Yakiv de Balmen
In July 1845 the poet's good friend Yakiv Petrovych de Balmen died, aged thirty-two. Shevchenko, already a celebrity in his homeland because of his first book of poetry, Kobzar (The Blind Minstrel, or The Kobza Player, 1840) (see Figure 8), had met de Balmen in 1843 during the poet's first tour of Ukraine and near the end of his art studies in St Petersburg.
They met at a party or ball at the Volkhovsky residence in Poltava province in leftbank (eastern) Ukraine, where most of the local gentry and aristocracy were descended from Cossack officers and were well disposed to Cossack Ukraine and to the old “hetmanate,” or autonomous state, founded by Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytysky in 1648, which had maintained its own army and administration despite Russian suzerainty. On the west or right bank of the Dnieper, a partly resurgent Polish state had crushed the western flank of that same Cossack Ukraine, which by the 1840s was only a poignant memory, revived by Shevchenko's fiery and melancholic verses.Although de Balmen was of French and Scottish ancestry, and claimed an old French title (count), he and his circle were Ukrainian local patriots who treasured Cossack traditions. He and Shevchenko met up several more times, including at the de Balmen estate near the Volkhovskys'. The two young men joined an informal fraternity of local sons of the gentry, and both signed a humorous letter to the historian Mykola Markevych dated 22 January 1844. (In 1918 the Ukrainian Peoples Republic under Mykhailo Hrushevsky declared independence and dated it 22 January.) The poet signed that letter to Markevych “Hetman Shevchenko,” and de Balmen signed “Military Captain (yesaul) Yakiv Dybailo.” Shevchenko then continued on his journey across Ukraine, and de Balmen, together with a friend, transcribed a collection of Shevchenko's verse into Latin letters using Polish orthography and illustrated the manuscript with his own drawings.4
In 1845, Shevchenko returned to Poltava and his friend's estate. He learned from de Balmen's brother that his friend had been killed, fighting in the tsar's army against Caucasus mountaineers vigorously resisting Russian encroachments.
Deeply disturbed by the tragic death, and struck by the irony of a Ukrainian patriot dying in the service of a rapacious empire oppressing Ukrainians and neighbouring Muslim peoples, Shevchenko penned “Kavkaz.”5Less than a year later, the poet finally saw de Balmen's manuscript and illustrations. By hand, he restored a few lines that the imperial censor had struck out and added the stirring first two lines of “Kavkaz”:
Za horamy hory, khmaroiu povyti, Zasiiani horem, krovoiu polyti. (Mountain upon mountain,
Covered with cloud,
Seeded with woe, blood
All the way down.)6
In 1847, after the arrest of Mykola Kostomarov and the other members of the secret, democratically inclined Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius (Slavonic patron saints), with whom Shevchenko had close relations, authorities confiscated the de Balmen manuscript. After the 1917 Revolution it was transferred to Kyiv, and today it is preserved in the library of the Institute of Literature of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences.7