CHAPTER ONE THE LITERARY SCENE

The half century before Taras Shevchenko began to write saw the beginning of those tendencies which were to develop to their full power at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. It was a period of transition in which the principles and ideas which had dominated Europe for centuries were being steadily shaken and losing all authority over the minds of men. They were questioned logically by the leading thinkers of the day but they were with equal vigor attacked by the uneducated masses who were vaguely hoping for better conditions of living. At the same time these new ideas with a few exceptions had not been translated into effective political and economic action and the resulting situation was the despair of both the reformers and the conservatives. There was an uneasy stalemate which differed from land to land and even from district to district.

On the positive side the successful revolt of the American colonies and the establishment of the Republic of the United States left a deeper imprint upon European thought, even in the east of Europe, than we usually think. There is no need to exaggerate this but for good or ill the ideas of federation, as shown by the new country in the West, penetrated into distant lands and was hailed as a substitute for the centralizing policies of the autocratic monarchs who were working to destroy on paper as well as in practice the local liberties and traditions which had existed for centuries.

This had been followed by the French Revolution and then the Napoleonic Wars. The confusion and hostilities had aided the ambitious plans of such rulers as Catherine II of Russia who had used the preoccupation of Europe with the West to finish the dismemberment of Poland and the annihilation of the last Ukrainian organizations. It comes as something of a shock to realize that the Zaporozhian Sich, long reduced to only a shadow of its past greatness, was not destroyed until 1775, and the last vestiges of the Hetmanate, which had been practically turned into an aristocratic regime, were wiped out in 1783 and the territory was divided into governments and ruled on the Russian pattern. Thus so far as Ukraine was concerned, the final extinction of the old liberties came precisely at the period of the American Revolution. In 1792, with the division of Poland, Russia took over the region of Kiev, the area where Shevchenko was later to be born, incorporated that into its grandiose structure, and reduced the population to the status of Russian serfs.

The final end of local liberties was thus hardly carried into practice when Russia was compelled to face the Napoleonic Wars. The officers of the aristocratic and Europeanized classes were brought face to face with the new ideas which they met definitely in Paris and in the contact with their allies during the campaigns and they began to dream of introducing into their native country some of the modern practices which they had seen in the West.

These men were however too weak and too scattered to combine their influence for an effective movement and when they attempted it in the short-lived Decembrist revolt of 1825, they were decisively checked, and their leaders were executed or exiled to Siberia. The Polish revolt of 1831 fared little better and by the time that Nicholas I was securely established on the throne, he could in his own imagination breathe easily and forget that there had been such turmoils in the governmental organization.

Thus in the Russian Empire, it seemed as if the powers of the reaction had been definitely established. The ideas of the Holy Alliance and of Prince Metternich seemed as solid as the monolithic structure erected in Moscow by Peter the Great. On the political side the conservative and reactionary factions were in full control and the rulers no longer, as in the days of Catherine, played with new ideas, even if they had no serious intention of practicing them. There were peasant disorders but there were no more such convulsions as that led by Pugachov and his Cossacks which seriously menaced the established order and which demanded the use of large military forces to save the regime.

In the meanwhile every step forward in the Europeanization of the Russian aristocracy meant an increase in the exactions demanded of the serfs. This was a process that had been continuing especially since the reforms of Peter the Great, when there was inserted a steadily deepening wedge between the manorhouse and the peasant. Long hours of forced labor on the nobleman’s lands and the ever diminishing size of the serf allotments because of an increase of population made the life of the poor unfortunates more and more miserable. This was especially marked in those areas where the Russian system had been but recently introduced and where traditions of an older and happier time still lingered on in the minds of the older inhabitants.

Along with this political and economic stagnation and retrogression went a new intellectual and artistic development. This made itself felt throughout the whole of the Empire. It had both its good and its bad sides. On the positive side, there was in Russia the appearance of a new art, a new literature which tried to imitate and then to adapt the French pseudo-classic culture of the eighteenth century. Nobles who had previously known little but the traditional Church Slavonic conceptions, handed down from antiquity, were fascinated by the new innovations. New methods of literary composition were introduced. A new language was devised. New influences from Western Europe came in.

All this could not fail to draw away a large part of the intellectually alert landowners from their original moorings. During the eighteenth century the Ukrainian educated class tended more and more to accept the Europeanized Russian culture. This was the easier, because the Ukrainian centres, as the old Academy of Peter Mohyla in Kiev, had busied themselves entirely with Church Slavonic and theological subjects. The system of education had not included any of the results of Western development, the language used was artificial and differed markedly from the colloquial speech of the villagers, and even such a man as Skovoroda in the eighteenth century had not taken any definite step to assault the entrenched system except by the power of his own personal refusal to bend himself to its demands. Where in the seventeenth century the Kiev schools had sent scholars to reeducate Moscow, now after the absorption by Russia, they contented themselves with a continuation of the old policies. As a result there was a growing exodus of the young men to the dominant center of St. Petersburg and there was a consequent fall in the culture and educational resources of the Ukrainian lands and a rise in Russian influence.

These tendencies were again counterbalanced by a new series of developments in Western Europe which could not fail to create a reaction throughout the whole of the continent. On the one hand, Rousseau in France developed his theories that the natural man had a higher moral virtue than the man of civilization and culture. There started a return to the primitive which could not fail to turn people’s attention to the condition of the serfs, while at the same time the renewed theories of the rights of man attracted attention to their misfortunes.

Side by side with this there were the doctrines of Herder as to the superiority of the folk song as a form of literature and the focussing of the attention of the educated on the speech of the common people and on their poetic productions and artistic practices. Those tendencies which had manifested themselves in Percy’s Reliques, a collection of Scotch ballads, which had continued with a desire to collect German folksongs, in which even Goethe took part, and the later interest in the Serb popular ballads naturally spread into Russia and resulted not only in the discovery of the byliny in the far north but in a revaluation of the Ukrainian folk songs which had passed unnoticed outside of the villages or which had been treated with amused disdain by the polished noblemen. A new wave of interest was therefore set into motion and it came so soon after the disintegration of the old order that parts of it could be easily absorbed into the new movement.

It was in this environment that Ivan Kotlyarevsky published in 1798 the Eneida, the first work to be written in the Ukrainian vernacular. It is to be noticed that the author in his humorous adaptation of the old Latin story to the Ukrainian scene rested rather on the old classical traditions of the eighteenth century and the practices of the Kiev Academy than on the newer ideas which were beginning to appear on the intellectual horizon. Yet the work appeared at a critical time and it showed to the people still smarting under the newly imposed yoke that it was possible to develop the vernacular and to produce outstanding works of literature in it. This was all to the good and it in a way corresponded to the revival of the Czech language which was being started by the philologically inclined Josef Dobrovský.

Yet before the vernacular literature could take a firm foothold, some other idea was necessary. This was found in the beginnings of Romanticism which swept with startling rapidity throughout Europe. This was a complicated movement and its form varied with the individual countries.

It made its appearance in Russia largely through the influence of Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky, who was for nearly half a century the leading critic and adviser of the young aristocratic poets who developed at the Lycée of Tsarskoye Selo at the imperial court of Alexander I. This circle included Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, the greatest of Russian poets, although in his composition there was always more of the older classical ideas and practices than it was fashionable to admit at the time.

Zhukovsky, who was an excellent translator, acclimatized in Russia the whole apparatus of the weird, the supernatural and the mediaeval that was being developed in Germany. He early translated Bürger’s Lenore, the story of the dead lover returning to claim his living bride. He gave his people poems and stories of mediaeval chivalry and he translated many of the ballads of Goethe and Schiller. Very soon he added to this movement the influence of Byron and for some fifteen or twenty years the gilded youth of the Russian capital not only imitated Lord Byron’s poems in their writings but they acted out his ideas in real life and considered themselves to be wanderers persecuted by the world.

With it all, the twenties and the thirties were the Golden Age of Russian poetry. Pushkin especially soon outgrew the narrow imitation of Byron. He added to the influences to which he was subjected those of Sir Walter Scott and Shakespeare. He wrote historical poems conceived in a profound admiration for Peter the Great as Poltava but at the same time in The Captain’s Daughter and other works he showed a strong appreciation of the career of that doughty old rebel Pugachov. Yet during the last years of his life he expressed more sympathy as in the Brazen Horseman with the sufferings of the poorer class of the people. The collapse of the Decembrist movement and the silencing of the reforming elements among the aristocracy gave rise to the beginnings of a more critical literature based on an attempted understanding of Western ideas and sharply divided Russian thought between the Slavophiles who were primarily conservative and attempted to find differences between Russian development and that of Western Europe to the advantage of the former and the Westerners, conservative and liberal alike, who sought to emphasize the backwardness of Russia and to demand the remodeling of the country on western lines. By 1840 these men, led by the furious Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky, had secured the ear of most of the literary journals and were well on their way toward the formation of a realistic school and the radical intelligentsia.

The Romantic movement therefore had but a short life in Russia. This is not to be wondered at, for the Russian mediaeval history was not of a character that lent itself easily to the glorification of the past and of the feudal period that was so effective in German. Chivalry as an organized movement had not taken root in mediaeval Moscow with its strong Tatar and Asiatic influences and Russian Romanticism always lacked a certain basis which was found in the Western European countries where for centuries the lords and barons had waged petty warfare with many deeds of individual daring.

A special position in this movement was held by Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol, the son of one of the early writers in Ukrainian. In his Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka and later in Mirgorod and especially in his powerful Cossack tale of Taras Bulba, he pictured the romantic side of Ukrainian or Little Russian tradition (to use the name which he gave it himself) and he told tales of the happier side of the life of the region where he had been born. His works really introduced into Russian literature a Russianized Ukrainian school of writing which by its color and charm attracted wide attention.

On the other hand in Poland, even after the division, there was the same outpouring of the Romantic spirit. Adam Mickiewicz who had started his brilliant poetical career in Wilno and Kaunas and had then been exiled to Russia and had finally gone abroad was the leading figure. One of that group of Polish patriots which had gathered around the University of Wilno, he had raised Polish literature to a new level of excellence. He was ably seconded by other writers as Juljusz Slowacki and Zygmunt Krasiński, the two other Romantic poets who were also forced into exile. The writings of this group were more in the conventional Romantic style and exercised an even stronger influence on Poland than did the Russian Romanticists in the narrow sense. Many of the writers of this time as Antoni Malczewski were familiar with the picturesque aspects of Ukrainian life, its rich supply of folksongs and its elaborate peasant rituals. As a result they introduced so-called Ukrainian themes into Polish literature and relying upon their Galician experiences, they made the Ukrainians or Ruthenians as they called them really popular.

In the meanwhile the energetic young group at Wilno were preparing for revolt which finally took place in 1831. Despite initial successes, the Russian Tsar speedily got control of this as he had of the Decembrist uprising among the Russian aristocrats. He suppressed it as brutally and for some decades the Poles were compelled to maintain abroad in France their chief literary activity, which continued to emphasize the principles of Romanticism with a strong feeling for their dismembered country.

Finally we cannot overlook the first halting steps of that movement which was destined to be labelled Pan-Slavism or the Slavonic brotherhood. It was really launched in Bohemia by the Slovak Jan Kollár who in 1824 published a collection of sonnets, the Daughter of Slava, in which he pleaded for a brotherhood of all the Slavonic races. His work set the key for much of the later Czech literature and his ideas expanded in more prosaic form by Pavel Šafařík and others slowly permeated all classes of thinking Slavs. To Kollár and his friends this undoubtedly meant a free brotherhood with Russia as the most powerful member and protector against the Germanic world. To the Russians it meant the absorption of the other Slavs by Russia and the Slavophiles easily took many of the current ideas of the German philosophers and crossed them with conceptions of the Russian Orthodox Church to create a theory for their new nationalism.

All of these various impulses combined to influence the newly born Ukrainian literature. There was much that directly appealed to the writers. For example the Ukrainians were conscious of their past, at least those who were conscious of anything. They knew that the exploits of the Kozaks were exactly the sort of thing that had attracted the attention of the Romantic poets of both Russia and Poland. They knew the wealth of their folklore, the number of weird themes that they had at their disposal. They realized the potentialities of the description of their folk customs. Besides, tales of the unhappy peasant, the seduced girl, the serf were common in the Romantic literature and the everyday life around them gave them countless examples to illustrate their writings.

It required the work of a master to put the new modern Ukrainian literature on its feet. Kotlyarevsky had made a start in fashioning the language in which they could work. Kvitka-Osnovyanenko had carried on the work with his prose tales but there was needed an outstanding author who was sincerely devoted to the Ukrainian cause and was at the same time a master of the language, to weld together the various elements and to produce in Ukrainian works which would be on a par with those of the two conquering cultures which were then at their highest stage of poetic development. With the loss of most of their educated classes and with the hard conditions and the scanty opportunities offered to the peasants and the serfs, it might seem as if the man could not be found and as if the Ukrainian start was from the beginning foredoomed to failure. To the surprise of even the most optimistic, a great poet suddenly appeared, Taras Shevchenko.