Ukrainians of Their Home

A crown of thorns will always be better than a tsar’s crown. The way to the calvary is always more majestic than the triumphant procession.

Consciously omitting in these meditations the national and state-making processes of the princely and Cossack’s era, the searches of members of the Cyril and Methodius Society, the bloody Bolshevik’s bacchanal of the 1920s-1950s, the audacity of Ukrainians during the Second World War, the men of the sixties, and the desperate victories under the motto of “the year of 2004,” I’ll also omit our intellectual discoveries of the early 1990s, when we enthusiastically and carefully read Vidrodzhennia natsii (Renaissance of the Nation) by Volodymyr Vynnychenko, discovered for us Petliura and Skoropadsky, Internationalism or Russification by Dziuba, acts and works by Chornovol and Stus, learned the truth about “gangs” of the period of the civil war, and first sprouts of information about the OUN-UPA (the Organization of Ukrainian Natio­nalists – the Ukrai­nian Insurgent Army). But let other specialists, historians, political scientists, source scholars and archivists tell about these often still sensitive moments of our liberation in a more detailed and grounded manner. And I, a philologist and li­terary critic, can advise in this sense to reread Kobzar by Taras Shevchenko, Berestechko by Lina Kostenko, Moses by Ivan Franko, and drama poems by Lesia Ukrainka, which generally give us the key to understanding the eternal secrets of our history.

In the meanwhile, as a researcher of Lesia Ukrainka and her entourage, I’d like to focus somewhat more on the powerful audacity of that generation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, trying to follow those striking turns and twists of the Ukrainian reality, which will explode no less expressively in the Ukraine of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. I consciously forgo a special study on the acute Russophobia and “glamorous” Russophile instincts of Ukrainians, from the early times till today, for I want to focus on the epoch and the generation of Lesia Ukrainka — one of the most interesting and most ­pro­mising nation- and state-building ge­nerations of Ukrainians.

At the end of the 1880s in Kyiv, Lesia Ukrainka with her mother, the writer and scholar Olha Kosach senior (Olena Pchilka), her brother Mykhailo, and her sister Olha, with friends the Starytskys, the Lysenkos, the Kovalevskys, the Sikorskys-Vyshynskys, created a group “Pleiad,” or “Pleiad of young Ukrainian penmen,” “Small literary society” or “Small literature”; they referred to the “Old Kyiv Society” as a big one. This group will unite writers of the older and younger ­ge­nerations, children of the old society members and their friends will come here; at first only Kyiv high school and university students. Soon the circle will expand to Chernihiv and Odesa, Poltava and Volyn, Kharkiv and Lviv, and even to Bulgarian Sophia. It will become a non-official Ukrainian university where people not only studied untiringly, but also actively worked, realizing the most daring creative projects. They studied the Ukrainian language, literature and history, learned dozens of other languages and literatures. They started to translate intensely, calling their pilot ­pro­ject “The library of world literature”: the best works of the world literature (a hundred and fifty titles, a hundred authors!). In one of letters to her brother young Larysa Kosach mentioned who of her friends were and what they translated into Ukrainian. She herself was the most active participant of this process and, together with the sworn brother Slavynsky, she will dedicate three decades of her own life to translations of Heinrich Heine. By the way, musicologists and literary critics describe the Ukrainian version of the poem When two part, translated by Slavynsky and set to music by Lysenko, as congenial. It has been made into a folk song long ago.

The “Pleiad” members gathered at the Lysenkos’, the Starytskys’, the Kosachs’, and the Sikorskys’. They conducted literary contests and different quizzes. They also prepared, edited, and arranged books of original poetry, translations, collection of works, almanacs, and anthologies. The Kyiv branch of the editorial of the Galician journal Dzvinok (Bell) was born here. Here they distributed topics for studying and writing special books and brochures on Ukraine’s and the world history. It was then, during the “Pleiad” epoch, that Lesia Ukrainka wrote the handbook Ancient History of Oriental Peoples for her younger sister. It was also then that Maksym Slavynsky and Mykhailo Hrushevsky, under the guidance of the university research supervisor professor Volo­dymyr Antonovych, started their own fundamental research which happened to worthily immortalize the names of the authors, and affect their fates until their tragic end.

According to Liudmyla Staryts­ka-Cherniakhivska, they were the first generation of the Ukrainian intelligentsia to be brought up as conscious Ukrainians by parents who were members of the old society. They were the first, therefore they had the right to make mistakes, be careless, and somewhat naive. Once, for example, the young “Pleiad” members decided to secretly celebrate Shevchenko’s anniversary. To this purpose they rented a one-story building at the Jewish market. It was neglected and abandoned: “We will pay 20 karbovanets per month, but it will be in full secrecy — there will be neither neighbors, nor curious servants, we will be on our own,” said Hnat Zhytetsky at the time. They cleaned that dwelling, brought there furniture and dishes, co­vered windows with newspapers, laid the table; on each window they put two candles, and as a result that abandoned building became truly illuminated. At about eight o’clock at night they sat down to listen to the first report. At this moment the doors opened from both sides and gendarmes entered the room.

The “Pleiad” members would receive a thorough European education, because together with “Pleiad” they will successfully graduate from the best universities, sometimes even from two departments, as Slavynsky (law and historical-philological departments of Saint Volodymyr Kyiv University). Feofan Pashkevych studied medicine in Kyiv and went on to become the best student of the Warsaw university. There were future professors, such as the physicist and mathematician Mykhailo Kosach, the philologist Kostiantyn Arabazhyn, the historian Hrushevsky, the linguist Yevhen Tymchenko, and the medical scholar and president of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences Danylo Zabolotny. During their entire life they will confirm the internal human need for independent and self-initiated work, always in the name of the Ukrainian nation, state, its science, culture, and education. Soon the “Pleiad” members, aside from one of the most prominent poetesses in the world (Lesia Ukrainka), will present to the city of Chernihiv their own, “Pleiad” mayor (Arkadii Versilov); they will become Ukraine deputies of the Russian State Duma (the Ukrainian faction) and diplomats from the Ukrainian People’s Republic and the Hetmanate, as Slavynsky, and even the head of the Ukrainian People’s Republic himself Hrushevsky. Later it may be useful to focus on the intellectual and social development of two “Pleiad” members — Anatolii Lunacharsky and Ivan Steshenko. They first studied together at the Poltava gymnasium, and then continued their education in Kyiv. After the collapse of the empire both became ministers of education — the former in Bolshevik Russia, and the latter in independent Ukraine.

The “Pleiad” members believed the chief task of their life was to support and spread the unique fire of the national spirit, about which the old society member, father of a “Pleiad” Pavlo Zhytetsky, once neatly said: “[…] one shouldn’t quench the Spirit which has lived in our people. This is the spirit of democratic freedom, which ruined the Polish monarchy because it didn’t allow our people to be who they wanted to be, because it tried to transform our Ukrainian people into some other people.” Now another monarchy tries to transform us, but the same historical fate will engulf it. For “this is the people’s national force, which we should develop, not avoiding our best traditions, and not avoiding the experience of European science and politics; we must develop it if we don’t want to drown in the boundless sea, if we don’t want to turn into an element without form and image. I couldn’t say anything against this elemental existence, if our people didn’t have their symbols, obtained during their long historical existence, if they didn’t have their native land covered in blood and sweat.”

They “delegate” their sworn brothers to the desperately patriotic “Taras Fraternity.” And after years of functioning of the “Pleiad,” the older generation will invite its representatives with pleasure, for example, Steshenko and Tymchenko, to join the old society.

They will constitute the main creative core of the famous student choir of Mykola Lysenko, the Ukrainian national classic theater (particularly, the young company of Mykhailo Starytsky, and will also present new original works for the repertoire, do necessary translations and so on), the Kyiv Literary Artistic Society, the Shevchenko Scientific Society (particularly, its Kyiv branch), “Prosvita” societies (Odesa, Kyiv, Chernihiv and so on), “ The Ukrainian Club,” and “Rodyna.” They will take the most active part in the organization of the jubilee celebration of new Ukrainian literature (1898), unveiling the monument to Ivan Kotliarevsky, collecting money for the anniversary and erecting a monument to Taras Shevchenko, developing the Ukrainian national press, creating genuine Ukrainian schools, universities, the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, in the initiating and development of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church, the whole bunch of Ukrainian political parties, radical, radical-democratic (soon social-federalist), the party of the Ukrainian socialist-revolutionaries, “Spilka,” the Society of Ukrainian Postupovtsi. They will withstand the horrors of tsarist and Soviet prisons and concentration camps, and also the opera of the “Union of Ukraine’s Liberation” to the music of the State Political Department, as Ukrainians bitterly joked about the Kharkiv trial over the national intelligentsia on the stage of the local opera house in 1930.

The “Pleiad” members will create an original group of politicians-state makers, under a somewhat unexpected and expressive name “Ukrainians of Their Home.” Lesia Ukrainka, Mykhailo Kryvyniuk, Oleksandr Tulub, Oksana and Ivan Steshenko constituted its intellectual core, tirelessly studying and developing the extremely popular (at that time) social-democratic ideas. But the Ukrainian social-democratic concept was a bit different from what was dominant in Europe; it ruined the Russian empire and instead produced Bolshevik Russia.

The national idea of the Ukrainian national-democrats of that time period was deprived of any extremes: there was no revolutionary struggle, no terror — only an evolutional way of development of the nation and the state. There was no dictatorship of the proletariat, and no dictatorship at all, no extremism, no mythological superiority, “Aryan theories,” “special merits” or “special mission,” or “Messianism.” All these had been cultivated and propagated in Russia for many centuries until then; one can still hear them today, propagated by Putin, Zhirinovsky, and Mikhailov! The idea of “Ukrainians of Their Home” was based, first of all, on three constituents of Drahomanov’s concept of Ukrainian public movements: cultural-literary national work, gaining political freedoms, and solving social problems. These ideas of the Ukrainians of Their Home were mature, non-aggressive, and nation- and state-forming.

Ivan Franko, officially neither a “Pleaid” nor a “Ukrainians of Their Home” member, was nevertheless always close to the participants of these groups, stated at that time: “Everything what goes outside the framework of the nation is either the hypocrisy of people who would be glad to cover their competition for dominating of one nation over the other by internationalist ideals, or an unhealthy sentimentalism of those who would be glad to cover their alienation from the native nation by broad all-human phrases [highlighted by Ivan Franko – ­Author].” In the search for the national ideal the creator of Moses distinctly defended his national and state-forming position, the position of a free and intellectually able master of his own land: “The ideal of national independence of Ukraine in any view, cultural or political, thus far lies for us, from our current focus, outside the limits of the possible.

“Let it be so. But let’s not forget that thousands of paths leading to realization lie just under our feet, that whether we follow the paths in the direction to it or maybe we will turn to different ones will depend only on our awareness of the ideal, our agreement about it. Created by the so-called materialistic worldview fatalism, which stated that some (social and also political) ideals must be realized by the ‘immanent’ force of the development of production relations, without taking into account whether we will want to stir a finger or not, belongs to the category of the same superstitions as the belief in witches, evil places, and unfortunate days. We must feel our ideal with our heart, we must perceive it with our mind, we must use all efforts and means to approach it, otherwise it won’t exist and no mystical fatalism will create it for us, and the development of material relations will be the first to trample down and crush us like a blind machine.”

There is the assignment directly from Ivan Franko. Once can reach the vital sources of the nation’s development by carefully reading the documents. Ukrainians of Lesia Ukrainka’s generation should be first to speak; after all, they were one of the most interesting, powerful, and important generations for our spiritual progress.

Liudmyla Starytska, the closest friend of Lesia Ukrainka, and later, after the death of the latter, one of the most active members of the Ukrainian Central Council, stated: “I have seen my ideal long ago, during tsarist times, independent Ukraine: with all freedoms, of speech notably; the right for free, equal and secret elections; land for peasants, rights for all national minorities and so on. The federation, I supposed, was the step necessary for the young state, still sparsely armed with culture and self-knowledge, on the road to independence.”

The state inhabited by people free and self-sufficient, intellectually able and powerful in the work for their own state. Franko, as well as Lesia Ukrainka with friends from the “Pleiad,” supposed that perhaps the following should be the most important in this nation-forming situation: “We must learn to feel ourselves Ukrainians – not Galicians, Bukovyna Ukrainians, but Ukrainians without official borders. And this feeling [Maksym Slavynsky will call it the ‘feeling of integral nationalism.’ – ­Author] shouldn’t be just an unsubstantiated phrase for us, but it must lead to practical consequences. We must — all of us without an exception — first of all know our Ukraine, all of it in its ethnographic boundaries, in its current cultural state. We must get acquainted with its natural means and civil defects, and realize the knowledge thoroughly, to the extent that we grieve over its every particular and local pain, and rejoice at its every trifle and particular success, and, most importantly, that we understand all expressions of its life to really feel as actually a part of it.”

A wonderful, many years of dialog on this topic, between Lesia Ukrainka and her sworn brother Mykhailo Kryvyniuk, was recorded by the writer’s sister Olha Kosach-Kryvyniuk in her famous book Lesia Ukrainka. Life and Creativity Chronology. Let’s just ponder over what the writer and thinker Larysa Kosach (Kvitka) tells us, posterity: “We should, in my opinion, leave this form of evidence: ‘Am I to blame that I’m Ukrainian? Even if I wanted to be different, I can’t.’ For stateless people this self-humiliation is quite unnecessary, for it resembles a ‘slave language,’ and the example of the Ukrainian intelligentsia shows that Ukrainians know how to be non-Ukrainians, if they want to (the difference in accent and some use of Ukrainian is, of course, not important). Only then truly free, not chauvinistic nor slavish, national psycho­logy starts, when a man says: maybe I could be different, but I don’t want to, and don’t need to, because, perhaps, I’m not better, but I’m also not worse than the others, at least than those who want to make me their way. Accept me as I am, and as the one I want to be, it’s not your business to choose the language and customs for me. Is my language provincial? All languages are, and masters try to speak in foreign languages everywhere, so that they don’t speak as their simple people do: Moscow masters want to speak French and spoke it until recently, and they often didn’t speak and read the Muscovite language, for it was ‘a dialect of common people’ for them (March 26, 1903).”

“It’s time to make a point that the ‘brotherly peoples’ are just neighbors, tied, however, with one yoke. But in general they don’t have identical interests, and because of this they would rather act together, but each in their own way, not interfering with the neighbor’s ‘internal politics.’ And if brothers want to be real brothers, then they will come themselves to offer a cooperation and not slavery.” Lesia Ukrainka observed this principle all her life. Therefore she managed to become a worthy sworn sister, for example, for the workers of the organ of legal Marxists – the journal Zhyzn (Life) of Saint Petersburg. Therefore she was always welcome as an equal by the best artists of Europe. She bravely undertook that responsibility. A responsibility for nation and state.

Lesia Ukrainka’s father Petro Kosach once wrote to his daughter: “And we [Ukrainians] crawl apart as crayfish, divide into ever new circles, and make discord among everyone. While the Ukrainian cause remains where it was! But how many plans!” It seems these words can remind us some reality of today. Lesia Ukrainka could also bitterly state on this: “[…] we, Ukrainians, are born, live and perish in prison, and still we can’t get used to it, and as soon as we escape it, we miss it as something good!” But she constantly repeated that the strange land didn’t serve her and she couldn’t get used to it as long as she lived there. ­Liudmyla Starytska-Cherniakhivska couldn’t and didn’t want to get used to the loss of Motherland either; the Soviet Ukraine pulled out her heart from her chest, as she said herself: they killed her only daughter, her beloved husband, the husband of her sister, her nephew... Her fate was also predetermined. But she didn’t even try to follow the emigrant paths of Petliura and Chykalenko, Slavynsky and Vynnychenko, though these paths, as it turned out later, weren’t wreathed with laurels either.

These people were different, but they could be tolerant, listen to each other: “I’ll tell you once again,” wrote the “Pleiad” member Maksym Slavynsky to Olena Pchilka in 1911, “that I like your letter for there is nothing but truth in it. And I like its style for it resembles the old times to me and, again, you as I loved and respected. And now, in many years, when lots of things passed through our heads, hard and nice, bad and good, our native, alien and general, I remember my ‘godmother’ in literature with the same honor, which I had to you at that time too. One can’t agree with you in all your thoughts, one can even struggle with your worldview, but one can’t help respecting you. For the sacred fire of love for the native land and people has always burnt in you. I’ll tell you more: having met you, one can’t help catching your fire and carrying at least a small sparkle of it to one’s future life. I have never told you words like these. Generally, I don’t like speaking words like these, but somehow it happened so that I wanted to tell you these words. And it comes to my mind that the reason for this is as follows. In the past, if I had said this, I would have felt embarrassed, these would have been the words of a student to a teacher: not good. Now that I have enough grey hair in my head and lack the hair itself, when we are on the opposite positions, perhaps even hostile, now I felt like expressing this feeling of mine to you, which I have always had, have now, and will retain forever.” Would some advanced Ukrainian patriot tell Slava Stetsko, or Viacheslav Chornovil, or Symon Petliura, or Mykhailo Hrushevsky something like this? Unfortunately, probably not. But I’d like to be mistaken. For we see mistakes of the others well, but don’t notice ours.

In this context it seems somehow savage to me, for example, that supporters of Vitrenko or Moroz each time attempt to pop out of nowhere during elections, as a jinn out of bottle, drawing on their flags the mottoes of Lesia Ukrainka. They’d better read Lesia Ukrainka, Ivan Franko, and Taras Shevchenko more carefully at leisure, and they would be bewildered how antagonistic to the ideas of the nation’s luminaries they are! I deliberately speak here about the Ukrainian intelligentsia, for I suppose that it is the brain and the driving force of the Ukrainian evolution, and not some widely advertised dictatorship of the proletariat, which for some reasons was “neglected and underestimated” (according to the observations of some sharp wits) by Lesia Ukrainka.

Alla Dyba is a literary critic, research fellow at the Shevchenko Institute of Literature, the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, a member of the National Union of Writers of Ukraine (the literary union “Radosyn”)