An Evolving Historical Sensibility
Indeed, the nineteenth century saw the birth of a new idea about history and its relationship to science and knowledge in general. Science had already swept away so many of the old religious-based ideas about personality and society, and psychology and sociology were emerging.
Although “facts” had always been respected by the best of historians, fact turned into organized knowledge about humankind and its communities was now put on a much firmer basis. Merimee himself shared this new respect for facts and saw in it a deeper, truer reflection of society than could be afforded by fiction. Seemingly, he was a pioneer of that approach - “the noble dream” of historical objectivity. In 1856, he expressed these sentiments in certain of his essays and letters, which biographer A.W. Raitt summarizes:“In my eyes history is something sacred” [Merimee wrote]; factual truth is sacrosanct, and the cardinal sin is to tamper with it, whether in the name of morality or in subservience to some abstract theory. The historian's prime aim should be the “discovery of truth”; vain embellishments and preconceived ideas must be forsworn. The overriding duty of a historian is to be “detached and fair”; his function is not to prove a thesis but to ‘collect numerous facts and subject them to impartial criticism.”... [Merimee continues,] “I wrote so many novels in years gone by that now I only like history... For my part, I know of no more interesting problem than the complete dissection of a historical character.”11
And indeed, even though today we see his biases vis-a-vis religion and his juxtapositions of “civilization” and “savagery,” “civility” and “barbarism,” this noble dream remained his method as he wrote later in his career about Ukraine, Russia, and Slavonic Europe as a whole.
Soviet historians and writers, both Russian and Ukrainian, pleased with his attention to their little-known countries, exaggerated Merimee's importance in French literature and played down his misgivings about their cultures, especially his juxtaposing of “civilization” and “barbarism.” So a major Soviet literary encyclopaedia published in the 1930s under general editor A.V.
Lunacharsky, the most prominent of all Communist cultural officials, accorded Merimee five pages, complete with four handsome illustrations. The article evaluated Merimee according to Soviet Marxist theory, but said very little about his Russian/Ukrainian period. It started with the writer's early writing, during the absolutist Bourbon restoration:[After the success of La Guzla,] Merimee gave himself over to [more] serious work. In 1828, his historical drama/chronicle La Jacquerie [sic] came out. It was a remarkable attempt to depict the positive traits of the uprising of medieval peasants, sharply reflecting [not only medieval times, but also] the shifts which were happening in the social life of France during the epoch of the feudal-Catholic reaction in the twenties of the nineteenth century, when arose the rebellious inclinations of the petty bourgeois elements and their intelligentsia. Among the shorter novels of 1829, together with the negrophile novel Tamango, it is necessary to mention Venlevement de la redoute, a sparkling page in the Napoleonic Wars, and Mateo Falcone, devoted to the heroization of that spiritual simplicity and feeling of honour which Merimee considered characteristic of the Corsican peasantry... The anti-feudal and anti-clerical positions of the class group, whose ideologist Merimee was, stood in the traditions of the Great French Revolution and the Empire, but to a much greater degree came out of the pre-revolution free thinking of Voltaire and the materialistically inclined salons of the eighteenth century... Merimee actively opposed the influence of aristocratic romanticism then developing its literary mystifications... He avoided lyricism, [rather giving himself over to] the laconic, and even a dryness of exposition with a complete lack of the declamations typical for the purple patches [krasnorechiia] of the romantics.12
These stiff Marxist prescriptions, alluding to Merimee's disgust with the conservative Romantic postulates of the religious writer Chateaubriand, had some basis in fact, and re-appeared in a second Soviet literary encyclopaedia of the 1960s.
They were generally followed in all Soviet works.13Merimee was a contemporary of Hugo and Balzac and knew them both well. He was a friend of the French writer Stendhal (1783-1842), twenty years his elder, who had been in Russia during the Napoleonic Wars and may have sparked his initial interest in eastern Europe, as in his Venlevement de la redoute (1829), about Shevardino, a major engagement of the French, Poles, and Russians on the eve of the great Battle of Borodino. Both Hugo and Balzac wrote about Ukraine, Balzac even spending much of the last two years of his life there (see chapter 6, above), but Merimee studied the country more closely and in the 1850s and 1860s wrote much more about it, especially about serfdom, history, and literature in the Russian Empire, which soon brought the Ukrainian Cossacks and the Ukrainian people to his attention.