The Epoch of the Nobility (to the 1840s)

The beginning of the national renaissance of Ukraine is usually dated from the publication of the travestied Aeneid by Kotliarevsky in 1798. Although the Aeneid was undoubtedly epoch-making in the history of Ukrainian literature, from the viewpoint of the development of national consciousness it is rather an echo of the previous Cossack epoch.

In eastern Ukraine, in the former territory of the Hetmanate (provinces of Chernihiv and Poltava) and of Slobodian Ukraine (province of Kharkiv), the nobility of Cossack origin continued to be the leading class of society through the first half of the nineteenth century. Foreign travel­lers (such as Kohl, a German, in 1841) noted that the Ukrainian nobles were dissatisfied with the existing order and antipathetic toward the Mus­covites. However, this discontent found almost no expression in practical politics, except for such episodes as the secret diplomatic mission of Vasyl Kapnist to Prussia in 1791, certain hopes raised by Napoleon’s in­vasion in 1812, and the participation of Ukrainians in the Decembrist uprising of 1825. A counterpart to these manifestations of active opposi­tion were the occasional attempts (during the Napoleonic War and again during the Polish revolt of 1830-31) to win at least a partial restoration of the old Cossack autonomy through a demonstration of loyalty to the throne and the Empire.

Ukrainian consciousness was expressed much more strongly in the form of an apolitical, cultural “provincialism,” i.e., an attachment to the historical and ethnic particularities of the homeland, but with a passive acceptance of the political and social status quo. This nostalgia for the glorious Cossack past, lost beyond recall, served as the basis for a vigorous movement of historical and antiquarian dilettantism.

During this epoch we find the beginnings of scholarly research into the various fields of Ukrainian studies, particularly that of historiography. The central point of interest of the historiography of the Ukrainian nobles was the military and diplomatic history of the Hetmanate in the seven­teenth and eighteenth centuries. This historiography had a much more outspoken sense of Ukrainian state loyalty than did the “populist” his­toriography of the next generation. But the logic of this conception, which identified the nation with the former political organization of the Cossack class, led to the conviction that the nation must have been ex­tinguished by the demise of the state. The aristocratic authors of the first third of the nineteenth century felt themselves to be epigones who wished to preserve from oblivion the remnants of a Ukraine which no longer ex­isted in reality. In these circles the conviction was widespread that even the Ukrainian language was dying out. In truth this feeling of decadence reflected the situation of the Ukrainian nobility, which was weakened po­litically by the absolutism of Nicholas, economically by the crisis of serf­dom, and morally by its alienation from the people, and was ready to leave the historical stage as an independent force.

The chief importance of the aristocratic period in the formation of Ukrainian consciousness lies in the fact that it preserved the continuity of development between Cossack and modern Ukraine. There were also noteworthy original achievements during this period which were not de­stroyed by the decadence of the nobility and entered into the permanent Ukrainian heritage. We have just mentioned the beginnings of scholarly research into Ukrainian studies. The conception of Ukrainian history elaborated by the aristocratic authors of the first third of the nineteenth

INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF MODERN UKRAINE century had a profound influence on later generations of scholars and on public opinion. The beginnings of a new Ukrainian literature proved even more fruitful. This new literature used the language of the people, unlike Ukrainian literature of previous epochs, which, up to the second half of the eighteenth century (i.e., until the abolition of the Cossack state), preserved Old Church Slavonic as its linguistic base. This new Ukrainian literature, fertilized by the general trend of European pre­Romantic and Romantic poetry toward the “popular” and local colour, at first made no claims to be a national literature or to compete with Rus­sian literature, to the flowering of which many native Ukrainians contrib­uted. The Ukrainian writers of that period were bilingual; they wrote in Ukrainian when addressing the narrower local circle of connoisseurs and in Russian when they wanted the wider audience of the entire educated public of the Empire. Here the linguistic line of division in no way coin­cided with any division in political ideas. In Ukrainian-Ianguage works we often find complete loyalty to the tsar and the Empire. On the other hand, the work which expressed most radically the anti-Russian national opposition, and which had an enormous influence on the development of national consciousness in the first half of the nineteenth century— Istoriia Rusov (History of the Rus’ People)—was written in Russian around 1800.

No less important for the future were the efforts to create a synthesis between Ukrainian patriotic feelings and modern Western political ideas. The great importance of Istoriia Rusov lies in the fact that here, for the first time, the traditional defence of the rights and liberties of the Cos­sacks was fused with European liberalism of the Age of Enlightenment. A similar phenomenon in the next generation was the birth of a program of democratic, federalistic Pan-Slavism developed by the young conspirator-officers in the Society of United Slavs—a particularly Ukrainian brand of the Decembrist movement. However, the Ukrainian Decembrists fell under the direction of Russian revolutionary “Jacobins,” men such as Pestel, and perished without having brought any permanent gain to their homeland. This was a portent of the future. Throughout the nineteenth century, the bleeding of Ukraine by the Rus­sification of its elite continued, not only on the “right” by service in the imperial bureaucracy, but also on the “left” by participation in the all­Russian revolutionary movements.

So far we have spoken chiefly of Left-Bank Ukraine. However, analogous, if less clear-cut, processes were also visible on the Right Bank among the Polish or Polonized nobility. The so-called Ukrainian School in Polish literature corresponded to that of Gogol and other writers of Ukrainian origin in Russia, with exactly the same Romantic enthusiasm for the beauties of the Ukrainian land and the life of its people. Here also there were beginnings of literature in the popular lan­guage. The political ideology of this circle was the idealization of the old Polish Commonwealth as an alleged fraternal union of three nations: Poland, Lithuania, and Rus’-Ukraine.

This can be illustrated by the following examples. Before the ap­pearance of Shevchenko, when the new vernacular Ukrainian literature created by Left-Bank writers was politically rather harmless, it was a Polish-Ukrainian poet, Tymko Padura, who dared to glorify Hetman Mazepa as a great champion of liberty. “Mazepism” had always been, in Russian eyes, the very embodiment of Ukrainian separatism. Another Ukrainian Pole—or should we rather say a “Polish Ukrain­ian”?—Franciszek Duchinski (“de Kiow,” as he signed his French pamphlets), made an important contribution to the formation of modern Ukrainian political thought. Duchinski, an advisor to Prince Adam Czartoryski, the “uncrowned king of the Polish emigration,” formulated the theory that the Great Russians or Muscovites, their language notwith­standing, were not real Slavs, but only superficially Slavicized “Turanians.” The Ukrainians, on the other hand, were genuine Slavs and hence, according to Duchinski, closely related to the Poles. The lat­ter thesis failed to impress Ukrainians, but the former did. Duchinski was not a sound scholar, and his fantastic exaggerations compromised his theory, which nevertheless contained an element of objective truth.

A look at a nineteenth-century political map of Europe shows that, but

INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF MODERN UKRAINE for the Austrian section, all Ukrainian lands were united in the Russian Empire. But this is not the full story. On the Right Bank there was a dominant Polish class. Actually, these noble families were often of Ukrainian descent, having become Polonized through conversion to Roman Catholicism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Polish public opinion was unanimous in claiming not only ethnically Polish ter­ritories, but also all provinces of the historical Polish state in its pre­partition frontiers. Even the Russian authorities, at least before 1830, tacitly recognized Right-Bank Ukraine (and similarly, Belorussia and Lithuania) as a Polish sphere of influence. After the defeat of the 1830 insurrection, the tsarist government proceeded to remove the most glar­ing symbols of Polish ascendancy in the area—e.g., the Kremianets Lyceum, the chief educational center for sons of the Polish gentry in Ukraine, was closed down. But its conservative social outlook and devo­tion to serf-owning interests made it impossible for the regime of Nicholas I to attack the roots of Polish power on the Right Bank.

Thus, for most of the nineteenth century, Ukraine remained a battlefield where Russian and Polish forces clashed. Neither side was ready to give Ukraine a position of equality. Russians and Poles fully agreed—discounting a few exceptions —in rejecting the Ukrainian claim that Ukraine had the right to a free national development of her own. But, as a matter of fact, the Russo-Polish struggle was a retarding factor in the process of assimilating Ukrainians to either neighbour. It pre­vented the Ukrainian problem from becoming fully and exclusively an internal concern of Russia. For instance, during the Crimean War, the Polish-Ukrainian adventurer Michal Czajkowski (Sadyk Pasha) organized in Turkey a Cossack legion against Russia. Between the Russian hammer and the Polish anvil, Ukrainian patriots were forced to define their atti­tude to both their neighbours. This helped to develop an awareness of Ukrainian national identity. The Ukrainian answer to Russian and Polish pressure was formulated theoretically by Mykola Kostomarov, a noted historian and publicist of the ensuing “populist” generation: he defined the Great Russians as pre-eminently despotic, the Poles as aristocratic, and the Ukrainians as a democratic people. Here we see the birth of a Ukrainian ‘ ‘ messianism. ’ ’

The leaders of the Ukrainian movement in the nineteenth century did not separate the cause of their people from that of all of Eastern Europe. They believed that Ukraine had a mission to fulfill. By liberating herself, Ukraine would also help the Russians and Poles throw off the most ob­jectionable traits of their inheritance, and thus secure a better common future for all three peoples. This is the kernel of the federalist idea which, up to 1917, remainedthe very foundation OfUkrainian political thought.