Verkhivnia, at Last (1847)

Nevertheless, by 1847 Eve's old objections to Balzac's visiting Ukraine had all dried up, and she finally invited him to Verkhivnia. He replied that for him Ukraine, with its wide steppes, peasants, and Jews, with its conjunc­tion of “civilization and barbarism,” as he put it, was the one place where he could discover “completely new people and things.” In September, he travelled by train and then coach across the continent - uneventfully till western Galicia, which had been turned upside down by a great peasant uprising the previous year.

Crossing the border into the Russian Empire, Balzac felt he was indeed leaving Europe. He was greatly impressed by the wide spaces, endless fields of wheat, empty lands and roads dotted with the great houses of Polish aristo­crats, almost all in the neoclassical style: “those rare and splendid dwellings,” he wrote, “surrounded by parks, with their copper roofs shimmering in the distance.” Finally, he reached Berdychiv, which he considered the beginning of “Ukraine,” where he was surrounded by a crowd of Jews, who, he later claimed, suspiciously eyed his golden watch. “It was the desert,” he later wrote in his unfinished Lettre sur Kiew, “the kingdom of wheat, the Prairies of Fenn­imore Cooper, and their silence.

Balzac spent four and a half months at Verkhivnia with Eve, Anna, and Jerzy (“Georges” to Balzac). They all got on very well, and Balzac was hap­py. He had finally found his refuge from his relentless creditors, his oasis in the desert. He even managed to do some writing, starting his Lettre sur Kiew and composing a few other pieces. But at the same time, he seemed oblivious to the injustice surrounding him. He took a very mixed view of the peasants and serfs he saw and met, thinking them potential insurgents, like the Polish peasants of western Galicia. Peasants, in Balzac's view, espe­cially in France, were generally sly, greedy, idle, promiscuous, and not very bright; but in “Russia,” at least, so he thought, they were well controlled by the tsar. In Ukraine, he believed them happy, secure under the benevolent emperor. Unlike in France, they actually sang on their way to work! They were like children, and serfdom was actually good for them. “In this para­dise,” he noted, “there are actually seventy-seven different ways of baking bread from the abundant wheat!”¹⁶

Of course, Balzac, the great realist writer, was completely unaware of the geographical, historical, and ethnographical peculiarities of the land he was visiting: he had no accurate idea of where Ukraine actually began or ended (simply following Polish traditions) or of the linguistic and cultural differ­ences between Ukrainians and Russians (he thought Hanski a “Ukrainian” count). For him, Eve was his “north star,” and Kyiv “the northern Rome.” Little did he know that Russians considered Ukraine their own South, their “Russian Italy.” Moreover, only a few months earlier the tsar's police had imprisoned or exiled the brilliant national awakeners Taras Shevchen­ko, Mykola Kostomarov, and Panteleimon Kulish, leaders of the patriotic Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, which wanted to abolish serf­dom and the Russian tsardom and replace them with a free federation of independent Slavic states, centring on Ukraine.¹⁷

When Balzac went to visit Kyiv, he met some of the tsarist officials who had dealt with the Cyril-Methodians.