Outline of This Book

This general question of east and west informs the title of this book in a different way, and I should like to expand on a few matters mentioned in the Preface. I am concerned here not so much with Ukraine's ostensible westward orientation (as opposed to Russia's eastward) as with eastern and western influences on Ukraine itself and, especially, Ukraine's forgotten influences and contacts with others west and east.

So part I, “A Complex History: Ukraine and the Dar al-Islam,” and some elements of the other chapters treat the country's contacts with the Middle East, especially the Islamic Middle East. The first two of its three chapters deal with the many cultural luminaries who wrote about or vis­ited the region - primarily in the early modern era (chapter 1) and in the nineteenth century (chapter 2). This includes iconic figures such as the Igumen [Abbot] Daniel, the first medieval pilgrim from Kyivan Rus' to leave an account of his visit to Palestine, and many centuries later, Ahatanhel Krymsky (of Crimean Tatar ancestry), the first modern, pro­fessional Ukrainian “Orientalist” scholar to do formal research in that part of the world.

Of course, not all these travellers were “ethnic” Ukrainians. For example, not only the Igumen Daniel, who lived long before the name “Ukrainian” was coined, and Ahatanhel Krymsky, claimed today by both Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians, but also certain Jews from what is today Ukraine, visited or lived in the Middle East for long periods. These include characters as diverse as Sarah, the beautiful but controversial wife of the charismatic seventeenth-century Jewish prophet Sabbatai Zevi; Sarah grew up in what is today Ukraine, but married Sabbatai Zevi in the Ottoman Empire. Then there was the twentieth-century religious figure Muhammad Asad, Pakistan's first ambassador to the United Nations, born to a Jewish family in Austrian Galicia, whence came his happy memories of his childhood summers among Ruthenian country folk.²⁰

These notable figures indicate the great variety of Ukrainian contacts with the Middle East.

Chapter 3, also in part I, treats more specifically slave raiding by Tatars in Ukraine and its reflection in Ukrainian folklore. Such activity was a very big business, during its earlier periods surpassing even the much bet­ter-known transatlantic trade. Invaders raiding lands, seizing their people, and enslaving them shattered and scarred families and communities and tore people from their homelands into an uncertain and often-miserable existence, although slaves' fates varied greatly, depending on where they were taken. The Black Sea slave trade remained significant for about three centuries (1441-1783) and left its dark imprint, still barely explored, on the Ukrainian national psyche and narrative.²¹

The formation in 1648 of the Ukrainian Cossack “Hetmanate” within the Russian Empire, following the triumphant Cossack insurrection against the Roman Catholic, noble-dominated Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, transformed the geopolitical situation in eastern Europe. Because of these wars, the slave trade suddenly expanded. But during the later years of the Hetmanate, it went into a steady and irreversible decline. Two figures dominate the history of the Hetmanate: founder Bohdan Khmelmytsky (c. 1595-1657; hetman 1648-57) and its most highly cultured ruler, Ivan Mazepa; hetman 1687-1708). Throughout this period Ukraine and its Cossacks attracted the attention of both western Europe and the Ottoman Empire - see, for instance, the French-language geography and map of the country by Guillaume le Vasseur Sieur de Beauplan (cited frequently cited in chapter 3 below) and the histories of the Ukrainian Cossacks by Pierre Chevalier, J.B. Scherer, and others. Khmelnytsky became known a bit in western Europe, but his apparently difficult name stifled interest, according to the French novelist Prosper Merimee, who wrote a book about him in 1865 (see chapter 7 below).²²

In contrast, Ivan Mazepa (1639-1709) - see Plates 2 and 3; the artist for Plate 2 also rendered (Plate 1) one of Mazepa's predecessors, Petro Doro­shenko (1627-1698) - became at home an enduring symbol of Ukraine's western longings and fascinated many people in western Europe during his reign and ever since.

The Mazepa legend within the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and Ukraine itself has affected how the man is today seen in the West. During the Great Northern War (begun 1700, pitting Denmark, Saxony, Poland, and Russia against Sweden and allies), at a crucial time in his country's history, Mazepa turned west and tried to orient his country in those direc­tions. Mazepa, disillusioned with Russian rule, in 1708 allied with Charles XII of Sweden, who promised Ukraine independence, or at least a very wide-ranging autonomy. However, the Swedish forces were badly defeated at Poltava (1709) and Mazepa died soon afterwards. But he has inspired later Ukrainian patriots and nationalists who have rejected the Russian connec­tions. At the same time, he has remained a villain in Russian literature and historiography, and this basic disagreement over his character still shapes the writing of history in both countries.

Well into the twenty-first century, the Russian version of the “traitor” Mazepa, anathematized by the Russian Orthodox church, supposed enemy of the Ukrainian people, and disgraced by the glorious Russian victory over his Swedish allies at Poltava, dominated Russian writing on him, and re­mained present even in independent Ukraine. As late as 2011, the Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Dashkevych still had to deconstruct this caricature. He pointed out that all great modern national rebels, beginning with George Washington, have been accused of being “traitors” to the imperial power until their countries finally gained their independence. Dashkevych noted that priests' condemnations of religious “heretics” have never extended to political rebels otherwise loyal to the church, such as Mazepa. Priests used to re-proclaim this ban in the official liturgy of the church on certain days every year - proving, the writer noted, the church's scandalous subser­vience to the Muscovite state and its irreligious Tsar Peter. Only Russian clerics continue to denounce Mazepa.

Dashkevych next turns to Ukrainians' attitudes towards Mazepa. He concludes that Russia's ferocious repressions of the Ukrainian Cossacks and the Ukrainian people before and after the Battle of Poltava in 1709 (espe­cially its massacre of the population of the Cossack capital at Baturyn), in contradiction to the Russian myth about Mazepa's unpopularity, clearly showed whose side that populace favoured. And finally, he notes that the “glorious” victory of Poltava became a central pillar of Russia's imperialist propaganda (and later its nationalist propaganda) in its opposition to Maze­pa's vision of independence, even though two years later it was defeated by a Swedish/Ukrainian ally, the Ottoman Empire, during the Prut campaign of 1711. These wilful distortions are still dominant in Russia, and still influence much Western writing about its history.²⁴

More generally, in Russia, the Cossacks are seen primarily as border folk, wild and unruly, useful only to serve the tsar at the outer limits of the empire.

In part II of this volume, “A People Finds Its Voice: Maksymovych and Shevchenko,” we examine the initial phase of the nineteenth-century Ukrainian national awakening. We begin (chapter 4) with the historian, folklorist, literary scholar, and biologist Mykhailo Maksymovych (1804­1873). Although biology was Maksymovych's first calling, and the German philosopher F.W.J. Schelling's idealistic “nature philosophy” his main in­terest, he soon picked up the early Romantic fascination with folklore and language.

Chapter 5 turns to the national poet, Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), whom Maksymovych greatly admired. Although Shevchenko knew Russia well, he looked back to a time when his beloved homeland was inhabited by free Cossacks, beholden to no one, and he could also see the firm Mus­lim resistance in the Northern Caucasus to Russian imperial culture, and sympathized with it. In his great poem “Kavkaz” (The Caucasus, 1845) - first circulated in manuscript form to avoid censors and finally printed in Leipzig in 1859 - he revealed himself a local Ukrainian patriot, but also a fi­ery opponent of Russian imperialism in general. Scholars of his work would probably agree on his being revolutionary - but perhaps not on whether he favoured “national” or “social” revolution. His simultaneously “national” and “international” poem “Kavkaz,” treated in this chapter, is a centrepiece of this book.²⁷

Part III, “From Paris to Verkhivnia and the Sich: The French Connection,” deals with the French writers Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) and Prosper Merimee (1803-1870). The former, as we saw above, had close personal relations with Ukraine, and he married a rich Polish aristocrat from the right bank (west of the Dnieper), where Poles held most of the land and Ukrainian peasants worked it. Balzac actually lived with her in Ukraine for much of the last two years of his life, but took sick while there and re­turned to Paris, where he died. Prosper Merimee, however, never visited the country but knew its history and ethnic and national composition much better than did Balzac. He was especially fascinated by those soldiers of the steppes called “Cossacks,” and he wrote a major French-language biography of their hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky (c. 1595-1657). Yet neither Balzac nor Merimee seems even to have heard of Taras Shevchenko, who was their contemporary and already famous.²⁸

Part IV of the current volume - “Contested Canvases: Rembrandt's ‘Polish Rider' and Repin's Satirical Cossacks” - consists of two chapters on art history. The first deals with Rembrandt's mysterious painting The Polish Rider (c. 1655), which today hangs in the Frick Collection in New York. The chapter explores the rider's identity and points to some intriguing Ukrainian connections. The figure, originally thought “a Cossack Rider,” most likely was of “Ruthenian” origin from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. But “Ruthenian” and “Polish” had different meanings in that era, which forms the thrust of the chapter. I also mention the theory espoused by some modern-day Ukrainians that the model was Ivan Mazepa, who was in Holland roughly when the picture was painted.

Chapter 9 treats Ilya Repin's great 1891 painting of the Zaporozhian Cossacks responding to the Ottoman sultan. During his lifetime and since, Repin has been Russia's most beloved painter, and this was his masterpiece. Its influence was enormous, and it has provoked endless interpretations. This chapter zeroes in on the era's conflict between realism and the avant- guarde and on the famous nineteenth-century debate over the nature and meaning of Orientalist painting and “Oriental” studies, especially relating to Islam and the Middle East. It also addresses the historicity of the event depicted and the historical interaction of Islam and Christianity, starting with the sultan's letter to the Cossacks, precedents for which date back perhaps to the Prophet Mohammed himself.²⁹

The book ends with three appendices. The first concerns the varying meanings of Saqaliba (Slavonic peoples) in the medieval Muslim world. The second looks at philology - words of eastern or “oriental” provenance in modern Ukrainian. It treats such basic loan-words and concepts as Boh, or Bog (God), in the various Slavonic languages, and khata, a small house or “peasant cottage,” in Ukrainian and Belarusan, as well as rather obscure (to Westerners) artefacts such as the kobza, a stringed musical instrument widely used by blind and elderly nineteenth-century itinerant folk musicians, and then popularized by the fiery poetry of Shevchenko, who took inspiration from such folk artists. That poet's ideas about Islam and Muslims in general form the third appendix.³⁰