer zone between them, so that each could deal in its own way with the unruly local population. This division of Ukraine was a “fatal blow to its indepen­dent development.”⁹² Poland, although it lost Left Bank Ukraine, could still rejoice in retaining the Right Bank for another century.

The multinational and heterogeneous nature of the state meant that “Bureaucracy in administration, and dictatorship in politics inevitably became the forms of state life in the vast empire.”⁹³ The Russian administration turned for assistance to the Polish landowning gentry in Ukraine in order to gain control of the population and strengthen its rule, in the same way that it struck alliances with the gentry element in other parts of the empire. Naturally, neither the Russian state nor the dominant Polish gentry had any interest in extending any rights to the local Ukrainian population. In fact, it had every reason to erase the memory of a “third force” and to deny the existence of another nation on this territory. The study of the history and present condition of these Ukrainian lands was particularly neglected after the failed rebellion of 1830-31, which led to the closing of the universities of Warsaw and Vilnius and the lyceum in Kremenets. The critical attitude Polish historians like Lelewel had expressed toward the old Polish state now gave way to an uncritical idealization of its achievements: “Polish society developed the idea that the cossack-Ukrainian revolutions were not the result of a natural reaction to magnate-Jesuit politics, as the serious historians of Lelewel’s school had argued, or a social reaction complicated by a national reaction, as Lelewel’s followers had taught, but saw it as the acts of brigands (cossacks), stimulated by Muscovite intrigue... The Ukrainian school in Polish literature died out in the thirties, and the ethnographic study of Ukraine among Poles, which had been initiated by Chodakowski, Zaleski, Pauli, and others began to die out in the 1840s.”⁹⁴

By the mid-nineteenth century, members of both Russian and Polish educated society could claim to be unaware of the existence of a Ukrai­nian people, of its history or culture. Even the work of proscribing, to paraphrase Terdiman, had been thoroughly proscribed.⁹⁵ Drahomanov, however, argued that the second largest Slavic people, the Ukrainians, had always been a part of the triangular political-cultural relationship and that their removal from history and the silencing of their voice was primarily a result of the competition for supremacy between Poland and Russia. He was convinced that the great cossack rebellion of the mid-seventeenth century had come close to giving Ukraine not only national independence but also viable political and social insti­tutions. The devastation that followed the country’s division between Poland, Muscovy, and Turkey and the years it spent as Muscovy’s protectorate had set back socioeconomic and cultural development.

Gradually, as the universities of Kharkiv and Kyiv began to produce Ukrainian historians, as modern Ukrainian writing began to appear, and as the sense of a shared identity grew, the claims that Ukraine was an invention of Polish, Russian, Austrian, or German intrigues became less tenable. The “third force” had reappeared. Evidence for its con­tinuous existence was detected in the literature and folklore of the preceding centuries. Drahomanov himself contributed to the research by editing and introducing anthologies of Ukrainian historical songs and folksongs that, over the centuries, bore witness to a strong sense of social awareness and shared national goals.⁹⁶ In short, like other nineteenth-century intellectuals, he discovered a counterdiscourse that was now fuelling the sense of a national identity.

Drahomanov’s writings demonstrate how perceptions formed within the limits of discursive constraints could be challenged. Foucault has characterized discourse as the “delimitation of a field of objects, the definition of a legitimate perspective for the agent of knowledge, and the fixing of norms for the elaboration of concepts or theories.”⁹⁷ If we take these three assertions in order, we see how Drahomanov’s anal­ysis overturns that of the colonial discourse at every point. First, he demands that new facts and phenomena be given attention, that the proscribed history be studied. Second, he insists upon the right to speak, to gain entry into the discourse, foregrounding in this way issues of legitimacy and authority. Drahomanov had been thrown out of his position at Kyiv University and had subsequently been asked by Ukrai­nian intellectuals to present their case from abroad. His works were published in Geneva, Sophia, and Western Ukraine and from there had been smuggled into the empire. Third, in reading Drahomanov, we become aware of how these views, considered illegitimate and nation­alist by the authorities and many Russian intellectuals, were denied access to a wider forum. As a consequence, the counterdiscourse nec­essarily turned in on itself and evolved its own concepts and theories.

As a socialist, Drahomanov argued that Ukrainophiles should take up not only cultural but also social issues, in particular the concerns of the peasantry. His political thinking was dominated by the need to extend individual civil liberties. National emancipation, as he stated on several occasions, was merely a means to this end. He refused to follow the Romantic nationalists in unconditionally privileging the rights of the national “organism” over wider political, social, and eco­nomic concerns. His writings therefore reflect upon the dilemmas and complexities of national dependency within the overarching narratives of enlightenment and progress. The prerequisites for the achievement of socialism were, in his mind, the spread of education, the widespread acceptance of cultural standards, and the establishment of voluntary associations that would be united on federal principles.

Opponents termed this contextualization of the national question “cosmopolitanism.” In particular, his view of Russian literature as a conduit for progressive European ideas was challenged by those who adhered to a “nativist” position. The discourse of empire had bifur­cated in the last two decades of the century into a Russian-language and a Ukrainian-language stream, and younger writers now increas­ingly questioned the wisdom of contributing to the former. One of the most important exchanges over this issue was a debate between Borys Hrinchenko and Drahomanov that took place in 1892-93. They had already clashed in the Lviv journal Star (Zoria) in 1888-89 over the attitude to be taken toward Russian literature, and the novelist Ivan Nechui-Levytsky had earlier, in 1891, also championed the idea of a national literature independent of Russian influences.⁹⁸ However, Hrinchenko’s “Letters” to the Chernivtsi journal Bukovyna in 1892-93 and Drahomanov’s responses in the Kolomyia journal Narod in 1893­94 constituted the high point of this debate.⁹⁹ Drahomanov repre­sented the older generation of activists, and his writings make the best case for maintaining a dialogue with Russian liberals and radicals.

In his response to Hrinchenko’s criticisms he carefully complicates the organicist view of nation by pointing out, for example, that the seventeenth-century cossack class was composed of various elements: “Ukrainians, Poles, Wallacians, Tatars, Serbs, even Greeks and Jews, and later, Russians.” In the eighteenth century this class could not adapt itself to the lower Ukrainian social element but had to model itself on the existing Russian system. Given the historical circum­stances, its Ukrainianization could not have occurred quickly but was dependent on a gradual evolution - in his words, on “time” and the spread of “democratic ideas.” Drahomanov argues that democratic and liberal ideas, which encourage the spread of education, had in fact often come to Ukraine through Petersburg and Moscow and continue to do so. Kapnist’s “Ode on Slavery” of 1783, the History of the Rus, and Ryleev’s poetry were all written in Russian. All were products of Euro­pean liberal, democratizing ideas, and all were instrumental in raising Ukrainian national consciousness. Ukrainians, argues Drahomanov, ought in the present, as they had in the past, to appreciate enlightened views in whatever language they present themselves.

The same argument was also used by Franko in 1895, when discuss­ing Ivan Vyshensky’s obstinate rejection of the Catholic-Latin-Polish culture of the seventeenth century. He wrote that by following Vyshen- sky’s advice and turning their backs on the dominant culture, the Rus citizens of Lviv had placed themselves, in the words of a contemporary, “outside Lviv, outside the burgher estate and, one might even say, outside their own society,” becoming “greater foreigners in the Rus city than the Germans, than the first Poles, than even the Arme­nians.”¹⁰⁰ Franko makes the point that this “program of separatism, which immediately placed the Ruthenians outside civic life” was, how­ever understandable, a demoralizing factor. It led to the liveliest minds and spirits searching for wider horizons elsewhere. “Separatism, which was meant,” in Franko’s words, “to save Rus, ended up causing moral and material harm, and might have destroyed it altogether, if its complete implementation had been possible.”¹⁰¹

Drahomanov’s second response to Hrinchenko is a socioeconomic argument. In the eighteenth century, the Ukrainian population, according to Drahomanov, sensed the urgency of dealing with the Turkish-Tatar threat on their southern border and the Polish on its western. Although they had no enthusiasm for Peter the Great’s Baltic campaigns, the moment the tsar turned his attention to capturing Turkish strongholds on the Azov Sea, they provided their fullest sup­port. In the same way, argues Drahomanov, the Ukrainian people “instinctively sensed” (chuv niukhom) that Catherine’s capture of the Black Sea coastline had opened up for them the possibility of settling the rich steppe region they had long disputed with the Ottoman Empire and Tatar raiders. Up until the abolition of serfdom in 1861, Ukrainian serfs were still escaping to the landlords’ slobody (free lands) within these territories. Moreover, Ukraine’s security and development required the establishment of a friendly Constantinople with guaran­teed access for Ukrainian ships to the Mediterranean and, later, the Suez Canal. In short, there were moments when expansionary tsarist policies fulfilled Ukraine’s “elementary geographical and national” interests and were therefore treated with sympathy: “tsarism, when all is said, to a certain extent organized the forces of the community... and accomplished our national goals from the historical moment when we were unable to accomplish them ourselves.”¹⁰²

Drahomanov demonstrates, first, that expressions of support for imperial expansion by Ukrainian writers like Kotliarevsky and Stor­ozhenko, who served in the imperial army, were not necessarily expres­sions of abject servility, as Hrinchenko had assumed. Second, he wishes to suggest that Hrinchenko was misguided in dismissing almost the entire nineteenth-century Ukrainian literary tradition (with the excep­tion of Shevchenko). Writers, he states, should be given credit for making the best of historical situations. Sometimes the motivation, as in Kostomarov’s case, might have been opportunism, to “fool the Russian,” as he puts it, and the use of Polish, Latin, or Russian was not, as Hrinchenko argued, self-abnegation but in many instances a legitimate and effective tactic. Kostomarov, after all, published “fifteen to twenty volumes” in Russian that propagated the case for federalism and served as the basis for “every intelligent work that Ukrainian historiography has [since] produced.”¹⁰³ But above all Drahomanov argues that the psychology of national identification is itself multilay­ered and can coexist and merge with other forms of identification and be expressed in various languages and manners. He is able to assert, therefore, that “Ukrainians would, perhaps, always be left with two literatures [Ukrainian and Russian], not one. Nature is a more com­plex thing than doctrine!”¹⁰⁴ Moreover, Russian hegemony, according to Drahomanov, had never been total and had always been vulnerable; the subaltern had in every historical situation found ways of challeng­ing and undermining it.

The Ukrainian scholar’s determination to recover this subaltern voice and his high level of comfort with notions of cultural hybridity prefigure some of the ideas of postcolonial theory, in much the same way as his complication of the Romantic nationalist viewpoint antici­pates postmodernist uncertainties.

Borys Hrinchenko

Hrinchenko was a member of the younger generation of activists who formed the Brotherhood of Taras in 1891 from among Kyiv and Kharkiv students. In his “Profession de foi,” he called for the active development of a national consciousness among all Ukrainians through mastery and dissemination of the language and the study of culture and history.¹⁰⁵ He was particularly outspoken on the question of Russi­fication and demanded a clear cultural separatism in place of the bicul- turalism that characterized many members of the intelligentsia.

Hrinchenko’s main argument in the “Letters” is the inevitability of rapid Russification if the Ukrainian intelligentsia fails to use its own language and develop its own literature. Second, he portrays past writers as lacking a firm national consciousness. They often had “two souls: one Ukrainian, the other Russian” and as a consequence attempted to serve both their native land and the oppressor. He lists odes to Russian tsars and generals written by Kotliarevsky, Kvitka, Hulak-Artemovsky, and Storozhenko and complains that Kulish’s views on history and Kostomarov’s on the role of Ukrainian literature only served to justify the hegemony of Russia. As a result of this schizophre­nia, writes Hrinchenko, Kulish, in his History of the Reunification of Rus (Istoriia Vossoedinenie Rusi), ended up maligning the cossack period of Ukrainian history, portraying Sahaidachny as a “brilliant pirate and plunderer” (genialnyi pirat i naezdnik) and the whole cossack period as a history of “Ukrainian banditry” (ukrainskikh razboev). The same schizophrenia caused Kostomarov, in his Two Russian Nationalities (Dve russkie narodnosti), to argue for the incapacity of Ukrainians to rule themselves and to subsequently put forward the view that the Ukrai­nian language was fit only for “local use,” in this way encouraging assimilation to the Russian language and culture.¹⁰⁶ Hrinchenko described these views as expressions of servility that had only hindered the development of a national consciousness.

The “Letters” were an attack on the older generation of Ukraino- philes, who included Drahomanov, and a call for an intransigent stance toward Russian literature and culture. Hrinchenko was con­vinced that by writing for the Russian press, the Ukrainian intelligen­tsia was becoming part of the “all-Russian intelligentsia,” accepting its way of thinking and feeling, and turning its back on its own people. Worst of all, it was accepting the imperial point of view. Did this mean, Hrinchenko asked himself, that all that had been done in Russia to unite the two peoples should be seen as ruinous for the Ukrainian national cause? His answer was affirmative: it had all been done in the name of Russian, not Ukrainian, unity. Hrinchenko ridiculed Draho- manov's orientation to Russian literature and Russian “pseudoliber­als.” In particular, he took offence at the idea, expressed in Drahomanov's article “Russian, Great-Russian, Ukrainian, and Galician Literatures,” (Literatura rosiiska, velykoruska, ukrainska i halytska) that there could be a common “Russian imperial” literature (rosiiska) that should serve as a forum in which matters of importance to all intellectuals in the empire could be discussed and that should differ from the literature devoted to Russia proper and Ukraine proper.

These comments, reminiscent of many twentieth-century statements by intellectuals seeking to reject the intrusions of a metropolitan culture, are a typical anticolonial reflex that seeks to draw firm lines of demarcation between the colonizer and colonized. Working from a Romantic nationalist framework and holding an organicist concep­tion of the nation, Hrinchenko's metanarrative of the Nation insists on it distinguishing itself from others, particularly from close relatives. The “Letters” mark a conscious attempt to break from the previous intellectual tradition and to radically reformulate national tasks. It is clearly an important moment in the discourse of empire and can be theorized in several ways.

Most discussions of national movements have, since the sixties, been under the spell of Miroslav Hroch's tripartite scheme, which saw national movements developing from an academic, through a cultural, to a political stage.¹⁰⁷ If the period from 1800 to 1840 could be represented as the academic stage, the cultural could be seen as the period from 1840 to 1890, and the 1890s could be characterized as a time when political parties emerged and mass mobilizations began. There are, however, problems with the rigidities inherent in a scheme that fails to account for the emergence of the “political” in earlier periods or for the possibility of lapses and uneven developments. Even more questionable is the applicability of the sociological model (on which Hroch’s analysis relies) to the psychology of individual writers. A second model, which allows for greater flexibility in distinguishing the imaginative construction of the national, is the colonial/anticolonial/ postcolonial progression that has been proposed by Marko Pavlyshyn.¹⁰⁸ Hrinchenko’s “Letters” can accordingly be seen as an attempt to break with all attempts by the colonial to inscribe hegemony, an announce­ment of an unambiguous anticolonialism. There is much to recom­mend this second interpretative model, especially when it allows for the layering of colonial, anticolonial, and postcolonial in individual writers. A third interpretative framework has been proposed by Serhy Yekelchyk, in order to gain a more nuanced view of the counterdis­course and its relationship to the growth of national movements. He has suggested viewing national movements in Eastern Europe through the concept of discursive strategies. He outlines three principal strat­egies: substitution, identification, and projection.¹⁰⁹ Substitution describes the psychological process of transference or sublimation. It would apply to the desire of writers to study their folklore and local dialects, to juxtapose or “substitute” a local patriotism and political interests in the place of the imperial. Identification is described by Yekelchyk as the fusion of an individual with another identity, in this case with an “imagined” nation. The counterdiscourse figures promi­nently in the construction of such an imagined national identity. And, finally, the nationalist strategy of projection is, according to Yekelchyk, the aggressive propagation of nationalist ideas and symbols over an entire region or country.

The second, identificatory stage in this scheme would appear to characterize Hrinchenko’s “Letters.” The writer’s position is that Ukrainians must be aware of the discourse of nation and its develop­ment. According to him, a “normal” Ukrainian consciousness began with Shevchenko, whose uncompromising stance is to be emulated. Hrinchenko finds the selection of symbolic features important for self­identification. Such features include not only texts and national heroes (Shevchenko, Hrushevsky, and so on), but also styles (in the arts, appearance, dress, and manners). The 1890s can, in such a revision of Hroch’s scheme, be seen as involving an intensified self- identificatory process that precedes a strategy of mass action.

Ivan Franko

In 1906 Ivan Franko wrote an article on Drahomanov in which he characterized his former intellectual mentor as a product of both West­ern liberal ideas and Russian critical thought.¹¹⁰ Franko argued that Drahomanov’s generation came on the political scene after the aboli­tion of serfdom in 1861 and became advocates of elementary education for the common people and basic language rights but still remained wedded to Russian colonial ideas and culture. Drahomanov and other activists justified the teaching of Ukrainian in elementary schools in terms of creating a bridge to Russian culture - the real language of education and ideas. This manner of thinking gave birth to several theoretical propositions, the most famous being Kostomarov’s concept of Ukrainian as a language for domestic use and Drahomanov’s idea of Great Russian, Ukrainian, and Galician literatures as three compo­nents of a common Russian literature.¹¹¹

Franko argued that the two chief influences on Drahamanov’s intel­lectual development - his progressive, European side and what Franko called his Russian “muzhikophilia”- never fused into a harmonious and convincing synthesis. Here, in Franko’s opinion, lay the key to under­standing Drahomanov’s positions and activity. Fear of the state’s intru­siveness drew him toward an emphasis on what Isaiah Berlin later termed negative rights: the freedom from state control and the liber­ties of thought, speech, and association. Drahomanov’s ideal was a universe of self-governing, small-scale communities that would be linked in a federal system. The rights of the individual (and the local community, which functioned as an individual) were always his funda­mental concern. Franko summarized this position in the following terms: “Drahomanov’s liberalism was based above all on the rights of the human individual, on the autonomy of the individual, on the freedom of speech and thought.”¹¹²

At the dawn of the twentieth century Franko surveyed this classical form of Western “liberalism” Drahomanov had taken from the British example and found it wanting. He felt that Drahomanov’s theory of the state provided no place for an autonomous Ukraine and indicated no path toward its realization. Drahomanov, he wrote, “recognized the dominance, both spiritual and political, of only one nation in multi­national states... Nationalities were only forms, ways of expression, contours that had to be filled with the same human or. European content.”¹¹³ As a result, in spite of his fine article on “Historical Poland and Great Russian Democracy,” which explained the consequences of ignoring the national question, when, in 1884, he came to draft a project for a liberal constitution for Russia, Drahomanov ignored the principle of national autonomy, foregrounding only the right of regional autonomy. Five years later, when challenged by proponents of cultural independence, he responded negatively by indicating inter­national elements in all cultures. Franko considered Russia’s intellec­tual culture so much a part of Drahomanov’s intellectual formation that the latter simply could not imagine Ukraine without Russia. The focus on local interests and small-scale organizations appeared, there­fore, to be a way of avoiding the larger political issue of nation­building. As a result, Franko defined his political identity as “gente Ukrainus, natione Russus.”¹¹⁴

Drahomanov’s view of the Ukrainian nation as a plebeian people who spoke only their native language and were therefore cut off from richer intellectual sources determined his cultural and political strat­egies. Under such circumstances the national movement could only restrict itself to educational activities of a primary nature and make basic demands for human rights. The strategy coloured his interpre­tation of figures like Shevchenko, whom he saw as a rebel against serfdom and caste egoism, not as an advocate of nationhood. The view of Ukrainians as a plebeian ethnos, in Franko’s opinion, inadvertently confirmed the claims advanced by the Polish gentry in Western Ukraine that there was no Ukrainian nation but simply an ethno­graphic mass that would, in time, under the influence of Polish cul­ture, acquire a Polish identity. Franko argued that Drahomanov’s focus on the peasantry was, in short, not the tactic of a nation-builder who recognized the importance of popular education at a given stage of development but the product of an imperfect national awareness, a failure to recognize the nation as “something organic, historically necessary, indivisible, and higher than all territorial organizations.”¹¹⁵ For Franko the task of winning national political autonomy became the goal, one that required an immense common effort and the mobilization of all available social forces.

National self-determination was for Franko a necessary step on the path to individual emancipation. Literature, by adopting this liberation- ist national ethos, played an enormous role in educating the colonized. Franko’s great philosophical poems, particularly The Death of Cain (Smert Kaina), Ivan Vyshensky, Funeral (Pokhoron), and Moses (Moisei), and prose works like Zakhar Berkut deal with national liberation and the struggles of intellectual leaders to enlighten their people. Oksana Zabuzhko has described the structure of feeling in his poetry as the “fear of unpreparedness,”¹¹⁶ the sense of an impending international crisis for which the colonized were not adequately mobilized. This fear drove the writer to portray characters who are activists and national awakeners with demiurgic desires to form, out of the popular masses, an organized nation conscious of its political goals. Franko differs pro­foundly from Drahomanov in his emphasis on the crucial role of the intellectual who must provide his people with spiritual leadership and in his modern sense of the nation as intellectually and politically con­structed. The trials and tribulations of the intellectual, whose conscious­ness is in advance of the masses and who is frequently misunderstood by them, is, in fact, Franko’s great theme. It is best captured in his opus magnum, Moses. A similar portrait of the far-sighted but unheeded prophet was shortly afterwards produced by Lesia Ukrainka in her Cas­sandra (Kassandra) and On the Ruins (Na ruinakh).

Franko, however, was no isolationist, as is indicated by his already quoted comments on the Lviv Ruthenians in Ivan Vyshensky’s day. Ukrainians had to strive to participate fully in international cultural and political life as equals. Self-imposed isolation (the choice of the Lviv burghers) would lead to ignorance, a loss of faith in one’s own powers, and demoralization. Ukraine had always drawn on the cultures of Europe and should continue to do so, without, however, retreating from the ultimate goal of autonomy. These remarks were frequently linked to a critique of the narrow-minded populism that many of his compatriots embraced. The poet wrote damningly not only of the conceited, intellectually stultifying atmosphere of Western Ukrainian letters but, pointedly, of the complex and strained relationship between the intellectual and “the people.” Many of his best poems, like The Death of Cain, Ivan Vyshensky, The Funeral, and Moses, are in fact challenges to any simplistic notions of national solidarity.

The move toward an independent cultural stance at the turn of the century can, in fact, be attributed to and correlated with the enormous number of foreign contacts and influences at work among writers. Awareness of the “other” stimulated awareness of the “self.” Ukrainian culture at this time shed the image of a provincial or regional product and, as several observers have noted, assumed a self-sufficient, self­determining attitude.¹¹⁷ Zabuzhko has written that “The transfer of the “spiritual capital” of Ukraine from Kyiv to Lviv had a decisive influence on the “reorientation” of culture and its entry into the pan­European cultural context, principally because it drew the Ukrainian national revival into the epicentre of those turbulent processes of nation-building in which all Europe... was involved during the ‘age of nationalism.’”¹¹⁸

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, members of Franko’s generation, who sometimes referred to themselves as Young Ukraine (Moloda Ukraina), attempted, like the analogous Young Poland and Young Italy movements, to revive the national spirit and to break decisively with the dual loyalty that they detected in previous genera­tions. Their sense of serving a “national idea” was governed by a deep sense of humanism and an emancipatory ethic that is strongly reflected in their literary works and that is one of their great legacies. It set their nationalism apart from later forms, like the integral nation­alism of the 1930s and 1940s that downplayed or denied the ethical imperative. An episode in Franko’s life can serve as an illustration of the importance he attached to the ethical. The Ukrainian writer had been heavily involved in Polish politics as a founder of the Polish National Party and a correspondent of the Lviv Courier (Kurier Lwowski) for ten years. Moreover, not only had he been educated in large part on Polish literature, but about a fifth of his own writings, including literary writings, were in Polish. Nonetheless, he decisively ended his association with Polish radicals in 1897, the moment he published an article entitled “The Poet of Treason” and two other articles condemning Polish attitudes.¹¹⁹ Outraged by the fact that they had placed their own national interests ahead of granting elementary legal rights for Ukrainians in the 1897 elections, he accused them of harbouring a Wallenrod complex.

In Mickiewicz’s poem of the same name, the hero, a Lithuanian under the assumed name of Konrad Wallenrod, becomes Master of the Order of Crusaders and deliberately leads the German crusade against Lithuania to destruction. After being exposed, he commits suicide. Treason, the poem suggests, is sometimes the only weapon available to the oppressed. Franko indicates this and other frequently anthologized works by Mickiewicz as a source of the immoral behav­iour of Polish radicals, whom he charges with using internationalist slogans as a cover for colonial policies. As the poet who legitimized such “patriotic treason,” Mickiewicz, argues Franko, is guilty of under­mining universal ethical principles.¹²⁰

Polish patriotic views had begun to dominate the Lviv Courier from 1894. The editors found Franko’s political views an increasing embar­rassment, while he, in turn, found his association with the periodical increasingly untenable. The political polarization along national lines was proceding rapidly in Galicia, with the case for Ukrainian indepen­dence first being made by a young Ukrainian radical, Iulian Bachinsky, in 1895 in his Ukraina irredenta. The election of 1897, therefore, brought several issues to a head. In its aftermath Franko vowed that he would from that time devote himself, if not exclusively, then at least primarily, to the Ukrainian cause.¹²¹ It was a declaration that other Ukrainian activists would make frequently in the ensuing decades as they moved out of Polish or Russian into Ukrainian reform move­ments. In the light of this traumatic episode in his life, Franko’s break with Drahomanov’s Russian liberalism and insistence on Ukraine’s becoming an agent of history can also be seen as a response to the personal disappointment and the sense of betrayal that accompanied the break with Polish allies.

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