Critical Assessments of Shevchenko and “The Caucasus”
Opinion on the Ukrainian poet's nationalism versus his internationalism has always been divided, even among the people who knew him best. The Ukrainian novelist Panteleimon Kulish at one time thought him an excellent citizen, the poet of his people, and at another “a drunken muse,” representing the worst of that people.
The moderate St Petersburg Ukrainian historian Mykola Kostomarov considered him in no way radically anti-Russian - not “a Ukrainian separatist.” In the substantially Polish Austrian Empire, another moderate, the Galician-Ukrainian writer Omelian Partytsky (1840-1895), championing “Kavkaz,” wrote that Shevchenko directed all of his anger at Russia, ignoring his fierce criticism of the Poles, especially in Haidamaky (The Haidamak Rebels). Both he and Kostomarov seemingly strove to make the fiery poet acceptable to their own rulers, admitting his criticism only of their foreign rivals.In the next generation, the Ukrainian socialist, federalist, and political thinker Mykhailo Drahomanov, who long lived abroad, was far more radical. He clearly saw this peculiar split between those two critics and concluded that Shevchenko had excoriated both Russian and Polish oppressors; he was a radical in his own way, but not necessarily “progressive.” Drahomanov saw Shevchenko's rage as more like that of some biblical prophet than that of a man with a clear political program. So, it seems, Drahomanov was more critical of Shevchenko than his predecessors, as would be of most of his successors.45 Yet he maintained high regard for the poet, and later, in exile in western Europe, popularized his endeavours in French, which reached Karl Marx, who, in his copy of Drahomanov's brochure La Iitterature oukrainienne proscrite par le gouvernement russe (1878), underlined the telling transnational phrase “from the Moldavians to the Finns, in every tongue, there is silence.”46
About a decade or so later, Galician-Ukrainian radical Ivan Franko, in Temne tsarstvo (The Dark Empire), his detailed study of the political poems Son (The Dream) and “Kavkaz,” pointed out that Shevchenko's political thought evolved.
The poet started with a narrow Romantic elevation of Ukraine's Cossack past and criticized mostly its historical enemies - Turks, Tatars, Poles. But even in his Haidamaky, Franko noted, the poet thanked God that those violent days were passed, and he seemed to look forward to more friendly relations between Ukrainians and Poles. By the time he wrote “Kavkaz,” concludes Franko, Shevchenko had become more “universalist,” condemning “the Dark Empire,” “from the Moldavians to the Finns,” and sympathized openly with the Caucasian fighters. Franko's central thesis, that Shevchenko passed from localism to internationalism, proved valuable, and he even considered writing a doctoral dissertation on the subject at the University of Vienna. He never did that. But he did reprint this essay as a booklet for Shevchenko's centenary in 1914.47In our times, George Grabowicz (born 1943) dismissed all specifics and historical circumstances and examples of Shevhencko's works and postulated that everything in them is primarily about good and evil, light and darkness - not local or national, but manichean and “mythic.” His arguments quickly found a welcome public among Ukrainian literary critics, first in the West, and then later in independent Ukraine, who were used to thinking in either-or terms: emigres idealized the national prophet, who raged against Russian domination; Soviets saw the prophet of social revolution, who raged against landlords and nobles and their oppression of the common people.48
Of course, the reality is that he was all of these things and more. Yes, he raged against the Muscovites and the Ukrainian nobles, but found some of his best friends and patrons among them, especially in Poltava province. Indeed, the stern and reactionary Nicholas I and his family freed him from serfdom, which reality must have troubled him when he turned so sharply against the tsar. Indeed, the resulting “cognitive dissonance” seems to have intensified his hatred of the injustices of the imperial system.
His life was full of such contradictions and psychological turmoil. For instance, not only did Yakiv de Balmen serve, if perhaps reluctantly, in the tsar's armies, but so too did the Cossack General Kukharenko. And what about the historian Kostomarov, who believed all states intrinsically evil, but bent over backwards to make things Ukrainian, including Shevchenko, acceptable to Moscow? And then there was the Poltavan Paskevych who crushed the Polish Uprising and fought in the Caucasus, decorated by the tsar and lionized in his Ukrainian homeland; and Kulish, who eagerly served the Russian administration in occupied Poland, but continued to contribute to Ukrainian literature, soon to be completely banned. 49
Shevchenko's portrait of the anguished patriot de Balmen points to the more complicated nature of real life and a world far removed from dualism and myth. It is in this unlikely combination of fire mixed with melancholy, of hope mixed with dashed hopes, of compromise combined with endurance, and ultimately in noble ideals brought down to earth by bitter realities that Shevchenko's true genius lies. It is a genius that, despite the old claims of patriotic Soviet Ukrainian writers, is still not widely acknowledged today, although, Kulish and Drahomanov aside, it has never been seriously questioned in the fiery poet's homeland, and most probably never will be.