Modernism’s National Narrative

feminism: lesia ukrainka’s

BOYAR’S WIFE ( 1 9 1 O ) AND

STONE MASTER OF THE HOUSE (1912)

In the work of Lesia Ukrainka (real name Larysa Kosach) the discourse of national liberation is complicated by two important factors: femi­nism and a revolt against populist attitudes.

The settings of Ukrainka’s works, which are mostly historical and frequently biblical, make impossible any easy allegorization or inter­pretation in terms of contemporary politics. This fact has been attrib­uted to the pressures of censorship or the desire to introduce “universal” themes into Ukrainian literature. Although both explana­tions are valid, a more persuasive argument is that such a selection of themes allowed her to focus on an issue that cut across both the colonial discourse and the national counterdiscourse. In particular, they enabled her to develop a sophisticated and subtle critique of oppressive male attitudes with respect to both the ruling powers and the domestic opposition movement. The dramas that she wrote between 1896 and 1913 and that constitute her greatest literary achievement are in fact a comprehensive challenge to patriarchal norms as expressed in Ukrainian and Russian literature. These plays typically portray the heroine as trapped between two patriarchal soci­eties, an establishment order and an oppositionist group. She is com­pelled to deny her own needs in order to satisfy the demands placed upon her by both these societies. Like Ibsen (whom she greatly admired), Kobylianska, and other contemporary women authors, she portrays her heroines as trapped in roles from which they wish to escape. They are generally not the docile, self-sacrificing figures fre­quently depicted in populist writings of both the colonial and antico­lonial discourse but assertive women with intellectual concerns, a need for political involvement, and powerful emotional and sexual desires. In attempting to break out of the confinement imposed upon them, they succeed in expressing their point of view but are ultimately driven to madness, sickness, or alienation by the social order.

The first, after it appeared in a collection of the writer’s works in 1929, was omitted from all subsequent Soviet editions until 1989.¹ It has frequently been seen as her most overtly anti-imperial drama. The action centres on the marriage of Oksana to a Ukrainian nobleman, Stepan, who lives in Moscow and serves the tsar. The events take place in the decades that followed the Pereiaslav Treaty of 1654, the period known as the Ruin. During this time Ukraine was essentially partitioned between Russia, Poland, and the Ottoman Empire, each of which sup­ported its own protege hetman. Petro Doroshenko, in alliance with the Turks, attempted to reunite the country and win back for it the greater degree of independence enjoyed in Khmelnitsky’s time. As a result Ukraine was torn apart and depopulated by a prolonged series of wars. Throughout these events, Stepan claims to be pursuing a cautious advo­cacy in Moscow on behalf of Ukraine. In fact, his role is indistinguish­able from that of a cowardly opportunist and renegade.

The anticolonial message of the play is clear enough. Ukraine has been overrun by Russian forces who abuse their authority. The tsar prevents any Ukrainian, however loyal, from being appointed as gov­ernor and makes no effort to stop the abuses that lead to revolt against his rule and to the ensuing military destruction. The dramatist’s atti­tude toward Russian rule was negative. In a letter to her brother of 13 November 1902, she described the “Muscovite transgressions” and the “demoralization” that Muscovite rule brought the Ukrainian nation following the Treaty of Pereiaslav. The destruction of the Zaporozhian Sich was to her “the last and most significant act in the enserfment of our people.” Tsarist rule brought “hard labour,” “unnecessary wars,” “the yielding of Right Bank Ukraine to Poland,” and “serfdom and servitude in the tsar’s army.” These views concerning the period of Ruin were influenced by Kostomarov’s book on the subject, which was critical of Muscovy’s policy of exploitation and centralization and sym­pathetic to Petro Doroshenko.² In Ukrainka’s play, Muscovites treat the political views of Ukrainians with suspicion and their religious prac­tices, customs, and language with contempt.

Upon arrival in Moscow, Oksana is shocked by how different Russian traditions are from Ukrainian. Women, in particular, are given far less independence than is allowed by Ukrainian customs. The bride is shocked to learn that she must be segregated from male company and submit to humiliating customs, such as being kissed on the mouth by male visitors. Stepan, too, must adapt his dress, speech, and politics, but in Oksana’s case national discrimination is coupled with gender discrimination. Oksana initially submits to the indignities and suffers isolation and enforced passivity for the sake of her husband and his career.

The complexities of the play, however, are to be found in the linking of this theme to others. Supporting Doroshenko’s revolt might be the only option left. It is not, however, an attractive choice. The play portrays the country’s predicament in all its tragic insolubility. Against the sober assessment of the situation provided by Oksana’s father and the heroine herself, the headstrong militancy of her brother Ivan sounds immature. Stepan’s appeasement might not have brought the desired results, but, the reader is asked to consider, will military involvement be any more successful? The political and personal choices are neither clear-cut nor easy.

Criticism of the male leaders of the Ukrainian movement and their opportunism is but one aspect of her feminist and antipopulist cri­tique. Another is her portrayal of female heroism. The image of the woman as a mature, far-sighted, and clear-thinking tactician, ready to suffer and face defeat in a just cause, is one of Ukrainka’s great contributions to literary characterization. This image, of course, over­turns some traditional perceptions and portrayals of female character. In The Boyar's Wife Stepan is in fact the passive, timid, and emotional character, whereas Oksana is the more committed, valiant, and thoughful individual. Ukrainka’s other major plays similarly disappoint stereotypes inherited from populist and male literature. In The Forest Song (Lisova pisnia, 1911) the image of the female monster-nymph and the cult of male genius, both of which had enjoyed a wide currency in literature since the Romantic age, are challenged.⁷ It is, however, in The Stone Master of the House that the critique of male attitudes is most forcefully articulated.

The play has been interpreted in strictly political terms - as the depiction of opposition to imperial rule. This is a possible reading. In Ukrainka’s version of the Don Juan theme, both Donna Anna and Don Juan are finally seduced by power and status. The final moments of the play see Anna forced to submit to the Commander’s authority and Don Juan turned to stone. Anna’s description as an eagle invited to share the Commander’s eyrie on the mountain top and, after the Commander’s death, her invitation to Don Juan to share the same nest with her suggest the dominant importance of political ambitions and the consequences that their attainment entails. The seductive nature of power and the opportunism of leaders constitute a strong theme running through this work. Clearly, however, the main polemic is with male attitudes that underpin the drive for power in both the personal and private realms. The critique of the male drive for power makes Ukrainka’s treatment of the DonJuan theme differ from that of Mozart, Byron, or Pushkin. It also can be seen as a response to Lermontov’s Demon. There is in Ukrainka’s Don Juan still much of the traditional male seducer who desires the subjugation of women. As in The Boyar's Wife, however, it is the heroine, in this case Anna, who is at the centre of the plot. Her intelligence and ambition appear to offer her two choices: either, like DonJuan, to free herself of the deadening hand of societal norms and expectations by staging a personal revolt against society or to gain emancipation by rising to the summit of power from which she can survey society fearlessly. Attracted to Don Juan’s iconoclasm, she nonetheless realizes its limitations. It is a dead end. Don Juan himself is not free; he is constantly pursued by society and is bound by certain personal commitments. More impor­tantly, his actions are neither honourable nor sincere. His behaviour in duels is, for example, base: he attempts to strike his opponent in the back and kills him when the latter is distracted by Anna, and he is willing to implicate his lovers in the murders. He is egotistical and dishonest and full of a deluded self-importance, and, most impor­tantly, he succumbs to Anna’s temptation of personal aggrandisement. She paints a picture of the enormous powers that await him if he accepts the dead Commander’s role and puts on the white coat. By accepting them and succumbing to the temptations of power and privilege, Don Juan exposes the superficiality of his societal revolt. Ultimately, he and the Commander turn out to have much in com­mon. The exercise of power in male-female relations is shown to be analogous to its expression in politics.

Ukrainka’s interpretation of the legend turns out to be a demythol­ogization of the traditional Don Juan and a critique of male authority and its practices. The play is therefore not about the Promethean revolt of the individual but about the entire “elaborate system of patriarchy which consists of insignificant men such as Juan and the Commander.”⁸ It is particularly interesting that spirited, intellectually astute, and beautiful Anna should consciously set herself the goal of achieving supreme power and should take the lead in convincing Juan to join her in this quest. Unlike Dolores, who maintains a pessimistic, even fatalistic, view of men, even though she is self-sacrificing and loving to the end, Anna is forceful, independent, and ambitious. She is the strong heroine at the centre of the action who pays the penalty for her choices. It is, in the end, the proud Anna who discovers that she has submitted to life’s established pattern - the pursuit of power and prestige - precisely at the moment when she thinks she has escaped its petrifying influence.

What is significant and rarely mentioned in explications of the play is the implicit critique of all patriarchal structures, including the Ukrainian. The play is deliberately structured to allow several readings. Its message is at once a critique of male behaviour within the Russian imperial regime, within the family, and within the Ukrainian opposi­tion movement. The Commander and the summit of the stoney moun­tain could just as easily be interpreted as the national movement, which has its own rigid demands for decorum and loyalty. DonJuan’s declaration of his motives are a good example of the possibility of more than one interpretation. In seducing and “conquering” women, he claims that he gives them what they desire and are capable of accepting: “a dream, a few brief hours of happiness, excitement.”⁹ He views his own actions as courageous, generous, even liberating and is oblivious to the fact that this “liberation” demands their subjection. In this respect the character of Don Juan can plausibly be seen as a veiled critique not only of Russian liberalism’s condescending and chauvinistic stance toward the Ukrainian movement but also of the Ukrainian male leadership, which was condescending and chauvinistic toward the women’s movement. The exposure of subtle connections between the personal and the public, the “domestic” and the “univer­sal,” or the national and the imperial is a conscious strategy employed by the author. Ukrainka’s sensitivity to authoritarian behaviour in family and personal relations and her abilty to demonstrate the oper­ation of similar patterns in the political arena make her works complex studies of power relations. She admitted two years after writing the play that upon rereading The Boyar's Wife she felt a certain dissatisfac­tion with its “elementary,” “black-and-white” nature.¹⁰ Her displeasure was, no doubt, caused both by the failure to present a richer texturing of the play’s historical conflicts (in the same letter she complained of her limited historical knowledge) and also by her desire to convey the presence of the subtle threads binding personal and public lives. She subsequently wrote The Stone Master, which focuses on the latter and is less easily assimilated to patriarchal, populist pieties. This her final major drama was a work that could also be read simultaneously in several ways. It complicated the emancipatory discourse by including the feminist perspective and by raising the issue of manipulative male behaviour and populist prejudices.

Ukrainka was herself a product of the nation-building movement. A child prodigy who was already composing poetry in her early teens, she was guided, trained, and “shaped” by her parents and instructed by her uncle, Mykhailo Drahomanov.¹¹ On a personal level her plays can be read as a poignant record of her own struggles to free herself from the great expectations placed upon her by her family and the “national liberationist” milieu. Her heroines are frequently supporters of an oppositionist movement who disagree with some key aspects of its philosophy. They may have a close personal relationship with a male figure who plays a leading role in a movement, but they do not entirely support his political views. Solidarity, her dramas suggest, may be extended for various reasons. Complete ideological agreement need not be one of these. Personal loyalty, love, and the fulfilment of emotional needs are among some reasons that might figure more prominently. In any case, it is indisputable that after the writings of Olha Kobylianska and Lesia Ukrainka the solidarity of women in the national movement could not be taken for granted in the same way as it had been previously. The brunt of the antimodernist and anti­feminist response to such views was felt by Kobylianska, who was strongly criticized by the leading populist critic Serhii Yefremov. Ukrainka escaped the same sort of attacks, even though her plays explored female awareness and made the same claims for recognizing a woman’s point of view. The reason for Ukrainka’s immediate “can­onization” as a national icon lay partly in the readership’s ability to misread some of her plays, whose “arguments” are couched in subtle terms, and to focus only upon those works that best suited their predispositions. The attacks on Kobylianska were not, in any case, overtly antifeminist. The dominant issues were modernism’s aestheti­cism, mysticism, intellectualism, and individualism, and the attacks constituted part of an extended polemic with modernism’s perceived abandonment of the common cause. Yefremov’s primary concern was with the cult of individualism, in which he suspected a threat to the national movement’s cohesiveness.

It was a misplaced fear. Ukrainka, like other modernists, felt that a high culture was necessary to serve a consolidatory, regulatory, and emancipatory function; it would define, sustain, and direct the nation­building effort, providing it with what Gellner has described as “cog­nitive centralization and codification.”¹² In the estimation of modern­ists, their politically fragmented nation required a tradition of high art (a coherent, normative culture) precisely in order to forge a unified consciousness. Moreover, a high culture that served the eman­cipatory dynamic in Ukrainian society could only be developed by acknowledging and integrating women’s awareness. In the years fol­lowing independence contemporary Ukrainian feminists like Oksana Zabushko, Tamara Hundorova, Vira Aheieva, and Solomiia Pavlychko have faced similar dilemmas in reconciling national and women’s issues. Not surprisingly, they have been attracted to and felt the need to reevaluate the life and the writings of Lesia Ukrainka. They have seen the conflict between the Ukrainophile populists and modernists as a profound issue. The modernists, in particular the feminist mod­ernists, challenged the deeply ingrained ideals, the rituals, and the ceremonies of the Ukrainophiles. Overturning patriarchal taboos and myths, deflating the idea of the male legislator, and questioning faith in a structured, unchanging civilization of ancient provenance was akin to dethroning the father-figure.¹³ Modernism had allowed the repressed individual voice and the unconscious to speak. Frequently, these were the voices of women.

FAILED REVOLUTION: PETRO KARMANSKY^,S THORNS OF THE ROSE (i92i)

The First World War, Ukraine’s declaration of independence in 1918, and the failed struggle to create an independent state profoundly affected Ukrainian society. The transformation it wrought on the modernist generation is dramatically illustrated in Pavlo Tychyna’s poetry, particularly in his Instead of Sonnets and Octaves (Zamist sonetiv i oktav), which created for the twentieth century the myth of Ukraine as a crucified martyr and at the same time expunged any lingering, nineteenth-century images of the country as a peasant paradise. Kar- mansky’s two-part novel of 1921, Thorns of the Rose (Kiltsia rozhi) is based on the writer’s own experiences during this same period and provides an analogous image of the martyred nation. Unlike works such as Leonid Andreev’s Red Laugh (Krasnyi smekh, 1905) and Osyp Turiansky’s Beyond the Bounds of Pain (Poza mezhamy boliu, 1921), which describe individual suffering against a distant, generalized background of war, Karmansky’s chronicle is, in large part, an eyewit­ness account of actual historical events. The author’s main task is to portray the shifts in political consciousness of his hero and all Gali­cian society from 1914 to 1920. Like Conrad’s war-time “plain narra­tives of fact,”¹⁴ it aims at an unadorned account of the personal soul’s gradual merger with the fate of broader society and describes a shared movement through a national purgatory. In contrast to accounts such as Babel’s Red Cavalry (Konarmiia, 1926), Myroslav Irchan’s Films of the Revolution (Filmy revoliutsii, 1923), or the numerous Soviet depic­tions of revolutionary events, it does not perceive the war from the bolshevik side. Karmansky’s hero, Sviatoslav Petrovych, experiences the conflict as a nationalist.

In this his major prose work, the writer offers an apologia for his own evolution. He reassesses his earlier aestheticism, condemns Europe’s moral blindness, and espouses a passionate nationalism. In many respects the work develops the “prodigal son” myth that had already been taken up by writers from Eastern Ukraine like Volodymyr Vynnychenko, who in his I Want! A Novel (Khochu! Roman, 1914) had described the coming to national awareness of a Russified member of the intelligentsia of St Petersburg. Karmansky paints a similar picture of decadence rejected and political links reestablished.

Western Ukraine, as part of the Austrian crown land of Galicia, was disputed by both the Polish and Ukrainian national movements. When the Habsburg Empire collapsed in 1918, Poland was reconstituted as an independent state. The Western Ukrainian People’s Republic (zunr) declared independence from Poland on 1 November 1918 and then united with the Ukrainian People’s Republic (unr) on 22 January 1919. The Ukrainian state fought a war on several fronts before being defeated by Poland on the western flank and the Red Army on the eastern.

Karmansky spent the First World War years in Austria working with Ukrainian prisoners of war. In 1918 he lectured to teachers in Kher­son. Returning to Ternopil in the autumn of 1918, he edited the newspaper Voice of Podillia (Holos Podillia), which, under the title Ukrainian Voice (Ukrainskyi holos), briefly became the Western Ukrai­nian People’s Republic’s organ when it moved to Ternopil. He became a member of the city council, then a delegate to parliament. He was the republic’s representative in Kyiv when the unification with the Ukrainian People’s Republic was proclaimed. The government then assigned him to its diplomatic mission in the Vatican. His novel was completed in Vienna, along with a second volume of poetic satires and a translation of Giovanni Papini’s short stories. After Karmansky quit Vienna, he attempted unsuccessfully to have the manuscripts returned to him.¹⁵ Although the last two have never been recovered, his novel was eventually located in Rome, and sections of it were published in 1989.¹⁶

The story begins in Rome with Sviatoslav Petrovych’s crisis of faith. He prefers the city’s old pagan ruins to contemporary museums and would sooner spend his time in the coliseum, contemplating the past, than attend church services. To the local children he distributes repro­ductions of paintings by Raphael, Botticelli, and Fra Angelico, rather than the usual images of saints. The square on which he lives is flanked by the Ukrainian theological seminary, the Collegium Ruthenorum, and a church, but his rooms are full of reproductions of ancient art, antique vases, and classics of Italian literature. On his table lie copies of Leopardi’s poetry and prose.

The free-thinking artist has also rejected national pieties. To his coun­tryman the visiting artist Bohdan Rostkovych, he confesses that the new turbulent Rome reminds him of his own detested Lviv. He particularly loathes Marinetti and the futurists who proclaim the necessity of destroying ancient art and all monuments to the past. Still, he muses, Italy, which has a strong sense of history, can digest this blasphemy, but in his homeland, which represents but a “farce of pseudo-culture and pseudo-liberation,” such sentiments are incomprehensible. His retreat from the world appears complete. Given to contemplating contempo­rary life against the span of recorded history, he sees vanity in all human activity except art. Artists, he states, are the nation’s slaves, its forced labour; unappreciated and unrewarded in their own time, they unearth treasures that will be needed in a distant future. Petrovych believes that posterity will appreciate his work, but only after “a powerful cataclysm” has disrupted the placidity of “our social pond.” In the meantime he has nothing but contempt for the commercial interests, bureaucrats, and journalists who constitute his milieu and whose chief concern is a comfortable career. Petrovych represents the paradoxical combination of fervent cosmopolitanism and sense of nationalist high cultural mis­sion that was typical of Central European modernism at the end of the century and that Karmansky espoused early in his literary career.

Alienated from his countrymen, he has also neglected his wife, a Pole, who embarks on an affair with the younger and livelier Rostk- ovych. The yoke of national oppression is in this way shown to be responsible for damaging individual psyches as well as distorting soci­eties. The connection between the personal and political is made clear during the climax of the first book. Petrovych strikes and abandons his wife on the same day that the newspapers announce the outbreak of war. The purgatory that will transform the alienated couple and all Ukraine begins. The masses are aroused and suddenly everything changes. The individual finds reason for action in the political; per­sonal salvation becomes inseparable from social renewal. Whereas in the past the poet had seen his task as describing inner states of consciousness, these are now subsumed in public moods; the political is now dramatic and exciting. As he is drawn into the national libera­tion movement he asks himself: what has happened to give him such optimism about the success of the cause? His answer is that the Galician peasant has ceased to be an easily manipulable, “mindless machine.” The poet too has changed. The Baudelairean spleen has gone; his heart, which was full of self-destroying venom, has now rediscovered its better feelings: “He felt that he had been wearing a mask that covered his true appearance. And he began to detest him­self. Immediately he felt an invincible longing for liberation” (i.i6).

The Romantic disdain for the profit motive and the unheroic middle­class society cease to be relevant. Problems of the heart still remain: the hero struggles to master unruly, unworthy emotions and instincts and to deal with his rage, which follows the discovery of his wife’s adultery. However, the emotional adventure that the narrator describes from now on runs parallel to the shifting moods and atti­tudes of the masses. Rage, despair, admiration, and contempt over­power him at every turn, but the contrast between the first part of the book and the second is between personal and collective emotion. There is a new sensitivity to history’s dialectic and the growth of a national awareness. Criticism of Ukrainian leaders is now balanced against a new-found respect for the political maturity exhibited by the peasantry and the rank-and-file intelligentsia.

Karmansky’s book represents an exorcism of his earlier fault-finding and refused commitment. The modernist poet known for sneering at “patriots” and accused of spreading socially destructive attitudes in his poetry picks up the mantle of the national revolution - becomes, in fact, its official Western Ukrainian bard. His hero, through disillusion- ments with successive nationalist governments, is inspired and sustained by the steadfast patriotism and iron will of the Ukrainian Galician Army, which is drawn mainly from peasants. It forms the backbone of Ukraine’s defence against Russian and Polish incursions and performs heroically on the battlefield. In the final pages the hero is reunited with his wife, who has been through her own personal hell and is now a nurse working with the nationalist wounded. He dies in the knowledge that some barrier in the national psychology has finally been breached: the momentum toward independence will now prove unstoppable.

Much of the interest of the book lies in following the hero’s path to such convictions. Elation alternates with depression. The hero-narrator has a keen eye for moral injustice and a nose for hypocrisy, which he detects most frequently among his own countrymen, particularly among jumped-up officers and carpetbaggers. The depressions are, in turn, overcome by anticolonial anger. It is unique among Ukrainian novels in its outspoken condemnation of all imperial attitudes - Aus­trian, Russian, Polish, and French - for the tragedy of aborted state­hood. The first disillusionment is with the Austrians who, immediately following the declaration of war, abrogate civil rights and fill the pris­ons with Ukrainian activists: “The Ukrainian nation was left with no rights: Austria had only the hangman and the military court for us; we were merely cannon fodder” (1.13). His experience in Eastern Ukraine is equally disheartening: “He saw that Ukrainian society did not have one soul; that this soul had become atomized, fragmented; that petty slogans drowned out the main one, the liberation of Ukraine;

that the sickness of individualism had sapped its strength.” (2.6). The blame for this tragedy could ultimately be laid at the feet of “Moscow’s despots and their millions of henchmen, who had, on the orders of these despots, disfigured this soul over the centuries” (2.6).

Unable to continue a war on several fronts, the Western Ukrainian Republic turned unsuccessfully to Europe, which, however, supported Poland’s claims to the territory: “All along the Zbruch stood Moscow’s bird of prey, which the Galician army had held back from its westward march for a long time. From the west, French tanks approached along with the Polish hordes under the command of liberal French generals, fitted out in English uniforms and armed with French machine-guns” (2.10). It could hardly have been otherwise, argues the author:

Europeanjustice, which has millions of dead, wounded and crippled on its conscience and a whole sea of tears, cannot sympathize with an entity as small as Galician society... The despairing voice of five million does not even reach the ear of Europeanjustice. It does not even figure in the combinations of those who divide up entire continents. The entire world seemed to have conspired to let the Ukrainian people perish, or to allow it to become an eternal outlaw, an eternal revolutionary, an eternal enemy of the civilized world harbouring the desire for revenge in its soul. (2.13)

The hero sheds tears over the fate of his people, is deeply touched by the stories of the individuals who cross his path, and is left, in the end, physically and emotionally devastated. The body is not distanced, as it will be later in the twenties and thirties, from public displays of emotion: the hero cries and rages frequently, his wife is physically overcome by emotion, and even delegates at congresses weep publicly. The devices for examining the inner life are conventional: the diary and letter, the internal monologue, and the inclination to recite poetry and snatches from the scriptures. In all these moments characters find words to describe their feelings: the hero in his most exalted moments declares his love for his wife, for the nurse who loves him, and for the simple Galician peasant-soldier. One is aware in all this sentiment of an appropriation of the modernist cult of feeling for the national cause. In the New Testament imagery that runs through the book - Gogotha, the crucifixion, the tears over a condemned Jerusalem, Christ’s agony - one sees the fusion of Christian with nationalist symbolism. Petrovych is a secular Christ, suffering on behalf of his people, expiating their sins and dying so that one day in the future their salvation may come.

In Karmansky’s earlier work this ability to display and articulate emotion had been associated with finely tuned, aesthetic natures, whose existence served to rebuke the rationalism and materialism of the age. The secularization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had directed this cult of feeling away from the love of God to the love of the individual human being. It reappears in this novel as amor patriae. In a writer with his kind of sensibility and religious temperament it was natural that the loss of religious faith, which Karmansky felt as a young man studying in the religious seminary in Rome, should have led to a search for another authority to validate life and serve as an emotional focus. The moments of esctatic love and the declarations of fraternal unity described in the novel make it clear that Nation has replaced God, a new sacrament of political activism has taken the place of religious ritual.

This aspect of Karmansky’s work has already been remarked upon by Mykhailo Rudnytsky. One wry insight in the provocative essay he wrote on Karmansky concerns the writer’s fondness for litanies: “Per­haps as a holdover from his days studying for the priesthood, Karman- sky retained the habit of repeating words mechanically as though in prayer - repeating the same words endlessly, in the faith that this would bring relief more quickly.”¹⁷ The hero’s declarations of nation­alist faith take the form of prayers. In his final esctatic vision an avenging Ukrainian Titan appears as a Last Judgment over the coun­try’s enemies and says: “Woe to the blind, who themselves being blind led others astray! Woe to the criminals, who filled their chalice with the blood of people and drove tanks onto their brothers’ graves! Woe to those who had little faith, who left the people defenceless in their moment of grief and took up service with foreigners and enemies! Woe to those who doubted the power of the nation and sold the blood of their brothers! Amen, amen, the hour will come and the people will separate the chaff from the grain and will burn the weeds merci­lessly and blow them over the steppes!”(2.i6) The opposition to chaos, to animal passions and appetites, to the shameful abdication of higher goals is in the end maintained by the individual who has asserted commitment, public and irreversible, to a consolidating idea.

The modernist ennui caused by a loss of meaning and realization of the world’s formlessness is in this way cured. The description of the journey through war’s suffering again reveals the writer’s conservative cast of mind. The conclusion offers the restoration of a familiar pat­tern, the comfort of a rediscovered identity accompanied by a call for order, unity, and discipline. Artists, it suggests, have to be brought back into the community’s bosom. They have a special role to play in healing the community’s sicknesses through demonstrating that the real Ukraine is still in the catacombs in the hearts and minds of intellectuals and activists. The narrator rejects the contemporary atomization and formlessness of ethnographic populism, on the one hand, and selfish individualism on the other. Both deny the higher unity, the acceptance of common historical experience and shared responsibilities, that must crystalize as national consciousness. This simultaneous desire to restore order and to shock into a new awareness reveals a dichotomy in Kar- mansky’s thought. On one side, artists represent national truths long known and suppressed; on the other, they must challenge accepted notions with the visionary zeal of the avant-garde. Karmansky’s novel of 1921 represents an attempt to combine these two stances: the hero surveys an ancient people who are struggling for their twentieth­century political rebirth.

The final page poses the great dilemma. Late in 1919 the Ukrainian forces have been surrounded by three enemy armies: the Poles, the Bolsheviks, and Denikin’s Russian Volunteer Army. An alliance with one of these three enemies is necessary, but in spite of repeated overtures the Ukrainian commanders have been rebuffed by each of them. Petliura’s forces are in favour of making an accommodation with the Poles. Most of the Ukrainian Galician Army, however, opposes such a turn. On his deathbed the hero learns that the army has thrown in its lot with Denikin.¹⁸ He dies with the words “But I am free!” on his lips: the idea of national emancipation will continue to live on in the individual consciousness.

Karmansky’s vision of an insensitive, deceitful, and powerful geopo­litical order, eternally hostile to Ukraine, serves as a justification for national egoism. It was this lesson that an entire generation drew from the traumatic events of 1917-20. Conrad, too, in the last two years of his life, described Poland (much as Karmansky represented Ukraine) as an outpost of stability and civilization in face of Russian destabiliza­tion. After 1918, however, Poland was accepted into the fold of Euro­pean nations and granted support from Western powers; the Ukrainian drive for independence, on the other hand, was dismissed and the country allowed to be partitioned between its old imperial masters, with the inevitable consequences of mass repression and forced assimilation. However, both the Polish and the earlier Italian example of renewed statehood figured prominently in the consciousness of most educated Ukrainians. The success of these two nations is invoked several times in the novel, notably in its conclusion, which pointedly looks forward to an age of cooperation and mutual understanding between Ukraine and Poland. Petrovych’s reconciliation with his wife elicits the following comment from him on the fate of the two countries: “I believe, that they will... understand their mutual need for one another, that they cannot survive without one another, because they have a common enemy in an insatiable Moscow which is trying to drown the freedom of all its neighbours in blood” (2.16).¹⁹ This passage suggests an equal relationship with Poland in a future political order and predicts that Ukraine will follow Poland’s path to independence.

The war, Edward Said has written, “restored Conrad’s patriotism. More, it affected Conrad in the manner of a startling religious expe­rience.”²⁰ Karmansky’s novel records a similar conversion, the more powerful since it overcame an individual whose early education had been deeply religious and patriotic and who, from being a distant critical observer of political life - even a resister of nationalism’s siren­call - found himself suddenly thrust into the vortex of a war of independence and became its spokesman.

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