Paris-Verkhivnia-Paris (1848-50)
In January 1848, Balzac “very sadly” left his Ukrainian dreamland for France and his literary obligations and creditors. The next month, early in Europe's year of revolution, Louis Philippe was overthrown, and a new French republic declared.
Balzac predicted its quick demise, but he was upset with these events and the complications for his work. He fled back to Ukraine just as soon as he could obtain a visa. The tsar, by now very suspicious of Frenchmen, granted it, but noted in the margins of the request: “Yes, yes, but under strict surveillance.” On 20 September 1848, the besieged writer again departed for Ukraine.19This time he traveled a bit more slowly, and after crossing the border into the Russian Empire, stopped at Vyshnevets, the great castle/palace complex that was the pride of the Mniszech estate in Podolia. The castle had been built in the seventeenth century and renovated several times by the famous Vyshnevetsky family, which had included Dmytro Ivanovych Vysh- nevetsky, who became the legendary Cossack hetman Baida (d. 1653), and Poland's King Michael I Wisniowecki (reigned 1669-73) - “the Ruthenian king,” as some have called him. At this time, Balzac dreamed up the idea of using Ukrainian lumber from the Mniszech estates to export to France, which was desperate for railway ties. But, as usual for Balzac, this project never took off. The writer continued eastward and by 2 October had arrived at Verkhivnia.
Balzac settled in quite well, expecting to write a great deal, trapped, as it were, by the snow and ice of the long Ukrainian winter. He was, of course, well-liked by Anna and Georges, but also by the household servants, who found him “wise” and “considerate.” He missed his Parisian cuisine, but soon grew to like the local tea blends and the food products made from millet, buckwheat, oats, barley, and even tree-bark.
(Ukrainians traditionally made excellent sherbet from poplar sap; and kasha, or buckwheat porridge, has long been a staple.) Balzac was treated as the “old man of the family,” surrounded by respect and affection. “The domestic who serves me here was recently married,” he wrote his sister in France, “and he and his wife came to pay their respects to their masters. The woman and man actually lie down flat on their stomachs, touch the floor three times with their heads, and kiss your feet.” The Frenchman's conclusion: they really knew how to do things right in “Russia”!20Alhough word eventually came that he would be permitted to wed Eve, Balzac's health took a sharp turn for the worse that winter. It had been bad for years, constantly aggravated by late hours, overwork, and too much coffee. His heart was ailing, and now he caught a terrible cold. It seemed that life was finally beginning to drain from him, he who had always been so strong. By springtime, Eve, seeing the writing on the wall, finally had mercy on him and agreed to marry. On 14 March 1850, they wed at a small ceremony in the Church of St Barbara in Berdychiv. Both of them fell sick on the way back to Verkhivnia.
She quickly recovered. But he did not. He blamed the Ukrainian winter for his illness, which the local physicians could not cure, and decided to return to Paris, to a house he had bought and furnished with his wife's Ukrainian money, but the trip to France only aggravated his condition, and everyone soon knew that he was dying. He passed away in Paris on 15 August 1850, in his debt-ridden house, filled with expensive art and artefacts from all over Europe, and the large print of Verkhivnia, given to him so many years before by Hanski, still hung prominently on the wall. Balzac had never ceased to dream of that paradise on earth he called “Ukraine,” but of which he really knew, or chose to know, so little.
At his graveside, Balzac's friend Victor Hugo pronounced a funeral oration, which stressed the nation's unity in mourning at his passing.
But Marxist literary historians, both then and now, have seen the French writer's life as filled with what they call “contradictions.” Political of course: a reactionary and supporter of absolute monarchy whose writings battereddown the falsehoods and exposed the injustices of bourgeois French society, and so fulfilled a “progressive” function. As a result, through much of Soviet history, Balzac was frequently translated into Russian, printed and reprinted, and widely read by Russians and Ukrainians. During periods of political thaw, Ukrainian translations also appeared, also consumed widely.21
However, the non-Marxist historian may take this point about “contradictions” beyond economics and politics, and see the great irony of the foremost founder of “realist” European literature, who was totally “unrealistic” in his personal life. He remained to the end an unthinking child in his finances, a hare-brained businessman always concocting disastrous new schemes, a sociologist who could not see the forest for the trees, a lover who strove always for the unreachable, the forbidden, and the distant, and last of all, a dreamer, who saw paradise where it was not. He was, in fact, no realist in life, but rather a hopeless romantic, and the tragedy of his biography was fully revealed by his late marriage and early death, just returned from a dreamland that bore no relation whatsoever to reality. The terrible revolutions and wars that consumed that dreamland in the century following his death proved it beyond any possible doubt.
As to Ukrainian attitudes towards the French writer, these remain divided. Although Ukrainian historians tend to admit his towering role in European literature, they obviously dislike some of his attitudes towards their homeland and his ignorance of its history. For example, the leftleaning emigre in France Ilko Borshchak, put off by Balzac's “miserly” notes on Ukraine, in contrast to Hugo and Merimee's more sympathetic and substantial contributions, only grudgingly admited his greatness.22 And D.S.
Nalyvaiko, though still constrained by Soviet censors on the very threshold of the Gorbachev reforms, compared him to Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Gorky, and called for a complete Ukrainian- language edition of his works, which was never done. Nalyvaiko argued that what Tolstoy was for Lenin, Balzac was for Marx.23 Most troubling for Ukrainians seems to be not just Balzac's ignorance of Ukrainian culture and history, but his extreme views on class and empire, although, of course, they could not openly say that until 1991.Verkhivnia today is a school of agronomy in an independent and democratic Ukraine, where the great-grandchildren of serfs study in the halls and parlours where Honore de Balzac and Ewelina Hanska once walked and sat, discussed literature, and sipped birch juice. It is said that in 1917 the last private owner of the estate, still a Rzewuski, seeing the storm of revolutionary destruction all around him, and before fleeing west, beseeched the local peasants not to burn it to the ground. Those simple Ukrainian peasants, so it seems, were far more “civilized” than Balzac ever thought.