Shevchenko, Shamil, and Echoes of the Caucasian War
Russian and Soviet accounts of Caucasian history could not ignore Shamil and his anti-Russian struggles but played them down, anxious to avoid furthering ethnic or national tensions.
From the explosive, decentralizing conflicts of the Revolutions of 1917-21, through the time of partially re-asserted central control and more guarded sympathies and “liberation struggles” of the 1920s, Soviet accounts passed to an officially sanctioned “Great Friendship of Peoples” under Russian leadership of Stalin's time and later, playing down or denying anti-Russian efforts.35 And the Russian/ Soviet authors of such accounts, and their Western counterparts, were duly impressed by the great empire's power, prestige, and culture and its dominant language and literature. Russian authors often noted the major Russian figures who wrote about the Caucasus and at times even acknowledged the continuing sufferings and oppression of its peoples. So mention of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tolstoy seemed to be de rigueur.But, despite their affection for the mountaineers, none of these icons, not even the sympathetic Tolstoy, went so far as Shevchenko. In his prose, Pushkin acknowledged Russian devastation, but not in his poetry, which exalted even the ogre Yermolov; while Lermontov lauded “the fearsome new Rome, which decorates the north with a new Augustus.” And Tolstoy, of course, though a severe critic of the Russian state and its official religion, who painted a very positive picture of Shamil's lieutenant, Hadji Murat, never sanctioned the violence of those Muslim fighters in Chechnya, Dagestan, and Circassia, although he knew them much better than did either Pushkin or Lermontov, but tried only to understand and depict the ferocious conflict. None of those Russian writers displayed the outraged anger and fiery invective of the Ukrainian Shevchenko and so clearly took the rebel side.
Zerov explains the difference as one between the pampered aristocrats and nobles, Pushkin and the others, and Shevchenko, the son of a serf, born into serfdom, who saw violence and oppression all around him and cried out in protest.36Shevchenko's most recent biographer, Ivan Dziuba, who during Soviet days wrote the influential samizdat tract Internationalism or Russification, which argued for preserving Ukrainian culture in a tolerant socialist society, reiterated this point many times in writing on Shevchenko, postulating the poet's “internationalist” sympathies and position in this regard. In 2016 he noted that in 1930, just before Stalin's ascendancy, the Georgian writer Constantine Gamsakhurdia openly praised Shevchenko's spirited opposition to “the barbaric expansion of the Romanovs” and “greeted as brothers” the North Caucasus rebels.37 Certainly, Shevchenko had a very profound effect on Akaki Tsereteli (1840-1915), the young Georgian student at St Petersburg University, whom he met in the spring of 1860 at one of his old friends Mykola Kostomarov's famous Thursday-evening parties. The three men discussed religious history, and Shevchenko suggested that Georgians and Ukrainians had a great deal in common. Tsereteli remembered that meeting and, when he became one of his country's great poets, acknowledged that he had learned much about national patriotism from the Ukrainian poet.38
But such international, or cosmopolitan ties between the southern nations are little known outside of Ukraine, Georgia, and even Russia. Western and non-Russian accounts of the Caucasian Wars, which followed the reports of Russian or Soviet historians, like those of Baddeley, Shauket Mufti, and others, do not even mention Shevchenko. They only paraphrase or mention Pushkin and Lermontov, and Mufti credits especially Tolstoy, who wrote so movingly about Hadji Murat, Shamil's lieutenant.39 Whether they did this out of respect for Russian culture - and/or because they knew some Russian, but not Ukrainian language or culture, is unclear.40
Certainly, during the Cold War both Soviet Ukrainians (when allowed to) and Ukrainians living in western Europe, the United States, and especially Canada did their best to make Shevchenko better known, especially in English.
But few of Shevchenko's major works, maybe just “Kavkaz,” can be read usefully in translation without extensive annotation, which affects the reader's response. Such annotations were never done, despite several renderings into English, some of them quite good.41Indeed, even in Soviet Ukrainian editions of Shevchenko's works, scholarly annotation was usually very weak and never mentioned Shamil by name, probably because of censorship. Even Yu.O. Ivankin's very detailed, booklength Soviet commentary to Shevchenko's poetry collection Kobzar (The Blind Minstrel, or The Kobza Player, 1840) referred to Shamil only once, in passing.42 Until recently, only Leonid Biletsky's profusely annotated emigre, and fiercely anti-Russian Ukrainian-language edition spoke of Shamil.43
But if Shevchenko was the universalist and internationalist that biographer Ivan Dziuba made him out to be, then why did the West ignore him, unlike Pushkin and the others? Perhaps Ukrainian affairs have never mattered much here? But at least during the Cold War, human rights mattered, and today still do. Indeed, was Shevchenko so narrowly anti-Russian, only a Ukrainian patriot, that his angry verses repelled foreigners? At any rate, from the 1950s to the 2000s, both Westerners with democratic sympathies and Caucasian patriots generally ignored “Kavkaz.” For example, a recent, strongly anti-Russian and pro-Chechen encyclopaedia of the Russian- Chechen conflict covers Pushkin, but ignores Shevchenko. Is it that this is because Ukrainian is little-known abroad, unlike Russian?44