The Ukrainian National Renaissance in Dnieper Ukraine before the 1860s

There was no distinct Ukrainian territorial entity and no effective political activity specifically on behalf of Ukrainians in Dnieper Ukraine during most of the nine­teenth century.

The idea of nationalism

Stated most simply, nationalism is an ideology which divides humanity into nationalities and which argues that the optimal social system is one in which nationalities enjoy cultural and political autonomy or, preferably, complete inde­pendence. As a political ideology, nationalism arose in Europe during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was in many ways a product of the French Revolution, in which the people and not the state or its leading represen­tative, whether king or nobility, were held to be the supreme source of political legitimization. Nationalism also evolved as a reaction to the French Revolution, or, more precisely, to the spread of French dominance throughout Europe, whether in culture or in politics. This was particularly the case in the German lands, where at the beginning of the nineteenth century several writers, reacting to the presence of Napoleon’s soldiers and to the widespread use of the French language and French cultural models by the German elite, began to argue that the German language and culture was at least the equal of the French and so should be accorded respect, if no where else then at least in its own homeland.

What Is a Nationality?

In English, the terms nationality and nation are often used interchangeably. "This usage results in great confusion whenever an effort is made to define what the terms mean. In particular, confusion arises with regard to the rela­tionship between a given people and the state structure in which they live. One must remember that most states both today and in the past have included within their borders peoples of different cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

In this book, the terms nation and nationality are distinguished. Nation (Ukrainian: natsiia) is used to refer to the legal citizens of a given state. Thus, the French nation or the Ukrainian nation refers to all the inhabitants of France or Ukraine who are citizens of those countries regardless of their linguistic or ethnocultural background.

'Fhe term nationality (Ukrainian: narodnost') is used to refer to a group of people (Ukrainian: narod} who'may have one or more of the following observ­able characteristics in common: a distinct territory (possibly but not necessarily statehood), language, historical tradition, religion, social attitudes, and ethno­graphic features. Taken together, these characteristics distinguish members of one nationality from their neighbors. It should be noted that ethnic or ethno­graphic groups (Ukrainian: etnohrafichni hrupy) also may have all or many of these same characteristics in common.

What, then, distinguishes a nationality from an ethnic group? The primary distinguishing feature is not the presence or absence of all or some of the char­acteristics listed above, but rather an awareness among members of a given group of people that they have such common characteristics and that it is these characteristics which distinguish them from neighboring peoples or nationali­ties. In other words, a nationality must have (i) certain objective elements, such as those listed above, in common; and (2) certain subjective elements - a self-perception as belonging and the will to belong to a distinct group.

The number of objective elements in common varies from nationality to nationality. Language, for instance, was thought for a long time to be an essen­tial, even the defining, characteristic of a nationality. This is obviously not the case, since the Brazilians, the Americans, and the Irish arc all distinct peoples or nationalities even though they have never had or have lost a distinct lan­guage. Accordingly, it is possible to identify oneself as of Ukrainian nationality without knowing the Ukrainian language. As for the subjective factor, the awareness that one belongs to a nationality is a learned process passed on through the family and especially through the school system.

Finally, because of the multinational reality of most states in the world, there has arisen the legal concept of the national minority (Ukrainian: natsionaina menshist'). In a real sense, there are no national minorities, only nationalities living in one or more states. Most states, however, have had as their goal to become a nation-state; that is, they have operated on the premise that all the inhabitants within their boundaries belong, or should be made to belong, to a single ‘state’ nationality. Some states have recognized that they rule over several different peoples or nationalities. For legal and constitutional purposes, the non-state nationalities are classified as national minorities.

von Schelling, stressed German cultural uniqueness, but another influential Ger­man, Johann Gottfried Herder, argued that every culture in the world has its own particular worth and value.

According to Herder, a people’s unique cultural values were best expressed in its language. In his Letters Addressed to Humanity, published in 1783, Herder posed what was to become for national enthusiasts an oft-repeated rhetorical question: ‘Has a people anything dearer than the speech of its fathers? In its speech resides its whole thought domain, its tradition, history, religion, and basis of life, all its heart and soul.

As nationalism spread throughout Europe after the French Revolution, its implementation and goals varied from place to place according to political cir­cumstances. There were, in effect, two types of nationalism: (1) state-imposed nationalism, and (2) intelligentsia-inspired nationalism. State-imposed national­ism emanated from above, that is, from governments in already-existing inde­pendent states who hoped to gain the loyalty of their citizens by convincing them that they were united because they apparently belonged to a certain nationality. Intelligentsia-inspired nationalism emanated from groups who lived in multina­tional states where a language, culture, and identity other than their own was dominant, and whose leaders - the nationalist intelligentsia - worked to convince their self-defined constituencies that they formed a distinct national group. As a distinct national group, they deserved cultural and political autonomy if not inde­pendent statehood.

Often it is assumed that the first type, state-imposed nationalism, existed in western Europe, whereas the second, intelligentsia-inspired nationalism, was a phenomenon of eastern, or, more precisely, east-central and eastern, Europe. But the distinction is false: even in the first half of the nineteenth century there were peoples in east-central and eastern Europe - like the Greeks and Serbs - who had independent states simultaneously with or before their intelligentsias were able to work out a common national identity, and there were also states - like the Russian Empire and Austrian Empire - which attempted to create a ‘state nationality’ - an imperial Russian or Austrian nationality - and impose it on its several peoples.

Western Europe also had intelligentsia-inspired nationalism, as among the Irish, or the Frisians, or the Catalans, or, for that matter, the Germans and Italians, all of whom during the first half of the nineteenth century were without their own states but fostered national movements led by intelligentsias whose ultimate goal was cul­tural autonomy and political independence. Conversely, western Europe had states like Norway, or Belgium, or Luxembourg, where political independence preceded the existence of a Norwegian, Belgian, or Luxembourgian nationality, which had to be created; and it had multinational states like France, Britain, and Spain, which tried to impose - as did Russia and Austria - an imperial French, British, or Spanish identity on its nationally diverse inhabitants. The point is that in classifying national movements, it is not possible to assume that western Europe experienced only one type of nationalism and east-central or eastern Europe only the other.

Ukrainian nationalism, in both the Russian and the Austrian Empire, belongs to the intelligentsia-inspired variety. But before reviewing the manner in which Ukrainian nationalism evolved in the Russian Empire, two more principles need to be kept in mind. One is that people are not born with a national identity; they must learn that they belong to a particular nationality.

If the diffusion of a sense of national identity was in itself difficult enough, an added problem for the intellectual leadership had to do with which social strata should constitute a given nationality, the ruling elite (usually the nobility) or all groups, including the peasant masses. Even if a consensus was reached as to social strata, there might still remain the question of which national identity was most appropriate. More often than not among stateless peoples, including Ukrainians, the intelligentsia was divided among factions identifying themselves with different nationalities. This was particularly the case in areas like Ukraine, where many nationalities lived side by side. In a sense, nationalist movements came to resem­ble ideological marketplaces where rival factions propagated their wares. Since no one was born with a fully formed national consciousness, it was possible for per­sons to be swayed by one or more of the competing factions. Accordingly, it is not surprising to find in Ukrainian lands members of the same indigenous population opting to identify themselves as Poles, or Russians, or Ukrainians.

Another concept to keep in mind is that of the hierarchy of multiple loyalties or identities as opposed to that of mutually exclusive identities. Very often in mul­tinational states individuals can feel perfectly comfortable with more than one national identity. Hence, for many residents in Dnieper Ukraine it was perfectly normal to be both a Little Russian and Russian, or a Russian from Little Russia speaking ‘Little Russian,’ that is, Ukrainian. Many nobles of Cossack origin, whom we perhaps too simplistically describe as russified, fall into this category, as does the great Russian-language writer from Dnieper Ukraine, Nikolai Gogol'.

As Ukrainian nationalism evolved, however, its leaders became convinced that for their movement to survive, the otherwise ‘natural’ hierarchy of multiple loyal­ties or identities had to be replaced by a framework of mutually exclusive identi­ties. In other words, one could not be a Russian from Little Russia or a Pole from Ukraine; one had to be either a Pole or a Ukrainian, or a Russian or a Ukrainian - they favored the latter term over Little Russian precisely in order to heighten a perceptual difference. In a real sense, the evolution of the nineteenth-century Ukrainian national revival can be seen as the story of the conflict between a framework of multiple loyalties on the one hand and one of mutually exclusive identities on the other, and of how this conflict sometimes had a traumatic effect on the individuals involved.

Finally, intelligentsia-inspired national movements can be viewed as going through at least three basic stages: (1) the heritage-gathering stage, (2) the organi­zational stage, and (3) the political stage. The first stage consists of efforts by indi­viduals to collect the linguistic, folkloric, literary, and historical artifacts of a given people. The second stage is one in which organizations, schools, and publications are formed to propagate knowledge about the cultural heritage that has been collected. The third stage witnesses efforts at participation in political life, often with the intention of obtaining autonomy or independence. The Ukrainian national movement of the nineteenth century can be seen in terms of this three- stage model.

The phenomenon of multiple loyalties

The original motivation of those who contributed to the first, heritage-gathering stage of the national movement in Dnieper Ukraine was not a desire for social innovation. Rather, it was the desire to revive something from the past, or, more precisely, to use the past to acquire something in the present. Such use of the past was of particular concern to the Cossack elite (starshyna) in the Left Bank. After Catherine II issued her Charter of the Nobility in 1785, the Cossack starshyna was less concerned with protesting the dissolution of the Hetmanate’s autonomy than with struggling to gain entry into the Russian nobility (dvorianstvd) with all its social and economic privileges.

Between 1785 and 1835, the imperial authorities first recognized Cossack noble status en masse, then rescinded it, then granted it again, but selectively (see chap­ter 26). This inconsistency prompted numerous Cossacks to submit petitions to the newly established Imperial Heraldry Office, set up in 1797. In order to prove their general premise that the whole Cossack starshyna was the equivalent of the Russian nobility (dvorianstvo), or to justify the merits of specific requests that cer­tain individual Cossacks were indeed of noble status according to local ‘Little Russian’ conditions, the supplicants were forced to examine a host of treaties between Ukrainian hetmans and Muscovite tsars, charters with Polish kings and Lithuanian princes, and other documents, including chronicles, historical and familial memoirs, genealogies, and descriptions of local traditions. One by­product of this practical search for legal justification was a new interest in the past, which soon resulted in several publications about the history of Ukraine. It is no coincidence that many of the earliest histories of Ukraine date precisely from the period when the Cossack elite was desperately trying to enter the Russian nobility.

Each of these early histories expressed a deep local patriotism and love for the Ukrainian past. Nonetheless, all were written in Russian, and all were imbued with the notion that Ukraine, or Little Russia as it was known at the time, was a natural and integral part of the Russian imperial world. Thus, the early histories of Ukraine implicitly accepted the principle of a hierarchy of multiple loyalties or identities.

Folklore also proved to be fertile ground for cultivation by the intelligentsia during the heritage-gathering stage of the national revival. At the same time that the first published histories of Little Russia were appearing, Hryhorii Kalynovs'kyi published his Opisanie svadebnykh ukrainskikh prostonarodnykh obriadov v Maloi Rossii i slobodskoi ukrainskoi gubemii (Description of Ukrainian Folk Marriage Customs in Little Russia and the Sloboda Ukrainian Provinces, 1777). This was followed by Prince Nikolai Tsertelev’s Opyt sobraniia starinnykh malorossiiskikh pesnei (Attempt at a Collection of Ancient Little Russian Songs, 1819). Tsertelevwas a russified Geor­gian born in Dnieper Ukraine, who as a staunch local patriot felt the urge to col­lect folk songs from the old bards in whose midst he lived. Commenting on the texts, Tsertelev argued that Ukrainian folk songs exhibit a moral quality which sets them apart from the songs of their greedier and more aggressive neighbors.

The first systematic assemblage of Ukrainian folk songs was undertaken by Mykhailo Maksymovych, who published three collections: Malorossiiskie pesni (Lit­tle Russian Songs, 1827), Ukrainskie narodnye pesni (Ukrainian Folk Songs, 1834), and Sbomik narodnykh ukrainskikh pesen (A Collection of Ukrainian Folksongs, 1849). Picking up on Tsertelev’s approach, Maksymovych stressed the differences between Russians and Ukrainians on the basis of their folk songs. His collections had an enormous impact on Ukrainian intellectuals who sought to discover the riches of their people’s indigenous culture. Following Maksymovych’s, several other folk-song collections were published, among the more important at the time being six volumes (which included many contrived texts) entitled Zaporo- zhskaia starina (Zaporozhian Antiquity, 1833-80), edited by the Russian Slavist Izmail Sreznevskii.

The Early Histories of Ukraine

Before the noble status of the Cossacks became an issue, there was only one published general history of Ukraine, Kratkaia letopis' Malyia Rossii (A Short Chronicle of Little Russia, 1777), which was an updated version of a chronicle written in the 1730s. Hryhorii Hrabianka’s earlier Diistviia prezi/'noi... brani Bohdana Khmel'nyts'koho, hetmana Zaporozhskoho s poliaky (Events of the Most Bitter... War... between the Zaporozhian Hetman Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi and the Poles, 1710) was published in an abridged form in 1793, and another general work by Aleksandr Rigel'man, Istopisnoe povestvovanie 0 Maloi Rossii ieia narode i kozakakh voobshche (Chronicle Account about Little Russia, Its People, and Cossacks in General), was completed in 1787, but not published until 1847.

The controversy over the Cossacks’ status and the practical historical research it stimulated soon gave rise to a flurry of publication. Some of the new works were polemics defending the rights of Ukrainians to noble status (Roman Markovych, ca. 1800; Tymofii Kalyns'kyi, ca. 1800 and 1808; Vasyl' Polctyka, 1809; Adriian Chepa, 1809; Fedir Tumans'kyi, 1809); others were more extensive general histories. Among the latter were an amateurish description of Ukraine by lakiv Markovych, Zapiski o Ma/orossii, eia zhiteliakh i proizvedeniiahh (Notes on Little Russia, Its Inhabitants and Its Works, 1798), and the more serious five-volume compilation of Mykola Markevych, Istoriia Maiorossii (History of Little Russia, 1842-43). One work, however, eclipsed all the other early histories - the four-volume Istoriia Maloi Rossii (History of Little Russia, 1822) by Dmitrii Bantysh-Kamens'kii, a member of the Ukrain­ian nobility. Bantysh-Kamcns'kii’s work was based on a wide body of archival sources and imbued with a sense of deep loyalty to the Russian Empire. His history was so popular that it went through three more editions (1830, 1842, 1903), and it remained the basic source for Ukrainian history until the very end of the nineteenth century.

The other important element in the heritage-gathering stage of intelligentsia- inspired national movements - language - did not fare as well as history and folk­lore in Dnieper Ukraine. In other Slavic national revivals, linguists played a prom­inent role, and dictionaries and grammars were prepared as the essential building blocks for national cultures. The stature of figures like Josef Dobrovsky and Jung- man among the Czechs, Pavel Josef Safarik and L'udovit Stur among the Slovaks, Ljudevit Gaj among the Croats, and Vuk Karadzic among the Serbs attests to the significance of linguists in the national movements of other Slavic peoples. But Ukrainians, at least in Dnieper Ukraine, seemed to lag behind. During the whole first half of the nineteenth century, only one grammar, by Oleksii Pavlovs'kyi {Grammatika malorossiiskago nariechiia, 1818), and one small dictionary, by Ivan Votsekhovych (Sobranie slov malorossiiskago nariechiia, 1823), appeared. Moreover, both these authors did not consider Ukrainian a distinct language; for them, what they called ‘Little Russian’ was a dialect of Russian.

Literary works also began to appear, but even they were unable to provide the basis for a vibrant Ukrainian literary movement. The first work written in modern Ukrainian, the publication of which was begun in 1798 by the so-called father of Ukrainian literature, Ivan Kotliarevs'kyi, was entitled Eneida. It was a travesty using Ukrainian themes of Virgil’s classic Latin epic poem, the Aeneid. While the language of Kotliarevs'kyi’s Eneiida as well as of his operetta Natalka Poltavka (1819) and vaudeville show Moskal' charivnyk (The Muscovite-Sorcerer, 1819) were definitely Ukrainian, their subject matter seemed to suggest that Ukrainian was appropriate only for jocular or slapstick themes. This attitude to the language barely changed even after the appearance in Ukrainian of works by writers like Petro Hulak-Artemovs'kyi, Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko, and levhen Hrebinka, who wrote burlesques, feuilletons, short stories, and fables. In short, for those who wanted to compose works in more serious genres, it was necessary to use Russian. This, of course, is precisely what one of the greatest Ukrainian writers of the period, Nikolai Gogol', did. The lack of confidence in Ukrainian language and culture was summed up in 1840 by the otherwise patriotic folklorist Mykhailo Maksymovych: ‘Everything written here in Little Russian is in some sense artificial and has only a regional character like a German writing in the Alemannic dialect. We cannot have a literature in the South Russian language, there can only be indi­vidual works in this language...’³

Despite its limited achievements in language and literature, the national revival in Dnieper Ukraine during the heritage-gathering stage of the late eighteenth and first decades of the nineteenth century made some important gains, espe­cially in the realm of history and folklore. It is interesting, if somewhat unex­pected, to note that the Russian imperial government generally supported these developments. The result was the beginning of the organizational stage in Dnieper Ukraine’s national revival. Of great importance in this regard was the establishment of the first two modern universities on Ukrainian territory, at Kharkiv in 1805 and Kiev in 1834. Kharkiv University was begun at the initiative of a local Ukrainian philanthropist and gentryman, Vasyl' Karazyn. The university was created for a very practical purpose: to train imperial bureaucrats. Classes, therefore, were not conducted in Ukrainian, or, for that matter, in Russian; instead, Latin, French, and German were used, for several decades. Owing to its largely foreign-born faculty, the latest intellectual currents in western Europe, especially those associated with Romanticism and nationalism, reached the other­wise provincial town of Kharkiv.

It was not long before individuals in the university’s intellectual environment developed an interest in the area in which it was located. As a result, by the 1820s Kharkiv had become the first center of the Ukrainian cultural revival. Among the activists in the Kharkiv circle were the Russian folklorist and philologist Izmail Sreznevskii and the Ukrainian writers Petro Hulak-Artemovs'kyi, Hryhorii Kvitka- Osnovianenko, Amvrosii Metlyns'kyi, and Mykola Kostomarov. Kharkiv became

the place where the first anthologies of Ukrainian literature (Ukrainskii al’ manakh, 1831; Ukrainskii sbomik, 1838) and the first periodicals partly devoted to Ukrainian themes (Ukrainskii viestnik, 1816-19; Ukrainskii zhumal, 1823-25) were published. Although these periodicals appeared for the most part in Russian and had as their primary goal to expose their readers to western European literature, they also became a forum for publications in Ukrainian by the Kharkiv circle of belletrists and scholars. It was also at Kharkiv that the term Ukrainian, instead of Little Russian or the older Rus'/Rusyn, was used to designate the inhabitants of Ukraine.

The University of St Vladimir in Kiev was established in 1834 not, like Kharkiv University, at the initiative of local philanthropists, but rather by the Russian gov­ernment. Moreover, while Kharkiv University had a somewhat mundane purpose - to train functionaries for imperial service - Kiev University had from the outset a clear political purpose - to transform the Polish-dominated Right Bank into an ideologically integrated part of the Russian Empire. In fact, the establishment of the university was a direct result of the abortive Polish revolt of 1830-1831, in which thousands of Polish nobles from the Right Bank had participated. While the Polish revolt did not present any serious military threat to the empire, it did convince Tsar Nicholas I that four decades after their incorporation into Russia the Polish nobility in the strategically located western provinces was still politically unreliable.

To rectify this problem, Nicholas entrusted his minister and the head of the Imperial Academy of Sciences Sergei S. Uvarov with the task of transforming the polonophile school system of the western provinces, including Dnieper Ukraine’s Right Bank, into an instrument of Russian imperial ideology. In the pursuit of this goal, Polish secondary schools were russified, the excellent Polish lycee at Kremenets', in Volhynia, was closed, and the Polish university at Vilnius was trans­ferred in 1834 to Kiev. Uvarov himself chose Kiev as the site of the new institution because, as he said, it was the ‘mother of Russian cities’ and therefore an appro­priate starting point for imperial Russia’s cultural expansion westward.

Kiev’s University of St Vladimir and its initially small professorial staff were to be concerned primarily with research into the history of Russia’s western prov­inces in Ukraine and Belarus. These territories had once belonged to Kievan Rus', and from the imperial perspective they should now be ideologically as well as politically integrated into the empire of the tsars. In the process of cultural rec­lamation, in which Polish youth would be trained in a Russian imperial spirit, the local Little Russian movement would have a special role to play. It was to be used as a weapon to de-polonize Kiev and the Right Bank. It is not surprising, there­fore, that one of the leading Ukrainian intellectuals of the day, Mykhailo Maksy- movych, was made rector of the new university.

To promote further research in Slavic studies, in particular research con­cerned with Dnieper Ukraine, or Little Russia, in 1838 Uvarov provided generous government-funded research and travel fellowships for the empire’s leading scholars. Two of them, Osyp Bodians'kyi of Moscow University and Izmail Sreznevskii of Kharkiv University, were already actively engaged in scholarship about Ukraine. In Kiev itself, three volumes of a literary and scholarly journal, Kievlianin (1840, 1841, 1850), appeared, and in 1843 the Imperial Archeographic Commission was set up to collect and publish historical documents. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian folklorist and historian Bodians'kyi, after returning from his research trip abroad, became secretary of the Imperial Society for the Study of Russian History and Antiquities in Moscow, where he began a series of publica­tions entided Chteniia (1846-1918). Under his editorship during its first three years, Chteniia consisted of twenty-three volumes containing a wealth of historical material about Ukraine.

Thus, it was the Russian imperial government which provided a solid organiza­tional basis for research into Ukrainian matters. After all, such action was in keep­ing with tsarist Russia’s official ideology, propounded by the minister Uvarov in 1833, that the ideological pillars of the empire should be Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. With respect to the last concept, a Little Russian local identity was considered an acceptable and even a desirable complement to a Russian imperial national identity. It was, or so it seemed at the time, just a lower stage in a socio­cultural framework that recognized a hierarchy of multiple and complementary loyalties and identities.

The belief in mutually exclusive identities

At the very same time, another approach began to appear among Dnieper Ukraine’s budding intelligentsia, the approach reflected in the principle of mutually exclusive identities. This approach was evident in a limited way in the published commentary appended to the collections of folklorists like Tsertelev and Maksymovych, in which they pointed out differences between Russian and Ukrainian folk songs. Differentiation, however, most poignantly shaped a work entitled Istoriia Rusov Hi Malm Rossii (History of the Rus' or Little Russia, 1846). To this day, scholars are uncertain who wrote the Istoriia Rusov, although they agree the text was composed sometime in the first decade of the nineteenth century, was circulated in several copies during the 1820s and 1830s, and, finally, was pub­lished in 1846 by Bodians'kyi as the very first title in the Chteniia series of the Imperial Society for the Study of Russian History and Antiquities.

Like the other histories of Little Russia from this period, the Istoriia Rusov put great emphasis on the Cossacks, particularly, their independent and semi­independent political life during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Unlike the other works, however, the Istoriia Rusov treated Little Russia not as a province of a larger Russian world, but as an independent country that only recently had come under Russian hegemony. Thus, the Istoriia Rusov proposed the idea of historical continuity and statehood in Ukraine from the era of Kievan Rus', through the Lithuanian period, and on to the time of the Cossacks. In order to inspire patriotism and arouse national passion, the Istoriia Rusov adopted a tone more like that of a moral tract than that of a straightforward historical narra­tive. It set up a clear dichotomy between the world of the Muscovites and that of the Ukrainians. In a philosophical framework of truth and justice and good versus evil, it was inevitable that the Muscovites should be depicted in a negative light. In the words of the Istoriia Rusov: ‘Serfdom and slavery in the highest degree reign among Muscovite people and... with the exception of what God created and the tsar donated they have nothing of their own and can have nothing. It is as if the people were created only that they might become serfs.’⁴

This picture was in stark contrast to the image of the freedom-loving and dem­ocratic way of life - albeit romanticized and historically distorted - which suppos­edly prevailed in Cossack Ukraine. The reader was obviously prompted to wonder whether contemporary Ukrainians should continue to suffer under the Muscovite yoke. The answer given by the Istoriia Rusov is reminiscent of the ideologies of the American and French revolutions: ‘Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [i.e., tries to deprive people of their inalienable rights], it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and to institute a new govern­ment, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.’⁵ This was a clarion call, in the language of the Enlightenment principle of universal lib­erty, for the rebirth of Ukrainian statehood.

While the Istoriia Rusov may not have been a serious piece of historical scholar­ship, it succeeded in using history to inspire a whole generation of Ukrainian patriots, who first became active during the 1840s and 1850s. Adopting the spirit of the Istoriia Rusov, Mykola Markevych composed his five-volume Istoriia Maloros- sii (History of Little Russia, 1842-43), which argued that Ukrainians, not Russians, were the true descendants of Kievan Rus'. Even greater was the Istoriia Rusov's impact on three figures who were to become the leading symbols of the Ukrainian national revival: Mykola Kostomarov, Panteleimon Kulish, and Taras Shevchenko.

Mykola Kostomarov was born in far eastern Sloboda Ukraine near Voronezh as the son of a Russian military officer of noble origins and his Ukrainian serf wife. He attended Kharkiv University, where he became enamored of history as well as of Herder’s philosophy concerning the intrinsic value of individual national cul­tures and languages. He published Ukrainian poetry in the organs of the Kharkiv circle, and in an early study he argued the need for a distinct Ukrainian literature. A secondary-school teacher by profession, Kostomarov moved to a position in Kiev in 1845.

Panteleimon Kulish was the son of a Cossack from Chernihiv province who was unsuccessful in obtaining entry into the Russian nobility. The young Kulish stud­ied for a while at the University of St Vladimir in Kiev and then from 1840 taught in a secondary school in Luts'k. He published his first novel in 1843 in Russian. Two years later, his greatest historical novel, Choma Rada (The Black Council), began to appear, also in Russian. Initially, Kulish was a national patriot of the Lit­tle Russian variety, and he generally felt comfortable with the idea of multiple identities. In November 1845, Kulish went to St Petersburg for a little over a year, but during his time there he maintained close contact with Kiev.

The third member of the intellectual trio, and the one who in the end would have the greatest influence on the Ukrainian national movement, was Taras Shevchenko. Of the three, Shevchenko had the most humble origins. He was born into a serf family on an estate in Kiev province. Exceptional given the era and his station in life was the fact that the young Taras was taught to read and write. He also revealed a talent for painting. After a stormy adolescence, which included flight from his father and stepmother and wanderings through the countryside, Shevchenko eventually returned to the estate of his master (Vasilii Engel'gardt), whose son brought him to St Petersburg in 1830. Shevchenko was sent to study at the Imperial Academy of Art, and before long became the darling of St Petersburg’s high society. In 1838, the famed Russian painter Karl Briullov painted a portrait the income from the sale of which was used to purchase Shevchenko’s freedom. Shevchenko remained in St Petersburg, where he contin­ued to paint, to study - especially Ukrainian history - and to write poetry.

Within two years, he published his first major work of poetry, Kobzar (The Kobzar, 1840). In the words of George Luckyj, ‘The appearance of the Kobzar is the single most important event in Ukrainian literature. It heralded a new and bold beginning, an attempt to express what was still thought by many to be impossible - a wide range of feelings and ideas in Ukrainian of the highest artistic form.’⁶ Gone are the hesitations about using ‘Little Russian’ for other than minor literary genres. The appearance of Kobzar began a process of perceptual change whereby Shevchenko’s contemporaries came to believe that the Little Russian dialect could perhaps become a full-fledged language. In other writings, Shevchenko took Kotliarevs'kyi, Kvitka-Osnovianenko, and Gogol' to task for believing otherwise.

Shevchenko’s Kobzar and his next major work, Haidamaky (The Haidamaks, 1841), were also radical in content. The subjects of both epic poems were the his­torical exploits of the Ukrainian people, who were depicted as representatives of an independent nation until its brutal subjugation by Muscovite Russian and Polish oppressors. Shevchenko created not only the medium - the language - but also the message - national pride, expressed in heartrending and memorable lit­erary passages. In complete contrast to his Little Russian contemporaries, who still believed in multiple loyalties, Shevchenko thought solely in terms of mutually exclusive Russian and Ukrainian identities. His most uncompromising castigation of Muscovite Russian rule appeared in two poems, ‘The Caucasus’ (1845), which is an indictment of Russia’s conquest of the Caucasus peoples, and ‘The Dream’ (1844), in which the poet mocks the imperial family and its ancestors. Shevchenko’s depiction of Tsar Peter I was strikingly different from the already well known poem on the same historical personality by the leading Russian poet Aleksander Pushkin. Shevchenko has the ‘free hetman’ Pavlo Polubotok address Peter:

Accursed tsar, insatiate, Perfidious serpent, what Have you done, then, with the Cossacks? You have filled the swamps With their noble bones! And then Built the capital On their tortured corpses, and In a dark dungeon cell

You slew me too, a free Hetman, In chains, with hunger martyred!⁷

Himself not part of the noble estate, Shevchenko had little sympathy with its view of Ukrainian history. His revolutionary message was that Ukrainians formed a nationality made up of all social strata. According to him, all Ukrainians were politically and culturally deprived, and the vast majority of peasants and serfs were socially oppressed as well. Accordingly, whereas the seventeenth-century hetman Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi was a hero for the nineteenth-century Ukrainian nobility because he had begun a political process ending in their own present-day wealth and social status, for Shevchenko it would have been better if the Cossack leader had never been born.

... Oh, Bohdan

Oh, my foolish son!

Look you well, now, on your mother

On Ukraine, your own,

Who, as she rocked you, sang about

Her unhappy fortune,

And singing, wept a mother’s tear

Looking out for freedom!... Bohdan, O my little Bohdan! Had I known, in the cradle I’d have choked you, in my sleep I’d have overlain you.

Now my steppes have all been sold,...

My brother, Dnieper, now runs dry

And is deserting me.

And my dear graves the Muscovite

Is plundering utterly.⁸

Shevchenko spent the early 1840s in St Petersburg and on several gentry estates in Dnieper Ukraine. He had gone to Ukraine as a member of St Petersburg’s elite, who were continually courted by the culturally starved provincial landed gentry. Then, in June 1845, Shevchenko returned home, not as a star from the St Peters­burg cultural elite, but rather to take up a post in Kiev as researcher in the recently created Imperial Archeographic Commission. It was in Kiev, in 1845, that Shevchenko had an opportunity to become acquainted with the other two mem­bers of Dnieper Ukraine’s intellectual triad, Kostomarov and Kulish.

By the mid-1840s, Kiev had become the center of a small group of Ukrainian enthusiasts who, under the leadership of Mykola Hulak and Vasyl' Bilozers'kyi, founded, probably early the following year, a secret society called the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood (Bratstvo Sviatoho Kyryla i Metodiia). While there is some doubt whether Shevchenko (who was traveling in the Ukrainian countryside as part of his job with the Archeographic Commission) and Kulish (who left Kiev for Rivne and then St Petersburg in November 1845) ever belonged to the society, they, together with Kostomarov - an active member - were nonetheless to be implicated in its activity.

And what was that activity? It consisted mainly of discussions and the formula­tion of a program whose goal was the propagation of social equality, Slavic broth­erhood, and, indirectly, Ukrainian patriotism. With the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood, the national movement, emphasizing an exclusive Ukrainian iden­tity, entered what could be considered its second, organizational stage. The broth­erhood drew up a document entitled Knyhy bytiia ukrains' koho narodu (Books of Genesis of the Ukrainian People), probably authored by Kostomarov, which in messianic spirit traced traced the hisory of the world and the place of Ukraine in it. Particular emphasis was given to the growth of the Cossack movement and to how the ‘landlords saw that all the people would become Cossacks, that is, free.’⁹ This ideal state of affairs lasted until ‘the German tsarina, Catherine [II], a univer­sal whore, atheist, and murderer of her own husband, ended the Cossack Host.... And Ukraine was destroyed.’¹⁰ Ukraine’s destruction, however, was more appar­ent than real, because at whatever future time one of the brotherhood’s goals - the federation of all the Slavs - was realized, ‘then all the peoples, pointing to that place on the map where Ukraine will be delineated, will say: behold, the stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.’¹¹

The program of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood in Dnieper Ukraine included the abolition of serfdom and the establishment of schools to educate the masses. The idealistic organization remained stillborn, however, because a fellow- Ukrainian infiltrator reported the group to the tsarist police. Ten of its members, including Shevchenko and Kulish, were arrested in the spring of 1847. Put ^on trial, all were found guilty. Hulak was imprisoned for three years; Kostomarov for one year and a period of exile; Bilozers'kyi and Kulish for four months and a period of exile. Shevchenko, because of his fiery poetry and its anti-Russian impact on Little Russians, was exiled to the Ural Mountains for an indefinite period as a private soldier and, in accordance with the personal, handwritten instructions of Tsar Nicholas I, was ‘under the strictest supervision, forbidden to write or to sketch.’¹² All the accused were forbidden to live in Ukraine after their terms were served.

With the trial and sentencing of the brotherhood’s members, the first hesitant effort at Ukrainian organization was completely aborted. The trial also revealed that the Russian imperial government, which not only had tolerated but actively had supported Little Russian cultural activity, from now on would suspect pro­vincial patriotism of a relationship with national separatism. The publication of Shevchenko’s writings in the early 1840s, however, had provided the Ukrainian movement with a new raison d’etre. He had succeeded in giving the movement an alternative to the provincial Little Russian mentality that had dominated Ukrain­ian intellectual circles until the 1840s. Even if organizations were expunged by a hostile regime, the linguistic and literary potential of Ukrainian culture as real­ized by Shevchenko could be revived as the instrument of a viable national move­ment whenever the political environment was opportune.