Merimee's Ukrainian Legacy

Of course in the century that followed, Soviet historians and writers, both Russian and Ukrainian, pleased with the attention Merimee brought to their little-known countries, and promoting a Marxism of their own type, tended to play down his criticisms, especially of the peasants' “barbarism,” or justify it as a natural reaction to the nobles' harsh oppression.

Thus during the occasional cultural thaws they released a few studies of this Frenchman, which ignored or minimized his criticisms and disregarded his fascination with egregious violence. So Dmytro Nalyvaiko, writing in 1970, basically ignored the Frenchman's negative impressions of Gogol and stated that his historical narrative about Khmelnytsky and others closely reflected later Soviet prescriptions about social divisions within the Cossack polity and the Ukrainian struggle “against the yoke of the Polish aristocrats.”³⁹

It was only after 1991 that these same Ukrainian intellectuals could talk about Merimee more freely, and they finally prepared Ukrainian translations of his historical works dealing with their country. In the first Ukrainian-language printing of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, which appeared in the journal Zhovten (October) in 1987, the translator gave three reasons for doing so: Merimee had expanded the general history of the Slavonic peoples (Ukrainians, Poles, and Russians), had called Zaporozhia “a democratic republic” in Ukraine, and had, by the breadth of his interests, revealed himself to be “a citizen of the world.” The translation was geared to fill a “blank spot” in Ukrainian history, which purpose also fitted in with the new spirit of the times.⁴⁰

Of course, these Ukrainian publishers and writers continued to ig­nore Merimee's contrast of “civilization” and “barbarism” (e.g., Ukraine).

Nevertheless, Merimee really helped publicize Ukraine's history, despite his harsh judgments of its history, his anti-religious biases, his stress on violence, and his reliance on Russian-language sources. For example, although he followed his contemporaries in calling these Cossacks, or their peasant followers, “Russians,” and ignored Kostomarov's distinctions between North and South Russians, he did write about “Ukraine,” not “Little Russia,” as so many others did. This was a clear national interpretation of Ukrainian history, hitherto banned by the tsar's censors. Moreover, he also referred to Ukraine as “a country” rather than simply a region - another important advance.⁴¹

Finally, he also could see a difference between the sauvage Don Cossack leader Stenka Razin, who behaved atrociously and ended badly, and the more cultured Zaporozhian leader Khmelnytsky, who, despite the ravages of his peasant followers, was a man of some wealth and education, enjoyed substantial success, and died peacefully in his bed surrounded by respectful attendants. And Merimee seemed to acknowledge that these rebellious inhabitants of Ukraine formed, or rather tried to form, “a Cossack nation” with its own native nobility and ruler. In other words, Merimee had a notion of that imaginary Ukrainian past captured by Gogol in his Taras Bulba (1835), but no inkling - knowing nothing of Shevchenko's Kobzar (1840) - of what that work looked towards: a future Ukraine with its own new literature in its own independent language. Indeed, so taken was Merimee with the Ukrainian past, with Ukrainian history, and with the Cossacks of yesteryear, that, despite all his misgivings, in 1867, when a Polish friend, Mme Przedziecka, to whom he seems to have been much attracted, sent him a book on eastern European history, urging him to be more sympathetic to the Poles, he playfully commented: “I have just received the book. It is well thought out and well-written, but has one mistake: It is a bit too Polish, and, as you know, I myself am a Cossack.”⁴² This statement, frequently quoted in Ukrainian appreciations of Merimee, aptly summed up his stance on Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian history.