Ukraine in Russian Imperial Discourse

THE DISCOVERY OF UKRAINE:

EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY RUSSIAN TRAVEL LITERATURE

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Russian readers con­sidered Ukraine a recently incorporated, relatively unfamiliar land.

The travel-narrative literature of the early nineteenth century that was devoted to Ukraine evidences a fluctuation between hostile and admiring assessments at the same time as it projects the sense of an entity simultaneously foreign and familiar: the literary Ukraine is aligned sometimes with the alterity of Polish civilization and at other times with the sameness of Russian civilization. For the portrayal of alterity, writers could draw on a repertoire of narrative myths and stereotypes already long deployed in descriptions of Poland. Right Bank Ukraine, which had been obtained from Poland after the parti­tion of 1793 and was still dominated by Polish gentry society (szlachta), was viewed by many travellers as still a largely Polish land, and conse­quently, depictions of Polish alterity in fact frequently serve as uncon­scious expressions of a hostile attitude to Ukraine’s cultural difference. In the first part of the nineteenth century they form an essential backdrop to any discussion of Ukraine’s distinctiveness.

Polish Alterity

Polish and Russian civilizations had been brought into close contact at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, when, as a result of the partitions, large numbers of Russians and Poles were thrown into personal contact with one another. The Polish insurrections of 1794, 1830-31, and 1863-64 and the war of 1812, in which many Poles fought on the side of Napoleon, ensured that the “Polish question” continued to occupy Russian statesmen. Writers generally constructed hostile images of the Poles. Waclaw Lednicki wrote in the thirties that “ideologists who represented Rus­sian national consciousness, found in the act of morally degrading the Pole and Poland a kind of moral soporific: in that act of degradation they drowned out in themselves and their society the voice of con­science which the bloody injustice done to Poland could not fail to awaken.”³ Russian intellectuals, on the other hand, spoke of the sup­pression of Polish activities as an unfortunate but necessary political act: only one Slavic state could, it was said, be dominant in Eastern Europe, and consequently, in the interest of Slavdom the Polish com­petitor had to be eliminated. The negative stereotyping of the Pole as an intriguer and rebel that prevailed in the nineteenth century had long been spread by state propaganda.⁴ In literature from the time of Catherine the Great, Poland had frequently been described as a trea­sonous, revolutionary “hydra,” a latinized renegade of Slavdom. Odes by major figures like Gavriil Derzhavin, Ivan Dmitriev, Vasilii Petrov, Mikhail Kheraskov, Vasyl (Vasilii) Ruban, Ippolit Bogdanovich, and Ivan Krylov had celebrated the empire’s expansion at Poland’s expense and the suppression of the Polish uprising of 1794.⁵ In the early nine­teenth century the former commonwealth was referred to as “old Poland” (a concept that was used later by Fedor Dostoevsky, among others), associating the country with an irretrievable past.⁶ No longer considered the West or the conduit for Western ideas, Poland lost its allure as civilization and came to be regarded as merely a transitional zone to Europe, a territory that for security reasons required immedi­ate political and military consolidation.

More sympathetic views were held by figures like Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, Petr Viazemsky, Aleksandr Herzen, and Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Nonetheless, Marlinsky, a friend of Polish gentry fam­ilies from Polotsk and Minsk and considered something of a Polono- phile for his relatively positive portrayal of Polish gentry in “Evening at a Caucasian Spa in 1824” (Vecher u vod Kavkazskikh v godu 1824,

1830) and “Raids: A Tale of the Year 1613” (Naezdy, Povest 1613 goda,

1831), expressed outrage at the uprising of 1830-31. “The Poles,” he said, “were never honest friends of Russians. The Polish nation was always well-treated by the Russians, who saved it from further oppres­sion by Polish lords - and in spite of this they do not love Russians, I do not know why.”⁹ He expressed the hope that the bloody crushing of the uprising would “forever” suppress Polish rebelliousness. Like many of his compatriots he found it impossible to imagine a Russia that did not rule Poland. Even Petr Viazemsky, who spent the years 1818-21 in Warsaw, who translated Mickiewicz and Krasiriski, and whose contacts with Poles were so extensive that he was accused by his countrymen of seeing the world “through Polish eyes,” revised his liberal attitudes after 1830 and totally jettisonned them after 1863. He came to view the Poles as incapable of independent state life due to an endemic lack of political realism.

The revolt of 1830-31, in particular, released a wave of anti-Polish writing in Russia. Among those who lent their voice to this chorus were poets of the stature of Vasilii Zhukovsky, Aleksandr Pushkin, Fedor Tiutchev, and Aleksei Khomiakov. Pushkin and Zhukovsky col­laborated in publishing a brochure entitled On the Taking of Warsaw to celebrate the defeat of the uprising.¹⁰ Pushkin contributed his “To the Slanderers of Russia,” in which he foresaw all Slavic rivers joining the Russian sea, and his “Anniversary of Borodino” (Borodinskaia godovshchina), which ridiculed threats from the West, greeted the capitulation of Warsaw as a new Russian “triumph” and assured readers that “Poland’s fate was sealed.” Zhukovsky contributed “An Old Song on a New Note” (Staraia pesnia na novyi lad), in which he expressed excitement at the idea of “avenging bombs” raining “like flaming clots of blood” on “the city that boiled with revolt.” In another poem published at this time, “Russian Glory” (Russkaia slava, 1831), he joyfully contemplated Russia’s past victories, particularly against the “treacherous, hostile Pole.” The slaughter of the Warsaw suburb of Praga in 1794 is retrospectively seen here as history’s revenge for the ancient Polish contempt for and mistreatment of Muscovy.

Tiutchev’s “On the Taking of Warsaw” (1831) avoided the trium­phalism of the above poems but stressed the historical and political necessity of Poland’s subjugation. Its statehood was to be a sacrificial offering on the altar of Slavic unity and Russian security. Tiutchev viewed Poland’s future through Slavophile concepts as an “eagle of the same tribe” that would be reborn in a unity with Russia. This sense of a decisive and final historical triumph over Poland as a vindication of Russian civilization was reinforced in a large number of works devoted at the time to the figure of Dimitrii Samozvanets (Dimitrii the Impostor), the Polish-supported pretender to the Russian throne during the early eighteenth-century “time of troubles.”¹¹ The most famous work devoted to these events, Pushkin’s Boris Godunov (1825), has been interpreted as contrasting two types of national culture, each of different origin: the Russian national culture, which is rooted in old Slavic popular culture, and the Polish, which is presented as a feudal creation, a denationalized, Latin-Catholic civilization of the West.

Ukraine as Residual Alterity

Russian travellers in Ukraine in the first three decades of the century were often influenced by these attitudes to Poland. Their comments on Ukraine, which range widely, surveying distinctive features of the land, people, and culture, serve as expressions of the political mythol­ogy and stereotyping that governed the metropolitan imagination. In the light of contemporary postcolonial theory, they can be seen as manifesting an array of tropes that construct the land and people as a society that was immature but nonetheless good empire-building mate­rial. These accounts were mostly written by members of the Russian aristocracy and gentry. Beginning with Vladimir Izmailov’s Puteshestvie v poludennuiu Rossiiu (Travels in Southern Russsia, 1800-2), Pavel Sumarokov’s Dosugi krymskago sudi ili vtoroe puteshestvie v Tavridu (Lei­sure Times of a Crimean Judge, or Second Travels in Tavriia, 1803-5), and Prince I.M. Dolgoruky’s Slavny bubny za gorami ili puteshestvie moe koe-kuda v 1810 godu (Glorious Drums beyond the Hills, or My Travels to Various Places in 1810 (1811, 1870)) and ending with Ivan Sbitnev’s “Poezdka v Kharkov” (Trip to Kharkiv, 1830), Vadim Passek’s Putevye zapiski Vadima (Vadim’s Travel Notes, 1834), and I. S. Vsevolozhsky’s Puteshestvie cherez iuzhnuiu Rossiiu, Krym i Odessu (Travels through South­ern Russia, Crimea, and Odesa),¹³ they invariably portray the country as foreign, an exotic destination that must be explained to Russian readers. Some even include vocabularies with translations of Ukrainian words. Sumarokov was so struck by the differences in appearance, man­ners, clothing, and language that the moment he crossed the border into Ukraine, he exclaimed “Is this really the empire’s borderland? Or am I entering another state?”¹⁴ Twenty-five years later Ivan Sbitnev repeated, “the fertile Ukraine, a land that differs from our localities in language, customs, clothing and even in the very appearance of peo­ple, their life, agriculture and soil.”¹⁵ Recognition of an alienness only recently integrated into the empire occurs both among writers who report on town and gentry life (schools, hospitals, theatres, and the entertainments and customs of landowners) and among those who describe the life of common people.¹⁶

Since the tsarist government’s support for investigations into a Little Russian identity was governed by the need to counteract Polish influ­ence, particularly in Right Bank Ukraine, it is not surprising to find that the Ukrainian alterity there is often constructed as a residual Polish influence or temptation.

When at the beginning of Alexander II’s reign a liberal thaw occured, Great Russian circles, which set the metropolitan tone for social opinion, were well disposed toward the Polish movement, and not having a good awareness of the real boundaries of Poland, were prepared to recognize as Poland every­thing that was not Great Russian, excepting, of course, those lands which the Russian government had become accustomed to ruling, namely Little Russia (Malorossiia) and New Russia (Novorossiia), which no one could even recall being settled before Catherine and which were known as the “Free Lands of the Army (or Society) of Zaporozhians.” Only Kyiv, that pan-Russian Rome, stirred some doubts in Russian literary society, but it was prepared to recognize the land to the west of Kyiv as Poland.¹⁷

Consequently, the first Russian observers often made a sharp dis­tinction between Left and Right Bank Ukraine. Naked raison d’etat served as the supreme argument for integrating Right Bank Ukraine with Russia. Dynastic claims and the rights of conquest were invoked by Karamzin, for example, to retain these and other Western territo­ries for the empire. In the case of Left Bank Ukraine the chief argument was that of a cognate identity. Gradually, as the history and ethnography of the Right Bank became better known, the same argu­ment of likeness of identity was used to bolster claims to this territory.

In the travel literature of the first three decades of the century Khmeln tsky’s revolt of 1648 was frequently used as evidence that “Little Russia” had definitively rejected Polish domination and an alien Polish civilization. The ensuing long association with Russia and grad­ual incorporation of ethnic Ukrainian lands into the empire was also proferred as proof not only that the country represented a less indi­gestible “other” than its western neighbour but that it was Russian in its essential nature. Although “old Ukraine” was described as a partly occidentalized culture, like “old Poland” it was emphatically repre­sented as an anachronism.¹⁸ Contemporary Ukraine’s rediscovery of the popular roots it shared with Russia was offered as evidence for the “naturalness” of the union with Russia. The high culture of the seven­teenth and eighteenth centuries was viewed as an artificial imposition from above, a Polish accretion, and Ukrainian society was redefined as a folk culture. From now on its high culture was to be that of imperial Russia.

Reports of the Ukrainians’ distinctive appearance, customs, and manners by early travellers were accompanied by exhortations to include them in the imaginative geography of the empire, a move welcomed by several Ukrainian writers, who wished their unique char­acter and distinguishing features to be recognized. The Ukrainian Orest Somov, who arrived in St Petersburg in 1817 and can be iden­tified as a proponent of a “pan-Russian” national identity, congratu­lated Pushkin in 1823 on representing “all sides of the land,” from the Baltic to the Caucasus. Implicitly drawing an analogy between literary and political assimilation, he recommended that writers con­tinue to conquer outlying regions for Russian literature and civiliza­tion, urging particular attention to “the blossoming orchards of bountiful Ukraine, the beautiful banks of the Dnieper, Psol and other rivers of Little Russia.. The very woodless steppes have their poetry: one can find chabany and herdsmen there, who do not see their settlement all summer, but wander with their herds through the val­leys; estranged from society, they are betrothed to silence; the zealous horse and faithful dog are their favourites.”¹⁹

Whereas Ukrainians like Somov proposed these descriptions in order to heighten awareness of an identity that was unique and closer to nature than the metropolitan one, Russian travellers often expressed anxiety, even alienation, in the presence of such exoticism and such intimacy with the natural world. Dolgoruky spoke candidly of the non-Russian nature of the territory, describing the disturbing feeling of “being in foreign lands” and suggesting that this was due to one “simple” reason: “I no longer understood the popular language; the local people spoke with me, answered my questions, but did not entirely understand me, while I required translation for three out of every five words. We won’t go into a labyrinth of details and refined considerations; we will give voice to a simple idea, with which many, I think, will agree, that where the local language [narechie] ceases to be comprehensible to us, there the boundaries of our native land, and, in my opinion, even of the fatherland end.”²⁰

The message of a resistant otherness was underscored by the fre­quent acknowledgment of a strong local patriotism: “Little Russians,” wrote Vladimir Izmailov, “love their fatherland and its glory, because their ears have become familiar with these names, whose glory was always closely connected with patriotic obligation. They remember that they defended their fatherland themselves against numerous foes.”²¹ Moreover, these observers were occasionally surprisingly frank about the Ukrainian dislike of Russians. “Unfortunately,” wrote Levshin, “I must, in conclusion, tell you of their hatred of Great Russians. You can easily confirm this for yourself, because you often hear them saying: ‘A good man, but a Muscovite.’”²² Travellers affirmed that the population refused to understand Russian speech. Ivan Sbitnev wrote: “The locals mock and dislike Muscovites and people from beyond the Desna, or Lithuanians as they call them. Seeing some of them driving by, they drop their work and strike up an abusive or satirical song aimed at them, accompanied by loud laughter and long echoes.”²³ Passek reported that since 1709, when Peter I had stationed fifteen regiments in Ukraine, the granting of lands to commanders in the Russian army and subsequent settlement upon them of Russian serfs had led to tensions that had the appearance “not of a family argument, no! It became a struggle of two races!”²⁴ Dolgoruky, too, was aware that thousands of Russian serfs had been moved onto these lands that had been populated by Ukrainians “from most ancient times,” causing “enormous difficulties and complications.”²⁵

Panoptical Time

Both the civilization and the language of Ukraine were the subject of speculation. Occasionally they were seen as an unpleasant hybrid of Polish and Russian. Dolgoruky, for example, expressed this view after observing a Uniate church service.²⁶ The language was also sometimes described as a dialect of Polish.²⁷ More frequently it was assumed to be a dialect of Russian that had been spoiled by the admixture of Polish elements. The general trend in the century’s first decades, however, was toward elaborating the view that both the civilization and the lan­guage were archaic forms of Russian. Some, like Dal, even argued that Ukrainian had best preserved the “full, pristine simplicity and force” of Russian and suggested that words from Ukrainian be incorporated into contemporary Russian in order to enrich the latter and bring it closer to its original, popular roots.²⁸ Journals like The Beacon (Maiak) and The Muscovite (Moskvitianin) argued that the language best man­ifested the Russian nationality (narodnost) because it was closer to the spirit of popular speech. As a consequence, they welcomed the occa­sional publication of a work in Ukrainian, viewing this as nothing more than a linguistic experiment, an investigation into an ancient branch of Russian that was rapidly being assimilated and would soon disappear altogether. The position of liberal periodicals like Notes of the Fatherland (Otechestvennye zapiski) was substantially the same. Both conservatives and liberals drew the line, however, at the idea of the Ukrainian lan­guage developing a contemporary literature of its own.

An explanation for this attitude can be found in the fact that both language and culture were grasped through a trope described by Anne McClintock as the construction of “panoptical” time, according to which “the axis of time was projected onto the axis of space and history became global. With social Darwinism, the taxonomic project, first applied to nature, was now applied to cultural history.”²⁹ The Ukrai­nian language was generally apprehended as the voice of Russia’s past, frozen in its pristine, folkloric innocence. Any return to such an anterior time was, of course, out of the question: it served merely as a reminder of a former condition, to be enjoyed just as one enjoys a picture of childhood, its passing lamented in the way sentimentalist writers of the day lamented the passing of a life of rural simplicity.

The discussion of the language, it soon became clear, pitted two views against each other. On the one hand were those who saw it as an ancient but disappearing dialect whose study was justified for academic reasons. On the other were those who defended the language’s apti­tudes and saw the possibilities of its literary development. Ukrainians like Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko, who published in the early Kharkiv journals Ukrainian Herald (Ukrainskii vestnik, 1816-19) and Ukrainian Journal (Ukrainskii zhurnal, 1824-25) and various contemporary alma­nacs or who contributed to Russianjournals, not only set themselves the task of presenting a more positive image of their language and culture than the one projected in Russianjournals but also began to argue that the language had a right to serve as a literary medium.³⁰

A Natural Paradise

Alienness and exoticism had their desirable aspects. They could be embraced as enrichments of the still-developing culture of an empire proud of its recently acquired superpower status and one that imagined itself as youthful and therefore capable of absorbing new impressions from a variety of sources. If the Caucasus was referred to as Russia’s Algeria, Ukraine was most commonly described as a second Italy, an Eden or an Arcadia.³¹ The term “second Italy” evoked a land with a warm climate and lush vegetation. The newly acquired Black Sea littoral was described in the most extravagant terms as “the best and most fruitful lands of Russia.”³² In conformity with the theorie des climats cur­rent in Russia in the first decades of the century, this natural paradise was portrayed as having produced an aesthetically gifted population that loved music and song and artists who delighted in painting the beauty of the land. The common people were described as living in a village idyll: they were lyrical and emotional; their homes were praised for their cleanliness and tasteful internal decor; they were admired for their colourful arts and crafts, their deep religiosity, decorous manners, honesty, hospitality, and attachment to patriarchal traditions.³³ The dominant Sentimentalist construct is that of a noble and innocent peas­antry, unspoiled by contact with the corrupting influences of urban life. Such an image of a naturally gifted but simple folk even led Karamzin, in his “Pantheon of Russian Authors” (Panteon rossiiskikh avtorov, 1801-2), to introduce the largely fictitious Semen Klymovsky, whose portrait and biography he included among a list of twenty writers from the legendary medieval Boian to Lomonosov. Karamzin was convinced that the “Little Russian cossack and poet” wrote “many fine poems, without, however, adhering to a definite metre.” He attributed a well- known folksong to him and offered the following assessment: “a student of nature, he unfortunately was a dilettante in matters of art.” Karamzin exhorted the other Russian authors included in the book not to be ashamed to see him in their midst.³⁴ Such comments capture the con­descending but anxious concern that the folk heritage of Ukrainians (in Pushkin’s words the “singing and dancing tribe”)³⁵ be incorporated into Russia’s national treasury.

Anachronistic Space

Offered as a journey into the landscape of the past, the type of pastoral idyll considered here has been described as constructing anachronistic space.³⁶ As “Russia’s Italy,”³⁷ the land serves as the scene of Russia’s own great medieval past and the picture of her own earlier, innocent self. “Little Russia,” writes one traveller, “is the land where the first elements of our fatherland emerged, from where the light of Christianity first flowed within it.”³³ Another refers to the country as reminding him of “patriarchal, happy times.”³⁹ As a picture of origins, however, the trope contains an internal contradiction, a tension between the celebration of a great founding past, in what now appears to be a half­alien land, and the assertion of a superior present elsewhere. The contradiction is resolved through maintaining a double focus: by expressing reverence for the medieval scene where the healthy shoots of Russian culture first appeared, while simultaneously glorifying this culture’s mature flowering in Moscow and St Petersburg.⁴⁰ All in the local culture that can be absorbed by these tropes of anterior time and anachronistic space is in this way aligned with the atavistic, com­ically quaint, or hopelessly provincial.

Arrested Development

An intimation of a primitive and undeveloped version of the Russian self is attached to the characterizations of Ukraine and Ukrainians. The Enlightenment had already provided the key concepts by direct­ing the viewer’s gaze to the past behind the present, to the barbarism beneath the veneer of civilization. Voltaire, in his Essay on Manners, had projected the Cossacks back into ancient times: “Their life is entirely similar to that of the ancient Scythians and the Tartars on the shores of the Black Sea. To the north and the east of Europe (!’orient de !’Europe), all that part of the world is still rustic: it is the image of those so-called heroic centuries when men, limited to the necessary, pillaged that necessary from their neighbours.”⁴¹ Gibbon, too, had assured readers that Ukraine’s “modern face... is a just representation of the ancient, since, in the hands of the Cossacks, it still remains in a state of nature.”⁴² In the spirit of Sentimentalism, at the turn of the century Russian travellers saw some of this “backwardness” in a positive light. However, praise for simple manners and sincere attitudes easily shifts into a criticism of naivety or a contempt for backwardness. This occurs most pointedly in reports indicating the absence of a high culture: “Society has developed minds, but has not raised them to what might be called the level of intellectual splendour, that in conversation demands refined feelings and vital ideas, philosophy and charm, in jests Attic salt and Voltaire’s epigrammatic humour, the spark of Diderot’s enthusiasm, and in language the tenderness of Racine... Local life is limited to the simple domestic rounds and to those conditions in which man finds worldly happiness in the satisfaction of first necessities and in the measured employment of his abilities.”⁴³ Ukrainians, like their language and culture, were described as being in a state of arrested development. This quickly became a recurrent formula: the people were merely a folk, in the same way as their culture was constructed as merely a folk culture, because, unlike Russians, they had failed to develop a viable political and socioeco­nomic superstructure. As indicated earlier, travellers seemed oblivious, for example, to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ukrainian baroque, because they attributed any evidence of regional sophistica­tion to Polish culture and tended to ignore evidence of Ukraine’s earlier autonomous political and socioeconomic development.

The inhabitants of Russia’s “Italy” could quickly become trans­formed from a noble into a backward peasantry - Ukrainophilia into Ukrainophobia. The description of quaint customs was sometimes glossed as “the survival of ancient prejudices,” the legacy of a life lived not so much in the bosom of nature as in the depths of ignorance. One author explained of the Little Russians: “They are in vain called complete ignoramuses - almost barbarians. True, they are simple in extraordinary measure, do not like to speak much, even view personal insults calmly for a long period of time.”⁴⁴ He considered the people to be characters from “delightful eclogues” who belonged to the stage in human development when people were “more occupied with nature and themselves.”⁴⁵ The construct, in short, is of a people who have not progressed, who, in contrast to Russians, have preserved unchanged a patriarchal style of life. Just as admiration of Asia in the early part of the century (represented by chinoiserie, the fashion of Chinese letters and arts) quickly gave way to a disgust with the East’s perceived stagnation or immobility, the attitude to Ukraine quickly shifted from delighting in exoticism to condescension and contempt for lack of development.

The Discourse of Idleness

The quiet, simple, rough Ukrainian folk who had lived close to the soil for many generations were almost invariably criticized by the metropolitan traveller for idleness. It was the most tirelessly invoked trait invented to account for their inferiority to Russians, and it was implicitly offered as the reason for their inability to maintain state- hood.⁴⁶ The earliest of the travelogues were written shortly after the introduction of serfdom into the newly acquired Right Bank and its extension in the Left Bank. Many cossack families had been forced into it, and resistance was widespread. McClintock, in describing the English situation, has written that the discourse on idleness is, more properly speaking, a discourse on work, one that is “used to distinguish between desirable and undesirable labor. Pressure to work was, more accurately, pressure to alter traditional habits of work. During the land revolution and the war on the cottages of the eighteenth century, Official Board of Agriculture reports of the time praised the land enclosures for robbing the lower orders of economic independence, thereby forcing laborers to work every day of the year.”⁴⁷ The Russian gentry, in much the same way, appeared to be concerned with the presence of a relatively prosperous rural population that had escaped serfdom. Certainly, the Ukrainian village was never reported as a place of poverty or squalor. On the contrary, its appearance was invariably described as superior to that of the Russian village, and it was held up as a model of cleanliness, prosperity, and order.⁴⁸ Since, however, for ideological reasons these attributes could not be found in any inherent qualities of the native population, it was most frequently explained as a lucky accident of geography: Ukrainians were blessed with a remark­ably fertile land that required little effort to yield a crop, and under exploitation by a more industrious people would produce even higher yields.⁴⁹ Sbitnev, author of the “Trip to Kharkiv” (1830), also makes the point that the advantages of climate and geographical location would have been inadequately exploited by Ukraine’s native rulers had the country maintained its autonomy.⁵⁰ This particular inflection of the argument could also be traced to the Enlightenment, which had spoken in such terms of Eastern Europe as a whole. Gibbon, too, had written, “The fertility of the soil, rather than the labour of the natives, supplied the rustic plenty of the Sclavonians.”⁵¹

Bestial imagery frequently accompanied explanations of an idleness perceived as endemic. Pavel Sumarokov wrote that “The slowness char­acteristic of this people, which displays itself in their walk and all their actions, comes, as I suppose, from their being around oxen from their earliest days, those lazy creatures, which accustom them to such con­duct.”⁵² And Dolgoruky commented that “The ox is the living repre­sentation of the khokhol, who is just as bestial [skoten] and lazy. If an ox is not pushed, it will spend days and nights on the same spot.”⁵³ Osyp Bodiansky, the Ukrainian editor of Dolgoruky’s travelogue, commented acidly in a footnote to this text: “No less [bestial], however, than the Great Russian, who lives frequently in too close a contact with his ani­mals.”⁵⁴ Other accounts attributed the indolence to the southern cli­mate.⁵⁵ Lazy, long-suffering, but capable of hard work when driven, the character of Ukrainians was seen as good potential, as long as empire builders provided the essential leadership.

Land of Darkness

There are parallels between the Russian view of Ukraine and of Asia. In fact the connection between Ukraine and Asia was explicitly made in some texts. In the years 1826-30 thejournal Notes of the Fatherland ran a series of stories and travelogues on “exotic” lands entitled or subtitled “The Kirghizian Captive,” “A Bashkirian Tale,” “A Kalmykian Tale,” “A Tatar Tale.” In 1830 the publisher, Pavel Svinin, included one of Nikolai Gogol’s Ukrainian tales and provided the following exoticizing description of Ukrainians: “Little Russians are closer in appearance [than Great Russians] to the splendid inhabitants of Asia,” resembling Asians in their “facial appearance, frame, shapeliness of figure, laziness and carefree nature,” but “Little Russians... do not have those stormy, untameable passions characteristic of believers in Islam: a phlegmatic unconcern appears to serve them as a defence and barrier from uneasy disturbances; and often from under their thick eyebrows a fire flashes; a bold European intelligence penetrates; a passionate love of the motherland and ardent feelings, clothed in pristine simplicity, fill their breasts.”⁵⁶ This appropriation of the Enlightenment discourse on orientalism aligned Ukraine with the Caucasus as Russia’s “orient,” a borderland to be tamed, civilized, and exploited. Within the limits of this discourse metropolitan observers could construct the appropriate anthropology of malleable peoples who would make good labourers.

An example of a clearly racial contruct, one that might in fact have sprung from the pages of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, is contained in Dolgoruky’s travelogue. The prince writes:

The khokhol appears to be created by nature to till the land, sweat, burn in the sun and spend his whole life with a bronzed face. The rays of the sun burnish him to the extent that he shines as though covered in varnish, and his entire skull turns from yellow to a green hue; however, he does not grieve over such an enslaved condition: he knows nothing better. I have spoken with him. He knows his plough, ox, stack, whisky, and that constitutes his entire lexicon. If the khokhol complains about his condition, then the reason for his indignation has to be sought in the cruelty of the landlord, because he willingly bears any fate and any labour. However, he needs constant prodding, because he is very lazy: he and his ox will fall asleep and wake up five times in one minute. This, at least, is what I have observed, and, I dare think, if this entire people did not owe a debt to well-mannered landowners for their benevolence and respect for their humanity, the khokhol would be difficult to separate from the negro in any way: one sweats over sugar, the other over grain. May the Lord give them both good health!”⁵⁷

Nature is enlisted here as an advocate of subordination, becoming in Condorcet’s words “an accomplice in the crime of political inequal­ity.”⁵⁸ Omitted from Dolgoruky’s field of observation, of course, is any discussion of the population’s resistance to serfdom. A century later the Soviet historian Mikhail Pokrovsky looked back on Ukrainian history during this period and described the country as being turned into a “factory for the production of grain” and the landlords’ estates “into a likeness of the American plantation” with the part of black slaves played by the recently enserfed peasants.⁵⁹

These texts reveal a dichotomous attitude to nature and the peas­antry. The traveller is, on the one hand, moved by the sight of natural beauty to envy the peasants’ closeness to the soil and, on the other, to support the need to harness both nature and peasant labour power. Izmailov’s account, for example, incorporates ecstatic descriptions of natural beauty in which the author dreams of escaping the artificial pleasures of the city and devoting himself to the simple country life. Such sentiments, however, find their counterpoint in equally ecstatic apostrophes to Peter the Great, the “artist tsar” who is portrayed as having mastered the “science” of ruling and is repeatedly praised for taming nature. Izmailov writes, “where wilderness hid the beauty of nature, where rivers roared, where impenetrable forests rustled, there now flourish cities, temples and orchards.”⁶⁰ Dolgoruky admires unspoiled beauty but reserves his loudest applause for the harnessing of natural resources and his greatest laments for the contemplation of unexploited natural riches. To his mind, it was the foresight of Catherine and the intelligence of Potemkin that had brought the lands of Ukraine under cultivation: “When Catherine was filling the marshes and creating ditches in Petersburg, Potemkin at the other end of the world found virgin land and planted gardens in the steppe! Plant a stake in the ground and in a year’s time, like Aaron’s staff, it will be covered in green and will bear fruit. Extravagance in the enterprises of a wealthy master is as marvellous as Nature is in the hands of its wise Maker.”⁶¹ This formulation captures the potentially fabulous wealth of a fertile land, while insisting on the necessity of its exploitation under autocratic rule. It also demonstrates the widely observed tendency to feminize colonized territory as virgin land and

employ sexual imagery to suggest that the country was a passive, accepting young woman.

History's Purpose

The Russians were consistently described in the Russian travel litera­ture as superior to Ukrainians in “perseverance, cheerfulness and live­liness,”⁶² a fact that made them capable of evolution and change. The clearest example of this superiority had been provided by history, nota­bly by victory at the battle of Poltava in 1709. Poltava itself became a site of pilgrimage for almost all Russian travellers. Outside Kyiv itself, it was the most often mentioned tourist attraction in the land, offering visitors an indispensable moment for personal communion with his­tory and an opportunity for genuflection to Peter and the empire.⁶³ Poltava was at the same time offered as a metaphor for the integration of Ukraine’s pre-Petrine history into Russian. For the sentimental trav­eller the pilgrimage to Poltava was therefore described as providing an experience of the sublime analogous to that derived by the Romantics from contemplating the Caucasian mountains. Dolgoruky, for exam­ple, depicted himself as falling to the ground during a ceremony com­memorating the victory, in rapturous contemplation of the battle’s fallen soldiers.⁶⁴ Kulzhynsky suggested that when approaching Poltava the happy pilgrim would be transported: “even the air smells of Russian glory. The traveller greedily seeks traces of the great Peter.”⁶⁵ The sym­bolic importance of 1709 in these accounts, therefore, carries a heavy load of meaning: it demonstrates the superiority of Russian civilization, marks the moment at which Russia drives out foreign influences, and confirms Russia’s right to appropriate Ukraine’s history both as its own “ancient Rome” and as colourful “Italy.”

Ukrainians also contributed to this symbolic historiography and created their own discourse of promotionalism. The above-mentioned Kulzhynsky, who was Gogol’s schoolmaster, wrote gushing descriptions of Ukraine, the nineteenth-century equivalent of travel brochures, for consumption in the imperial capitals. In one of them he insisted that “It is unforgivable for a Russian not to visit Kyiv, not to glance at Poltava.”⁶⁶ Another account by Ie. Kovalevsky, purportedly a Ukrainian travelling within the country in 1819, described the stereotypical good- natured, musical - but lazy - peasantry living in a bucolic paradise. The author, however, testily insisted that the laziness characterized only the “common people and not at all the other estates.”⁶⁷ He also described the penchant of Ukrainians for literature and the arts:

Every thirty or forty versts you will come across a small town, in which you will find hospitable people, an elegant school, and not infrequently a town poet, whose muse alternately serves a wedding epithalamium and celebratory odes on the occasion of births, name-days, and so on. He writes elegies for lovers, and praises the deceased, depending on the fee, with a long or short epitaph- ian. In a word, this poet fulfills all the duties which are in larger towns divided among many versifiers. Lacking competitors, he calmly rules his little Parnas­sus, and, although his glory may not travel beyond the town walls, he need not fear reviews or journalists, lives without feeling a writer’s jealousy and dies leaving the gift of his verse to his beloved son.⁶⁸

This passage promotes the land as a quaint, idyllic, trouble-free vaca­tion spot or immigration destination. The author mimics metropolitan attitudes by commenting that the continued influx of hard-working “Northern” settlers from Russia, coupled with the influence of “the mother of labour - necessity,” will rid the local peasants of their lazy habits.⁶⁹ It is, once more, a portrait of an amenable labour force, political stability, and economic promise.

Most travel-narrative accounts, therefore, present a dualistic por­trayal. Just as Ukraine’s civilization is viewed as simultaneously unfa­miliar and yet recognizably Russian, its population is presented as frequently hostile but fundamentally loyal, even docile. This dichoto­mous portrayal also has deep roots in Polish literature, which from the mid-seventeenth century described Ukraine as a dangerous but fabu­lously rich “borderland.” From Guillaume de Beauplan’s description of 1651 of the land as “de merveilleuse fertilite” and “un Boulevard inex­pugnable contre la puissance des Turcs, et la violence des Tatares” to Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Ogniem i mieczem (With Fire and Sword) of 1885, this is a dominant image of the country in Polish writing.⁷⁰ The Russian travelogues generated an analogous imagery, reflecting an underlying political discourse. The empire’s political strategy toward integrating Ukrainians had, in fact, been clearly articulated by Catherine the Great early in her reign. In numerous confidential documents she had out­lined a policy of “treating them [Ukrainians] in the gentlest manner with the aim of Russifying them and putting an end to their gazing like wolves to the woods.”⁷¹ While seeing Ukraine as a component of Russia, strengthening absolutism and expanding the empire, the empress sought to avoid a potentially violent reaction. Her propaganda applied the rhetoric of rationalism and enlightenment to centralizing inten­tions. The documents are eloquent testimony to a concerted plan to exploit Ukrainian land, labour, finances, and military resources to the fullest, while gradually and deliberately removing all traces of auton­omy. Indeed, the fullest exploitation of resources is advanced as the justification for abolishing all vestiges of home rule.⁷² The widest range of tactics, from the extremes of cajolement to brutal force, it is made explicit, could be utilized in order to win over or intimidate local oppo­sition in the name of administrative uniformity and political security.

However, Ukraine’s distinct sociopolitical life and legal code stood in the way of imperial exploitation. Imperial strategists had from the 1760s blamed the free mobility of the Ukrainian labour force (which had not known serfdom until Catherine introduced it) for what they termed “drunkenness, laziness and vagrancy.”⁷³ They complained that the Ukrainian legal code allowed “the criticism of whomsoever one wished.”⁷⁴ Grigorii Teplov found “completely republican” the law that prevented the tsar from giving Ukrainian lands to foreigners and insisted that “not a single hetman” from 1657 up to the time of Ivan Skoropadsky had “failed to practice treachery or at least tried to do so.”⁷⁵ Catherine and her advisers listed various forms of resistance to imperial rule. The empress herself spoke of the “hidden hatred” of Ukrainians for Russians, who “in their turn have become accustomed to displaying a distinct contempt for Little Russians.”⁷⁶ She first moved to destroy the power of the Cossack starshyna, the ruling officer class in Ukraine, and then turned her attention to the independence of the Zaporozhian Sich, which had conducted a broad colonization of the lands within its jurisdiction, often accomplished by settling escap­ees from Polish and Russian serfdom. Catherine was aware of the political challenge to imperial authority harboured by this economic independence. She wrote, “In establishing their own agricultural pro­duction, they have lessened their dependence on our throne.”⁷⁷ The Russo-Turkish war of 176S-74 weakened the Zaporozhian Sich by removing eleven thousand men for the war effort, forcing the popu­lation to support tsarist armies, and conscripting the population for corvee. There were widespread complaints of theft, destruction of farm­lands, and exploitation and enserfment of the population. It was charged that Russian officers behaved “almost as though it was a conquered land.”⁷⁸ Eventually, when Catherine felt strong enough, she razed the Sich in 1775.

In the 1SS0s Mykhailo Drahomanov would claim that the policy of undermining the legitimacy of Ukraine’s autonomy, of obliterating its traces and intensifying Russification, was a conscious and deliberate one that originated in Catherine’s reign and was continued throughout the nineteenth century. In commenting on the empress’s secret instructions of 1764 on how to Russify Ukraine, he wrote: “We have been witnesses to how these words became the slogans of various Katkovs, Samarins, Aksakovs and the basis of a whole range of government undertakings of a centralizing and Russificatory character.”⁷⁹ In its concluding pages the oppositionist, anonymous Istoriia Rusov (History of the Rus People), which circulated widely in the early decades of the nineteenth century, described Catherine’s policy as governed by the motto “Complete what has been left unfinished!” (nedokonchannaia sovershaem), suggesting that her policy toward Ukraine was a conscious endorsement of the subor­dination to imperial rule initiated by the first emperor. It is against the background of this long-standing imperial policy that the literary atti­tudes of the first part of the nineteenth century should be viewed.

The travel writings of this period provide texts of encyclopedic scope that aim to justify the absorption of the land and people and that envisage their culture and history as an organic part of the empire. They share tropes with contemporary fictional accounts and deploy images that were to become stereotypes in literature, journalism, and scholarship. It has been asserted that the Russian journals of this period were “philo-Ukrainian”⁸⁰ and that the significance of Ukraine could, as David Saunders has indicated, be interpreted in different ways:

According to taste, Ukraine could stand for either medievalism or the pristine simplicity of the state of nature; either age-old tradition or freedom from the straitjacket of modern society. It therefore provided both conservatives and liberals with food for thought. Given this wide appeal, and given the presence of Ukrainians in Russia who could respond to Russian interest and advance the discussion, it was not at all surprising that Ukrainian subject-matter figured prominently in early nineteenth-century Russian literary activity. On the con­trary, it was a natural consequence of earlier political developments and current cultural concerns.⁸¹

This statement is true only up to a point. It fails to mention what was elided in literary descriptions of Ukraine and ignores the existence of an underlying homogenizing discourse that worked to construct the land and people as tractable and therefore desirable material for assimilation. Russian dynastic nationalists (like Faddei Bulgarin, Nikolai Grech, and Osip Senkovsky), Romantic nationalists (like Mikhail Pogodin and Stepan Shevyrev), Slavophiles, and Westernizers all interpreted Ukraine differently, yet all agreed on the necessity and inevitability of imperial growth and cultural assimilation. Moreover, philo-Ukrainianness, like the phenomenon of philo-orientalism in its various manifestations, welcomed the incorporation of “foreign” cul­tural traits as long as they revitalized and invigorated the conquering civilization. Invariably, therefore, accounts of Ukraine coupled any description of distinctiveness with integrationist sermons on imperial historiography. Like the “orientals,” Ukrainians were granted the inno­cence and freshness of a “developing” people, but their coming to maturity, the reader was assured, would make them indistinguishable from Russians. The inhabitants of Kyiv, for instance, were described by Izmailov as living through the “the human race’s time of youth.” He expressed regret that “enlightenment” would bring “dissolute­ness.”⁸² This latter development was seen in Enlightenment terms as the inevitable cost of spreading rationality, progress, and universal civilization. Izmailov concluded his comments on Ukrainians by denouncing the aggressive behaviour of the Zaporozhians, the emblem for him of all that was atavistic in the Ukrainian character. It was, however, an undesirable quality only up to the moment when it was integrated into the imperial military. After this had been accom­plished and the Zaporozhians had entered imperial military service, their proclivity to violence became a positive attribute: “the conquer­ing arms of Russia found them in the depths of the Sich, and barbar­ism submitted to heroism.”⁸³

The empire, it was asserted, had brought enlightenment and progress to a primitive, inchoate civilization that had no hope of independent existence. Contemplating Baturyn, the capital of Hetma- nate Ukraine, Sbitnev comments on the changes Russian rule had wrought: “The insignificant advantages that Little Russians formerly enjoyed have today been replaced by the welfare of the entire country, extend to all social layers. This country was ruled according to the whims of people who were not always enlightened and benevolent, and would have remained to this day a wilderness, a den of igno- rance.”⁸⁴ It is an assumption of this Enlightenment rhetoric that the far-sighted despot has the right to bring the light of civilization and the benefits of progress to backward nations, while in the process assimilating them for their own good. It is interesting to note that this passage nonetheless contains a grudging admission of Ukraine’s ear­lier civilizational superiority and greater wealth and that their appro­priation is described as an involuntary sharing of “advantages” with all estates within the imperial realm.

Imperial regimes, as postcolonial theory has pointed out, seek legit­imation in all available ways. Ashis Nandy, in describing of the British colonial encounter with Indian culture, indicates variance and inted- erminacy as a specifically designated tactic.⁸⁵ Homi Bhabha has simi­larly described the practice of authority as displaying an “ambivalence that is one of the most significant discursive and psychical strategies of discriminatory power.”⁸⁶ The Russian colonial archive - both the administrative pronouncements and supporting literary texts - displays inconsistencies. Moreover, much of the commentary contained within this archive was challenged. Ukrainian writers often reacted to what they perceived as misinformation and bias. Ivan Kotliarevsky, for example, included in his play Natalka-Poltavka (1819) a response to A. Shakhovskoi’s presentation of Ukrainian folklore, history, and speech in popular vaudevilles such as The Cossack Poet (Kozak Stikhotvorets), which was first performed in St Petersburg on 15 May 1812. A char­acter in Kotliarevsky’s play complains that “a Russian assumed the task of writing in our language and about us, without ever seeing the country or knowing our customs and beliefs.” Ukrainians argued that representations such as Shakhovskoi’s caricatured them. Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko, Levko Borovykovsky, and others began writing in Ukrainian in the 1830s with the explicit aim of refuting charges that their language was fit only for depicting the comic and crude and incapable of expressing finer feelings. A large number of works on Ukrainian themes began to appear in Russian at this time. Some adopted the dominant tropes of the travel accounts described here, but others rejected them and contributed to the literary counterdepic­tions that together constituted a counterdiscourse.

INCORPORATING UKRAINIAN HISTORY:

EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY RUSSIAN WRITING

We have no need to resort to fables and inventions as the Greeks and Romans did to elevate our origin. Glory was the cradle of the Russian nation, and victory the herald of its existence.

Nikolai Karamzin,

On Love for the Fatherland and National Pride (1802)

Russian historical literature of the early nineteenth century is marked by the need to incorporate Ukraine within its imperial narrative. In an article from 1802 Karamzin listed the historical themes that he considered significant and worthy of treatment by Russian artists. The first is the taking of Kazan, and the last is the founding of Moscow. The rest are all selected from the history of Kyivan Rus and events on Ruthenian (Ukrainian and Belarusan) territory. The mythic structures that he proposed for these narratives are as revealing as the geograph­ical predominance of Ukraine in Karamzin’s desiderata. He was par­ticularly taken with the story of Rogneda:

Who can imagine without a feeling of pity the beautiful and unhappy Rogneda, who because of her great misfortune has been given the touching name of Goreslava? Vladimir has destroyed her fatherland, killed her brothers and par­ents, and married this desperate captive. With faithful love he might still con­quer the tender heart of the woman; his lust satisfied, however, he wants to get rid of his spouse. Then her humiliated love recalls all the evil deeds of the cruel and ungrateful Vladimir, and Gorislava, strengthened by the teachings of her pagan religion, which counts vengeance among the virtues, decides to kill Vladimir. For the last time he visits her and falls asleep in her chamber: Rogneda takes the knife - but delays - and the prince, awaking, tears the deadly weapon from her trembling hands. At that point Goreslava, in a moment of passionate despair, lists all his insults and cruelties... I believe I can see before me Vladimir, astonished and finally moved; I see the unfortunate Goreslava incited by her heart, her night clothing in disarray, and hair dishevelled. Vladimir. listens to Rogneda with an attention that speaks for the fact that her words have deeply touched his heart. I think that this subject is affecting and colourful.⁸⁷

Rogneda’s role as the recalcitrant colonized woman was reworked many times throughout the first decades of the century.⁸⁸ A female counterpart to the Mazepa myth, she plays upon imperial fears of an undomesticated, imperfectly assimilated conquest and an ever-present threat of treason. In various versions of the story, she was depicted as wishing to kill her husband in revenge for the destruction of her homeland, Polotsk. The focus is usually on the astonishing depth of deception. Izmailov, in commenting on the episode, expressed amaze­ment that “the hand which tenderly caressed” the Prince, could hold a knife over him, that “wild ferocity” blazed in “eyes which at one time sparkled with love and tenderness!” In his retelling of the legend, the ruler first condemns her to death, then, heeding the pleas of their child who is now “the hostage of their earlier love,” pardons her.⁸⁹ In another version Vladimir kills her father and lover, but the latter dies with a final exhortation on his lips: that Rogneda accept Vladimir’s embrace.⁹⁰ The message is clear: the conquered Slavic principality can be romanced into a willing loyalty.

The contemporary import of such empire-building allegories is made explicit in fictional accounts of events from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ukrainian history, which began to appear in 1816 and became popular in the 1830s. Their favourite themes are Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s revolution, the haidamak rebellions, and Ivan Mazepa. The first two are celebrated as popular uprisings against a cruel and oppressive Polish regime. They carry an anti-Polish, pro-Russian assim- ilationist message that recounts Polish atrocities and offers justifica­tions for Khmelnytsky’s treason.⁹¹ The Mazepa theme, on the contrary, carries an antirevolutionary message, emphasizing the civilizational superiority of Russia and the benefits of tsarist government.⁹² The topoi of Mazepa’s characterization in the numerous accounts of the events of 1708-9 form a counterpart to the depictions of Polish perfidy in the Dimitrii Samozvanets theme from this time. Ukrainian cossacks and the population at large are reassuringly depicted as imperial loy­alists. Mazepa’s motivation for revolt (like Khmelnytsky’s in hostile Polish accounts) is described as a personal vendetta to avenge insults. Foreign intrigues play an important role in explaining the treason: the Polish court,Jesuit influence, a desire to Catholicize the country, or to place it under Polish rule configure his intentions as those of a seditious alien. Described as a “Ukrainian Machiavelli,” he is both dev­ilishly clever and a ruthless and oppressive ruler despised by his people.

This Mazepa narrative can also be read as allegory: Russia’s “past,” her own former innocent self, is represented by the common people who justly fear contamination by an occidentalizing, latinizing Polish culture that has been “unnaturally” grafted onto them from above. Consequently, they welcome the elimination of this threat and a return to the “all-Russian” fold. The only account to depart substantially from such a portrayal is Bulgarin’s Mazepa (1833-34). Bulgarin, a Pole who fought against Russia in 1812 before deserting and fashioning a liter­ary career for himself in Russia, conceived his book as a response to Pushkin’s “Poltava,” which, he felt, had not done justice to the hetman. In his preface the author asserts that he wishes to examine the “polit­ical character” of Mazepa, whom he describes as “one of the most intelligent magnates of his age.”⁹³ The book portrays the hetman’s court not only as occidental but as splendid and in close contact with Poland and other Western countries. The Cossack starshyna, according to him, was unanimously opposed to amalgamation with imperial Russia and passionately opposed to tsarist intrusions into local affairs. Even Mazepa’s enemies, Polubotok and Palei (Palii) are fanatical defenders of the country’s rights. Moreover, Mazepa and his starshyna exhibit great political sophistication, making them a formidable polit­ical entity. What has also gone unremarked in Bulgarin’s account is his recognition of Mazepa’s politics as a coherent and consistently maintained drive for independence. Bulgarin’s hetman recognizes clearly that Peter’s new unitary state has no place for Ukrainian auton­omy and therefore attempts to develop a system of alliances that would create the diplomatic room to manreuvre that he needs.

The hetman’s strategy and diplomacy become so absorbing for the reader that they threaten to derail the pro-tsarist narrative. Recogniz­ing this, the narrator offers explanations for the mistaken indepen­dentist politics. First, Little Russia had good reasons at the time for avoiding close union with Russia, because the empire was “not then what it is today”: boiars and viceroys sent by the tsar plundered the country “after the example of the Tatars”; there was no rule of law and “no reason to envy the Russians.”⁹⁴ The benefits and compensa­tions of empire, its “vastness, power, might and enlightenment,” became apparent only in recent times. Second, and more fundamentally, Ukraine’s independence was not viable: the country would inevitably have been drawn into close union with either Poland or Russia and would have become a pawn in the hands of other powers. Ukraine’s only choice was who would be its master. In the novel the “far-sighted and perceptive” Mazepa recognizes this and aims for a Ukraine allied with Poland as a European buttress against the “Russians and Tatars.”⁹⁵ Ironically Bulgarin, the renegade Pole, acts as a spokesman for a strong hereditary autocracy in opposition to the elected Polish mon­archy and for ties of “blood and faith” binding Ukraine to Russia.⁹⁶

Moreover, he identifies a supposedly anarchic impulse in Ukrainians that prevents them, as it does Poles, from developing a stable form of government. Bulgarin was one of the first authors to examine the anar­chistic “philosophy” of the Zaporozhians, which is presented in the novel as indulgence in uninhibited violence and unrestrained drunken­ness and sexuality, alternating with the enforcement of a strict code of discipline during military campaigns. Ukrainian society, represented pri­marily by the cossacks, is, like the Polish society of independent nobles, constituted of insubordinates - intransigent social groupings who have obstinately refused to fit into the imperial structure. Mazepa’s strategy aims at taming the warlord Palei (Palii), who has been created by the destabilized international situation and whose concept of cossack “free­doms” (volnosti) is nothing but lawlessness. Palei’s anti-Polish and anti- Jewish pogroms make Mazepa’s desire for a stable national government an attractive alternative. Bulgarin’s point is that ultimately only Peter’s despotic, ruthless rule could achieve the required control and stability.

In the end, however, the reader is left well aware of the patriotic motivation of Mazepa and the starshyna and with a sense of Ukraine as a serious player in international affairs. For the hetman’s central ideo­logical statement, Bulgarin chooses Mazepa’s famous poem “Oi bida, bida chaitsi nebozi” (Oh, Woe to the Unfortunate Seagull), which out­lines the difficulty of protecting the internally divided and geographi­cally exposed patria against neighbouring powers; it is a sentiment that other Cossack leaders fully endorse.⁹⁷

The Rogneda and Mazepa themes suggest a fear of the enemy con­cealed within. Even a Ukraine that appeared loyal, subdued, and domes­ticated might instantly turn hostile. For the imperial imagination, therefore, familiarity had its nightmares. One of the most frightening was revolution, which was often associated with a resurgent Zaporozhian Sich. Indeed, the great Pugachev rebellion of 1773 had connections with the Zaporozhians’ military encampment on the lower Dnieper. Many rebels were former Zaporozhians who had been exiled to Siberia after staging a revolt in 1769, and Pugachev himself had attempted to find sanctuary in the Sich at the end of the rebellion. The Sich contin­ually attracted soldiers and escaped peasants who bolstered its resistance to the empire. A second rebellion took place there in 1774. Rumours circulated that this would be a second Koliivshchyna (the rebellion of 1768 against Polish rule), this time directed against the Russian empire. The manner in which the Sich was destroyed and its leaders arrested and exiled, although never mentioned in Russian literature, was widely known and resented in Ukraine. The last Zaporozhian leader, Petro Kalnyshevsky, who had ably defended the Sich from imperial encroach­ment, was exiled in 1776 to a monastery in the Solovets Islands, where he was kept in chains for twenty-six years in a dungeon two metres wide and three metres long. Finally amnestied by Alexander I in 1801, he died a monk in the monastery in 1803, aged 110. In the early decades of the nineteenth century memories of the Sich were still fresh, and the creation of the Black Sea Cossacks, which served as part of Suvorov’s army in the 17gos, had rekindled the idea of a national fighting force.

Continual insurrections fuelled demands for political autonomy. As serfdom was extended into Ukraine, peasant revolts took place and legendary figures like Semen Harkusha, a Ukrainian Robin Hood, were able to operate for as long as a decade (1772-84) with popular support. When Aleksei Arakcheev began forming military communes in Ukraine in 1816, driving over 350,000 state peasants into them, he sparked a further string of revolts that lasted from 1818 to 1820. In short, the recent history of the Sich and peasant discontent created a receptive mass base for an autonomist ideology, which was reflected, at first mutedly, and later explicitly, in the writings of Ivan Kotliarevsky, Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko, Panteleimon Kulish, Taras Shevchenko, and other writers, who frequently took the historical popular rebel­lions as their themes.

The fantasy literature that was generated by Romanticism and that often fused with historical literature turned to the country’s rich and ancient folklore for a seemingly inexhaustible source of myths and leg­ends. Ukraine was seen as a land of witches and charms, magic and treasures, ancient rites and forbidden knowledge. The attraction of folklore was shown to be either dangerous and occult or harmless and reassuringly familiar - another duality that caused the bifurcation of this fantasy literature into two streams: gothic horror and comedy. The first produced tales of latent evil, supernatural powers, and cruel revenges, like Gogol’s “Terrible Vengeance” (Strashnaia mest), with their suggestions of unresolved social tensions. As Romanticism waned and threats of insurrection and political separatism receded, the second stream came to predominate in the Russian literature devoted to Ukraine. It is associated with some of the fiction of Ivan Kulzhinsky, Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko, Ievhen Hrebinka, and Nikolai Gogol - all Ukrainians who wrote in Russian and described a country of charming and anachronistic ways, far removed from the urban and enlightened modern society. In these depictions Ukraine is associated not simply with the past and the rural but with the superstitious, outdated, and backward.

Eccentric provincial gentry-folk, who can be seen as embodiments of the assumptions present in travel and historical writings, populate this literary landscape.⁹⁸ These landowners are sometimes hidebound reactionaries, simple-minded traditionalists, or ridiculous raisonneurs - all portrayals that were greatly appreciated by the metropolitan reader and critic, who took these comic images as reassurances of a homogenizing cultural vision and centralizing political ideology. How­ever fascinating its past history, however charming its folkways, con­temporary Ukraine was a backward province.

Two writers who introduced Ukrainian history to Russian literature deserve special attention. Orest Somov, who wrote between 1826 and 1833, and Ievhen Hrebinka (Evgenii Grebenka), whose works appeared between 1835 and 1846. Their stories attempt to find a role for the Ukrainian historical identity within the Russian imperial imag­ination. Somov, under the influence of Romanticism, produced tales of Gothic mystery and horror that drew on Ukrainian folklore, like “Kyiv Witches” (Kievskie vedmy, 1833), or were set in a Ukrainian historical context, like “The Captive Turk” (Plennyi Turok, 1831) and “The Haidamak” (Gaidamak, 1825). These stories deal with the pres­ence in Ukraine of the assimilable and unassimilable “Other.” This literary Ukraine is populated by a number of races - Poles,Jews, and Turks among them. The captured Turk at the end of the eponymous story refuses to return to Turkey when given a chance to do so, becomes an Orthodox Christian, and enlists in the tsarist army. Other identities, however, are more difficult to assimilate, most notably that of the Jews. “The Haidamak” portrays a colourful brigand, aligning him not with the rude manners of criminals but with the noble conduct of a courtier. It portrays Jews as an alien group who have in the past served the Polish oppressor and presently harbour resentment toward the cossacks; their pro-Polish orientation and commercial interests are in competition with those of the cossacks, making them potentially treacherous. Most importantly, however, Somov’s antisemitism serves to create, by way of contrast, a favourable picture of Ukrainian loyalty to and cultural affinity for Russians.

The same theme of treachery was developed further by Ievhen Hrebinka in “The Nezhin Captain Zolotarenko: A Historical Tale” (Nezhinskii polkovnik Zolotarenko: Istoricheskaia byl, 1842) and Chaikovsky (1843). The first deals primarily with the perfidy of Poles, the second with that ofJews. Both are set in the legendary past during the seventeenth-century cossack-Polish wars. Chaikovsky is particularly interesting for its description of cossack life. Hrebinka’s narrative draws on family legends (his mother was a descendant of the historical lieutenent Chaikovsky) and sources recently made available, in order to paint a heroic picture of Ukrainian society in struggle with the Poles to the west and the Tatars and Turks to the south. The work enjoyed great popularity. Ivan Franko described it as the favourite reading of Galician Ukrainian youth in the 1860s and 1870s.⁹⁹

It draws a clear line of cultural demarcation between Ukrainians and Russians, on the one hand, and the remaining peoples, on the other. The two camps can be distinguished by their customs, rituals, and faith. The hatred of the Jewish Rokhlia for Ukrainians is well- motivated. Her family has been the victim of a pogrom perpetrated by cossacks who carried off her two children, Teklia (Tetiana) and Gertsik. The past cruelty of the cossacks, the reader is made aware, has produced a fifth column within their own society. In order to survive Gertsik has to deny his identity and pretend to be a German and a loyal friend of Chaikovsky. He eventually tries to kill and ruin the lieutenant’s son. Rokhlia, dressed as a gypsy, wanders the cossack land in search of her lost children. She pretends to care for the sick but in fact takes every opportunity to administer poison to unsuspect­ing victims. Jews are portrayed as subversives like Rokhlia and Gertsik, spies like Gershko, or foreign elements that cannot be successfully integrated into the society, like the hapless Teklia, who commits sui­cide. The final carnival, like the witches’ sabbath in Somov’s “Kyiv Witches,” which brings together Germans, Jews, Poles, gypsies, and devils, suggests that these groups are eternal outsiders who continue to hide their true identities and intentions.

The Ukrainian world is portrayed as a rugged frontier society that has become accustomed to rooting out and destroying treachery and is attuned to the divisive power of religious and cultural difference. The role of Ukrainians in dealing with disloyalty has been of vital importance to the state: they have learned how to unmask traitors (Gertsyk, the “gypsy,” Gershko) and fight off Tatars, Turks, and Poles. In this way the Orthodox Slavic warrior-society has proven its value to the empire-builders. The narrative plays up the “arguments” of con­sanguinity, shared faith, and common cultural features. But the most important “argument” is historical: Ukrainians have already made a vital contribution to maintaining the boundary between the Orthodox Slavs and other, hostile civilizations. Ukraine’s violent history is shown to have served an essential function in protecting the empire’s border from foreign incursions. The cossacks have assimilated violence, in other words, as a defensive military posture, a by-product of aggression directed against them.

The novel, however, contains an important critique of this military society that is linked to the generalized use of violence. Permissible and necessary use of violence in a boundary-guarding warrior-society is applauded, but the text suggests that no absolute distinction, and in fact a troubling interconnectedness, exists between different kinds of violence. We are made aware of violence as a sport among some Zaporozhian, who encourage young men to prove their mettle by raiding neighbouring Polish lands; of violence used in revenge, as in the case of the pogrom against the former oppressors, Poles and Jews; and of violence against women. The story demonstrates that the cycle of violence is, in the end, crippling to all parties. The cruel pogrom and the capture of the two children, who are later sold, comes back to haunt the Ukrainian society: Gertsik deceives and almost destroys Chaikovsky’s family. The misogynistic warrior-cossack ethos causes misery to Chaikovsky’s wife, who dies complaining of her husband’s insensitivity. It comes close to destroying Maryna, whom the Zapor- ozhians, upon discovering the presence of a woman in their midst, are prepared to kill. The young men of the Sich push Maryna out of their camp, in this way preventing the more fanatical Zaporozhians from hurting her. It is clear that misogyny damages men too: Chaikovsky is more sensitive than his macho identity allows him to admit.

The key problem is one of containing the violence and choosing its lesser form when appropriate. The use of violence against women and children is clearly unacceptable, and its depiction is meant to shock readers. It is punished by having its consequences rebound on the perpetrators. Rokhlia is the clearest example of this. The unmasking of her gypsy identity is preceded by an important discussion of human evil and the pernicious spirit of revenge. The author discusses the importance of overcoming violent animal instincts and hatreds, which exist “even in civilized society.” He warns that if passion overcomes an individual, “especially revenge,” that person becomes capable of worse behaviour than “tigers and snakes” and “can surprise imagination itself.”¹⁰⁰ It is to be noted that Rokhlia’s admission of guilt is not followed by punishment. She is banished with the words: “It is not for us to judge you; the Lord will stand in judgment over you.”¹⁰¹

The epilogue describes the death of Chaikovsky’s last remaining descendant long after the narrated events, in the 1820s, on the Persian frontier where he has served the imperial army loyally. The old family estate, which came to life briefly during the “last Turkish campaign,” is now overrun. The old town church has been hit by lightning and has burned down. The contemporary carriage driver, whom the author meets, suggests by his appearance a blend of the old Zaporozhian world and the new Russia, a manifestation of the hybrid identity that the new imperial state has produced: he has long Zaporozhian whis­kers, wide cossack trousers, a Russian armiak, and a red Muscovite shirt.

Taken together, these facts suggest the severing of links with the past, the denial of the old warrior ethos, and the attempt to move beyond the “spirit of evil” associated with the martial order, vengeful­ness, and violence. What aligns Hrebinka’s Chaikovsky with Somov’s Gaidamak is not their acquiescence to Russian hegemony so much as the subtextual argument for inclusion. Xenophobia and anti-Semitism are linked to a pro-Russian stance and are rewarded with the promise of Ukraine becoming a partner in state- and nation-building. The epilogue to Chaikovsky suggests that Ukrainians have been successfully integrated in a way that Poles and Jews will never be.

In his verse play Bohdan (Bogdan, 1843), which was written at the same time as Chaikovsky, Hrebinka describes the violence of Khmelny­tsky’s revolt as a spontaneous phenomenon of nature, an event called forth by the injustices done to Ukrainian society over the centuries of Polish rule and sanctioned by natural law. Jews are seen as the exec­utive hand of oppressive Polish rule. It is significant that the second half of the play moves to integrate Ukraine ideologically with Russia. The familiar arguments of consanguinity, common faith, and history are made, and an acquiescence to Russian hegemony is encoded in the biblical image of Joseph, to whom, it is said, eleven brothers were eventually forced to submit. The cliches of Russia as a “realm without boundaries,” one that spans all points of the compass and unites all Slavic tongues are repeated. However, the motivation for the final act, the signing of the Pereiaslav treaty on 8 January 1654, has its compli­cations. The motive given for signing the treaty is war-weariness among the people. Preparations for convincing the population of the legiti­macy of the treaty are manipulatory and mechanical: bandura-players and blind minstrels are sent out by the hetman to prime the popula­tion. As the group moves toward the gathered crowd to make the proclamation, the first comment is, “Oh, what a freezing cold! A Muscovite cold, they call it.” The common people have hardly even seen a Muscovite, and only one of those in attendance claims to have heard their language. On the strength of his assurances, they are prepared to accept that the language, appearance, and faith of Rus­sians are similar to theirs. But most significant is the final metaphor of two eagles. The elder brother-eagle, we are told, stayed at home and grew strong. The younger eagle took off for foreign lands too early in life. When the elder brother caught up with him, he found him exhausted, surrounded by hostile crows, and in mortal danger. The final words of the play (“The blood brothers embraced / And were strong again. / How great is Russia / And Ukraine - the mother!”) summons up the image of two intertwined eagles or the double-headed eagle of the imperial banner. It suggests a claim of partnership - albeit an unequal one - between brothers. Even though requiring rescue through the intervention of a stronger, older brother, Ukraine, nonetheless, has fought more difficult battles on the frontier, earlier and longer, and can now provide both the political and military skills that the expanding state requires. Having policed the boundaries of the East Slavic realm, Ukraine has acquired specialized knowledge of foreign worlds. The final comments also remind the reader that Ukraine, not Russia, was the cradle of East Slavic civilization. Incon­gruously, Hrebinka combines the claims of Ukraine’s seniority (“the mother”) with a younger, “weaker brother” status.

The verse drama Bohdan and the novel Chaikovsky construct Ukraine as an inalienable part of the empire whose union with Russia has been the product not of violence but of natural affinities and whose identity demands recognition within the empire. Both Somov and Hrebinka continued the discourse of promotionalism: they furnished persuasive guarantees of the permanence of the union, calmed fears of native violence and intractability, and presented a request for visibility within the imperial self-image.

mazepa: Kondratii ryleev's “voinarovsky” (1825) AND

ALEKSANDR PUSHKIN'S “POLTAVA” (l828)

By the time of the Decembrist revolt of 1825 a Russian literature that celebrated imperial expansion already had a long tradition, with its own codex of themes, metaphors, and tropes. It merged with a pro- autocratic discourse that denied legitimacy to local autonomies and republican aspirations. An example of the latter is Catherine the Great’s Historical Play from the Life of Riurik (Istoricheskoe predstavlenie iz zhizni Riurika, 1786), which condemns Vadim of Novgorod as an ambitious pretender to the lawful rule of Riurik, in whom the empress saw her ideal of an enlightened monarch. In the end Vadim comes on bended knee to Riurik and swears eternal loyalty. Mikhail Kheraskov’s “The Tsar, or Novgorod Saved” (Tsar, ili spasenie Novgor- oda, 1800) also portrays Vadim as a terrorist and Novgorod as saved from the “horrors of anarchic rule.” His Rossiad (Rossiada, 1778), an attempt at a national epic, describes the taking of Kazan from the Tatars by Ivan the Terrible in 1552. Written at the time of the Russo- Turkish wars, when Catherine was attempting to capture the Crimea, it depicts the Tatars as cruel oppressors of Russia.¹⁰² Karamzin’s Martha the Governor, or the Subjugation of Novgorod (Marfa-Posadnitsa ili poko- renie Novagoroda: Istoricheskaia povest, 1802), a foundation work of modern Russian historical fiction, develops the same theme. A litera­ture critical of tsarist policies emerged to challenge such representa­tions. It included Aleksandr Radishchev’s ode “Freedom” (Volnost, written in 1783 and partly published in 1790), Iakov Kniazhnin’s tragedy Vadim Novgorodsky (refused staging in 1789 because of the outbreak of the French Revolution but published in 1793), which portrays the hero as a republican and defender of civic rights, and Pushkin’s “Ode to Freedom” (Volnost, 1817). A patriotic Ukrainian literature that defended local democratic rights appeared, at least on the surface, to be a natural ally of this liberal trend. Vasilii Kapnist’s “Ode on Slavery” (Oda na rabstvo, 1783), which is generally inter­preted as a protest against the extension of serfdom to Ukrainian territories by Catherine the Great’s edict of 3 May 1783, can be seen as such a defence of local rights.¹⁰³ In the 1820s readers attuned to the Decembrists’ elevation of personal freedoms and political liberties viewed Novgorod’s veche and Ukraine’s elected hetman as examples of a recoverable democratic tradition. Moreover, Ukraine possessed a rich literature and folklore that celebrated the heroic struggle against foreign domination. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, chronicles and epic songs, known as dumy, from the seventeenth and eighteenth century, as well as tracts like the History of the Rus People (which was published in 1846 and had earlier circulated in manuscript copies) became available. These writings helped to strengthen Ukraine’s image as a freedom-loving land continually in revolt against foreign tyrants and an oppressive social order.¹⁰⁴

Ryleev became acquainted with much of this literature through his contacts with Ukrainian scholars. He employed a generalized, unified image of Ukraine’s struggle for social and national freedom to create a civic-minded poetry in the service of the Decembrist cause.¹⁰⁵ Its most arresting expression came in the poetic production of his last two years, which deals predominantly with Ukraine and includes his most famous poetic statements, “Voinarovsky” (1825) and “Nalyvaiko” (1825).

Using Ukrainian history as the source for a liberation mythology brought with it several difficulties. In the first place Ryleev’s break with imperial notions embedded in the idea of state patriotism was gradual and only partial. His profound respect for Derzhavin and admiration for Karamzin’s Histor y of the Russian State, the ninth volume of which inspired him to write his Dumy (1822-23), reveal a hesitation between what Nestor Kotliarevsky called “the permitted codex of civic morals” and “the most genuine freedom-thinking poetry.”¹⁰⁶ However, Ryleev’s originality lies in the explicit connection he made between democratic and national rights with reference to Ukraine. In “Voinarovsky” Ukraine’s aspirations for autonomy are viewed sympathetically, and legitimacy is given to an anti-imperial, anti-Russian point of view. It was not a position the poet held unambiguously, but it nonetheless resounds so strongly in this poem that the author, who was the chief conspirator in the Decembrist revolt, can be seen as belonging to an anti-imperialist current within Russian literature.

The poetry of Ryleev’s last two years celebrates the spirit of freedom and various movements to overthrow tyrants in both Russia and Ukraine. Were the freedom movements in these two countries com­patible? Could they be reconciled with the idea of a unified empire? Tsarist censorship thought not. The original publication of 1825 included several editorial explanations and cuts to the text. Even so, readers were astonished by its appearance. A reprinting was not per­mitted in the nineteenth century, and forty years after Ryleev’s death the Petersburg censorship committee still refused to publish an anthology of the poet’s work on the grounds that “Voinarovsky” was “too vivid a reminder of the former independent status” of Ukraine.¹⁰⁷

A century later, following the revolution of 1917, Volodymyr Vynny- chenko complained that Russian liberalism ended at the Ukrainian question. Ryleev’s application of democratic, republican principles, however, indicates a Russia prepared to transgress this political and psychological taboo. This opinion finds support in his political views: in his rejection of Pestel’s ideas of centralization, which he considered a dangerous Bonapartism, and in his gradual turn away from the glorification of empire-builders like Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great to sympathetic portrayals of empire dismemberers like Mazepa and Voinarovsky. In the final months of his life he worked on philo­sophical poems devoted to the eternal revolt of freedom against des­potism. The scheme of one, entitled “The Spirit of the Time or the Fate of the Human Race,” outlines humanity’s fall from a state of “wild freedom” to enslavement by despotism, followed by a gradual libera­tion in the Reformation and French Revolution. The concluding section was to describe a struggle of “nations against tsars” leading to a union of religion, morality, and politics.¹⁰⁸ This recognition of national rights as an irreducible aspect of political morality, coupled with his strong interest in the figure of Mazepa, constituted a radical challenge to received notions.

Ryleev’s interest in Ukraine was stimulated by his stay in the country from 1816 to 1820, during which time he married the daughter of a Ukrainian gentry family from Ostrogozhsk, an area that had been settled by Ukrainian cossacks. Even as late as 1897, census figures revealed that the area was over 90 percent Ukrainian.¹⁰⁹ Many settlers had been enserfed by Catherine the Great only after 1783. In the years he spent there, Ryleev travelled to Kharkiv and Kyiv, establishing con­tacts with intellectuals at a time when interest in Ukraine was growing rapidly among writers, ethnographers, and historians. Kharkiv Univer­sity, which had been founded in 1805, published studies on Ukraine in the Ukrainian Herald (Ukrainskii vestnik) and the Ukrainian Journal (Ukrainskii zhurnal). N. Tsertelev’s Collection of Ancient Little Russian Songs (Opyt sobraniie starinnykh malorossiiskikh pesen) appeared in 1819 and Bantysh-Kamensky’s History of Little Russia (Istoriia Maloi Rossii) in 1822.¹¹⁰ Through his contacts with intellectuals, Ryleev also had access to the unpublished History of the Rus People.¹¹¹

Peter the Great’s meeting with Mazepa in Ostrogozhsk would have been known to local people and described to the poet. In his early poem devoted to this incident, “Peter the Great’s First Meeting with Mazepa,” the hetman is presented as a mysterious and romantically attractive, if not entirely positive, character. Ryleev’s picture of Mazepa in “Voinarovsky,” however, breaks with the long imperial tradition of demonization.¹¹² The poem describes the revolt against Peter the Great through the eyes of the hetman’s nephew, Voinarovsky, who has been exiled to Siberia. Both Mazepa and Voinarovsky are Ukrainian partriots who aspire to restore their country’s ancient liberties. Their alliance with Charles XII of Sweden is seen to be motivated by a legitimate desire to protect Ukraine’s autonomy in the face of increas­ing infringements of its rights by Russia.¹¹³

It has become commonplace among commentators to assert that Ryleev took numerous liberties with his sources in order to construct Mazepa’s patriotic motivation.¹¹⁴ The sources were, however, open to differing interpretations. Ryleev’s account certainly departs from Karamzin’s historiography and Bantysh-Kamensky’s conclusions. The latter’s History, however, made available so many documents from Mazepa’s time, including the hetman’s letters and poetry, that these materials provided evidence for a positive assessment: readers were able to form their own opinion of the man and his intentions.¹¹⁵ Historical sources, such as the History of the Rus People, and Mazepa’s poetry argued for the hetman’s patriotic concerns. Maslov points out that the Polish writers with whom Ryleev maintained contact also had a positive view of Mazepa.¹¹⁶ Most importantly, however, contemporary attitudes among the Ukrainian gentry and intelligentsia reveal wide­spread support for Mazepa as a defender of autonomy.¹¹⁷

In Ryleev’s version, the hetman, like the later Decembrists them­selves, is uncertain of success, misunderstood by his own people, doomed by circumstances, and yet convinced that the long-awaited opportunity for rebellion has to be grasped whatever the conse­quences. Mazepa and Voinarovsky express their fervent love of their “native” land, which is referred to as Ukraine throughout. The term “Ukraine” is employed because differentiation from Russia is precisely the issue. The battle of Poltava is described by Voinarovsky as the loss of the fatherland (otchizna) and motherland (rodina). “Ukraine” occurs thirteen times; “motherland” and its derivatives, eighteen times; “fatherland,” three times; “countryman” (zemliak) and its derivatives, three times; and “citizen,” twice. All these words create a positive semantic grouping. “Russian” is used once to descibe the enemy in battle; “Muscovy” and its derivative occur twice, both in close associa­tion with the word “enemy” (vrag). Ukraine is portrayed as a national entity with rights to an independent existence. Mazepa says:

Both Peter and I are right: Like he, I live for glory, For the good of my native land.¹¹⁸

It was not, of course, lack of historical accuracy that disturbed critics. Departures from the actual historical record are, in fact, far more glaring in Pushkin’s “Poltava,” which was devoted to the same theme. The central episode in Pushkin’s poem, the love affair of Mazepa and Kochubei’s daughter was in fact over by 1704, whereas Pushkin places this love in 1708, in quite different circumstances. John P. Pauls, in his Pushkin's “Poltava,” has pointed out, among other things, that the central charge of incest in Pushkin’s poem was false: “The historical Matryona was never Mazeppa’s mistress, because, according to objec­tive history and his own letter to her, he sent her back to her parents’ home with the Tsar’s representative, Colonel Annenkov, the very same evening she arrived in his castle.” These are facts that Pushkin chose to disregard.¹¹⁹ It was not such historical details, however, but the interpretation of history, the message of Ukraine’s legitimacy as a historico-political entity, that made “Voinarovsky” so controversial. Ryleev’s historiography is, in fact, close to that of the History of the Rus People. His acceptance of the legitimacy of the revolt, his description of Mazepa’s political dilemma in playing off foreign “despotisms” against one another, and his portrayal of the motivation for revolt follow its lead.

Ryleev focuses on the issue of Ukraine’s loss of sovereignty and freedom, on the fact that the country has the right, as a conquered nation, to be resentful and to rebel. Mazepa’s use of violence is a calculated and politically justified move by a ruling class acting on behalf of the nation. This makes it an aristocratic revolt, not a call to mass violence - an interpretation that accords with Decembrist fears that their revolt might release the kind of popular violence that had led to the terror in the French Revolution, and, in fact, an interpre­tation that also agrees with contemporary scholarly analyses of the hetman’s intentions.¹²⁰

The image of the leader owes a debt to Byron, as has frequently been indicated; it is evident in the physical description of the brooding hero, in his charismatic, misunderstood nature, and in the nostalgic picture of lost freedom (reminiscent of “Giaour”). Ryleev also follows Byron’s “Mazeppa” in portraying a meeting with a young Cossack girl. The Russian poet, however, makes the girl more than beautiful and passionate: she is a high-minded patriot who endures the privations of exile stoically, hiding her grief from the Muscovite, so that the “enemy of her native land” might have no occasion to rejoice. Like the other revolutionaries, she is politically conscious, a citizen (grazh- danka) - Ryleev’s highest mark of distinction.

The noble portrayal of Mazepa, Voinarovsky, and the revolt was such a dramatic break with the iconographic portrayal of Peter and the events of 1709 that one critic wrote admiringly: “In Russian poetry during that era very few would, of course, be able to demote Peter and elevate the “revolutionary” and “traitor” Mazepa.”¹²¹ The portrayal could not go unchallenged. In the original publication, the poem was introduced by two biographies, one of Mazepa by A. Kornilovich and one of Voinarovsky by Bestuzhev-Marlinsky. Both Decembrists took issue with the heroic portrayal and, above all, with the heretical suggestion that the revolt represented a national liberation struggle: “A low, trivial ambition led him to treason,” wrote Kornilovich.¹²² The poem appeared with cuts by the censor but also with a revealing ideological commentary. For example, “banished to the distant snows in the cause of honour and fatherland” was glossed as “This is how Voinarovsky jus­tifies a crime justly and mercifully punished.” The line “You, when sum­moned, will not spare yourself for Ukraine” elicited the comment, “Vain concern! The great transformer of Russia [meaning Peter] was solici­tous of Ukraine’s welfare.” Mazepa’s words, “Success is not assured; does glory or defamation await me?” are countered with, “What glory would have lighted Mazepa had he been Peter’s ally in the immortal battle of Poltava! What infamy darkens him for treasonously quitting Peter’s vic­torious ranks!” Mazepa’s words, “Peter and I were both right: Like he, I live for glory, for the good of my country,” were answered with, “This is the voice of Mazepa’s irrational despair following his defeat at Poltava. What amazing brazenness to compare himself to Peter.” The “enemy of his native land” was glossed as “the Tatars and Poles.”¹²³

A host of commentators have since taken the same approach. Nestor Kotliarevsky, in his study of tgo8, felt that Ryleev’s selection of native freedom fighters was in this instance “not entirely successful.”¹²⁴ Kotlia- revsky, like others, prefered to define the Ukrainian struggle as fought “for faith and freedom,” a terminology that ellides any national dimen­sion.¹²⁵ Tsar Nicholas himself, according to one witness, had an opin­ion on Ryleev’s portrayal of Mazepa. He reportedly commented that Pushkin understood Mazepa and Charles XII better than Ryleev, that Voinarovsky was “merely an adventurer,” but he thought the poem had wonderful verses. It is revealing of the solidarity among Russian anti­separatists that the editors of the Soviet edition of Ryleev’s work from 1g34, which is relatively sympathetic to the writer, expressed their complete agreement with Nicholas’ views.¹²⁶

The imperial scheme of thinking, according to which Ukrainians shared the same language and the same racial and cultural origins as Russians and were undergoing rapid, irreversible assimilation, left no room for separatism. It is therefore hardly surprising that Ryleev’s poem elicited a strong counterreaction that focused precisely on the issue of the legitimacy of separatism. The most famous example of this response became Pushkin’s “Poltava.” Pushkin’s reconfirmation of imperial teleology was greeted with a sense of relief that implied an unresolved tension around the question of Ukraine’s place within the empire and its contested relationship to the Russian identity.

The poet’s interpretation of Mazepa’s revolt follows the imperial tradition: he sets the national struggle in the distant past, seeing it as a superseded, now irrelevant historical stage; stresses the hetman’s per­sonal ambition; and downplays his patriotism and liberationist rheto­ric. While Ryleev’s work focuses on Ukraine’s loss of sovereignty and ancient freedoms, the structure of Pushkin’s Poltava turns on the vic­timization of Kochubei and his daughter. The poem opens and closes with the fate of these two, who pay the highest penalty for Mazepa’s infatuation with a goddaughter almost fifty years his junior. Described as shameful, both because it is unnatural and against the Orthodox religion (which prohibits marriage with a godchild), the love plot is analogous to, and provides a commentary on, the national question.

The beautiful Ukrainian girl has refused suitors from both Ukraine and Russia. She is seduced and ruined by the uncontrollable, selfish passion of the septuagenarian hetman. In Pushkin’s arrangement of the semantic fields, Mazepa embodies the old and outdated, while Peter’s reforming genius personifies the vigorous and forward-looking. This arrangement repeats the traditional opposition between ancient and modern that was coined by Peter’s first panegyricist, Feofan Prokopovich, shortly after the battle of Poltava and then grew into an enduring image of the first emperor as a hero of the Enlighten­ment.¹²⁷ The past, in any case, Pushkin tells the reader, was a “bloody” time of “captivity.”

Mazepa is described as vengeful, cunning, and treacherous. He cleverly manipulates the passions of his lover and the young patriotic hotheads, who have “forgotten” Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s agreement with Russia, which, the narrator suggests, ended their country’s sub­jection to foreign rule. Mazepa rides before his troops in a rather pathetic display of rejuvenation. However, the contest with “the auto­cratic giant” is an unequal one: the tsar celebrates a great victory, one of the most decisive in European history. Pushkin creates an erotically charged narrative structure that pits the politically impotent Mazepa and his rash young patriots against the potent and mature Peter, who alone knows how to discipline and direct Ukraine (“Little Russia” is Pushkin’s preferred designation) along its destined path.

Pushkin’s epilogue, like his conclusion to the “Caucasian Captive,” surveys the history of strife in an elegiac tone. The “imperial poet par excellence,” as Hokanson has referred to him,¹²⁸ delivers a judgment: in the century that has elapsed since the battle of Poltava, out of the bloody conflicts, the compulsion and deprivation, only Peter, “the hero of Poltava, has erected an enormous monument to himself.” The righteous Kochubei and Iskra, who attempted to denounce Mazepa to Peter and were executed, lie peacefully in a church ground; the ancient oaks still speak of their fame. The hetman’s grave, in contrast, has been lost and forgotten long ago. He is recalled only in the Russian Orthodox Church’s anathema that is still read annually to the faithful. The “sinful” daughter’s fate is occasionally described by wandering minstrels. As in much colonial literature, a woman is emblematic of the land. Here the heroine is chastised for being attracted to the hetman, whose power both was illusory (because dependant upon the tsar) and was put to infamous use, and for overlooking a devoted young suitor in Mazepa’s court who dies in the battle fighting on Peter’s side. This suggests that the correct choice ought to have been a modest position, subordinate and loyal to tsarism.

In this way Pushkin rejects the separatist infatuation as retrograde and unenlightened, a hopelessly misguided attempt to revive an extinct polity and an anomalous event that has left no mark on contemporary political existence. The symbol of the hetman’s rule, the bunchuk, and the kuntush he wears, construct him as an operatic, semi-Asiatic figure,¹²⁹ in contrast to the Europeanized, “rational” Peter. By suggesting that the enormous cost of Peter’s policies was justified, the poem provides an apology for imperialism based on the argument that Ukraine has done well under Russian domination. Like Polonsky’s later work “The Imeretian” (Imeretin, 1850), it urges the non-Russians to be grateful for the political freedoms and economic benefits they enjoy from their association with Russia.¹³⁰

Pushkin was particularly pleased to note a Ukrainian folk-song con­demning the hetman, but the writer was mistaken in claiming to have read it in Maksymovych’s Little Russian Folk-Songs of 1827. Not only was it missing from the collection, but two works by Mazepa, “Oi bida, bida chaitsi-nebozi” and the “Duma of Hetman Mazepa,” appeared there. The second, in fact, demonstrates that defence of the patrie was the hetman’s dominant motivation and was used by Bulgarin and others to counter Pushkin’s interpretation, which they saw as trivializ­ing Mazepa’s motives.¹³¹ Maksymovych dropped Mazepa’s song from the new, 1834 edition of his anthology and substituted in its place the song condemning Mazepa.¹³²

Pushkin’s account of events is interesting for a number of repres­sions. Like all subsequent literary representations it fails to mention the massacre in 1708 of all the residents of Baturyn, Mazepa’s seat of residence. The palace, archives, churches, arsenal, mills, and all prop­erty were razed to the ground and some eight thousand men, women, and children were killed in order to terrorize the population into submission.¹³³ Also eliminated is the fact that the historical Voit- sekhovsky (Voinarovsky’s prototype) collaborated with Pylyp Orlyk on the writing of a constitution for Ukraine that limited the ruler’s powers - a fact that had attracted the interest of Ryleev and other Decembrists.

Pushkin’s ending also implies that the ritual demonization of Mazepa through anathemization was justified. The poem was in all likelihood also an answer to Mickiewicz’s Konrad Wallenrod, which was then popular in Russia. The fact that Pushkin felt such strong negative feelings toward Mazepa and yet considered it necessary to respond to Ryleev’s and Mickiewicz’s depiction of the heroic traitor suggest the need to exorcise the ghost of separatism and to brand the “Wallenrod complex” as despicable.¹³⁴ His strong feelings of revulsion during the writing of this poem are perhaps symptomatic of an underlying dis­comfort with his own refusal to countenance Ukrainian claims to autonomy. With respect to Ukraine, Russian intellectuals granted the empire the role of a Western “civilizing” power with license to repress national resistance in the name of modernization and social reform. European liberals held similar views concerning conquest: Alexis de Tocqueville, as Said has indicated, found nothing incompatible about supporting American democracy, on the one hand, and France’s right to conquer Algeria, on the other.¹³⁵ Part of Pushkin’s discomfort in writing “Poltava,” one suspects, was due to the fact that he could not make the hetman into a Naturmensch, a savage with easily dismissible political claims. The staple image of the hetman in which Russian literature traded was that of a supremely sophisticated, devilishly clever politician and seducer, who for decades had been able to hoodwink the tsar. As a symbol of concealed aristocratic opposition to autocracy he represented values to which the Decembrists and Pushkin would, in other circumstances, have been attracted. Imperial solidarity, how­ever, overrode sympathy for a non-Russian elite.

Antiseparatist propaganda was, of course, not simply absorbed into literature but also figured prominently in cultural and religious ritual. After Mazepa’s defection Peter arranged the election of a new hetman, Ivan Skoropadsky. The tsar executed Mazepa in absentia in an elabo­rate ceremony and launched a propaganda war that, in turn, was countered by Mazepa’s supporters, who disseminated anti-Russian and pro-Swedish counterpropaganda while “masquerading as merchants, musicians, or beggars.”¹³⁶ Peter initiated the ceremony on io Novem­ber 1708, after learning of Mazepa’s attempt to withdraw Ukraine from Russia, and he ordered that the hetman be annually denounced in all Orthodox services. The supreme sin of separatism has therefore been reenacted ever since as a permanent religious, as well as a literary spectacle. The anathema was formally removed and prayers offered for Mazepa’s soul on 12 July 1918 in a ceremony held in Kyiv’s St Sophia Cathedral by hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, the head of a new Ukrainian state that had emerged from the collapse of the empire. In the 1930s the Russian Orthodox Church reinstituted the annual anathemization of Mazepa, along with other heretics and apostates of Orthodoxy, on the first Sunday of Lent.¹³⁷

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries writers were invited to participate in the literary equivalent of Mazepa’s anathema­tization and Peter’s canonization. Russian patriots were expected to pay homage to this central fact of imperial history, and Pushkin’s poem was invoked as encouragement. Attitudes toward Poltava, Peter, and Catherine became structuring principles in the code of imperialist atti­tudes, touchstones of an author’s loyalty. Like ritualistically repeated gestures, they reaffirmed the divide between the “sacred” and the “pro­fane” in Russian culture, the legitimate and the illegitimate in Russian thought. The violence with which the distinction between the “sacred” and “profane” was enforced suggests a clash between two deeply antag­onistic cultural models. Pushkin’s sanctioning of this cleavage, his bor­rowing from the repertoire of obligatory political attitudes and symbolic forms, places him squarely within the imperial codex.

On the other hand, Mazepa’s revolt has also always carried an enormous significance for Ukrainian nationalists. Alongside the cre­ation of a medieval Kyivan state, Khmelnytsky’s revolt of 1648, and the national renascence of the early nineteenth century inspired by Romanticism, it ranks as one of the most important historical remind­ers of Ukraine’s continuous aspiration for independent cultural and political existence.

nikolai gogol’s Ukraine

For many readers Gogol’s stories of the 1830s and 1840s have pro­vided the definitive codification of the literary Ukraine, summarizing and concluding the evolution of this literary topic in the Russian discourse of empire. The writer has frequently been portrayed as then parting from his attachment to Ukraine, discovering wider horizons and richer stimulation in Russia, and declaring an all-Russian, imperial identity in his final years. Gogol’s identity, however, has been the subject of several analyses that challenge this interpretation and sug­gest that the metamorphosis into an imperial Russian was never fully achieved and that the attempt at self-transformation was traumatic.¹³⁸

Gogol’s message (his name in Ukrainian is Mykola Hohol) appears to echo that of the Pole Bulgarin, who described Polish society as a doomed order with insoluble internal contradictions, one that required the construction of a new identity on its ruins, however pain­ful this might be for countrymen to accept. Bulgarin had urged the drawing together of Polish and Russian identities in his “Liberation of Trembovlia” (Osvobozhdenie Trembovli): “Charming women of Russia! Your history is full of the valorous feats of your countrywomen. I shall not repeat them: now become acquainted with the heroic deeds of a related Slavic womanhood, who inhabit a land watered by the great Vistula. Today you compose one family, have one father; your children and brothers have forever been united by the bonds of mutual happi­ness. You ought to know and respect one another.”¹³⁹

Nikolai Gogol’s Taras Bulba (1834 and 1843) has been interpreted in similar terms - as the elevation of a local identity on the path toward full integration. The construction of Ukraine’s cossack past in the book has, accordingly, been seen as the refusal of alterity. In this view, the narrative contrasts patriarchal and republican traditions among the cossacks favourably with foreign and monarchical elements that had entered Ukrainian life with Polish culture. The cossack republic, in defending its freedoms, faith, and patriarchal customs, overcomes the class-ridden system of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which rests upon class privilege and inequality. Those, like Andrei, who side with the Poles, are killed. Set in the early seventeenth century and describing an organic community rather than a political system, this anti-Polish account of Ukrainian history was eminently suitable for incorporation into imperial ideology. Belinsky made a characteris­tically reductionist and enthusiastic claim that Gogol had “exhausted... the whole historical life of Little Russia and in a strange artistic creation had forever sealed its spiritual image: this is how a sculptor captures in marble a person’s features and gives them immortal life.”¹⁴⁰ Because of its status as long-superseded history, as well as its anti-Polish and anti-Jewish animus, the theme of Zaporozhian wildness was not seen as a threat; on the contrary, since its violence was directed at “others,” it was seen as a virtue. The Zaporozhians, with their “wild” energies, much like the Muslims with their “savage” virtues, could eagerly be embraced by Russians as “surrogate selves.”¹⁴¹

This interpretation, however, avoids taking issue with some disturb­ing messages in the narrative. Many of the Zaporozhians, after all, wish to make peace with the Poles. The Sich successfully imprints its iden­tity on Bulba’s older son but not on his younger son, who goes over to the enemy. Moreover, the Sich is a military order, not a whole society. Eventually warriors need to be reintegrated into social life. Gogol’s Zaporozhians, like Lermontov’s soldiers, have difficulty return­ing to the world of marriage and agricultural or urban life. At a deeper level Taras Bulba describes an unresolved conflict between a glorious Zaporozhian warrior identity and the stable social system around it. This makes the book a much more complex exploration of identity than has frequently been acknowledged.

The conclusion of the book suggests, at least on the surface, that these conflicts were resolved by the appearance of the Russian tsar. In the final chapter of the later, 1843 edition the cossacks are described as fighting for the “Orthodox Russian faith,” “Russian power,” and the “Russian land.” Their Orthodoxy is in this way coopted into an impe­rial ideology. It is seldom noted, however, that these words and the paragraphs referring to the tsar are missing from the first, 1834 edition, which describes the purpose of the war against Poland as Ukraine’s liberation. The latter reference to Ukraine was dropped from the 1843 edition, which became definitive.¹⁴² The connection between loyalty to Orthodoxy and loyalty to the tsar is, of course, an anachronism for the pre-Khmelnitsky period described. It is, however, an essential part of the imperial mythology to which the writer had to accommodate himself. Integration with Russia is proferred as a solu­tion both to Ukraine’s conflict with Poland and to its social strife. It is also Gogol’s loyalist answer to accusations of Ukrainian perfidy. Zviniatskovsky has suggested that the writer was unsure what to do with Bulba’s insubordination and his fanatical faith in a crusading Ortho­doxy. In the end he “made a present of him [Bulba] to the empire” because he believed in the required disciplining and regulating power of imperial rule: “He combined two previously separate themes: the theme of a ‘natural,’ ‘wild’ Little Russia - that freedom-loving land (dear to the heart of the Russian intelligent) that recalled the Caucasus - and the theme of imperial patriotism.”¹⁴³ The loyalist picture of Ukrainian cossackdom also served as an answer to Bulgarin’s portrayal in Dimitrii Samozvanets (1830) of seventeenth-century cossacks as largely anti-Russian and pro-Polish and as driven into an alliance with Moscow by religious persecution.

In the first, 1834 edition of Taras Bulba the action had been set in the late sixteenth century, when, we are told, the idea of the Union of Brest was “just being born,” although at one point the action is referred to as occurring in the “hard fifteenth century.” The same confusion occurs in the second edition, where the writer again pre­sents a double time-frame: the period of “struggles in Ukraine over the Union” and the “hard fifteenth century.”¹⁴⁴ The first edition makes it clear that Taras’s military service had begun in the reign of Stefan Batory, creator of the registered cossacks: “When Batory created the regiments in Little Russia, and invested it with that military armature which was at first only characteristic of the inhabitants of the rapids, he [Taras] became one of the first lieutenants.”¹⁴⁵ In the later edition this reference to Zaporozhians being allies of the Polish army was dropped. Instead, the cossacks, completely incongruously, became con­scious defenders of the Russian state. The corresponding passage in the later edition reads, “when in ancient times the peaceful Slavic spirit was seized by martial fire and cossackdom, that broad, revelrous streak of Russian nature began.”¹⁴⁶ Although the term “Ukraine” is still used in the second edition, Gogol introduces the term “Southern primor­dial Russia” (iuzhnaia pervobytnaia Rossiia) to describe the territory. In this way Bulba, who in the earlier version began his career serving the Polish king who defeated tsar Ivan the Terrible and layed siege to Pskov, emerges in the 1843 account as a “Russian” knight. The result of this operation is a downplaying of Ukraine as a political agent and player in international relations. The country becomes an unstruc­tured, unstable area of conflict awaiting firm rule. The second edition ends with a final proclamation by the dying Bulba (which recalls the endings to both Khomiakov’s and Polevoi’s conclusions to their plays about Ermak, published in 1832 and 1845 respectively): “Even now people near and far hear: from the Russian earth her own tsar is arising, and there will be no force in the world which can refuse subjection to him!.”¹⁴⁷ The suggestion is that Ukraine’s salvation depended on the coming to power of the Romanov dynasty in 1613, following the “time of troubles.” Bulba dies crucified on high for all to see. His public martyrdom is old Ukraine’s heroic death and the prophecy of a new imperial identity. By ignoring all instances of conflict and idealizing cooperation between Ukraine and Russia, Gogol’s account harmonizes with tsarism’s self-image as the guardian of Orthodoxy and accords with imperial literary etiquette. The second version of the book represents an adjustment of Gogol’s own earlier national self-definition. The later Gogol serves the Russian reader­ship’s new horizon of expectation, one that finds Russia “unthinkable without Ukraine,” that sees the empire as powerful and triumphant precisely because it now includes Ukraine.¹⁴⁸

The idea of a frontier Slavic nation forged in a permanent struggle for survival allows the writer to align Ukrainians with what the con­temporary Russian public found attractive in the image of Caucasian tribesmen. In his article “A Glance at the Creation of Little Russia” (Vzgliad na sostavlenie Malorossii, 1832) Gogol describes “all its [Ukraine’s] life as a struggle.” Like the “mountain people” who are its neighbours, this warlike people has been shaped by the natural environment, “the beautiful, free steppes” that “stretch out along the full length of the Dnieper.” “Only a people with vitality and strength of character,” he muses, would have searched out such majestic loca­tions, or perhaps it is “only bold and remarkable locations” that can form “a bold, passionate and strong-willed [kharakternyi] people.” By appropriating the positive features of the “Asiatic” for Ukraine, Gogol was answering earlier stereotypes of the people as indolent, inert, and passive, creating a more attractive image of their character and history. This was implicitly a response to and a complicating of the received image of Ukraine as a natural paradise, by now a hackneyed and insipid myth. Gogol’s schoolmaster, Kulzhinsky, contributed to it in his Little Russian Village (Malorossiiskaia derevnia, 1827), which begins, “Under the gentle sky of Little Russia, every village is a small Eden.” The exoticizing portrayal of Ukrainians in Pavel Svinin’s Notes of the Fatherland is another target. Gogol’s Ukrainian stories in Evenings on a Khutir Near Dikanka (Vechera na khutore bliz Dikanki, 1831-32) and Mirgorod (1835) both play up to and challenge this view.¹⁴⁹ On the one hand, they provide a comic picture of “the provinces” - one that was much appreciated by Russian readers: Pushkin wrote, “everyone was overjoyed at the lively description of the singing and dancing tribe [plemeni poiushchego i pliashushchego], those fresh pictures of the Little Russian character, that simple and at the same time sly cheerful- ness.^,,1fio On the other hand, they reveal the presence of a “Ukrainian soul” that resists assimilation into a “Russian” identity, making Gogol’s work paradigmatic of the resistant Ukrainian identity and a symbolic depiction of imperial indigestion. At the same time as Shevchenko was indicating the irreconcilability of Ukrainian and Russian interests, Gogol was attempting to resolve the conflict between his “two souls.” His inability to accomplish this is encoded in the ambiguous and disconcerting manner in which he presents the message of an incho­ate Ukrainian society. This can be illustrated by examining the crisis of authority in two of his stories, “Night before Christmas” (Noch pered Rozhdestvom, 1832) and “The Terrible Vengeance,” which attempts to define the historical curse of Ukraine.¹⁵¹

In “Night before Christmas” the devil who visits the village commu­nity is a uniformed district scrivener. His appearance is disturbingly alien: a pig-snouted foreigner’s (literally, a “German’s”) face, a Rus­sian’s beard, and a tail. A symbol of intrusive, externally appointed bureaucratic rule, he confounds the normal Christmas rituals and attempts to undermine time-honoured religious conventions. The story begins with his stealing the moon to prevent the traditional social gatherings and carol singing by village youth (both expressions of national-cultural solidarity and identity) from taking place. He is not, however, the only, or even the primary, source of authority. The village leaders (the deacon, the village head, the rich local cossack, the merchant, and others who are to celebrate Chrismas eve together) represent a second source. The devil attempts to prevent their gath­ering by kicking up a snow storm to make the night impassable. The local authority figures, however, also exercise only limited power. The rich cossack, Chub, for instance, who in the old order would have been the community’s defender and governor, is portrayed as a weak­ling and a coward. A third source of potential authority resides in the reclusive old Zaporozhian, who had served in the community’s auton­omous military order. He, however, has gone to seed: a fat, gluttonous, and idle man, he now uses the traditional Zaporozhian knowledge of magic for trivial purposes: to command dumplings to jump into a bowl of sour cream and then into his open mouth. A fourth source of power and authority is represented by the weaver’s wife, Solokha, a witch who consorts with the devil and whose powers of sexual attraction give her complete control over the deacon, the rich cossack, and the village head. Then there is Solokha’s son, the blacksmith Vakula, who pos­sesses physical strength and great painterly talent. Finally, there is the beautiful but vain Oksana, with whom Vakula is in love. She mockingly offers to marry him if he obtains the empress’s shoes. The distinction between real and illusory power is difficult to determine: “It is a strange world!” comments the narrator. “Everything living in it tries to mimic and copy everything else.” Whether it is a question of fashion, behaviour, or rank, “everyone wants to be a somebody!”¹⁵²

Authority is located somewhere between the traditional village leadership, imperial bureaucrats, and the society of women and agri­culturalists. Chub refuses to take advice or orders (an echo of his proud cossack ancestry) but is easily controlled by the devil and Solokha. In this way the traditional cossack source of authority is shown to be weak. The manhood of this former governing warrior class, represented by Chub, Sverbyhub, and the Zaporozhian (known as Puzatyi Patsiuk, “fat castrated pig” in Ukrainian), is called into question. Neither physically imposing nor sexually attractive, they represent the unsexed Ukrainian male shorn of his traditional social role, lacking machismo and dominated by women’s society. These figures indicate a crisis in the Ukrainian polity. The imperial-bureau­cratic devil is, however, also made to look foolish. Attempting to avenge himself on Vakula, whose religious church paintings he detests, he is outwitted and made to carry Vakula on his back to another source of power, St Petersburg.

Here, in the imposing city of light, where the nights are brighter than the days in Dikanka, the same confusion recurs over the appear­ances and realities of power. To Vakula everyone seems to be a bureau­crat, town governor, or commissar. Intimidated, he demands that the devil take him to a group of Zaporozhians who, he knows, are in the city seeking an audience with the empress. These “countrymen,” whose opinion he trusts and from whose advice he hopes to benefit, are clearly aware of their lowly status within the imperial context. Their inferiority complex is revealed in comical attempts to speak Russian and to act the metropolitan habitue in front of the newcomer. They dress Vakula as a fellow cossack and take him along with them. Since light and elevation are associated with power, the brilliantly lit staircase they ascend to meet Catherine the Great in the climactic scene dem­onstrates their proximity to the highest political authority. The illus­trious Potemkin has called the Zaporozhians to plead for the creation of a military unit from the remnants of the Sich. They prostrate themselves before the empress, outline their loyal service in wars against the Tatars and Turks and during the conquest of the Crimea in 1783. As they are about to pose their request for the creation of the military formation, Vakula falls to the ground and makes an incongruous demand for a pair of the empress’s slippers. Catherine, amused by such forthright naivety, grants the request and the delighted Vakula returns to his village.

Meanwhile, the Christmas celebrations have continued in the village. Everyone is relieved at the return of Vakula; his beloved Oksana, who is the rich cossack’s daughter, agrees to marry him. As Vakula kneels before Chub, both in request for permission to marry his daughter and in penance for beating him, Chub’s timid nature is flattered and appeased. Although lacking any real power, his traditional status in the community must be respected, just as it is in traditional ethnographic symbolism: Vakula decorates the newlywed couple’s house with painted cossacks on horses, smoking pipes.

The story suggests that the old sources of authority have been emas­culated: the language and symbols of Ukrainian rule are treated in St Petersburg as nothing but an operatic farce.¹⁵³ Catherine remarks upon the “simple-heartedness” (prostodushie) of the people. The visiting Zaporozhians, taking their cue from this characterization, act out the staple role of loyal provincials with practised skill. For their audience with Catherine they dress in the requisite colourful national costumes, display rough-hewn manners, and speak only Ukrainian (although they have a rudimentary, albeit imperfect, knowledge of Russian). Their insistence on using the “muzhyk dialect” in front of Catherine aston­ishes Vakula, who nonetheless immediately grasps that this is part of an auto-ethnographic performance, the playing out of a role invented in the capital and expected of them. “Crafty people!” thinks Vakula. “They obviously know what they are doing.” In this situation the mimic role is a mask, both imposed and exploited, to use Luce Irigaray’s words, in order to “convert a form of subordination into an affirma­tion.”¹⁵⁴ In the real incident that this episode recalls, the cossacks did get their regiment, a fact of considerable symbolic importance for Ukrainian society. The struggle to retain even a semblance of the former military formation was applauded at this time by several fig- ures.¹⁵⁵ Gogol treats the episode as a farcical reenactment of a past Ukrainian identity in the context of contemporary power relations.

The new centre of the community and ultimate source of authority shifts in the end to the happily married family of Vakula, Oksana, and their newborn child. The clash of male and female roles, of cossack and agrarian identities, is here resolved in a fruitful union. The painted cossacks that decorate their homes integrate the legendary historical past into the domestic present. Vakula’s family in this way represents settled society. The blacksmith’s positive image responds to two Russian stereotypes: that of the “lazy khokhol” (lenivyi khokhol) and of the “lucky cossack” (udalyi kazak). Vakula is neither lazy nor socially irresponsible. Dikanka (which means “wild land”) is neither a frontier haunt of bloodthirsty, half-savage cossack warriors nor an Eden. The devils and witches that appear to have overrun it are relatively benign and under social control.

There are important subtexts in the narrative. It has been pointed out that when Pushkin described Ukrainians as “the singing and danc­ing tribe,” he was, in fact, quoting Catherine.¹⁵⁶ This image is played up to by the Zaporozhians and Vakula, who do not disappoint expec­tations but consumately act the role of exotic naifs. This performance is also a feature of Taras Bulba’s behaviour: he knows Latin and has studied classical authors but deliberately understates this education. There is a veiled reminder here not only of the fact that Ukraine was the better educated society until the second half of the eighteenth century and Russia’s source of classical learning and European influ­ence but also of the inadmissiblity of this fact.¹⁵⁷ The joke is, therefore, partly at the empress’s expense and made by those who are obliged to perform the role of simpletons. Another destabilizing element that might be pointed out is Vakula’s victory over the German-Russian devil­scrivener. It is the blacksmith, after all, who outwits the devil and gets to ride him and to dictate his will. The demonic foreigner-bureaucrat does not control Ukrainian society, which retains a large degree of autonomy and exhibits great vitality and an ability to triumph over evil and adversity.

“The Terrible Vengeance” (1832) describes the evil deeds of a seventeenth-century sorcerer (koldun). He is also described as a for­eigner. Having learned to dislike cossack food in his twenty-one years abroad, he refuses the local drink (preferring “some sort of black water,” which is to say, coffee) and, according to his son-in-law Danilo Burulbash, “does not have a cossack heart.” It soon becomes clear that this sorcerer is conspiring with the Poles who wish to cut off access to the Zaporozhian Sich and reestablish their rule in Ukraine. Having long ago killed his wife, he is attempting through evil spells to control the spirit of his daughter, Katerina, and the family. Exposed as a sorcerer and traitor, he is defeated in battle when he descends upon Danilo’s domain with Polish troops. This occurs, however, only after he has caused the death of his son-in-law, daughter, and grandchild.

This story and the unfinished novel Getman (Hetman, 1830-32), which is a similar tale of tragedy filled with Gothic horrors, attempt to define a national curse. The golden age of cossack rule is gone, complains Danilo: “There is no order in Ukraine: the lieutenants and esauls fight among themselves like dogs. There is no superior authority. Our nobility has gone over to Polish customs, taken up trickery... sold its soul, accepted the Uniate religion.”¹⁵⁸ The song of a bandura player recapitulates this history of strife in the epilogue. It presents a myth that serves as a key not only to this particular story but to the theme of a historical curse in Gogol’s work. According to this myth, in the time when Stephen of Transylvania ruled over both Ukraine and Poland there were two cossacks, Ivan and Petro, who “lived as brothers” and divided all their possessions equally. While on military service during a campaign against the Turks, Ivan succeeded in cap­turing the pasha, thus covering himself in glory. The king granted him the land beyond the Carpathians, half of which Ivan immediately

shared with his brother. Petro, however, envious of Ivan’s fame, pushed him and his young son into a ravine, took the entire land, and lived in luxury until his death. God judged Petro guilty of a great sin and asked Ivan to devise a punishment. In revenge for the “Judas-like” betrayal that deprived Ivan of “an honourable race and descendants on earth” (chestnogo moego roda i potomstva na zemle), Ivan asks that Petro’s own descendants find no happiness, that they be disgraced by a great criminal who will be thrown into a chasm together with all Petro’s descendants, where he will be endlessly tortured by them. Ivan requests that he be mounted on a horse and raised to the top of the highest peak, from where he might enjoy Petro’s torment. God grants this wish but also denies Ivan entry into heaven: he is doomed to remain in the Carpathians as a permanent, silent witness to his brother’s prostration.

The most likely historical subtext here is Stefan Batory’s creation of the registered cossacks, which Bantysh-Kamensky had described in his History as occurring in 1576.¹⁵⁹ Together with the Poles, the registered cossacks had successfully fought the Turks and other enemies of the Commonwealth. In Gogol’s work the strange rider of monstrous pro­portions destroys the koldun, the incarnation of the sinful predator, on one miraculous day when suddenly people in the capital, Kyiv, can see all Ukraine from the Crimea and the Black Sea to the Carpathians. This horseman, who is an answer to the Polish Wernyhora myth of a reborn Poland, symbolizes a united Ukrainian identity taking ven­geance on former Polish oppressors.

Having driven out the Polish brother, who is now permanently weakened and can no longer retake the country, the remaining society still cannot constitute itself as a viable political entity. This represents its curse. Petro’s punishment is “most horrible.” He wishes, as did nineteenth-century Polish society in Ukraine, to regain his former position, yet cannot. But Ivan’s satisfaction in witnessing this impo­tence is also a curse. He is, after all, nothing but a statue, an impotent image of his former self, a terrifying horseman with closed eyes. This vision of the apocalypse raised on high for all to see, like that of the crucified Bulba, can be read as a symbol of Ukraine’s political tragedy: it is an incomplete, conflicted, not fully functioning body politic.

In another interpretation, the clash between Peter and Ivan might be seen as a reference to Peter the Great and Ivan Mazepa, who (perhaps according to the terms of the Pereiaslav Treaty of 1654) were expected to “divide everything equally.” Whereas the Ukrainian side fulfilled this obligation, the Russian demanded everything for itself. In either case, the myth describes a fundamentally divided society cursed by history, tragically torn between its Left and Right Banks, between Russian and Polish rule, and unable to form an independent entity. The suggestion is that Ukraine’s ceaseless civil strife has perma­nently disabled it.

After delivering this tale, the blind bandura player goes on to sing comic songs, but both young and old remain transfixed by visions of “the terrible event that took place long ago.”¹⁶⁰ As a myth of origins, an attempt to capture and explain a national history, it proved reso­nant and challenged later writers to respond.¹⁶¹

The depiction of families in Gogol offers further metaphorical treat­ment of Ukraine’s history and evolution. Edward Said has written of the importance of the transition from “filiation” (familial relations) to “affiliation” (non-familial relations) in nineteenth-century Victorian culture.¹⁶² Where filiation was blocked or failed, it could be compen­sated for in an affiliation with a larger institution and its credo; fre­quently this was the imperial bureaucracy and its ethos. All Gogol’s stories (with the exception of the Vakula-Oksana romance) conclude with a failed filiation. The solution becomes affiliation with imperial power, which is most clearly expressed in the ending to Taras Bulba. There are obstacles, however, to the success of this process of affilia­tion, one of the most powerful being the society of women, who play a central role in preserving and transmitting traditions, thus ensuring the continuity of the familial order (“filiation”). They demonstrate the powerful pull of the traditional ethos and national culture, both of which work against imperial affiliation. Gogol’s narratives, therefore, also encode a juxtaposition of Ukrainian and imperial attitudes in the female/male, agriculturalist/warrior dichotomy. The warrior can more easily be incorporated into the imperial structure, while female society remains most intractable and gives notice of a deeper, less malleable alterity. The female/male, agriculturalist/warrior juxtapositions were familiar to Gogol from Maksymovych’s introduction to his 1827 col­lection of Ukrainian folk songs, where the cossack warrior ethos is described as a partly Asiatic superimposition on the root culture: “Brav­ery in raids, wild forgetfulness in joy and secure laziness in peace: these are traits of wild Asiatics - the population of the Caucasus, of which one inevitably thinks even today when looking at the clothing and habits of the Little Russian.” The spiritual qualities of the “root” Slavic nation, in Maksymovych’s view, had been best preserved by women, who were frequently separated from their happy-go-lucky cossack hus­bands and spent their time in the “peaceful occupations of domestic, rural life.”¹⁶³ This concept of a dichotomous identity was developed by Gogol as a key to understanding the Ukrainian character.

It has also been suggested that the baroque heritage in which Gogol was rooted pointed him in the direction of an aesthetic that sought to combine such dichotomies through the deployment of tropes and topoi that expressed the discovery of similarities in extremes: discordia concors.¹⁶⁴ His writings can, according to this view, be viewed as a containment of conflicts through the construction of a baroque-like imaginative symmetry, a balancing of antagonisms and antitheses. In his works Ukraine’s culture and identity is accommodated as an honourable and autonomous element within the overarching imperial structure. In the end, bowing to the inevitable, it becomes reconciled to its subordinate status.

I. Mandelshtam was one of the first to suggest that the conflict between the Little Russian and the Russian in Gogol was never resolved. There remains in all his work, he suggested, a deep brooding sense of evil, of a destructive and corrupting imperial sickness, which expresses itself in the contempt for subordinates, the portrayal of pompous, arrogant rulers and foreign interlopers, and the pervasive sense of a dysfunctional society. The critic saw Gogol’s famous admis­sion in which he claimed not to know what kind of a soul he had, Little Russian or Russian (Khokhlatskaia ili Russkaia) as connected to a second confession in which he admits that his unattractive characters are a part of his soul: “I have been discussed a great deal, analyzed from all sides, but my essence has not been defined. Pushkin alone detected it. He always told me, that no other writer has ever had the gift of showing life’s ugliness (poshlost) as clearly... This is my main quality; but it would not, I repeat, have developed in me with the same force, if it had not been united with my own spiritual circumstance and my own spiritual history.”¹⁶⁵ Gogol brought a Ukrainian consciousness to St Petersburg, structures of thought and feeling that were deeply critical of Russian society and upon which he drew throughout his creative life.¹⁶⁶ Even though over the years he developed wider contacts with Russian intellectuals, there was, wrote Mandelshtam, a “corner of Gogol’s soul which he allowed no one to observe, where he lived exclu­sively the life of a Little Russian, where he sensed himself free, spon­taneous and truthful - and creative.”¹⁶⁷ Some of this antipathy to Russians is expressed in his correspondence with Maksymovych and others. More importantly, however, it is obliquely suggested in his works. “Sometimes,” according to Mandelshtam, “Gogol tried, if not to hide his national particularity, then to show that he was Russian in the broad sense. From the letter quoted above it is clear that he does not wish to be a ‘Little Russian’ more than a Russian; but there are facts that support the view that his tribal particularity (plemennaia osobennost) was not only the chief driving force in his work, but that he cherished it - and demonstrated it to a considerable degree.”¹⁶⁸ The writer never stopped delving into the Ukrainian theme, sketching notes for new stories to the end of his life. The tension between the two identities appeared to provide him with the creative excitement he required. Accordingly, he was both incapable of quitting and unwill­ing to quit his Little Russian soul, whether he found himself in St Petersburg or Italy. On the cusp of the colonial and anticolonial dis­courses, his genius manreuvred between both.

vissarion belinsky’s little Russia

Biographers have regarded Vissarion Belinsky (1811-48) as the “father of Russian liberalism” and have focused on his role as a Westernizing critic of Russian backwardness. His Russian nationalism and his views on Russian hegemony have rarely been acknowledged. When admitted, his unsettling disparagement of Ukrainian writing and attacks on the incipient Ukrainian national movement have been noted as glaring exceptions in a career devoted to challenging the institutions of the monarchy, serfdom, and Orthodoxy in the name of radical reform. An explanation for the hostility toward Ukrainian writing has been offered in his theory of history - one that foresaw the creation of a modern, international cultural community and one that had no patience for local particularities. According to this argu­ment, Belinsky held “a progressive view of world history and culture” and adhered “to a universalist interpretation of Hegelianism that left little room for the cultivation of purely national traditions, whether Russian or Ukrainian.”¹⁶⁹ The rejection of much of Ukrainian culture was based not on “simple Russian nationalism” but on a principled suspicion of “national cultures,” Russian and Ukrainian. This interpre­tation of Belinsky’s theory of nationality has been challenged by critics who see in his work not a consistent opposition to all nationalisms but very different treatments of the Russian and Ukrainian nations.¹⁷⁰

The important issue is the establishment of an evolutionary, “Darwinian” hierarchy of nations. Belinsky looked forward fervently to an age of rationalism, when different nations could bring their own individual features to the universal culture of humanity. However, he firmly held that only some nations had an “individual” character and were slated for this honour. The rest were doomed to oblivion. His dogmatic ranking of peoples led him to conclude that Ukrainians could not achieve the higher historical purpose and should therefore give up the national endeavour and assimilate.¹⁷¹ But why should they be so fated? What were his criteria for nation status?

Belinsky perceived world history as passing through the narod (peo­ple) stage, to the nation (natsiia) stage and finally to the level of “organic unity,” in which reason would rule. In the narod stage of sociopolitical organization people act Unreflectively; they are driven by custom and habit, and their culture is static. The national stage begins when an upper class is created that provides the motor force for change and rapid progress. These views provided the framework through which he saw the evolution of the Russian nation. However, when the criteria for nationhood are reviewed, particularly within a theoretical reorientation afforded by postcolonialism, the formation of a world historical subject appears as a rationalization of “great nation,” or imperial, status and a denial of subject status to “lesser” nations. The explanation for the puzzling vehemence with which Belinsky dismissed both the Ukrainian movement and Shevchenko’s anticolonial poetry lies in this faith in national hierarchies and Russia’s imperial mission. As Apollon Grigorev pointed out in an insightful article of 1861, Shevchenko’s appearance discredited Belinsky’s histo­riography; it also exposed the latter’s imperialist views. Grigorev’s article drew attention to Belinsky’s focus on the growth of the state, his faith in centralization, his rejection of the spontaneous and innate (which he associated with the past), and his glorification of figures like Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great (whom he admired as history’s necessarily violent midwives).¹⁷²

Belinsky’s orientation is to those nations who have proven them­selves by developing sophisticated modern cultures, state structures, and armies. These prerequisites for membership in the survivors’ elite are closely connected. The absence of any one of them can be used to “prove” that a nation has forfeited the right to exist. The nations most commonly mentioned in admiring tones by Belinsky are the British, the French, and the Germans. Occasionally the Dutch, the Swedes, and others are given credit for particular achievements. But frequently all these countries are collapsed into the term “European” - a marker of cultural distinctiveness, political strength, and assimila- tory power. Their success in subduing, moulding, and disciplining populations gives them the right to qualify as “nations.”

His views of nation-building among all other peoples are for the most part contemptuous. The Czechs, he feels, might be an exception, but Bulgarian attempts to build a culture and a nation he finds ridiculous. As for peoples who find themselves under the Russian sceptre, he has no doubt that the interests of “world history” make their assimilation, however violent and regrettable, absolutely neces­sary. But these attitudes come out best in his frequent comments on “Asiatic” peoples, among whom the Chinese and the Persians furnish the most examples. In his opinion they will never develop into nations in his sense of the word; they will be, and ought to be, colonized and civilized. By contrast, the Russian nation, he asserts time and again, has become a powerful empire and has joined the club of “nations.” In order to maintain this position and to compete with other “nations,” Russian society must be modern: culturally and politically independent and militarily strong. Any backtracking by members of the society from this mission of national greatness, whether in the form of a yearning for a past peasant idyll or nostalgia for aristocratic cosmopolitanism, has to be eliminated. The peasantry have to be disciplined and modernized in the way Peter did with the upper classes. All sectors of the population have to be mobilized. The cultural and political mission he foresees for the country requires the cultiva­tion of a national ego. Modernizing Westernism, therefore, is a call for Russia to leave behind the vestiges of feudalism and fulfill her destiny as a great power.

In this discussion, Asia becomes a metaphor not simply for all that is peripheral and backward but for all that will be assimilated into the unitary imperial scheme. This applies to intellectual trends: “Only in some Dagestan,” he writes, “can one still speak of the old struggle of Classicism and Romanticism... No wonder: Dagestan is in Asia!”¹⁷³ It also applies to politics. “Asia” is Russia’s other and Russia has a right to treat it in the same way as the great “nations” of Europe treat their colonized:

The natives of Africa are lazy, animal-like, slow-witted creatures, condemned to eternal slavery and working under the rod and murderous torture. The poor sons of America even today remain the same as the Europeans found them. Having lost their fear of firearms, the voice of angry gods, even them­selves having mastered their use, they have not become any more human from that time, and we must seek the further development of human substance in Asia. It was here that creation ended, nature completed its circle and gave way to a new, purely spiritual development - history. Here humanity was once again divided into races, and the Caucasian tribe is its flowering.¹⁷⁴

The argument here is that Russia’s colonial domain, the Asian native, has greater potential than the African, North American, and Australian natives that Western Europeans were colonizing. It still, however, represents the inchoate and static and is marked by the absence of consciousness that typefies a narod stage of development. The “Asiatic” lives in a monotonous culture: “Immobility and fossiliza- tion are fused with Asia, like a spirit with a body.”¹⁷⁵ It has always been so: “Even in pagan times, in the ancient world, Europe’s character was the opposite of Asia’s.”¹⁷⁶ Enlightenment will be wasted on these peoples because “the faults of the Chinese or Persian have fused with their spirit; enlightenment would only make them more refined, cunning and depraved.”¹⁷⁷

The criteria, therefore, for assessing membership in the imperial club are fundamentally racial. In order to quash the suggestion that Russia itself was “Asiatic” or strongly shaped by Eastern influences, Belinsky makes an important and rigid distinction between innate characteristics, which he defines as national substance (dependent primarily on blood, race, geography, and climate), and historically acquired characteristics. Conveniently, this allows for the substance of the Russian people to be described as sound. It is offered as an explanation of why Russians have succeeded in becoming a great power, assimilating other nations, and are now on the threshold of creating a great culture. The accretions of backwardness are simply “Tatarism,” an imposition from without that is gradually being shed. Other peoples who lack this “great substance,” however, will be inca­pable of making the transition from narodnost to nationhood: “True, if there are people with great substances, there are also peoples with insignificant ones, and if the former are immutable and escape the will of one man, no matter how powerful he is, the latter can be destroyed easily, even accidentally, even by their own hands and not only by the will of a genius; and therefore from the latter no genius can fashion anything: the best you can do with a sugar-beet is turn it into a lump of sugar (luchshee, chto mozhna sdelat iz sveklovitsy, eto golovu sakhara); only from granite, marble, or bronze can an immortal mon­ument be made.”¹⁷⁸

By invoking the idea of a superior national substance, Belinsky is able to blame Russia’s backwardness on the “Asiatic,” while denying that this is part of Russia’s essential cultural makeup. Neither the Rus­sian peasantry nor the upper classes are, in his view, “Asiatic.” Other­wise the great Russian nation could not have appeared. Contemporary political and military strength, therefore, serves as a justification for past and present aggression. As Belinsky applies this organicist theory of historical development to Russia, he sees one age passing the mantle of future national greatness onto the next. The dialectic he traces is the expungement of foreign influences, the conquest of non-Russian territory, and the subduing of local resistances - all leading to the imperial synthesis. In this scheme all non-European races are relegated to inferior status. The European “nations” made the decisive move to maturity and revealed their innately superior essence in the early modern period: “The discovery of America, the invention of gunpow­der and printing were the exterior impulses for humanity’s move from its youthful age to its age of maturity, in which we live today.”¹⁷⁹

The Russian counterpart to this breakthrough is Peter the Great. Westernism, Eurocentrism, and imperialism are explicitly linked in Belinsky’s defence of Russian tsars and the legitimacy of their con­quests. It is not only Peter’s Westernizing cultural policies that he defends (the new dress, the shaved beards, the educational policies) but also the violence of all the tsars since Ivan the Terrible, the brutality of their conquests and the sacrifice of lives in building St Petersburg. In his article on Peter the Great he lists these as instru­mental in the construction of a powerful military state that really announced its appearance only 132 years previously, when Peter defeated Sweden.¹⁸⁰ The violence was completely justified, because the alternative was dependency: relating to Europe, in his words, “the way India relates to England.”¹⁸¹ The notions of a metaphysical national essence and the idea of a unique Russian mission align him with Russian nationalism and with some tenets of Official Nationality and Slavophilism, even though he rejects any idealization of peasant virtues and communal or religious traditions. What, perhaps, requires under­lining is not the “reactionary” nature of these views (although it might be recalled that his writings from 1837 to 1840 have been described by Victor Terras as “unctiously loyal, patriotic, and monarchist effu­sions”) ¹⁸² but their logical place in a teleology: the drive for great­nation status. Although Belinsky abandoned his political conservatism, he retained the teleology. In Terras’ words, “philosophically” he “remained a Hegelian all his life.”¹⁸³

The theorizing of empire and the construction of race were paral­leled by a classic trope of colonial discourse: the gendered represen­tation of conquest. A telling example occurs in Belinsky’s review of Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time, when he describes Pechorin’s attempt to force his sexual attention on the captive Bela. Belinsky praised the verisimilitude and “tenderness” of this scene. He considered the sub­ordination of the woman to male aggression as justified and sanc­tioned both by nature and by colonial relations.¹⁸⁴

Where did Ukraine fit within this scheme? It was not “Asiatic,” according to Belinsky, but neither did it have the “great essence.” In the earlier quotation the telling phrase concerning a sugar beet (Ukraine was the centre of the sugar-beet industry) captures his atti- tude.¹⁸⁵ Ukraine, the critic insists time and again, is a peasantry. It has the peasant virtues, the communal and religious traditions of pre- Petrine society, but it has failed the decisive test by never creating a viable state or throwing up a Peter. It is merely good potential for Russian state- and nation-building.

However, was not the first Rus state in Kyiv? In order to avoid a discussion of this historical complication, Belinsky plays down the significance of the Kyivan Rus heritage and the influence of Byzan­tium. The latter could teach only the “fashion of blackening teeth, whitening faces and putting out the eyes of enemies and criminals.”¹⁸⁶ He goes so far as to devise a theory of northern and southern races, categorically assigning Russian history to the former: “All southern peoples differ markedly from northern... In the last while the north has left the south far behind in artistic, scientific and civilizational achievements. Let us glance at Russia in this light. Its cradle was not Kyiv but Novgorod, from which, through Vladimir, it moved to Mos­cow.”¹⁸⁷ In a similar way he plays down the significance of the hetman state, the cultural superiority of Ukraine over Russia in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and its influence on the latter. Belinsky negotiates between two ideas, the imperial state and the Russian ethnos, homogenizing the history of both in order to account for the organicist idea of a great Russian essence steadily gaining hegemony.

In his major essay on Ukrainian history, couched as a review of Nikolai Markevich’s (Mykola Markevych’s) History of Little Russia¹⁸ he insists that Ukraine has always lacked the factors required for nation­hood: a strong essence, a conscious elite, a great leader, and a drive to forge a modern civilization. Bohdan Khmelnytsky, as a truly great statesman, realized the impossibility of Ukraine’s independent exist­ence. History’s verdict, as Belinsky sees it, has been complete absorp­tion by Russia. Ignoring Ukraine’s high literacy and cultural sophistication in the decades preceding imperial domination, he is able to construct an apologia that recalls Western empire-builders in their least reflective moments: “Merging forever with consanguineous Russia, Little Russia opened the door of civilization, enlightenment, art, science, from which it had previously been separated by the insurmountable barrier of its semi-barbaric way of life. Together with Russia, she now stands before a great future.”¹⁸⁹

Russian culture in the first half of the nineteenth century was “philo- Ukrainian” insofar as it appreciated the exotic themes, characters, and plots that delighted not only Russians but also Poles and Western Euro­peans.¹⁹⁰ The country, as we have seen, was constructed as a borderland with a colourful, dramatic, and heroic history. But the fact that this was grasped as a history of the distant past made Ukrainophilia as unthreat­ening as Egyptomania was to the West in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. Russian culture could afford to be “philo-Ukrainian” in the same sense as Western culture was “philo-oriental” at the time. As long as the Ukrainian question appeared politically resolved, the “love affair” could continue. Cultural Ukrainophilia, as long as it served to celebrate and augment Russian state- or nation-building, was entirely compatible with both a dynastic and a Romantic nationalist imperialism.

The idea that the Russian and Ukrainian identities might be incom­patible became gradually apparent after the arrest of the Cyrillo- Methodian Brotherhood in 1847 and the revolutions of 1848. Belinsky’s organicist views on culture and nation alerted him to this possibility earlier than most other observers. He no doubt foresaw that conces­sions in the cultural realm would lead to growing demands for political autonomy. True, Belinsky argued that his was the voice of reason. Andrea Rutherford has written that “it would be incorrect to associate Belinsky with the tsarist policy of forcible Russification of Ukraine. Instead, his theory predicts that the Ukrainians will voluntarily choose to become culturally Russian, recognizing, like Khmelnytskii, that they can enter civilization only by riding Russian coattails. This prediction is a direct implication of the view that nationhood is instrumental to becoming civilized. Given this assumption, it is quite natural to expect that people will adopt the nationality best equipped to achieve civili­zation.”¹⁹¹ However, this assumption was made in every age by “enlight­eners” who acted as spokesmen of imperial “civilizing” missions. The problem for liberal or radical critics of empire, as Albert Memmi has pointed out in his Colonizer and the Colonized, is what to do when the colonized fail to cooperate in the project of enlightenment as defined by the dominant nation. With the appearance of Shevchenko, Ukraine not only demonstrated that it had one of the greatest poets of Slavdom but presented a refutation of Belinsky’s entire theoretical structure. Belinsky’s bad-tempered and boorish response is not that of a man committed to rational debate. It appears to be the voice of denial and frustration, of the politically irrational: “a tribe [plemia],” he wrote of Ukrainians, “can only have folk songs, but it cannot have poets, and even less, great poets.”¹⁹² The powerful and moving anti-imperialist poetry of “The Caucasus” (Kavkaz), “The Dream” (Son), and “The Great Vault” (Velykyi liokh) circulated at this time in manuscript copies. After Shevchenko’s arrest and exile, Belinsky wrote to Annen­kov in a letter of 1-10 December 1847: “I have not read these lam­poons, and no one of my acquaintance has (which fact, by the way, proves that they are by no means malicious but merely flat and stupid), but I am convinced that the lampoon against the empress must have been outrageously disgusting.. Shevchenko has been banished to the Caucasus as a private. I am not sorry for him; if I had been his judge, I would not have done less.”¹⁹³

There is, as has been pointed out, a logic to Belinsky’s theory of nationality. It is seldom pointed out, however, that this logic is also connected to the imperial myth-making in which he was implicated. Belinsky was disingenuous when he suggested in the same letter that his antagonism to Shevchenko was based on the fact that such poetic demonstrations, by infuriating the government,jeopardized the pro­gressive movement. The conservative Khomiakov said something very similar in his response to the same event. The same structure of thought operated in both cases; both saw any expression of Ukrainian national feeling as regressive. It was an attitude rooted in the imperial teleology that most Russian writers shared.

“Philo-Ukrainianism” was acceptable to Belinsky, as it was to the wider public, as long as it reinforced the underlying historical scheme. He had already indicated what an acceptable theory of Ukrainian history should be and partly owing to his enormous influence, did a great deal to define the parameters within which many literary stereo­types of Ukraine and the Ukrainians were to operate. The most impor­tant of his desiderata was that Ukrainian history must always be treated within Russian history. Of the twenty pages he devoted to the review of Markevich’s History of Little Russia, sixteen are part of a lengthy dissertation on the historian’s purpose and methodology. In contrast to the essay on Peter, where the focus is on differentiation and antith­esis in the emergence of a Russian identity, here the emphasis is all on synthesis. The message is that Ukraine should not be allowed to function as an independent subject. The end of Ukraine’s history - its unification with Russia - must constantly be uppermost in the mind of any historian who tackles the subject. Russian history is the great river, growing ever wider and deeper; Little Russia is a tributary. Such a domestication of Ukrainian history, as has been observed, was a broad trend. Pushkin, after writing a review of the anti-Russian History of the Rus People, produced his “Poltava.” Gogol delighted the Russian public with his Taras Bulba. Distinctiveness was permissible as long as the overall teleological imperatives were observed.

In the review of Markevich’s book, Belinsky denied that the hetman and Zaporozhian administrations ever constituted a state or republic: it was “some kind of strange community of an Asiatic type.”¹⁹⁴ Since Ukrainian history lacked both leaders and the drive for nationhood, its bloody revolutions could only be described as pogroms. This inter­pretation of Ukraine’s “revolutionary” history became a stereotype in Belinsky; it is analogous to the depiction of a violent, blood-feuding Muslim banditry in literature devoted to the Caucasus. In his review of Shevchenko’s Haidamaks (Haidamaky, 1841) he focused on the attacks against Jews and the rape of their daughters. He wrote, “the Cossack had only two pleasures in life: slaughter and drink,” and repeatedly used the phrase “full of wild poetry” to describe the country’s history.¹⁹⁵

There were representations of Ukraine and Ukrainians that Belin­sky praised effusively. Nothing pleased him more than Kvitka- Osnovianenko’s image of a patriarchal Ukrainian gentry loyal to the empire. His Pan Khaliavsky received the warmest praise because, in the critic’s view, it ridiculed the quaint but hopelessly outmoded traditions of old Ukraine and suggested that the new imperial structures held the only hope for progress. He grasped Kvitka’s description of the hetmanate period as a picture of “ignorance, laziness, greed and prejudice,” ignoring the possibility that the work could be read as a moral satire.¹®⁶ The critic sought confirmation of his view that Ukraine was a peasant narod, that the hetman and Zaporozhian administrations were only a “muzhik democracy,” and that the maloros was naive, simple-minded, and easily manipulated: “the character of Little Rus­sians is patriarchally simple-hearted [prostodushnoe] and incapable of moral movement and development.”¹®⁷ Its literature, therefore, must necessarily be lowbrow, narrow in thematic range, poor in ideas and artistic quality, holding little interest for the educated. The most talented and ambitious Ukrainian intellectuals would, in his view, voluntarily choose to assimilate. The anthology Iaistivka (Swallow), put out by Ievhen Hrebinka in 1841, stirred him to the caustic comment, “A fine literature, which breathes the simple-mindedness [prostovatost ] of the peasant language and the stupidity of the peasant mind.”

Belinsky’s “liberal” nationalism is, therefore, deeply complicit in the defence and exercise of imperial power. He manifests the self-serving illusions and authoritarian traits embedded in the metropolitan cult of reason and enlightenment, which Habermas has described as “the depersonalized exercise of power.”¹®⁸ The portrait of Belinsky as a con­sistent opponent of nationalism, accordingly, requires revision. His espousal of an instrumentalist theory of nationhood, his deference to the “iron laws” of social development and the march of reason, turned repeatedly into a justification of raison d’etat and Russian national inter­ests. He employed the “dialectic of enlightenment,” as did other mem­bers of progressive movements in Europe, to brand small nations as “reactionary.” It was this kind of liberal nationalism wedded to impe­rialism that he transmitted in writings that were avidly read by progres­sive youth. His legacy included not only the celebrated letter to Gogol of 1847, which became the gospel of Russian revolutionaries but also a conceptualization of Ukraine and Ukrainians that was to play an important role in Russian liberal and radical thought. The Ukrainian liberal Mykhailo Drahomanov later commented that Russian revolu­tionaries began their career as radicals and frequently ended as des­pots, rescuing the “unity of the state” - something they considered absolutely necessary for the defence of “freedom and progress” - from “separatist” threats, which they viewed as the symptoms of reaction.¹®®

It has been suggested that there were psychological reasons shaping Belinsky’s views. Isaiah Berlin has noted that the ardent Westernizer was “emotionally more deeply and unhappily Russian than any of his contemporaries, spoke no foreign languages, could not breathe freely in any environment save that of Russia, and felt miserable and perse­cution-ridden abroad.”²⁰⁰ An emotional nationalism appears to lie at the root of Belinsky’s moral fervour and faith in progress, a national­ism that owed much to a belief in the consolidating and redeeming power of empire.

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