Borderland

by Anna Reid

  To the S. of the town is the extensive Kilinski Park, the favourite promenade of the citizens, with a statue of Jan Kilinski (1760–1819), the Polish patriot, by Markowski. Fine views of the town may be enjoyed from the Unionshugel, and from the top of the Franz-Josef-Berg.

  But out of sight of the Franz-Josef-Berg, the views were not fine at all. Like Ireland, Galicia was a byword for rural poverty. In the 1880s it was calculated that of all the ex-Polish territories, Galicia had the highest birth and death rates and the lowest life expectancy. The average Galician ate less than half the food of the average Englishman, yet paid twice as much of his income in taxes. Every year 50,000 people in the province died of malnutrition, and only one in two children reached the age of five. The population grew regardless, and peasant plots shrank from an average of twelve acres to six. What spare cash the peasants did have went on drink: in 1900 eastern Galicia had one tavern per 220 inhabitants, compared to one hospital per 1,200, and one elementary school per 1,500. Though speculators struck oil in the region in the 1860s, the resulting wealth flowed away to London and Vienna. A joke of the period has a Polish socialist being stopped by a policeman as he crosses the Galician frontier. Asked what he means by socialism, he says it is ‘the struggle of the Workers against Capital’. ‘In that case,’ replies the policeman, ‘you may enter Galicia, for here we have neither the one nor the other,’2

  The escape route for many was emigration. In the twenty-five years before the First World War more than 2 million Ukrainian and Polish peasants left Galicia, including an extraordinary 400,000 people, or almost 5 per cent of the province’s population, in 1913 alone. Some went to the new factories of Polish Silesia, some to France and Germany. But most took ship to Canada and the United States, founding today’s 2-million-strong North American Ukrainian diaspora. The New World was glad to have them. Some of the first Ukrainians into America were shipped over as strikebreakers by a Pennsylvania coal mine; the Canadian government used them to settle the prairie – not very different, they were assured, from the Ukrainian steppe. Fleeced by predatory commission agents, their first homes were often no more than brushwood wigwams; in time they progressed to mud-and-thatch huts and elaborate wooden churches just like the ones back home. As a Canadian home minister wrote: ‘I think a stalwart peasant in a sheepskin coat, bom on the soil, whose forefathers have been peasants for ten generations, with a stout wife and half-a-dozen children, is good quality.’3

  The second great wave of emigration came at the end of the Second World War, when hundreds of thousands of Galicians fled west before the advancing Red Army, finding their way via Displaced Persons’ Camps in Allied-occupied Germany to Canada, America and Britain’s industrial Midlands. The stories they have to tell are amazing: tales of midnight knocks, abandoned feather beds and dowry chests, carts strafed from the air, divided families, last trains. The journey was well worth it, for no better argument for nurture over nature exists than the tragicomic contrast between the escapees’ ‘hyphenated’ descendants – multilingual, well travelled, university-educated – and their cousins who were left behind to grow up in the Soviet Union. One young Ukrainian-American Reuters journalist I knew always had her swish Kiev flat piled high with sacks of potatoes, lugged into town by kindly relatives on a remote collective farm. ‘They really think,’ she would groan, ‘that otherwise I won’t have anything to eat.’

  Born of a mixture of political rivalry and Romantic preoccupation with peasant culture, the nineteenth-century Ukrainian national movement relied, like all national movements, on a large element of invention, not all of it even on the part of the Ukrainians themselves. Though it came to fruition in Galicia, it had its roots in eastern Ukraine, where Russia saw the Ukrainian peasantry as a potential counterweight to Polish influence. Most early Ukrainophile writing and research came out of Kharkiv University, founded in 1805 to train imperial bureaucrats, and one of the first histories of Ukraine, History of the Russes or Little Russia, was published by Moscow’s Imperial Society for the Study of Rusian History and Antiquities. In the 18 60s the movement passed into the hands of a group of young Kiev-born Poles, who took to the villages in embroidered peasant shirts to demonstrate their opposition to serfdom and discreetly lobby for support for Polish emancipation, and towards the end of the century it drew encouragement from Austria, which intermittently used the Ukrainians to counter Polish pretensions in Galicia.

  For the educated inhabitant of Ukraine, national identity was a question of personal taste. In many families, some individuals turned into prominent ‘Ukrainians’, while others continued to think of themselves as Russians or Poles. Volodymyr Antono-vych, professor of history at Kiev University and leader of the Ukrainian national movement in the 1860s and ’70s, was born of a noble Polish family, as was Andriy Sheptytsky, Metropolitan of the Uniate Church in Galicia from 1900 to 1944. Asked his nationality, he would say that he was ‘like St Paul – a Greek to the Greeks, a Jew to the Jews’. Andriy’s brother Stanislaw, meanwhile, remained a conventional Roman Catholic Pole, spelling his surname Szeptycki and ending up as minister of defence in one of the interwar Polish governments. Though the Ukrainian peasant knew very well he was not a hated Pole or moskal, it was not until the end of the century that he started thinking of himself as a ‘Ukrainian’. Asked his identity, he would probably have replied that he was a muzhik – a peasant – or ‘Orthodox’, or simply one of the tuteshni – the ‘people from here’.

  In the absence of a large body of people consciously identifying themselves as Ukrainians, the early evangelists for Ukrainia-nism had to stress what distinguishing features were to hand – history and language. At the beginning of the nineteenth century knowledge of either was rare. Tales of the Cossack uprisings had become the preserve of folk-tale and legend, transmitted by wandering bards. Ukrainian itself had turned into a peasant tongue, the language in which one addressed the servants, if one spoke it at all. In the cities, it was hardly heard. For a long time even Ukrainophiles expected it to die out completely, comforting themselves with the thought that Irish nationalism had survived the demise of Gaelic.

  The first man to try producing literature in Ukrainian was a Russian-speaking bureaucrat, Ivan Kotlyarevsky. Significantly, he used the language for comic effect – his ballad Eneida, published in 1798, is a burlesque on Virgil’s Aeneid, full of rollocking Cossacks and lusty village maidens. Though Eneida was a bestseller, even Kotlyarevsky did not think Ukrainian could be used for serious writing. But at the same time, work began on codifying the language. Ukrainian got its first grammar in 1818 (the compiler thought he was recording ‘a disappearing dialect’)4 and its first short dictionary in 1823. Given birth by eccentric antiquarians, national consciousness remained incongruously bound up with the dusty world of libraries and learned journals, academic rivalries and obscure linguistic disputes. It is no coincidence that the president of the first Ukrainian Republic, of 1918, was a historian.

  The lateness and fragility of the Ukrainian cultural revival was nothing unusual. Czech, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Romanian and Russian itself were all only just beginning to turn into literary languages. Czech got its first dictionary in 1835, and for a long time the language of the Bohemian cities was German. The first Hungarian grammar appeared in 1803, at which stage the Magyar nobility still spoke a mixture of French, German and dog-Latin. The Russian Academy published its pioneering six-volume Russian dictionary in the 1790s, followed by an official grammar in 1802. Pushkin, the first great writer in the vernacular, worked in the 1830s, and for much of the century the Russian nobility preferred French. Pushkin’s Onegin is charmed by girls who can’t speak their own language correctly – ‘I find a faultless Russian style/Like crimson lips without a smile’5 – and Tolstoy has Anna and Vronsky quarrelling in French as late as the 1870s. Hence, perhaps, Russia’s vicious defensiveness over the development of rival Slavic tongues.

  Ukraine’s equivalent to Pushkin, and the man who contributed more than any other single individ
ual to the creation of a Ukrainian sense of national identity, was Taras Shevchenko. Though rather scorned by young Ukrainians today, who have been force-fed his works at school, he single-handedly turned Ukrainian into a literary language, remains Ukraine’s greatest national hero, and led a life that must surely be one of the most remarkable in all literature.

  Shevchenko was born in 1814 in a village south-west of Kiev, to a poor serf family. His father worked as a carter in summer and a wheelwright in winter; his mother died when he was nine. From an early age he struck people as an unusual little boy, scratching pictures on walls and fences with lumps of coal or chalk, making clay whistles in the shape of nightingales, and getting lost in the fields looking for the ‘pillars that hold up the sky’. His father, whose death left Shevchenko an orphan aged eleven, is supposed to have bequeathed his odd son nothing, on the grounds that he would obviously grow up a ne’er-do-well or a genius, and money would be no help either way.

  Aged fourteen or fifteen, Shevchenko joined the household of the local landowner – Pavel Engelhardt, a great-nephew of Potemkin and a fashionable lieutenant in the Guards – as a servant-boy. His tasks were to wash the dishes, heave wood and empty slops. But at night, so tradition has it, he crept down the manor-house corridors making sketches of Engelhardt’s paintings. One account even has him hanging his drawings, Orlando-like, from the trees in the park. Later the same year he was sent to Warsaw, where Engelhardt had been posted to the Russian garrison. Here Shevchenko met and fell in love with a young seamstress – not, like him, a serf. ‘It was the first time,’ he wrote later, ‘that I began to wonder why we unlucky serfs were not free people like everyone else.’ The romance was not destined to last: November 1830 saw the outbreak of the Polish rising and the Engelhardt ménage decamped to St Petersburg.

  In the capital, Shevchenko’s life changed. Apprenticed to a house-decorator, he painted friezes on palace walls by day, and spent the eerie ‘white nights’ sitting on a paint pot in the Summer Gardens, taking copies of its mythological sculptures. Early one morning he struck up conversation with another Ukrainian, a student at the Academy of Fine Arts, Ivan Soshenko.Soshenko showed him how to use watercolours, took him to galleries, and introduced him to friends – including Karl Bryullov, creator of a celebrated salon picture of the time, the melodramatic Last Days of Pompeii. Bryullov took an instant liking to the ‘unserflike’ young artist, and called on Engelhardt to try to talk him into granting Shevchenko freedom. The meeting was not a success. Bryullov ended by calling Engelhardt ‘a feudal dog-trader’ and ‘a swine in slippers’; Engelhardt thought Bryullov a ‘real American madman’. The only way to get Shevchenko’s release would be to buy it. After much negotiation this was finally accomplished, the necessary 2,500 roubles being raised by Bryullov’s donation of a portrait to a charity raffle. Aged twenty-four, Shevchenko ceased to be a serf.

  A free man at last, he started enjoying himself. ‘At that time,’ wrote Soshenko disapprovingly, ‘he changed entirely. Introduced by Bryullov to the best St Petersburg families, he frequently went out in the evenings, dressed smartly, even with some pretensions to elegance. In a word, he became possessed, for a while, with the social demon.’6 In his memoirs, Shevchenko remembered gloating ‘like a child’ over a new coat:

  Looking at the skirts of this shining coat, I thought to myself: was it so long ago that, wearing a dirty smock, I did not even dare to think about such shining clothes? But now I spend a hundred roubles on a coat . . . Truly, the metamorphoses of Ovid!7

  At the same time he began to write. In 1838 he was showing verses to friends, and in 1840 he published his first collection, titled Kobzar after Ukraine’s race of wandering bards. The book created a sensation. The Ukrainophile intelligentsia instantly recognised it as a landmark – ‘so good’, wrote one, ‘that you can smack your lips and clap your hands’;8 Russians, of course, couldn’t understand why anyone should want to write in Ukrainian at all.

  Shevchenko’s poems are an odd mixture of pastoralism, xenophobia and self-hatred. His themes are the beauty of Ukraine’s landscape, her lost Cossack greatness and her shame in labouring under the Russian and Polish yokes. Though Russians, Poles (and, embarrassingly, Jews) all get short shrift, most of his bile is directed at the treachery and complacency of the Ukrainians themselves. Ukraine is a serf-girl seduced and abandoned by a heartless officer, a widow deserted by ungrateful children, a plundered grave, ‘mould-grown’, ‘rotting’, ‘covered in weeds’. Ukrainians are ‘asleep’, ‘worse-than-Poles’, even cannibals. Again and again, he lets fly at Russified compatriots:

  Here and there; they carry on

  In Russian, laugh, and curse

  Their parents who’d not had them taught

  To jabber, while still children,

  The German language, so that now

  They would not be ink-pickled . . .

  Leeches, leeches! For, maybe,

  Your father had to sell

  His last cow to the Jews, till he

  Could teach you Russian well!9

  Russian reviewers praised Shevchenko’s talent, but regretted that it should be put to work on a useless peasant tongue. Ukrainian was ‘artificial’, ‘dead’, ‘a joke and a whim’. It was incomprehensible that writers should ‘occupy themselves with such stupidities’. The Ukrainian ‘dialect’ was fated to ‘die in the archives’ and it was sad to see it ‘used by people who might adorn the all-consuming Slavic [i.e. Russian] literature’.10 The best-known critic of the day, Vissarion Belinsky, took him to task – with some justification – for ‘naïveté’. ‘There is everything here which can be found in every Ukrainian poem,’ he wrote of Shevchenko’s Haydamaky, a long and gory ballad on the peasant rebellions of the eighteenth century. ‘The Poles, the Jews, the Cossacks; they swear a lot, drink, fight, set things on fire, and butcher each other; in the intervals, of course, there is a kobzar (for what Ukrainian poem can be without one?) who sings his elevated songs without much sense, and a girl who weeps in a raging storm.’11

  Shevchenko had his reply ready:

  . . . If you want to sing

  For money and glory,

  Then you must sing about Matriosha

  And Parasha, and subjects

  Like the sultans, parquet floors, spurs,

  That’s where glory lies. But

  He sings – The blue sea is playing,’

  While he himself is crying. Behind

  Him stands a whole crowd,

  All in peasant coats . . .12

  Between 1843 and 1847 Shevchenko made two year-long trips to Ukraine, being lionised by the Ukrainophile intelligentsia and sketching Cossack monuments. Accounts from the period describe a short, thickset man with reddish hair, a plain face and strikingly bright and intelligent eyes. He made friends everywhere, and was evidently good company: Princess Varvara Repnina, who fell in love with him while he was painting her father’s portrait, described him to a friend as ‘one of those who are so congenial in the country . . . and whom one can leave alone without any fear that some trifle will offend him’. He was ‘simple and unpretentious’, ‘relaxed and tactful in society, and never used clichés’.13

  In the spring of 1846 Shevchenko fell in with My kola Kostomarov, a young historian at Kiev’s St Vladimir University. Kostomarov was leader of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, one of the many semi-secret discussion groups which produced the radical political thinking of the time. Comprising only a dozen or so members, the Brotherhood’s Utopian aim was to abolish serfdom and monarchy and form a new pan-Slavic democratic federation, with Ukraine at its head. This programme was set out in ‘The Books of Genesis of the Ukrainian People’, a pseudo-biblical document which Shevchenko may have helped write. Early in 1847 the Brotherhood fell prey to an informer. Disembarking from a Dnieper riverboat on his way to act as best man at Kostomarov’s wedding, Shevchenko was arrested and sent to St Petersburg for interrogation by Count Alexey Orlov, head of Nicholas I’s secret police. Orlov dec
ided he was not actually a member of the Brotherhood, but an ‘important criminal’ none the less. ‘Shevchenko has acquired among his friends,’ he reported, ‘the reputation of a brilliant Ukrainian writer, and so his poems are doubly harmful and dangerous. His favourite poems could be disseminated in Ukraine, inducing thoughts about the alleged happy times of the hetman era, the exigency of a return to those times, and the possibility of Ukraine’s existence as a separate state.’14 The tsar’s reply was unequivocal. All the Brotherhood members were to be sent into internal exile, and Shevchenko was to be consigned to penal service with the Orenburg Corps, on the Ural river near Russia’s present-day border with Kazakhstan. A note appended to Orlov’s report in Nicholas’s own hand reads: ‘Under the strictest surveillance, prohibited from writing or painting.’

  Shevchenko’s ten years of exile took up over a third of his adult life. But they were not as grim as they could have been. Merciless in theory, the tsarist penal system was notoriously slapdash in practice. Exiles with contacts, charm or money could live in relative ease, and Shevchenko had all three. The bored governors of distant barrack-towns were not about to let this charismatic celebrity – with his ability to sing, paint, tell funny stories and dance the hopak – pass unappreciated, and put him to use tutoring their children, taking portraits of their wives or directing amateur theatricals. Though there were periods when Shevchenko was forced to stay in barracks doing drill and guard duty, and suffered acute boredom and loneliness, most of the time he was able to paint, send and receive letters and books, wear civilian clothes and live in private quarters. He also continued to write poetry, hiding his notebooks with friends or tucking them inside his boots.

  By far the harshest period of his exile were two and a half years with a military expedition sent to chart the Aral Sea. In May 1848 a caravan of 2,500 carts, 3,500 camels, 600 Bashkir cavalry, 200 Ural Cossacks and an entire disassembled schooner, the Constantine, set off south from Orenburg. Shevchenko’s role, despite Nicholas’s ban on painting, was as official artist. As the caravan crawled across the steppe – as flat ‘as if it were covered with a white tablecloth’ – he took sketches of a huge grass fire and of a holy poplar-tree, to which the Bashkirs made sacrifices. The expedition safely crossed the Karakumy desert – a waste of sand-hills and glaring salt-plains, strewn with skeletons of men and animals – arriving at the bleak coastal fortress of Raim in June. Here the Constantine was reassembled, and with surveyors and a geologist as well as Shevchenko aboard, embarked on a two-year odyssey of gales and rocks, scurvy and boils. At one point the ship spent a fortnight anchored at sea riding out a storm, and the entire crew was forced to drink salt-water. Having mapped hundreds of miles of coastline and discovered several new islands, the expedition finally returned home in the autumn of 1850. The following year Shevchenko accompanied a much less arduous geological expedition to the coal-rich Mangyshlak peninsula on the Caspian Sea, spending pleasant days riding into the mountains with a sketch-pad, or reading and writing with friends in the back of a covered cart.