Counternarratives in Ukrainian Literature

nascent counterculture: hryhorii kvitka-Osnovianenko

Criticism has long been divided over Kvitka. On the one hand, he has been placed squarely within the camp of empire loyalism, his ideology and poetics treated as retrograde.

Shamrai finds an explanation for the contradictory conjunction of imperial loyalty and national assertiveness in the laws of art, which, he feels, worked against the author’s own will. The critic sees Kvitka much as Marx saw Balzac - as a reactionary monarchist who, nonetheless, wrote better than he knew.

Kvitka’s conservative ideology is well documented in pronounce­ments concerning his literary ambitions and in his Letters to My Dear Countrymen (Lysty do liubeznykh zemliakiv, 1839). In the latter he attempted to convince his countrymen that all was fundamentally well with the world and that the main cause of peasant poverty was alco- holism.⁷ He emerges from these pages as a firm believer in monarchy, serfdom, and the patriarchal order, a deeply religious man who accepts social inequality and personal misfortune as God’s will and who apparently senses no contradiction between his defence of the local idiom and state patriotism.

Faith in a political and moral order preordained by God is one key to Kvitka’s philosophical position. He sees the just, hidden hand of God in everything: those who live according to the wise rules of nature (God’s creation) are morally sound; those who contradict these rules are foolish and evil. The pattern of compassion for the poor and ridicule for the unworthy can be used to group his works, which divide into sentimental tales that teach the necessity of living righteously and accepting God’s will and moral satires directed against those who transgress the laws of God and nature. His faith in a universe governed by a rational plan ordained by God also aligns him with ancient Stoicism. When the Stoics spoke of nature, they were referring to this rational plan, which provided for the welfare of humanity and the world.

The consequences that flowed from the adoption of such a dispo­sition were the denigration of the body and a critique of excessive concern with physical pleasure; the withdrawal from external distrac­tions and the retreat into oneself; the preference for the unadorned life over opulence; the recognition of the supreme ideal as home­grown and self-developed and as the result of a self-sufficient disposi­tion. Kvitka incorporated these ideas into his literary position. He rejected, for instance, slavish imitation of French literary fashion. For this he was hailed as one of the best contemporary Russian writers by Stepan Anisimovich Burachok, the editor of the conservative Beacon (Maiak), who viewed Ukrainian writers as allies in his campaign to strengthen native (Russian and “Little Russian”) influences in litera­ture.⁸ Vladimir Dal also praised Kvitka’s works for familiarizing readers with the Ukrainian vernacular.

While his views on nativizing literature endeared him to conserva­tives, Kvitka’s social satires drew praise from liberals and radicals. Belinsky admired his scathing critiques of the old gentry, ranking him alongside Fonvizin, Griboedov, and Pushkin as an exposer of its vices. His work was, in fact, sometimes censored for these exposes: the plays Gentry Elections (Dvorianskye vybory, 1829, and Dvorianskie vybory, chast dva, 1829-30) and Clairvoyant (Iasnovidiashchaia, 1830) were denied staging permission, and his novel Life and Adventures of Petr Stepanovich Son of Stolbikov (Zhizn i pokhozhdeniia Petra Stepanovicha syna Stolbikova, 1841) went through three rewritings over eight years before being allowed into print.

Kvitka was not suspected of any political disloyalty. His social creden­tials were impeccable. He came from the milieu ot the gentry that produced Ivan Kotliarevsky, Petro Hulak-Artemovsky, and Orest Somov. Unlike them, however, he avoided any jingoism or the military theme.⁹ When he did describe military life in the story “God’s Children” (Bozhi dity, 1840), he focused on a peasant’s career as a courageous, self­effacing soldier who loses a hand in combat while rescuing his com­mander and is rewarded at the end of the war. It is not fame or money that motivates the hero but a simple sense of family obligation and civic duty. Moreover, Kvitka’s public life was that of a model citizen. He was a founder and director of the Kharkiv Professional Theatre, a founder of the Charitable Society, which funded the Institute for the Education of the Poorest Gentry Girls (Kvitka became its director), and an editor and publisher of the first Ukrainian journal, Ukrainskii vestnik (Ukrainian Herald), which appeared from 1816 until it was banned by the censor in 1820. He held various administrative positions, including that of the head of Kharkiv’s criminal court, where his principled defence of wronged parties, often serfs, caused him many difficulties with the gentry - experiences that served as the sources for his fictional plots.

When he began writing in Ukrainian, he portrayed positive charac­ters, whatever their social status, who had adopted a Stoic disposition and Christian ideals.

The choice of theme and character entailed a new voice.

Inexorably the writer was led to a defence of nationality. His com­ments about his own dilettantism, particularly his well-known admission that he initially wrote in Ukrainian only to entertain neighbours, have to be taken with a grain of salt, especially when we consider how assid­uously he managed his literary affairs, his sensitivity to the critical recep­tion of his works, and the range and importance of his literary achievement. His evolution into a Ukrainian writer involved more than a change in linguistic media; it also entailed the assumption of a civic role and a public identity. Zerov, in an article from 1929 revising his earlier harsh judgment of Kvitka, urged caution in reading the “naive, simple words” of the writer’s letters to Plenev: “Behind them lay a whole set of tactics, more than one well-thought-out idea about his writing, its strengths and weaknesses.”¹⁴ Kvitka’s deliberate purpose, according to Zerov, was to create a public for Ukrainian works and a literary inter­est in Ukrainian reality. The critic now interpreted the writer as manreuvring deftly to publish Ukrainian materials by exploiting inter­est among Russian editors. With sympathetic correspondents like Maksymovych, Shevchenko, and Andrii Kraievsky, Kvitka adopted a more candid tone, making his “tactics” explicit. In one letter to Maksy- movych he lays down the common position among Ukrainian activists: “to shame and compel to fall silent those individuals who loudly put forth the strange idea that one ought not to write in the language used by 1o million people, which has its own power and beauty, untranslatable into another, its own form of humour and irony, like any language.”¹⁵

Kvitka attempts to convince Kraievsky that there is a large reading public for and great interest in Ukrainian works. That interest will continue to grow as the prejudice of Russian journals against the Ukrainian language is overcome: “Give our youth time to mature, to find support, etc., to become familiar with the craft - they will demon­strate that the Russian language is only the dialect of a few guberniias, the child - and not the oldest child - of our language, which is the senior son of the root Slavic [language]. And when our lads begin to pluck and pull out of it all our roots, taken from us, then even the most fanatical supporter of the Russian language will fall silent and confess his former error.”¹⁶

Kvitka was a principled conservative who, as Franko put it, “stimu­lated sympathy for the oppressive situation” of the common people.¹⁷ Within the fracturing imperial discourse of the early nineteenth cen­tury he played a prominent role in defining the national literary difference, insisting on the existence of a separate readership, context, and interpretative matrix. Along with other intellectuals, he undertook a defence of the Ukrainian language, literature, and identity in the thirties and early forties in response to claims made by Senkovsky, Polevoi, and others in the Northern Bee (Severnaia pchela) and Lilrary for Reading (Biblioteka dlia chteniia) that the Ukrainian language did not exist or was incapable of producing a literature.¹⁸

The emerging counterposition, as it shaped Kvitka’s ideas, can be shown by examining two of his works, the Russian-language “Holovaty: Materials for a History of Little Russia” (Golovaty, Material dlia istorii Malorossii, 1839) and the Ukrainian “Witch of Konotop” (Konotopska vidma, 1836).¹⁹ The first story, which won widespread admiration and inspired Shevchenko to write a poem in the author’s honour, describes the character and fate of Holovaty, a leader of the Zaporozhian Sich. The real Holovaty actually visited the Kvitka household on his way to and from St Petersburg, where he succeeded in winning the Zapor- ozhians’ reinstatement as a military force on the island of Taman. Kvitka’s story is an autobiographical piece that portrays the effects of these visits on the local gentry and provides a report of Holovaty’s activ­ities in St Petersburg. The gentry are at first fearful of the terrible Zaporo- zhians, but they gradually learn to understand and admire their guests, who introduce them to a manner of speech, a history, and a mentality that are irresistibly attractive. The story thus serves as the record of a personal communion with the mythical Zaporozhian identity.

Holovaty and his cossacks are fascinating personalities. They confuse not only the local gentry but the court of St Petersburg and Catherine herself by their ability to switch from an idiomatic Ukrainian to the formulas of Russian salon society. While in the capital Holovaty mounts a clever media campaign: he successfully manipulates St Petersburg public opinion in order to win the concessions the cossacks require. Speaking from a position of weakness, he uses all his wiles to further his case, exploiting the exoticism that the Zaporozhians represent, the “fashionability” that they have manufactured for themselves, and the argument of their military usefulness to the empire. Without sacrific­ing their own identity - in fact by playing up its uniqueness - the emissaries succeed in charming those around them and winning their case. They successfully “perform” a Ukrainian identity in the capital.

Holovaty’s loyalty remains ambiguous throughout. His laments on behalf of the troops, like his well-scripted professions of respect and admiration for the empress, are publicly staged productions, but it is clear that his deeper commitment is to the historical Sich. The per­formance of an autonomous identity involves breaking the conven­tions of polite society: the speech and manners of the Zaporozhians are at points shockingly rude, bordering on disrespect for imperial authority, conservative values, and hierarchies.

The young Kvitka discovers in the visitors an identity with which he is intimately connected. It has been stated that a bantering, jocular military tone and bearing was typical of the cossack class and was consciously adopted as a literary style by some of the intelligentsia, serving, in fact, as an identity marker.²⁰ Just as the writer Kvitka claimed in his letter to Pletnev to have been seduced by the local language, the narrator in the story of Holovaty describes his captiva­tion with the style and identity of these visitors.

Finally, it should be said that in writing the story, Kvitka was indirectly supporting the idea of restoring the autonomy of the cossack army. This argument is also implicit in his “On the Sloboda Regiments” (O slobodskikh polkakh, 1838) and “1812 in the Provinces,” (1812 god v provintsii, 1843). His “Tales of Harkusha” (Predaniia o Garkushe, 1842), produced at the same time, is another sympathetic account of a Zaporozhian, who, after the liquidation of the Sich, commanded a band of outlaws from 1772 to 1784. In Kvitka’s story he is a Robin Hood figure. The author suppresses the fact that the historical Harkusha became an outlaw because he refused to serve the tsar.

“The Witch of Konotop” describes the drowning, or near drowning, of witches. The plot revolves around the witch Iavdokha’s revenge on the local authorities for the public flogging she has received. She is a mysterious power that can assume different shapes and voices, upset the local order, and dominate the town. The story provides a great deal of information, lovingly described, concerning the lore and ritu­als of witches and their relations with people. Although it begins and ends on a moralizing note (the witch, in the end, dies a painful death and witchcraft is denounced), it displays a powerful attraction to occult folklore. The story is also notable, in spite of the satirical tone, for the richness and accuracy with which cossack life under the Het- manate is depicted.

Like Kvitka’s other Ukrainian tales, it communicates the vitality of a local identity. One can easily read into it a return of the repressed. The evil powers of “The Witch of Konotop,” like those of the myste­rious Zaporozhians, can be seen as representions of suppressed forces with their own cultural codes and structures of allegiance. The writer does not deny or downplay these powers; in fact, he revels in describ­ing them. Iavdokha prefigured a long series of literary witches and wizards who draw on the secret powers of Ukrainian folklore. Holovaty, in turn, became the prototype for a long string of literary Zaporo- zhians with an ambivalent attitude to settled urban society and the power to win over the gentry, such as Kyrylo Tur in Panteleimon Kulish’s Black Council: A Chronicle of 1663 (Chorna rada: Khronika 1663 roku, 1845-46) and Harkusha in Oleksa Storozhenko’s Twin Brothers: A Sketch of Little Russia in the Last Century (Bratia-bliznetsy: Ocherki Malorossii proshlogo stoletiia, 1857).

“Holovaty,” “The Witch of Konotop,” and Kvitka’s other Ukrainian stories allowed an implicit social critique to arise from within Ukrai­nian society. In a letter to his Russian editor Kvitka explains how, living in Ukraine, he not only learned the language but also gained an understanding of “their [the people’s] thoughts” and in his works “made them talk to the public in their own words.”²¹ It is the successful presentation of this new voice that constitutes Kvitka’s major achieve­ment. Hryhorii Syvokin has described him as the first Ukrainian writer to consciously address the common reader, to create a prose for the “dear countrymen” he addressed in his Letters,²² and to develop a reading public. This ambitious project was more than a literary exper­iment. As Panteleimon Kulish was later to point out, the Kharkiv gentry in Kvitka’s day lived entirely in the old cossack gentry traditions. Their language and customs did not differ significantly from those of surrounding commoners. Russian was not Kvitka’s native language, and he never studied in Russian schools.²³ He never travelled beyond the Kharkiv region, and he resisted any suggestions that he should move to St Petersburg. He belonged completely to the generation that was absorbed in the study of its “own” identity. With the creation of Kharkiv University in 1805 and the founding of new journals and newspapers, a literary life had developed that fed the desire for Ukraine’s representation in literature. Kvitka, who was a regular atten­dant and performer at literary evenings and in gentry clubs, emerged from this milieu. It stimulated his Ukrainian writings and produced his first public.²⁴ He represented a new sensibility guided by what Syvokin has called an “orientation toward the democratic reader.”²⁵ The turn to the Ukrainian reader, the switch to the people’s “voice” and their language, was motivated partly by a refusal of what was perceived to be artificial, removed from real life, and not in accord with nature. It was partly also generated by the new gentry-commoner ethos of national solidarity. Even though his stance toward the regime exhibited the typical “Ukrainian dualism” of his day, at times deferen­tial and at others assertive, Kvitka’s cultural program and literary example were to inspire others. The repercussions were far-reaching.²⁶

COLONIAL WAR OPPOSED:

taras Shevchenko’s “Caucasus”

(¹845)

Taras Shevchenko’s stature as a national poet is closely allied to his rejection of the imperial paradigm of conquest and assimilation and the substitution of a counternarrative that legitimized local, native, and national struggles. The break with imperial ideology in his poetry of 1845 was complete. The works he produced in that year reverberate strongly with anticolonial sentiments. Dziuba described Shevchenko as going much further than any of his contemporaries in denouncing the sociopolitical order. He

rose to a total negation of tyranny, to an identification with the sorrow of another small nation that was not famous, unlike the Greek or Spanish (about whose subjection much had been written at various times), but had been forgotten by God and humanity; to the kind of understanding of the equality of peoples before God and the human conscience... of their sovereignty and irreplaceability in the world order that has only in the late twentieth century become part of humanity’s code [of conduct] - and even then only a theo­retical, “professed” code that is daily ruthlessly and cynically contravened in various corners of the earth.²⁷

In the last months of 1845 Shevchenko produced a series of poetic masterpieces indicting tsarism.²⁸ It is seldom pointed out, however, that they challenge not only the officially sanctioned nationality policy but also the complicity of Russian Slavophiles and Westernizers in this policy. One of the greatest of these poems is “The Caucasus.” Published only in 1859, it remained an embarrassment to both the tsarist and the Soviet authorities for thirteen decades. Dziuba recalls that through­out the Soviet period the poem was not recited at public celebrations of the poet’s name and that it was avoided by commentators.²⁹

“The Caucasus” was a direct response to an immediate event, the death of Iakiv de Balmen in 1844, while he was attached to an expedi­tionary force. He was Shevchenko’s close friend and the illustrator of the poet’s manuscript.³⁰ However, the genesis of the poem is more prop­erly located within the crystallizing anti-imperialism among Ukrainian patriots with whom he associated at the time and who would soon form the Cyrillo-Methodian Brotherhood. The poem has to be seen in the context of the numerous odes to empire and tsar that were published in journals like the Muscovite (Moskvitianin) in the 1840s. Its content, tone, and language parody imperial forms of address: official proclama­tions of the tsar, hymns of praise to autocracy and Empire, and ratio­nalizations of Russia’s “civilizing” mission. In demystifying these formulas, the poem takes aim at the entire colonial mentality, constitut­ing what one critic has called “a satire on each and every colonialism.”³¹

As he meditates on conquest and war, the poet constantly changes his addressee: from the reader to God, to the peoples of the Caucasus, the ruling class, Christ, and, finally, to de Balmen. At three different points the narrative shifts into a mocking mimicry of the autocrat’s voice. Each time the narrator’s angry, protestant voice punctures this august tone, challenging the apotheosis of violence, vastness, and power that was common in contemporary hymns, odes, and elegies. The narrator presents instead a picture of the suffering victim. The eagle, central to poetry glorifying the Empire, becomes a bird of prey that daily tears out Prometheus’ heart and drinks his blood. The tsar is described as “the insatiable one” (nesytyi), who will never succeed in his grandiose and perverted fantasy of “ploughing the sea bed.” The mountains have been “sown with grief” from which “bloody rivers” flow. The received image of the Russian flood, or sea, is here associ­ated with suffering and killing. Its waters consist of the blood and tears of countless widows, girls, mothers, and fathers.

In this way Shevchenko targets “official” poetic statement and its col­lusion with tsarist ideology: he ridicules its support of autocracy and its guilty apologies for serfdom. The traditional formula in Russian poetry describing the tsar’s possessions as stretching “from sea to sea” was a way of flattering autocracy’s power. It occurs in Derzhavin’s “On the Capture of Warsaw” (1794) (“from the Lena to the Neva”), in Zhukovsky’s “Lon­gevity” (Mnogoletie, 1834) (“From the Caucasus to Altai, from the Amur to the Dnieper”), and in countless other poems. Shevchenko reworks this construction into one of his most memorable aphorisms:

From the Moldavian to the Finn

In all languages everyone is silent,

Because everyone is blessed!³²

The last word was itself a topoi of poetry in praise of the tsar. Zhukovsky, for example, wrote “Ode, Blessedness of Russia...” (Oda, blagodenstvie Rossii. 1797), in which he compared the Emperor Paul to God; and another poem was titled “Power, Glory and Blessedness of Russia” (Mogushchestvo, slava i blagodenstvie Rossii, 1799). Both used what became a canonized formula characteristic of the most sycophantic verse.

Throughout, Shevchenko draws on and parodies the diction of offi­cial tsarist annoncements. He employs the first person plural, the royal “We,” and borrows from the phraseology of imperial addresses. “We mercifully” (mylostyvii my) draws on the similar formula used in the tsar’s manifestoes and proclamations of favours granted, which frequently employed phrases like “We have most mercifully deigned” (vsemilos- toveishepozhalovali my). The adjective “meek” (krotkii) is used ironically. It parodies another set phrase by which the tsar referred to himself in official proclamations. Hymns to the tsar frequently contained the rep­etition of the phrase “glory to” (slava). This formula is first ridiculed by offering glory to the tsar’s hunting dogs and their keepers and then turned against the Empire: the narrator suddenly shifts to a reverent tone and pays respect to the mountain peoples’ struggle for freedom, giving them the praise he has denied the monarch.

The poet reserves a particularly biting sarcasm for the hypocritical use of Orthodoxy to justify both the expansionist, “civilizing” mission in Russian foreign policy and smirenie in internal affairs. Shevchenko later commented in his journal that this religious ideology was a “key link in Moscow’s internal politics.”³³ In “The Caucasus” he describes this cynical exploitation of religious feeling. The Russians who say “we are Christians” and “God is with us” (words from the Russian “Te Deum” sung as thanks for military sucesses) are the ones who impose their ways on others and are prepared to justify serfdom.³⁴ In fact, Shevchenko reverses these desiderata: a truly Christian policy would call for respect and peaceful coexistence in foreign affairs and funda­mental internal reform. He ridicules the sophistry of Christians who use the example of the biblical David (who, having killed his friend and taken his wife, rose to be king) in order to justify their own base conduct. Theft and exploitation are rewarded, according to the official Orthodox church with a place in heaven: “We are told: squeeze and squeeze and give [to the Church] and you’ll go straight to heaven.”

This deconstruction of official tsarist manifestoes and of attitudes propounded by Russian Slavophiles like Khomiakov was paralleled by a challenge to Russian enlighteners, who envisioned the march of reason and progress in a modern, Russified state. The refusal of enlightenment’s dialectic makes his political critique much more dis­concerting than has often been acknowledged. In a voice that mimics that of Lermontov’s imperial Demon-tempter, he describes the stake small tribes can have in the vast realm. However, Russia’s vastness and might, the topic of panegyrics to tsardom, are sarcastically deflated by associating them with Siberia and its endless prisons. He comments on the Empire’s claim to be spreading education, civilization, culture. In truth, it teaches only economic exploitation (“the price of bread and salt”). Shevchenko writes:

As for us, what aren’t we capable of!

We can count the stars and sow buckwheat, Curse the French. Sell Or lose at cards...

Not negroes. Well,

Yfes, they are Christians, but simple people?⁵

This passage mimics the imperial voice and refutes its arguments in an ironic counterpoint. The benefits of autocracy’s enlightenment are described as astronomy (an observatory had been opened in 1839 in St Petersburg), anti-French propaganda (a reference to the criticism of republican influences, particularly in the wake of the revolutions of 1789 and 1830), and serfdom. Here the enlightener stutters while searching for a way to rationalize the trade in human beings and their being gambled away in card games. He argues that although they are, in fact, Christians, serfs are “simple” and therefore unworthy of sym­pathy. The Russian landowners would never trade negroes, as do Western colonialists (“We are not Spaniards; God forbid, / That we should trade in stolen goods, / Like the Jews. We do things legally!”). More than anything else it is this apology for serfdom that discredits the claim of the governing class to enlightenment. Christianity is being invoked by it in support of a fundamentally immoral order. As the narrator shifts back into the voice of the implacable critic, he contra­dicts its claim to “love its brother according to the apostle’s law”: “Idle- tongues, hypocrites, / Cursed by God!”³⁶ These are people, he says, who offer prayers to Christ in thanks for “theft, war and blood.” The empire has “enlightened” citizens only on how to construct prisons, how to carry chains and braid the knout. It offers all this “enlighten­ment” to the native tribesmen if they agree to surrender the last refuge of freedom, their “blue mountains.”

The silence in political affairs of the non-Russian nationalities and peasant peoples was assumed in the metropolitan centres to be a dem­onstration of their lack of a political consciousness and national des- tiny.³⁷ Shevchenko parodies and ridicules this monologic imperial voice and its assimilationist narrative, juxtaposing the national counter­narrative. The entire poem can therefore be read as a subversion of imperial historiography.

In the final section, which is a meditation on de Balmen’s death in the service of a foreign army, the focus becomes the tragedy of nations and individuals who must serve military causes that they find repulsive. There is a suggestion of sympathy for soldier-poets like Bestuzhev- Marlinsky and Lermontov, who explored the issue of divided loyalty in their work. Unlike these Russian authors, Shevchenko shows no equivocation. Like them he expresses sympathy for the mountaineers, but he does this in a manner that quite explicitly and unambiguously legitimizes their political aspirations and rejects the aggressor’s views. Marlinsky, in chapter 4 of “Ammalat-Bek,” and Lermontov, in “Gifts of the Terek,” viewed the story of the Terek river as that of a vigorous mountain stream tamed by the lowland sea. Shevchenko does not look with equanimity on what he interprets as endless bloodshed. The spirit (dusha) and liberty (volia) of the people will not be crushed, and blood will continue to flow. The killing on both sides in the colonial war is not only tragic but futile, since its goal and justification is not only an immoral but also an ultimately unrealizable imperial dream. The final comments return us to the epigraph, which is taken fromJeremiah. It reminds us that the poem is a lament over the eternal struggle of justice with tyranny.

“The Caucasus” creates a powerful synthesis of the social and national struggles, a unified ideal of freedom that serves as a rallying cry for dispossessed, voiceless nations within the empire, who were viewed by leading Russian intellectuals as obstacles to the march of reason. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Ukrainian nationalist movement would look back upon Shevchenko as its prophet.

It has, nonetheless, been argued that this appraisal of him as a revolutionary and independentist is mistaken. W.E.D. Allen claimed that he was a “revolutionary in feelings rather than thoughts.”³⁸ His Ukraine, according to George Grabowicz, is a poetic myth in which the mythologemes of punishment and active and passive stances toward coming change are primary and irreducible to a conscious political content.”³⁹ The attempt to entirely cordon off the mythic- poetic from the political is, however, unconvincing. One does not have to go as far as to argue for the presence of a suppressed, unspoken tendency toward separatism in Shevchenko’s work, as some have done,⁴⁰ in order to grasp his message of self-determination. It is, in any case, in the nature of liberation myths to incorporate several meanings, to suggest possibilities rather than to define concrete, spe­cific courses of action. Shevchenko’s defence of liberation struggles could and did find itself translated into a number of pragmatic purposes. The poet’s own narrative voice itself moves in a way that demonstrates the modelling of a number of options: he meditates on various possi­ble strategies for liberation within the context of wider moral prob­lems. Nonetheless his thought always begins with a categorical rejection of imperialism and then turns to a consideration of burning political and moral issues in a lyrical self-interrogation. In connection with “The Caucasus” Dziuba has written, “His exposed heart beats among heavy wrongs, his thought jumps from despair to faith and again to despair, his words flare with a sacred anger, bitter laughter, prostrate sympathy, painful tears and condemnatory cries.”⁴¹ Ulti­mately, the poem is a conversation with God, as are the lament of Jeremiah and the psalms of David, which Shevchenko translated at the time of composing “The Caucasus.” The poem represents simulta­neously an acceptance of a higher will and a prayer for divine inter­vention into an unjust world order.

Several critics have shown how these anguished meditations did, in fact, participate in the contemporary discourse on imperialism and anti-imperialism in very concrete ways, responding to overt political statements and to the political mythology submerged in official pro­nouncements and poetic cliches.⁴² Shevchenko contradicted, for exam­ple, a fundamental topos of Russian writing on the Caucasus - the assertion of final victory. Pushkin wrote of the tribesmen, “your blood did not save you,” and he predicted, in words that would be echoed in the ending to his “Poltava,” that future generations would recount their struggle “without pain,” not as living history but as folklore:

Just like Batu’s tribe did,

The Caucasus will betray its ancestors, Will forget the sound of avid strife, Leave behind the arrows of war, To the ravines where you nested, And your execution will be proclaimed [Only] in dark legends of fame.⁴³

Such wish-fulfilling conclusions became a staple. Zhukovsky men­tioned the “splendid captivity” of the Caucasian mountains as an achieved fact in “An Old Song on a New Note.” Lermontov’s “Dispute” also announced closure when Mount Kazbek, unable to count the enormous number of Russian troops, pulled its hat over its eyes and turned silent “forever.” Shevchenko could not deny the crushing mil­itary superiority of the Empire, but his conscience protested against the triumph of evil, and he raised his voice in denunciation of this triumphalist rhetoric.

The issue of service in the imperial military was enormously signif­icant for stateless nations. It was a theme that Giacomo Leopardi made his own during Italy’s Risorgimento. For Ukraine, which by Shevchenko’s time had a long history of military collaboration in imperial expan­sion, it was a deeply painful and divisive problem. Dziuba has indicated that Shevchenko’s attitude to the exploitation of Ukrainians in forced military service was negative but that he was sympathetic toward attempts to reconstitute military units disbanded after the loss of autonomy. Such units represented a partial recovery of political rights, a historical reminder and stimulus to national pride. As has been seen, the Black Sea Cossacks were reconstituted by Catherine as a fighting force in 1790, almost two decades after she had destroyed the Zaporo- zhian Sich. They fought in the Kuban and Caucasus against the Cir­cassians and other mountain peoples. Ukrainian fighters were particularly useful as scouts: they were effective and inexpensive aux­iliaries that were exploited for special assignments. Shevchenko’s Cossackophilia allowed him to wax enthusiastic about the continua­tion, in however attenuated and illusory a form, of Zaporozhian tra­ditions. But the knowledge that these troops were being exploited in an imperial war of conquest meant that the protest against such service was motivated by much more than a personal tragedy: the protest was a lament over the death of a close friend, de Balmen, but it was also a response to a national shame.

Shevchenko’s conviction that a nation was made up of all classes, including the peasantry, that, however deformed its social structure, each nation had a political integrity, and that a stateless people had not only a past but a present and a future that its poets were called upon to articulate - all refuted essential political assumptions in impe­rialist thought. The Cyrillo-Methodians’ program was a detailed expo­sition of these positions. It dwelt on the right to self-determination of small nations. Western scholars have played down its political charac­ter and significance, concentrating instead on characterizing its rep­resentatives as constituting an “intellectual national movement.”⁴⁴ This assessment has, however, been challenged by commentators who have examined the program, the number of its members, and the breadth of its support.⁴⁵ The production of a literature that articulated a new ideology was in fact one of the most influential aspects of the group’s activity. In any case, the appearance of Shevchenko’s poetry became the single most effective tool for conveying the brotherhood’s ideas.

“The Caucasus” became a symbol of resistance to the imperial juggernaut and of solidarity among its victim peoples. It gave the colonized a voice and portrayed the national-imperial conflict from their point of view. The crucial importance of this factor can be sensed in the reviews of Shevchenko’s early work in Russian journals. They question both his decision to write in Ukrainian and his construction of Ukraine as non-Russia. Belinsky’s comments are the best known. He was adamant that “it was silly to even think that something could today develop out of their, by the way beautiful, folk poetry.” Writing in Ukrainian he considered a regressive step, comparing it to moving “from a civilized, educated and humane condition (the attainment of which Little Russia owes to its annexation to Russia) once more to its former barbarism and ignorance.”⁴⁶ This was the general sentiment. The Literary Gazette (Literaturnaia gazeta), whose de facto editor was Fedor Alekseevich Koni, expressed enthusiasm for Shevchenko’s poetry but nevertheless offered him the following advice: “It seems to us that people with talent writing Romantic poems and stories in Little Russian would do better if they would write them in Russian.”⁴⁷ The Russian Herald (Russkii vestnik) called writing in the “khokhol dialect” simply “literary foolishness (shalost),” and decried the fact that some talented writers had participated in this practice, unfortunately draw­ing with them a host of talentless imitators.⁴⁸

The construction of the native realm as a world and consciousness distinct from Russia was most angrily dismissed, not in connection with the censored and unavailable “Caucasus,” but with reference to some of Shevchenko’s other poems. Bulgarin’s Northern Bee (Severnaia pchela), which in 1840 had printed an early sympathetic review of the Kobza r took an increasingly uncompromising line, publishing four negative commentaries on Shevchenko’s “Trizna” (Funeral Feast) in 1844.⁴⁹ The denial of alterity was made in a jocular and dismissive tone by Stepan Anisimovich Burachok, editor of Beacon (Maiak), in the same year. In discussing Shevchenko’s “Thought” (“It is hard to live on Earth”), which was written in Gatchina, outside St Petersburg, on 24 November 1838, he described the lyrical persona’s feelings in these words: “the Cossack leaves sadly for a foreign land and grieves that he must die there! And where is this land so foreign to the Cossack: in Turkey? Algeria? Germany? So who asked him to go there! If he considers him­self on foreign land when in Tver or Petersburg gubernia then one can really only smile at such a poetic anachronism.”⁵⁰

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF IDENTITY:

taras Shevchenko’s “great vault” ( ^{1 8}45⁾

Shevchenko’s “Great Vault,” like his “Caucasus,” is part of the cycle of poems he wrote for the “Three Years” (Try lita) collection of 1845. It is a “mystery” divided into three sections and in publications is always followed by the short poem “There Stands in the Village of Subotiv” (Stoit u seli Subotovi), which some critics have claimed is an epilogue that became detached from the main text due to an oversight by an early copyist and editor.⁵¹ The “epilogue” in fact summarizes and synthesizes the preceding three sections and decodes the “mystery’s” symbolic meaning. It tells us that the vault is Ukraine’s tomb, that both the real and, by implication, the metaphorical church and vault in Subotiv built by Bohdan Khmelnytsky will be destroyed and that from under the rubble will arise a free people. The poem exemplifies the creation by the writer of what Oksana Zabuzhko has described as a myth that “split apart” the “transnational ‘imaginary community’ which the Russian theocracy had consistently forged over almost two hundred years.”⁵²

The first section describes the conversation of three souls who have convened to witness the excavation of the site by tsarist authorities. They will be allowed into heaven, so God has informed Peter, only when Russia has finally taken everything from Ukraine and has uncov­ered the vault. The first soul used to be a beautiful young girl. Her sin was crossing the path of the hetman and starshyna with water from the well as he was on his way to Pereiaslav to sign the treaty with Moscow. The cursed water poisoned her father, mother, brother, her­self, and the dogs. Although, as the epilogue informs us, Khmelnytsky meant well, praying in this same church that “the Muscovite might share good and bad / with the cossack,” Russia plundered everything it “set eyes upon,” including the treasures of antiquity in burial mounds and tombs. The second soul is being punished for giving water to Peter the Great’s horse as he made his way to Moscow from Poltava. As a young girl this soul survived the sack of Baturyn, in which her mother and sister were slaughtered. The tsar, who was quartered in the only house still standing in the town, saw her carrying water and ordered her to give it to his horse. She collapsed and died upon returning to her home and was buried by an old woman who had taken her into her roofless house. This old woman, the final survivor of the Baturyn massacre, also died the following day, and with no one left to bury the dead, her body rotted. Unsure of why she is being punished, the innocent young girl’s spirit speculates: “Probably because it was everyone / That I served and aimed to please... Because it was the Muscovite tsar’s / Horse I gave to drink!” The third female soul was an infant in her mother’s arms when Catherine the Great made her way down the Dnieper in a golden galley. This is a reference to the famous voyage of 1787 staged by Potemkin as a spectacle for the benefit of the court, which captivated all Europe. It was a dramatization of Voltaire’s thesis that Eastern Europe was a backward land of bears and barbarians, and it aimed to justify Catherine’s enlightened despotism. Adorned with oriental effects throughout, the voyage staged savagery by having squadrons of cossacks and Tatar nomads appear before the travellers. At the same time the benefits of the civilization Catherine had brought were also on display in the choreographing of happy villagers singing rustic airs in a trompe l’reil spectacle that one observer described as “towns without streets, streets without houses, and houses without roofs, doors, or windows.”⁵³ In Shevchenko’s poem the infant girl, catching sight of the empress, princes, and viceroys, smiles, thus causing her own and her mother’s death. “Could I know,” she asks, “that the empress / Was a fierce enemy of Ukraine, / A hungry she-wolf!” The imagery challenges the Enlightenment’s construction of Ukraine as a barbaric and undisci­plined land lately softened and civilized by imperial rule.

This section recapitulates important historical moments in the grad­ual imperial subjugation of Ukraine: the treaty of Pereiaslav, which brought the country under the tsar’s protection, the defeat of Mazepa at Poltava, and the final liquidation of autonomy and the population’s enserfment under Catherine. These three iconic images in imperial historiography are denounced in Shevchenko’s anti-imperialist narra­tive. The first soul is punished for Khmelnytsky’s disastrous diplomacy; the next two witness and fail to understand the progressive enslave­ment of their country under Peter and Catherine. The poet’s coun­terhistoriography has been a continuing embarrassment for Russian and Soviet accounts of the Russian-Ukrainian relationship. Among prominent Russian intellectuals Herzen was almost alone in support­ing Shevchenko’s interpretation of tsarist intentions and colonial real­ities when he wrote that autocracy “set about oppressing Little Russia in contravention of all the treaties.”⁵⁴

Water is associated with religious rites, purification, and physical restoration. Ukrainians, Shevchenko implies, have an obligation to refuse both sanction and sustenance to the Russian occupation of their country. Water also carries other literary associations: it is the Terek that is tamed and confined on its way to the sea in both Marlinsky and Lermontov, and it is the Russian sea that swallows the Slavic streams in Pushkin. Subconsciously the message is the need to resist the plundering of the country’s once flowering culture and rich natural resources. The young girl who has crossed Khmelnytsky’s path testifies that the well from which she drew water is now muddied and dry. As a child she was a product of Khmelnytsky’s Ukraine, a childhood playmate of the hetman’s son, and never lacked for anything. This closeness to the hetman suggests a ruling elite and a government whose interests and culture were identical with the people’s. A similar comparison of past dignity and present misery is implied in the picture of Baturyn’s charred ruins and also in the third scene, where the mother with child, who is probably a serf working the fields along the bank of the Dnieper, can contemplate the opulence of Catherine only from an enormous social and political distance.

The second section describes the meeting of three crows on the cross of the Subotiv church. They are in fact evil spirits responsible for the sufferings of Ukraine, Poland, and Russia. In a reversal of the normal political hierarchy, Ukraine’s crow is the senior, since she has spread the most misery. She chides the second “Polish” crow for only spilling one river of blood and driving her gentry to Siberia following the 1830­31 uprising, and the third “Russian” crow for proudly claiming respon­sibility for the death of six thousand workers in the building of the St Petersburg-Moscow railway, then under construction. The evil Ukrai­nian crow, in an ironic use of counterdiscursive strategy, complains that their reading of Karamzin’s History of the Russian State (1816-29) has entirely obscured and repressed the real history of her own “achieve­ments.” Among these she lists the burning of Poland and her kings, the renting out as mercenaries of the free cossacks, the burning of Baturyn, the massacre of the cossack starshyna at Romni, and the murder of Polubotok in prison. As for the rank and file cossacks, they died in the tsar’s wars in Finland, the building of fortifications on the Orel River, and the construction of the Ladoga Canal. This reign of terror focuses on the destruction of Ukraine’s national polity and on the cossack class and their exploitation as slave labour in imperial construction projects, where they died in thousands. Herzen said the same thing when he commented that Catherine “paid for her Egyptian nights with cos- sacks.”⁵⁵ The first crow continues by congratulating the Russian crow on the wretched social system she has inspired. She is awed by the rapacity of Muscovites in Ukraine, who are now excavating ancient grave-sites, since there is nothing left to steal in homes. The country’s ruin, however, is not complete. The first crow complains of the people’s regenerative powers. In fact, she has called the others together because two twins are about to be born: one who is destined to fight the hang­man and one who will serve him. She suggests that “while the people are still blind,” the first son must be buried to prevent their “good work” from being overturned. There is a strong suggestion in this section of hybridity as a curse on the national character, particularly in the descrip­tion of half the nation (one twin) as ready to serve the oppressor for money and promotions but also in the large influx of Russian gentry and the fading memory of national traditions (symbolized by the ruined vaults around the country and the people’s current “blindness”).

The weakness of native resistance to imperial expansion is empha­sized by the gendering of society in the poem’s first section. The fact that it is the women who speak for Ukraine implies a very different point of view from that of officers and soldiers in the imperial army (whose perspective is given, for example, in Marlinsky and Lermon­tov). The male world of politics and war was distant from the experi­ence of these women until the moment when its consequences were forced upon them. This world of womanhood is the fabric of native society from which the male defender is absent. The failure of its male warriors to mount an adequate defence has left the society exposed and vulnerable. The three spirits were young girls unaware of the significant political actions taking place around them.

The same defencelessness is suggested in the third and final section by having contemporary Ukraine represented as three lyre players: one blind, one crooked, and one hunchbacked. Uninformed, they can only speculate about political events and tsarist intentions, giving credence to the rumour that the tsar wants “to capture the entire world.” One critic has described them as “spiritual cripples” with “degenerate intellects”: “The poet illustrates this in the absurd discus­sion of the beacons (maiaky). In Ukrainian history these beacons were important safeguards in times of danger. In contemporary Ukraine its spiritual leaders ought to play the same role... But they babble nonsense, lie unconvincingly, and exhibit a mystical faith in the power of Muscovites, the tsarist empire and the despotism of landlords.”⁵⁶ The ancient songs of Khmelnytsky’s glory, which they have come to sing, will not be required. After three days of digging, the vault is broken into, revealing a ladle, a rotting manger, and skeletons in chains that “appear to smile at seeing the sun.” Infuriated at finding no treasure, the Russian administrators flog the three singers.

The epigraph taken from David’s forty-third psalm (which the poet translated at this time) helps the reader to understand the message: the people have been abandoned by God as a laughing-stock and a “parable” for their neighbours, a shameful example to other nations. The thought is recapitulated in the epilogue: “foreign people [storonnii liudy] ridicule Ukraine!” Conscious political evil has created the coun­try’s humiliating contemporary condition. Yet the poem does not end on this note. The last lines contain a surprise:

But it was the small vault in Subotiv

That Moscow unearthed!

The large one, however,

They still have not found.⁵⁷

The economic bonanza anticipated by tsarist colonial rule will not materialize. The country’s natural riches, like the well already described, will dry up as a result of rapacious exploitation. But there is a suggestion of a real treasure that will not be unearthed by the tsarist administrators, or, when uncovered, will not provide benefit or comfort to the regime: it is the national identity that tsarism has done everything to deny and eliminate. This identity returns to haunt the administration in the smiling faces of long-buried skeletons and to frustrate its fantasies of enrichment. It is a further reminder that pop­ular resistance, which still infuriates the first crow, has continued. The epilogue, expanding on this idea, reads like a prophesy of resurrection and the final note is an optimistic one: we learn that Ukraine will rise from under the ruins and “blow away the darkness of oppression,” and its “children of captivity” will one day “say a prayer in freedom!”

DENATIONALIZATION AS TRAGEDY: Anatolii svydnytsky's Liuboratskys (18 61-6 2)

Anatolii Svydnytsky’s Liuboratskys: A Family Chronicle (Liuboratski: Simeina khronika, 1861-62) is the earliest and one of the best social novels in Ukrainian. Ivan Franko, the book’s first reviewer, called it the first major attempt at a Ukrainian novel “against the background of contemporary social relations.” He considered it “one of the very best” and compared it favourably with Ivan Nechui-Levytsky’s Prychepa (1869), which also deals with the problem of Polonization.⁵⁸ The novel focuses on the crisis of self-image among the petty gentry and families of the Orthodox clergy, the leading Ukrainian class on the Right Bank in the 1830s and 1840s. Svydnytsky’s particular concern is with the education system that produces Russified boys and Polonized girls. By examining the dynamics in one family, that of Father Hervasii Liubo- ratsky, he suggests a tragic process of coercive denationalization and the collapse of national identity among the clergy. At the same time his critique of the Russian school and seminary and of the Polish pen­sion for girls mocks their claims to be serving a mission of enlightenment.

The novel was written in the early sixties for the short-lived but impor­tant Ukrainian journal Osnova (Foundation). Because Osnova ceased to appear, and shortly afterwards the Valuev ukaz of 1863 banned the publishing of Ukrainian belles lettres, the novel remained unpublished for many years.⁵⁹ It was finally printed in truncated form in the Western Ukrainianjournal Star (Zoria) in 1886. Svydnytsky also wrote a series of stories on Ukrainian themes for the Russian-language Kyivite (Kievlianin) in 1869-71. They contain many Ukrainian expressions and entire dialogues exclusively in Ukrainian, in this manner partially sub­verting the censorship. Svydnytsky is also famous for a long poem crit­ical of Russian colonialism, “For Over Two Hundred Years Already...” (Vzhe bilshe lit dvisti.), which circulated illegally among Ukrainian patriots and was never published in its full form under either the tsarist or Soviet regimes.⁶⁰

Liuboratskys was written when the writer was deeply involved in the struggle to create Ukrainian Sunday schools. Two were established in Kyiv in 1859. Ivan Stepanovich Beliustin had written a searing expose of the village clergy and its education in 1858.⁶¹ The Orthodox sem­inary was also to be the focus of Nikolai Gerasimovich Pomialovsky’s Seminary Sketches (Ocherki bursy, 1862-63) and figured prominently in Dmitrii Ivanovich Pisarev’s criticism from these years. Osnova also contributed to the debate on education in several articles and stories at this time.⁶²

For Ukrainian writers, however, the issues of obscurantism, outdated pedagogy, and sadistic teachers was bound up with the question of their own national revival. As part of a Polish propaganda effort in the years leading up to the Polish uprising of 1863, several dozen Polish schools had been opened in Right Bank Ukraine. Their textbooks described Poland as including most of Ukraine. This campaign was countered throughout 1861-62 with articles in Osnova by Mykola Kostomarov and Volodymyr Antonovych.⁶³ Ukrainians argued for their own schools as a method of resisting Polonization.⁶⁴ Svydnytsky’s novel was written, therefore, at a time when national education was a burn­ing issue. The critique in Liuboratskys was, however, directed at much more than the schools. The book reached beyond this question to condemn systematic practices of Russification and Polonization and depicted their disastrous social consequences.

Father Hervasii Liuboratsky and his wife represent the old genera­tion of priests’ families who have remained closely tied to the local community and have retained a sense of their Ukrainian national identity. They sympathize with the national-social liberation struggle. Their manner of life does not differ substantially from that of many peasants: the priest’s family does physical work and shares much of the community’s worldview. Although it enjoys a higher social status, it does not own the land it works or the home it occupies. They must be passed on to the priest who will succeed Father Hervasii. Further­more, the family is at the mercy of the rich Polish landowners who own most of the land and control the rights to exploit it. The priest’s family therefore occupies an ambiguous and vulnerable class position.

Father Hervasii’s Ukrainian self-image is founded upon old patriar­chal traditions. Lacking an education and worldly wisdom, he has no defence against the seductive overtures of the local Polish landowner, who showers him with gifts (a basket of nuts, a bottle of wine, sacks of flour, a field for exploitation “during his lifetime,” a ticket for three cords of firewood from the forest) and convinces him to send his daughter, Masia, to a Polish pension. The tactic is part of a conscious attempt to Polonize the families of the Ukrainian intelligentsia through offering small material concessions and the promise of the accomplish­ments of civilization and social advancement. Following the disastrous revolt of 1830-31 much of the Polish gentry began to realize the need for broader support in the local population in the event of any future struggle to reestablish a Polish state. Although in the early decades of the century the vast majority of educational institutions were Polish and the tsarist regime acquiesced in the Polonizing policies of the land­lords, after 1831 Russian gymnasia and seminaries began opening for boys. Girls, however, were not considered for them; Polish schools still served as their only educational option. This was a loophole that Polish society exploited.

Fruzyna Pecherzhynska provides Masia with a knowledge of the Polish language and instruction in social manners, but her real aim is to instill contempt for the Ukrainian language, the Orthodox faith, and the peasantry. Masia’s external metamorphosis, caused by drink­ing vinegar to cultivate a pale, thin, “aristocratic” appearance, is par­allelled by an internal transformation: she becomes cruel, avaricious, and arrogant. However, the reasons for Polonization’s success lie deeply embedded in a whole system of economic, social, and cultural relations. Not least among the reasons why Hervasii succumbs to the landowner’s agitation is his own desire that his children obtain the education and the veneer of civilization that will distinguish them from the “muzhyks.” It is this psychological weakness, the product of ideo­logical and material insecurities, that the landowners exploit.

The clues to this psychological and ideological problem are deftly scattered throughout the book. The family retains a sense of class dis­tinction. Hervasii forbids his children to attend village parties because he does not want them to find partners in life there. Humiliated by the landlord’s mockery of their upbringing, he is determined that his daughters not be considered peasant women. These feelings of social and national inferiority are communicated to Masia and manipulated by the teacher, Pecherzhynska, whom the cynical landowner has rec­ommended as an educator. Ironically, she is, in fact, the daughter of a serf. Forcibly taken by a landlord for his concubine when a young girl, in her thirties she recognized her insecure station and asked that a marriage be arranged with the handsome Iavtukh Pecherytsia, a young serf the master kept as a lackey (kazachok). On threat of military con­scription - another noble privilege frequently used to punish unruly serfs - Iavtukh had married her but had soon escaped. The depraved Fruzynia then changed her surname to the Polish-sounding Pecherzhynska and was set up in business by the Polish landlords as an educator of Orthodox priests’ daughters. The pension’s instruction in Polish language and embroidery are supplemented by a relentless mockery of Orthodoxy, whose priests are referred to as “goat beards” (kθzia broda) and their church as a “temple of boors” (khamska bozhnytsia). In this atmosphere Masia rapidly becomes anti-Orthodox, anti-peasant and anti-Ukrainian. She assimilates the szlachta code of behaviour, refuses all contact with other village girls, and speaks Polish exclusively. External coercion, however, is only part of the explanation. The fam­ily’s unsophisticated patriarchal views, we are led to understand, have not provided the children with the ideology to resist. The following portrait of Masia occurs early in the book. The lines ommitted from the edition of 1886 are set in brackets:

Having grown up among simple girls, maybe not in luxury but also not in need, Masia saw grief enough and nurtured a good heart; her own misfortune and that of others were her teachers. [A higher, more intelligent person will not take anything bad from a lower, but will even draw the latter along.] All Masia learned from the girls was a lot of songs; and whom can this treasure hurt! [She did not even learn hostility toward the landlords from them. Occasionally she cursed the landlords; but one forgets even one’s own trou­bles, never mind the grief of others.] Innocent of any trickery and deviousness, she was simple and sincere; hid nothing in herself, because like a flower in a green meadow she had nothing to hide. [Being a lady attracted the poor thing; she desperately wanted to be lady-like, but at the same time regretted the simplicity and innocence she was preparing to leave behind; she did not know herself what she was seeking and what she was abandoning. And she cried sincerely, without understanding why the tears fell.]⁶⁵

Syvachenko points out that the effect of the cuts is to simplify Masia’s psychology and remove the subtleties of Svydnytsky’s portrait. Masia’s feelings are contradictory: she is torn between class loyalties, which in the context are national loyalties.⁶⁶ The effect of her education is to turn her against both her parents and her nationality, which she begins to make fun of during visits to the local Polish gentry. The latter, of course, delight in this, but in private continue to look down on her. In order to escape her family, whom she has learned to detest, Masia marries the aging Polish landowner Kulynsky. After his death, however, she is left without the means of subsistence. Considering herself a member of the szlachta and, therefore, too proud to accept any employment, she is reduced to destitution and commits suicide.

The education of Hervasii’s son, Antosio, in the bursa and seminary draws on autobiographical materials. It paints a damning picture of the education and living conditions of the pupils, but unlike Pomia- lovsky’s account, which was written shortly after Svydnytsky’s, it includes a national dimension. The author, for example, describes the nota, a log that was hung around the neck of any pupil who used a muzhyk (Ukrainian) word and that could be removed only when another “transgressor” was caught. This punishment was administered by the pupils themselves. As other accounts make clear, it was a common method of eradicating the use of Ukrainian.⁶⁷ Like Masia’s pension, the bursa aimed to instill masochistic tendencies.

Violence is widespread in the schools. Svydnytsky’s point is that it is learned, internalized. and passed on, becoming endemic to the entire society. A poignant illustration occurs during one of Antosio’s early vacations in the village. Already transformed from the happy innocent he used to be, he verbally abuses and hits his sister, then knits together switches and beats the threshold with them. While doing this he mimics two Russian voices: that of the punisher (“Are you going to study? Are you? Take that; study!”) and a second, tearful one (“I will, teacher, Sir! I swear I will!”). The first voice resumes (“I know you will! Beat him! Harder, harder-harder, harder-harder-harder!”), and the second voice of the victim again pleads for mercy. When the beating has been completed, the punisher announces “Enough!... Next!” Chased from the threshold by his sister Orysia, Antosio wanders about the yard, or melon-patch, continuing the ventriloquism. The episode depicts the manner in which the young boy’s psyche divides itself and violent behaviour is internalized. (Pisarev describes similar destructive acting-out by pupils in his discussion of Pomialovsky’s book.⁶⁸) Later, Antosio uses a similar authoritarian, accusatory tone with his mother and his younger sisters, blaming them for the younger sister Orysia’s forced marriage.

Svydnytsky’s target is the wider society. He generalizes the issue of forced marriages of priests’ daughters to seminary graduates (required in order to preserve the family home, the only source of livelihood) by showing the wretched consequences of several such matches. At the same time he produces a portrait gallery of seminarians who make it clear that the worst elements (Robushynsky the informer, Kovynsky the thief and ignoramus, Sobalsky the social incompetent) are rewarded with the best parishes. Antosio, who has made enemies by revealing informers within the seminary and by challenging authority, is refused entry into the priesthood. Toward the end of the novel, he begins to grasp the social and national injustices of the system. His motivation to struggle for reform is sincere. In a moment of mature reflection he imagines a better life: he sees himself defending the rights of the community against the landlord, the laws against the tsar, and envisages his future wife as an equal, not a slave. However, nothing of this comes to pass. His own forced marriage to the frightful sister of the seminary deacon is a punishment he must accept, since it is the only way he can obtain a parish and rescue his family from the poverty into which it has fallen after the death of his father. He is completely in the power of the cruel and vindictive archpriest, in a system as soul­destroying as serfdom. A broken man, Antosio dies of consumption.

The intellectual and spiritual formation of the young priests pro­duced by the new Russian seminaries is compared unfavourably with that of the older generation. Father Hervasii’s generation, for all its faults, was an organic part of the village community in a way that the younger generation is not. The seminaries created under Nicholas I in Right Bank Ukraine aimed to establish a clergy who would receive civil rights and material benefits from the government but who in return would become the regime’s “agents in the villages.”⁶⁹ Affiliation with the Russian authorities was therefore accompanied by alienation from the populace and a corresponding growth of careerism, self­interest, and cynicism among the clergy. The simple peasant girl, Hanna, accurately encapsulates the effect the new schooling produces: “cursed education! They will make such a devil out of this little angel that you are left powerless. A ruined human being! May whoever devised such an inhuman education never be forgiven!”⁷⁰

Ultimately the cause of tragedy is forcible denationalization. The community does what it can to support the Liuboratskys following the death of Father Hervasii. First an elderly retired priest provides tem­porary help. Then another priest from a neighbouring village does double duty, serving both parishes for a while. In the meantime all attempts to find a suitor for Masia from among seminary graduates have failed. Significantly, the priest appointed by the Russian church hierarchy is a Russian. Orysia, the second sister, must marry him if the family is to avoid eviction. The new priest introduces a brutal, colo­nialist manner. Protected by the administrative authority (he is the archpriest’s nephew), he insults all things Ukrainian, beats Orysia violently, and in the end kills her. His conflict with the community is equally violent. At first afraid of his uncle the archpriest, the villagers observe the family abuse from a distance, but as soon as it is turned against the wider community, they take matters into their own hands, delivering their own beating to the priest and successfully petitioning for his removal. The figure of the escaped Iavtukh and this example of group protest by the community show active resistance to oppres­sion. There is a carefully understated glimmer of hope here, as in the fact of Antosio’s belated enlightenment. The violence, however, is systemic, and the choices available to its victims are few. The fate of the three daughters is emblematic of these choices: assimilation to Polish landlord society (Masia), victimization at the hands of Russian colonialism (Orysia), or escape into a convent (Teklia). Like the three female souls in Shevchenko’s “Great Vault,” they feminize Ukraine and illustrate its vulnerability.⁷¹

As for the Podillia clergy, the depiction of the conflict between generations leans in the direction of showing that neither generation can provide the spiritual and moral leadership required by the nation. The fathers retain a sense of Ukrainian tradition through the inertia of their conservative beliefs, but they are doomed to oblivion. The illiterate panimatka’s ideology is a fusion of two elements: a sense of belonging to a distinguished clerical family and a belief in eschatolog­ical peasant theories. The days of the cossack administration have passed, however, and few notables remain among the clergy. There is little in the old ideology to attract the younger generation. The sons, as the novel shows, have turned their back on the people, whom they treat with arrogance and contempt.

There is a firm structure to Liuboratskys. The tragic dissolution of the family represents a nation torn between Russia and Poland, its intellectuals compromised by an anti-Ukrainian education, its youth encouraged to become “turncoats.” With great psychological insight and artistic tact Svydnytsky provides a memorable and convincing depiction of the decay of a key Ukrainian social strata, the Orthodox clergy. As a piece of realist fiction, Liuboratskys finds explanations for human conduct in social causes, particularly in educational back­grounds, and in political factors, the most salient of which is the assimilation of Ukraine’s leading national strata by rival national groups. The author’s ability to combine this social canvas with vivid and dynamic psychological portrayals makes the novel one of the most successful in nineteenth-century Ukrainian literature.

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