The Origins of “The Caucasus”
Shevchenko had heard something of the Caucasian War years before he wrote “The Caucasus” (Kavkaz). While he was studying in St Petersburg, it was a huge story, much in the newspapers - Russia's principal military engagement after it suppressed the Polish Uprising of 1830-31.24 In the early 1840s, Shevchenko met Yakiv H.
Kukharenko (1800-1862), lieutenant-colonel of the Kuban Cossack Army, defending the empire's southern flank against Circassian incursions in the Kuban and the western foothills of the Caucasus. Kukharenko was an amateur historian, ethnographer, and writer, already in contact with the historian Mykola Kostomarov and the Kharkiv circle of Ukrainian Romantic writers, who were also very interested in Cossack history, especially in the Zaporozhian ancestors of the Kuban Cossacks.25Shevchenko became friends with Kukharenko immediately. One of his first letters to the colonel, dated early 1843, discusses ethnographic matters and a manuscript of Kukharenko's.26 Many years later, before Shevchenko was returning home from central Asian exile, the now majorgeneral wrote him on 8 August 1857: “Free yourself, dear friend, and come to our Cossack Ukraine!” But for some reason the poet decided on a more northern route instead. 27
Their surviving correspondence never mentions Shamil, but in the early 1840s Kukharenko may well have told his new friend about the Caucasian resistance.28 In October 1845, the poet's good friend O.S. Afanasiev-Chuzh- bynsky returned from the Caucasus and Transcaucasia, and Shevchenko questioned him closely about his impressions, as his interlocutor recorded in his memories of the poet. Thus Shevchenko must already have known something of Shamil, or his struggle, before he completed “Kavkaz” on 18 November 1845.29
If Shevchenko's poem offers few details of the Caucasian War, it is strong on its main drift and the merciless behaviour of both parties.
But it places no hint of blame on those mountaineers, or on their unnamed leader. All of the poet's outrage is directed against rapacious Imperial Russia and its tsar, whom he held responsible for the terrible injustice inflicted on the freedom-loving mountaineers and his unfortunate friend.“In its fundamentals,” wrote the “Soviet” Ukrainian literary historian Mykola Zerov in the relatively liberal 1920s, “[the poem] is a romantic synthesis of nature and culture.” His masterly summary of “Zavkaz” stresses Shevchenko's use of Prometheus, who pitied mankind and stole fire from the Gods for its use, but whom Zeus then tied to a rock high in the Caucasus with an eagle forever tearing at his flesh:
The kindly, soft-spoken, warm-hearted but wild [dykuny] Caucasians are symbolized in the person of the Titan Prometheus, who was once tortured on these “blue mountains” “nestled in the clouds.” Russian imperialism with its strong state organization, with its entire system of religious and political ideas, which sanctioned its attacks on those knights of the Caucasus Mountains, is symbolized by the eagle, which tears at his breast. Moral corruption and political hypocrisy enter the Caucasus together with the Russian Army. The most naked pillage is excused by Christian dogma. Sarcastic barbs like “From the Moldavian to the Finn...” follow one another in the poem with elevated pathos: (“For whom were you crucified, Christ, oh Son of God?”), and the poem ends with breaks in the tempo and a gentle, highly intimate lyricism (“and you, my dear and only friend have been driven to this”).30
The intensity of Shevchenko's attack (one of several over the years) on the pseudo-benevolence of the all-powerful tsar,31 and on the pseudo-Christian hypocrisy of the Russian imperial ideology, seems even more ferocious and timely while those Russians were attempting to destroy a Muslim culture and people, itself in the midst of its own religious revival.32
Nevertheless, after some time chained to those rocks with those eagles tearing at his flesh, Prometheus was eventually freed by Hercules.
So even in this tortured symbolism, all was not yet lost. The central part of the poem was not given to weeping and despair, unlike the biblical epigram from Jeremiah at the start, but was rather a ringing call to arms:I vam slava, syni hory,
Kryhoiu okruti.
I vam, lytsari velyki, Bohom ne zabuti!
Boritesia - poborete, Vam Boh pomahaie!
Za vas pravda, za vas slava
I volia sviataia!
In my humble translation, which hardly does justice to the piece, these lines read:
And glory, mountains blue, to you,
In blocks of frost encased!
And glory, freedom's knights to you,
Whom God will not erase!
Keep fighting - you are sure to win!
God aids you in your fight!
Your fame and freedom grow not thin
And on your side is right!33
Such was the power of these ringing words in the vernacular Ukrainian that in the 1920s historian and political leader Mykhailo Hrushevsky made from them the motto and title of his emigre journal Boritesia poborete! (Fight and you will win!). The 1960s Ukrainian dissident poet Vasyl Symonenko likewise made them the motto of his stirring poem Kurdskomu bratovi (To a Kurdish Brother) at a time when the Kurds were under siege from occupying powers in mountainous Kurdistan. These words constituted the most important part of the first poem by Shevchenko ever translated into
English, in 1868 in the Alaska Herald, and were quietly omitted from the first collection of Shevchenko's poetry published in 1939 in the Chechen autonomous region of the ussr, although other of his revolutionary verses, such as his Son (The Dream) did appear.34