Merimee on Ukrainian Cossack History (1850s-1860s)

These interests soon bore fruit. In 1852, the year after his article on Gogol, Merimee published the play Les debuts d’un aventurier, about False Dmitri, who, with the help of Poles and Ukrainian Cossacks, overthrew Tsar Boris Godunov in 1605 and claimed Muscovy for himself.

In this drama, and in his more carefully composed Episode de l^,histoire de Russie : Les faux Demetrius (1852), he postulated that the man was no Muscovite at all, but probably a student of the learned schools in Kyiv, then under Polish rule, who tired of his studies and joined the Zaporozhian Cossacks in southern Ukraine, where he learned about the arts of war. This hypothesis contradicted all Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian historians of that time, but brought much new attention to Ukrainian history and to its Cossacks. Merimee painted Dmitri as intelligent and generous, too mild and lacking in ruthlessness to hold onto the Russian throne (he was murdered in 1606). Merimee scholar A.W. Raitt considered Episode the French writer's most original and successful study of Russian history.²⁹

Merimee wrote extensively and well on Russian and Ukrainian history. One essay (1854) outlined the Ukrainian Cossacks' history from their fifteenth-century origins to the death of Hetman Ivan Mazepa in 1709. A book-length essay of 1865 covered the successful Cossack revolt against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1648, led by the greatest Ukrainian Cossack leader, Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky.

The first work, Les Cosaques de l^,Ukraine et leurs derniers Atamans (1854), outlined the origin of the Cossacks on the Dnieper River defending the exposed peasants of that rich land against Tatar raiding parties and increasingly demanding landlords, many from Poland. Relying on the most recent discoveries in philology (one of his special interests), he traced “Cossack” back to its root in the Turkic languages as a “freebooter” or independent soldier, who owed allegiance to no ruler.

He stated that the Zaporozhian Cossacks of central Ukraine were the oldest of all the Cossack Hosts, lived without women at their headquarters, or Sich, on the Dnieper River, and provided a model for the Cossacks of the Don River, who were mostly refugees from Russia, not Poland or Lithuania. Both Hosts, he correctly stated, originated as boatmen, were transformed into infantrymen, and only much later acquired their reputation as cavalrymen, in which guise they entered Paris after Napoleon's final defeat.

Merimee's study next outlined Bohdan Khmelnytsky's Cossack insurrection of 1648 against the Poles, the turmoil and chaos that followed his death in 1657, and Hetman Ivan Mazepa's revolt against Peter the Great in 1708. Merimee thought Khmelnytsky, who was so little known in western Europe, had sought only to liberalize Polish rule but, by turning to the Muscovites for help and agreeing to the Treaty of Pereiaslav, which recognized the tsar's overlordship, brought to his people a much heavier burden, and he himself soon regretted his actions. Merimee concluded that the suppression of Mazepa's revolt ended Cossack dreams of independence and even of a clearly defined, independent Cossack stratum within the Russian Empire.

For this study, Merimee used Russian, but also French sources, the latter including Voltaire on Mazepa (whom he corrected on the spelling of Mazepa's name and on the youthful Cossack's famous but apocryphal naked horseback ride); the cartographer Beauplan (who wrote on the eve of the Khmelnytsky revolt); and the Swedish historian J.A. Nordberg (who had penned a detailed history of Charles XII of Sweden, with whom Mazepa allied himself against Peter the Great). This survey of Ukrainian Cossack history was fluidly written, relatively well researched, and quite informative for the general European public, who knew nothing of Cossackdom. It dovetailed with Napoleon III's foreign policy and was published during the Crimean War (1853-56) in the official journal Le moniteur universel, so was relatively brief.³⁰

As a result, it was Merimee's second study of Ukrainian Cossacks - Bohdan Khmelnytsky (1865) - that became his main contribution to popularizing Ukrainian history in the West.

In the 1860s, he came across the Ukrainian historian Mykola Kostomarov's superb two-volume biography of Khmelnytsky and was simply carried away by it. He loved Kostomarov's use of local colour, his exciting narrative, and, most originally, his use of folklore and folksong as historical sources and to enliven chronicles and documents. (Merimee had done something a bit similar in his Corsican tales, Colomba and Mateo Falcone) About Kostomarov's study of Don Cossack rebel Stenka Razin, who rose against Muscovy in 1670-71, Merimee wrote:

Monsieur Nicolas Kostomarof, author of some very well regarded historical and archaeological works, has written the life of this wild hero [de ce heros sauvage]. He has endeavoured to collect not only all the printed documents and manuscripts from the archives and libraries of Russia, but also local traditions and folksongs which often can reveal better than official reports the passions of the masses... He believes that the historian, without losing his character of [fair] judgment, can and must make use of drama and poetry. The reflections and dress of these ornaments do not negate truth; to the contrary they succeed when they are chosen with taste and discernment, in the same way that a portrait done with a close attention to detail adds to the image of the principal figure.³¹

This captured Kostomarov's general approach to writing history. On the one hand, Kostomarov later became more critical of oral sources grounded in folklore and revised some of his findings accordingly. On the other hand, he always found “popular poetry” a useful guide to the spirit of the people. By the time Merimee discovered him, Kostomarov had become a very popular “historian-artist,” the most popular in the Russian Empire, who, because of strict censorship, partly hid his Ukrainian sympathies, especially vis-a-vis Ukrainian independence, beneath a thin faςade of pan-Russian patriotism. For example, at a time when the new term “Ukrainians” was still not widely used, he typically spoke of the “North Russian” and “South Russian” “nationalities” (singular: narodnost).

Merimee, who sometimes saw through this faςade (possibly with Turgenev's aid), and who loved folk poetry, resolved to write at least an extended French paraphrase of Kostomarov's life of Khmelnytsky, despite his serious difficulties with its many Ukrainianisms.³²

The work proceeded very slowly, and at times Merimee despaired of it, writing to a friend, “I am still not finished with this animal of a Chmiel- nicki.”³³ But in the end, although he was already aged and ill, Merimee's Bohdan Khmelnytsky, following Kostomarov, painted Ukrainian history and the Ukrainian Cossacks in the brightest and most garish of colours, fully reflecting the excitement and the seemingly unrestrained violence of those times. It outlined the heavy oppression of the peasants in the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and summarized Khmelnytsky's possible impressions when he visited Warsaw to take his personal grievances to the king: all around him, he saw chaos and disorder, the nobles' arrogance, the ineffective government, private armies all over the land living off pillage, and not least “the brutalized peasants, who were ready to follow anyone who would carry fire and sword to [the castles of] their masters.”³⁴

And when the Ukrainian insurrection came in 1648, Merimee described the Poles impaling the Cossacks, and the Cossacks flaying the Poles. Still, he criticized some of Kostomarov's sources and disagreed with some of his positions - for example, that Cossacks had burned alive some fifteen thousand Jews at the capture of the town of Bar, as was related in the sources, and that Khmelnytsky, after his first great victories in Ukraine, had decided not to enter and destroy Poland proper out of lingering patriotism for the old Commonwealth. Instead, Merimee proposed that Khmelnytsky actually needed Poland in the dangerous political scene in central and eastern Europe - he was just being practical. Merimee saw him as a brilliant military leader and tactician who skilfully united his people while playing off his enemies, one against the other.

Moreover, Khmelnytsky was “the elected leader of a small nation surrounded by powerful neighbours [who] devoted his whole life to the struggle for independence.” He continues:

Nations like to find in their chosen leader the qualities and even the defects of their national character. Bohdan Khmelnytsky was, as it were, the perfect type of the Cossack. He was brave, cunning, and enterprising; he had an instinctive understanding of war. His intemperance, his real or assumed brutality, was no more creditable to him among the Russians [sic] than Henri IV's love-affairs were shocking to the French. Few rulers have been more absolute; none observed more carefully the laws and customs of his country. Within the confines of the Zaporozhian Army, he seemed to be only the humble executor of the decisions of its assembly. All his power consisted in persuasion based on his unalterable attachment to its interests.³⁵

Merimee concluded by saying that Khmelnytsky did not aim to create a new nation, at least in the modern sense, but rather sought to raise the Cossacks to an aristocratic class similar to that which already existed in Poland. In his exciting narrative, Merimee, ever conscious of the need for local colour, introduced new Ukrainian words into the French language, many of them in Russian guise from Kostomarov.³⁶

Merimees colourful book was a moderate success and, amazingly, is still in print today. Some authors, such as A. Zhukovsky (Arkady Joukovsky), a Ukrainian emigre living in France, and Thierry Ozwald, a Frenchman, argue cogently that it was no paraphrase at all but rather an original work of interpretation, which clearly used a much wider range of sources than was once previously thought. Zhukovsky in particular speculates that Merimee saw Khmelnytsky as “a kind of Father of the Cossack nation,” who, as Merimee wrote to a friend, “seems to have invented the [modern] war among nationalities.”³⁷

Merimee, however, completely misread Kostomarov's basic purpose, which was not sensationalist.

The latter did colourfully describe the violence of various Cossack revolts against the Polish and Muscovite governments, but not out of any love for or fear of revolt, or fascination with violence, but rather simply to debase these uprisings, so as to pacify the censors, who hated revolts of all kinds. So Kostomarov, in that earlier book on Stenka Razin, detailed the “savagery” of the Russian Cossack revolt against Moscow (again repeated by Merimee in his own narrative of those same events) for that reason, and he may have done the same for Bohdan Khmelnytsky and his peasant followers' ostensible “barbarism.” Otherwise, the French writer did greatly admire Khmelnytsky for his try at independence and clearly distinguished between the professional fighting men - the actual Cossacks - and the peasants. But generally, Merimee, and perhaps others like even Karl Marx himself, who, as discussed in the Introduction to this volume, also relied on Kostomarov for eastern European and Russian history, took this depiction of extreme violence to be Kostomarov's real interpretation and passed it on to the general European reading public, which was thereafter greatly influenced by it.³⁸

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Source: Prymak T.. Ukraine, the Middle East, and the West. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press,2021. — 306 p.. 2021

Merimee on Ukrainian Cossack History (1850s-1860s)

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