Conclusion: Caricatures and Continuing Responses

There is no doubt that Repin's Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Satirical Letter to the Turkish Sultan was his masterpiece. In more than one way, it de­fined that artist for Ukraine, for Russia, and for the outside world.

So Repin saw the matter in terms of defiance of the foreigner, who had invaded his native land and carried off so many of its people into foreign slavery, that is, as a defence of native liberty and national independence; but he also lived to see official Russia interpret it simply in terms of interna­tional relations, which had nothing to do with personal or national liberty and did not threaten the autocracy in tsarist times or the dictatorship of the proletariat later on. Meanwhile, taking the opposite view, Ukrainians such as Chykalenko saw its national significance principally for Ukraine, and by about 1900 clearly viewed Repin as a Ukrainian national painter, though one with some interests in “Russian” or Imperial Russian culture as a whole.⁴⁹ Indeed, during the Revolution, in a satirical pamphlet titled Pro^,stari^, chasy na Ukraini (About the Olden Days in Ukraine), the graphic artist P. Kotsky produced a caricature of Repin's painting with a group of Ukrainian autonomists in Cossack garb circled around the table. It sport­ed none other than a bearded Professor Hrushevsky playing the part of Taras Bulba, and the Orthodox leader Oleksander Lototsky as secretary, or perhaps as the other bespectacled Cossack pointing off in the distance at Kerensky and defying the authority of the Russian Provisional Government in Petrograd (Figure 14).⁵⁰

A few years later, after the Bolsheviks had established their new regime, they returned to that earlier view of the Zaporozhians as the defenders of the homeland from a foreign power, but with a very Soviet twist.

In the 1930s, some Ukrainian satirists offered a much more confused view in a caricature of the Ukrainian political class in interwar Poland, which had annexed the former Austrian Galicia after defeating the Western Ukrainian People's Republic, established after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918. The Galician Ukrainians could not accept their defeat, and they continued to struggle both politically and militarily against the new Polish regime. In 1934, their leadership was united in appealing to the League of Nations in Geneva to protest their situation. At that point, the political satirists of the popular Galician-Ukrainian magazine Komar (The Mosquito) published a caricature of these leaders decked out as Repin's Zaporozhians writing to the League. They included every major Ukrainian political figure in Poland, from the quasi-fascist publicist Dmytro Dontsov on the far right to the democratic socialist Radical Party activist Matvii Stakhiv on the left.

However, to anyone unacquainted with Ukrainian political life in interwar Poland, this caricature loses much of its intended meaning. While the scribe looks a lot like Vladimir Kaye-Kysilewskyj, the legendary 1930s anglophile Ukrainian-Canadian lobbyist who ran the Ukrainian information bureau in London, the two pseudo-Cossacks standing directly behind the scribe look like the British comics Laurel and Hardy, who in the 1930s seem to have been famous across all of Europe. The caricature itself is very poorly done and strikes the modern reader as plainly insulting, with strongly racist overtones.

Indeed, a modern reader can hardly believe that it actually was published by Ukrainians themselves, as another of the pseudo-Cossacks (perhaps a Nazi sympathizer) sports a small, Hitler-style moustache and resembles the Fuhrer. To the viewer today, the rugged defiance and spirit of protest that so animated Repin's original painting are completely missing, and sympathy here gives way to derision. Moreover, even to the Ukrainian public of the 1930s, the parallels with Repin's original were shaky: Repin painted a pro­test “against” the presumptuous sultan, while the Galician Ukrainians were protesting “to” the League of Nations for assistance.⁵²

Westerners, however, from Elizabeth Hapgood and Apollinaire to more recent writers sympathetic to Communism or to Russia, evaluated the orig­inal canvas somewhat differently, and long felt the dignity and spirit of protest in Repin's stunning painting of 1891; many of the latter to some extent even today share Stalin's crass but positive view of it, largely ignor­ing the Ukrainian national aspect. Edward Said was a 1970s New York City Marxist, who sparked a new debate in Western scholarship, so at least one attempt to view the painting in that context was inevitable. But Said knew nothing of the Russian language and almost nothing about Russian history and did not dare to venture an opinion on “Orientalism” in the Russian Em­pire, let alone on Repin. The American enthusiast of “Orientalist” painting Kristian Davies was braver, but he too knew little of Russia and nothing of Ukraine, and completely misinterpreted the matter. Those brash Ukrainian soldiers who, during the Russian-Ukrainian War that began in 2014, posed as Zaporozhians, and wrote their satirical letter to Putin, thought that they knew much better. All this, we may modestly conclude, says much about Repin's great painting, which continues to spark interest and debate. And that is as it should be with all great art.