The Building Blocks of National Identity

Although the evolving intelligentsia emerged from among educated bureaucrats and nobles, it did not fit in well with the imperial elite, which had little interest in new ideas or independent thinking.

The impact of Western ideas strengthened this inclination. Herder’s notions and their ready acceptance in Eastern Europe were a case in point. In the early 19th century, the German philosopher’s adulation of peasant culture dovetailed with the spreading influences of Western Romanticism. In many ways, Romanticism was an intellectual revolt against the Enlightenment of the 18th century. The Enlightenment, which molded the thinking of the Habsburg and Russian empire-builders, stressed rationality, uniformity, universality, and order. In contrast, Romanticism, which captured the imagination of the new East European intelligentsia, glorified emotion, spontaneity, diversity, and nature. And in drawing attention to the unique features of the world’s various peoples “in their natural state and habitats,” the ideas of Herder and the Romantics gave rise to the concept of national characteristics and provided thereby the means for defining nationhood.

In establishing the elements of national identity, the Ukrainian intelligentsia, like others in Eastern Europe, focused on such unique features of their ethnic group as their history, folklore, language, and literature. Of course, when Ukrainian intellectuals first embarked on their studies of these fields, they did not have a grand, predetermined plan of creating a Ukrainian national identity. If asked why they were drawn to such seemingly esoteric pursuits as the collection of old documents and rare folk songs or the emulation of peasant speech, many intellectuals would probably describe their activities as little more than a hobby encouraged by local patriotism or a nostalgic affection for a disappearing world.

The road to national consciousness was paved with books. They were the storehouses in which information about Ukrainian culture was collected. Simultaneously they served as the means for the dissemination of this information among literate Ukrainians. Furthermore, in the process of writing these books, the intelligentsia developed and refined the Ukrainian language, the one element that was most effective in creating a feeling of fraternity among all Ukrainians. For this reason literary works loom large in the early history of Ukrainian nation-building. The re-creation of a national history

In the growth of national consciousness throughout the world, the study of national history has always played a crucial role. In achieving a new sense of community, it was necessary for a people to believe that it had shared a common fate. Moreover, this shared historical experience should be perceived as a glorious one that instilled in individuals a sense of pride and encouraged them to identify with their nation. As important as a glorious past was an ancient past. An extended history gave people a sense of continuity, a feeling that the current sad state of their nation was but a passing phase. A glorious and ancient past was also useful in rebutting the arguments of numerous skeptics who claimed that a given nation never existed, that it was a new, artificial creation (hence nationalist writers in Eastern Europe preferred to speak of a national rebirth or renaissance). Because national histories fulfilled these functions, it is not suprising that among Ukrainians, as well as other peoples, it was historians who were in the forefront of the nation-building process.

By the late 18th century, there were signs that interest in history, especially that of the Cossacks, was growing among the gentry-intelligentsia of the Left Bank.

But the motives of some of these amateurs were not only altruistic. In approximately 1800, the Imperial Heraldic Office began to question the right of the descendants of the starshyna to noble status because, in the words of a Russian bureaucrat, “In Little Russia there was never a genuine nobility.”² As a wave of indignation and protest swept through the Ukrainian elite, some of its members, such as Roman Markovych, Timofei Kalynsky, Vasyl Chernysh, Adrian Chepa, Vasyl Poletyka, and Fedir Tumansky, took to collecting historical documents. And, between 1801 and 1808, they wrote a series of essays attesting to the glorious deeds and high status of their forefathers. After the controversy was resolved in the 1830s in favor of most Ukrainians, some of the Left Bank nobles retained their interest in the history of their land and encouraged further historical studies.

Because the early historians were untrained dilettantes, the need for a more sophisticated, well-researched history of Ukraine soon became apparent. In 1822, Dmytro Bantysh-Kamensky (a Moscow-born and educated son of an archivist and secretary of Prince Repnin, the governor-general of the Left Bank) completed his thoroughly documented and very popular four-volume history, “A History of Little Russia.” The appeal of Bantysh-Kamensky’s work to the Ukrainian elite lay not only in its professionalism but also in its interpretation of the Ukrainian past.

A very different work from those mentioned above was the Istoriia Rusov (“History of the Rus’”). An air of mystery surrounds this extremely influential historical tract. Neither the place nor the date it was written is known. Historians can only deduce that it probably appeared in the first decade of the 19th century, somewhere in the Novhorod-Siverskyi region of the Hetmanate. For decades the Istoriia Rusov remained unpublished, circulating widely but surreptitiously among the Left-Bank gentry. Only in 1846 did it apear in print. Even the most painstaking and detailed historical detective work has failed to identify the author conclusively, although specialists have narrowed the circle of possible authors to such members of the gentry-intelligentsia as Hryhor Poletyka and his son Vasyl, as well as Opanas Lobosevych and Oleksander Bezborodko.

Why the mystery? Apparently it is because of the dangerously inflammatory tone of the Istoriia Rusov, which was actually more of a political tract than a scholarly history. The work unabashedly glorified and romanticized the Cossack past, and although the author did not advocate outright independence for Ukraine, he did view Ukrainians as a people separate from the Russians and called for some form of self-government. His heroes were Khmelnytsky and, significantly, the recalcitrant Polubutok who stood up to Peter I. He also argued that it was Ukraine and not Russia that had a primary claim to the heritage of Kievan Rus’. Although the author portrayed the Poles as the Ukrainians’ worst enemies, a subtle note of anti-Russianism also permeates the work.

But while the Istoriia Rusov brims with national pride, it is not based on narrow ethnocentrism. The author contends that truth and justice are the cornerstones of any political system and the defense of life, liberty, and property are the inalienable rights of all individuals. Even more radical is the work’s argument that no government can rest on tyranny and serfdom. Thus, on the one hand, the work’s colorful (if not always accurate) depiction of the Cossacks heightened interest in the Ukrainian past, and on the other hand, it raised questions about Ukraine’s place in the present political order. Consequently, with the appearance of the Istoriia Rusov the study of Ukrainian history began to have an ideological and political significance. The glorification of folklore

Another absorbing and widespread activity among the early Ukrainian gentry-intelligentsia was the study of folklore. This new interest in the customs, traditions, and songs of the peasants was in striking contrast to the past, when educated elites had always insisted on maintaining a gap between their own culture and that of the masses. Again, it was Herder’s ideas, which slowly seeped into Ukraine, that sparked the Ukrainian intelligentsia’s interest in native culture.

In Herder’s view, the chief prerequisite for a vibrant, creative culture was naturalness. Unfortunately, in his estimation, the cultural activity of late 18th-century Europe was dominated by cosmopolitan, imitative courts and nobilities that readily adoped foreign languages, manners, and values, thus creating an atmosphere that stifled the expression of a people’s unique cultural characteristics. The solution, Herder argued, was to reject the artificial “high culture” and turn for fresh sources of inspiration and modes of expression to the unspoiled, authentic, and organic culture of the common people.

In the early decades of the 19th century, many young intellectuals tramped throught the countryside in order to discover, collect, and, later, to publish these pearls of folk wisdom and creativity. For example, the noted Ukrainian historian Kostomarov recalled how in his youth he “went off on ethnographic expeditions to the villages around Kharkiv… listened to the tales and discussions, noted down interesting words and phrases, entered into conversations, questioned people about their lives, and asked them to sing their songs.”⁴

Because Ukrainians were largely a peasant people, one of their most appealing features was a rich, vibrant folklore. Herder himself was so smitten by the beauty of this folklore that he declared, “Ukraine will become another Greece: the beautiful sky, the gay spirit of the people, their natural musical gifts, and their fertile land will arise one day!”⁵ Even Poland’s greatest poet, Adam Mickiewicz, acknowledged that Ukrainians were the “most poetical and musical people among the Slavs.”⁶ It is not surprising, therefore, that ethnographic studies soon became all the rage among the Left-Bank intelligentsia.

Among the early enthusiasts of Ukrainian folklore was Prince Nikolai Tsertelev. Although of Georgian origin and Russian education, Tsertelev grew up in Ukraine and developed a deep attachment to its people. In 1819, he published in St Petersburg his “An Attempt at a Collection of Ancient Little Russian Songs.” In the preface, Tsertelev noted that the songs would demonstrate “the genius and spirit of the people, the customs of the times, and, finally, the pure moral quality for which the Little Russians have always been known.”⁷ A much more comprehensive and systematic study on Ukrainian ethnography entitled “The Little Russian Folk Songs” was completed in 1827 by Mykhailo Maksymovych, a Ukrainian of Cossack background who became a professor at Moscow University and, in 1834, the first rector of the new university in Kiev. Another Ukrainian professor at Moscow University, Osyp Bodiansky, had devoted his master’s dissertation (completed in 1837) to a comparison between Russian and Ukrainian folk songs. With typically Romantic exaggeration, he contrasted the supposedly despondent, submissive tone of the songs of the Russian north with the dramatic, vivacious melodies of the Ukrainian south. “How different is the north from the south,” wrote Bodiansky, “and how different are the peoples who live there.”⁸

Besides helping to draw distinctions between Ukrainians and their neighbors, the seemingly harmless study of folklore soon affected the intelligentsia in other ways. Observing everyday life in the village, members of the intelligentsia not only saw colorful customs, but also came face to face with the merciless exploitation of the peasantry. Initially they were too absorbed by their idealistic search for universal truths and uniquely Ukrainian characteristics to draw broader conclusions about the socioeconomic plight of the peasantry. However, eventually some of them concluded that they could no longer simply observe the hapless peasants but that something had to be done to help them. Language: the common link

According to Herder, language is the most important component of nationality: “Has a nationality anything dearer than the speech of its fathers? In its speech resides its whole intellectual domain, its traditions, its history, religion and basis of life, all its heart and soul. To deprive a people of its speech is to deprive it of its one eternal good.”⁹ But the function of language in the development of national consciousness is even broader than that sketched by the German philosopher. Language establishes most effectively the “natural” limits of a nationality. It distinguishes between native and alien. It binds together various classes and regions. Modern social scientists have argued that not only does a language facilitate communication among its speakers, but – because it constitutes a unique system of perceiving and expressing a particular people’s view of the world – it also allows them to understand each other on a deeper, subconscious level.

Given the central importance of language to the nation-building process, it would only be a matter of time before the Ukrainian intelligentsia attempted to transform the vernacular (that is, the spoken language) of the common people into the primary means of self-expression of all Ukrainians. Only by doing so could a common bond be established between the elite and the masses and the basis laid for a shared identity. At the outset, however, this transformation seemed to be an unattainable goal. Compared to prestigious and cultivated languages such as French, German, and, increasingly, Russian, the spoken language of the untutored Ukrainian peasant appeared crude and of limited application. Ukrainian nobles would use the language only to discuss simple and mundane domestic matters with their peasants. Among the educated, the view prevailed that as peasants had little to say of importance and as their way of saying it was crude anyway, it was pointless to raise peasant speech to the level of a literary language. Moreover, because Ukrainian was closely related to Russian, many members of the intelligentsia argued that Ukrainian was not a distinct language but merely a dialect of Russian.

Nevertheless, despite these daunting obstacles, some members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia attempted to refine and uplift the vernacular. But even these pioneers initially had doubts about the viability of their undertaking and they approached the task only as a curious literary experiment. An example was Ivan Kotliarevsky’s Eneida, the first work ever written in the language of the Ukrainian peasants and townsmen. Its appearance in 1798 marked the advent of Ukrainian as a literary language and of modern Ukrainian literature as well.

Significantly enough, the Eneida was a travesty, a burlesque poem. Based on the famous Aeneid by the Latin poet Virgil, it portrayed the ancient Greek heroes and Olympian gods as rollicking Cossacks and lusty village maidens who spoke in the pithy and colorful Ukrainian vernacular. Kotliarevsky, a tsarist official and himself the son of a minor Cossack officer, liked to mix with the Ukrainian peasants, note down their customs, and listen to their speech and songs. At first, he did not believe that his linguistic experiment was worthy of publication. Only the urging of his friends persuaded him to publish the Eneida, which to his surprise enjoyed instant success among the Left Bank gentry. However, even then Kotliarevsky did not realize that his work represented a linguistic and literary turning point. It merely proved to him that Ukrainian, a language that he loved and in which he continued to write, could be used effectively for comic effect. But he retained his doubts about its usefulness in “serious” literature.

Similarly tentative were the efforts of Oleksii Pavlovsky, who wrote a “Grammar of the Little Russian Dialect” in 1818. The author’s attitude toward the Ukrainian language was ambivalent, for although he wished to refine it, he still regarded it as a dialect of Russian. But Pavlovsky’s achievement, like that of Ivan Voitsekhovych, who in 1823 compiled a small dictionary of Ukrainian, was significant. Literature: the enrichment of Ukrainian national culture

The ultimate test of the viability of the Ukrainian language resided in the quality and range of the literature produced in it. Kotliarevsky earned the epithet “father of modern Ukrainian literature” not just because he was the first to write in the Ukrainian vernacular, but also because his Eneida was of high literary merit. His success, however, encouraged a host of feeble imitations of his classic, temporarily impeding the development of other genres. For a time, it appeared that written Ukrainian would be used exclusively in jocular, folksy, regionalistic burlesques rather than in “serious” literary productions.

Much of the credit for expanding the range of literary expression in Ukrainian belongs to the Kharkiv Romantics, as they were called. Most of these writers were based in Sloboda Ukraine and were associated with the newly founded Kharkiv University. In the 1820s and 1830s, this easternmost of ethnic Ukrainian lands took its turn in playing the leading role in Ukrainian cultural development.

It was allegedly a wager between Petro Hulak Artemovsky (the son of a priest and rector of Kharkiv University) and Hryhorii Kvitka Osnovianenko (the scion of a prominent Cossack family) that hastened the development of Ukrainian prose. Hulak, who had a strong affinity for Ukrainian and experimented with it in literature, was convinced that its future was dim: “The thought that perhaps the time is near when not only traces of Little Russian customs and antiquity will disappear forever, but also the language itself will merge with the huge river of the mighty, dominant Russian language and will not leave any trace of its existence, plunges me into such melancholy that there are moments when I feel like renouncing all my ambitions and going away to the peaceful refuge of the simple villager in order to catch the last sounds of the native tongue which is dying every day.”¹⁰

Because the Ukrainian nobles were abandoning Ukrainian for Russian and it was only the villagers who spoke it, Hulak argued that the language could not be used to produce serious literature. Kvitka disagreed with him and resolved to prove his point. In 1834, he wrote his “Little Russian Stories by Hrytsko Osnovianenko.” These sad, sentimental tales were well received and the astute Osyp Bodiansky quickly proclaimed that they heralded the beginning of Ukrainian prose writing.

Levko Borovykovsky, another Kharkiv writer, further expanded the range of Ukrainian literary genres by composing ballads in Ukrainian. The favorite, indeed almost exclusive, theme of the Kharkiv writers was Cossack Ukraine, which was portrayed in typical Romantic fashion as a sad echo of the glorious past. These mournful ruminations about the past were epitomized by Ambrozii Metlynsky, a professor of Russian literature at Kharkiv University, whose own collections of Ukrainian poetry and translations he characterized as “the work of the last bandurist who passes on the song of the past in a dying language.”¹¹

A myriad of other, minor writers in Kharkiv also contributed to the growth of Ukrainian prose and poetry. Surprisingly, the moving spirit behind much of this literary activity was a Russian – Izmail Sreznevsky – who later became one of Russia’s leading philologists. However, the contributions of this fervent convert to things Ukrainian were more on the organizational than on the literary level. Sreznevsky’s multivolume anthologies of Ukrainian literature, entitled “Zaporozhian Antiquities” and “Ukrainian Anthology,” represented an attempt to address the serious problem of the lack of a suitable forum for Ukrainian writers. The only regularly published journals on the Left Bank, the “Ukrainian Herald” and the “Ukrainian Journal,” appeared in Kharkiv in the 1830s, mostly in Russian. Little more than a potpourri of local news, travelogues, ethnographic materials, and some literary works, these journals had a small readership, numbering only several hundred.

To reach a broader and more sophisticated audience, Ukrainian writers often turned to Russian journals published in St Petersburg and Moscow. Many of these, especially the more conservative, were quite willing to publish Ukrainian stories, even those written in Ukrainian. In fact, among Russian Romantic writers of the 1820s and 1830s, there existed something of a vogue for things Ukrainian. To many Russians, the turbulent history and rich folklore of the land evoked fascinating, exotic images, not the least of which was that of Ukraine as a “wild frontier.” But although they acknowledged its distinctiveness, they considered Ukraine to be an integral part of Russia and viewed the promotion of Ukrainian “regional” literature merely as an enrichment of general Russian culture. A similar fascination with Ukraine existed among some Polish writers of the time, such as Antoni Malczewski, Bogdan Zaleski, and Seweryn Goszczynski, who formed the so-called Ukrainian School in Polish Romantic literature. They, for their part, viewed Ukraine as part of Poland’s historical and cultural heritage.

Thus, despite the progress in Ukrainian literature and scholarship, the intelligentsia of the early 19th century continued to regard Ukraine and Ukrainians in “regionalist” terms. It did not as yet believe that Ukrainian culture could ever develop to the point of displacing Russian cultural dominance in Ukraine. Like their Russian colleagues in St Petersburg and Moscow, Ukrainian literati were convinced that, in cultivating things Ukrainian, they were also enriching the cultural heritage of Russia as a whole. Yet, their work and their efforts would have ramifications that neither Ukrainians nor Russians could foresee. These have been lucidly summarized by George Luckyj: “If one assumes that these early Ukrainian historical and folkloristic researches are the first stirrings of modern Ukrainian consciousness, one must conclude that they provided it with a firm foundation. For what can be more urgent to the needs of an emerging nation than to find its historical origins and its cultural distinctiveness? For the time being, Ukrainians were busy doing just this and discovering thereby their basic identity.”¹²