Copernican Revolution In Ukrainian Consciousness
I happened the other day to come across a small book, Taras Shevchenko and His Religious and Political Views published recently by Krutitskoye Podvorye (Russian Orthodox Church, residency of the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia) with a print run of 5000 copies. This is a reprint of a work the exiled Archpriest Ivan Chernavin wrote in New York in 1941, on the eightieth death anniversary of the bard whom the author brands as “Ukrainian rhymester” and “father of the Mazepa movement.”
In the foreword, Father Chernavin sincerely wonders why “since 1861, the poet’s days of birth and death have been shrouded with some kind of ‘magical veneration’ whenever at least 3 or 4 ‘Ukrainians’ (note the quotation marks — Author) meet — be it in ‘Ukraine,’ Galicia, America, Siberia, the Russian capitals, or Paris. The fetes always attract children, young and old alike. In the past few years, these festivities have become common in the countryside too... Commemorative functions draw thousands of enthusiasts, and theaters are crammed with the poet’s admirers.” The author recalls the 1914 celebration of Shevchenko’s birth centenary, when Kyiv, other “southern” and even Siberian cities saw street unrest, university strikes, and slogans of “Long live free Ukraine.”
In the next passage Father Chernavin makes a painstaking effort to convince those simpletons (the so-called Ukrainians) that they had never had and would never have any reason to venerate Shevchenko, “godless, misanthropic, and without talent.” He tries to prove this so hard and fervently as if his own life and eternal salvation depended on whether or not he will sling enough mud on the son and pride of another nation (I wonder what would happen if, say, the Ukrainian mass media or Poland’s Ukrainian-language newspapers suddenly mounted a defamation campaign against Mickiewicz or Chopin).
Retelling this kind of writing is quite a thankless task. You will find everything there. For example, comparing Shevchenko, “the enemy of the Orthodox Church,” with such “exemplary Orthodox figures” as Russian writers Aleksandr Pushkin (who wrote Gavriliad, of all things) and Leo Tolstoi (excommunicated by the Holy Synod). It is utterly impossible to perceive the greatness of an individual’s work, talent or vocation by simply gloating over the details of his private life, habits, and nature. Following this path of allegedly seeking the truth, one can only bump into the indisputable fact that any genius is also human. As human as everybody else (Pushkin noted wittingly, “As long as Apollo does not require a sublime sacrifice from the poet, the latter falls prey to high society’s mean gossip”). This logic also proves the opposite: all human beings, including the authors of such pamphlets, resemble geniuses in all respects — except that they are unable to create works of genius that have a magic irrational impact on society, history, and public opinion. However hard you try to present the dirtiest supposed revelations, it will not change things.
It has always seemed to me that the better a writer, artist, composer, etc., an individual is, the less important to us consumers of art is his life story, character, habits, and personal relationships. For example, why should I care about the private life of, say, Phidias or Callicrates who created the Parthenon? Or about the character of El Greco who depicted tens of thousands of most diverse characters, all shrouded in unsurpassable mystical beauty, on his canvases? I do not care about the details of Dostoyevsky’s life, about his personal dramas, tough character, ailments, poor accommodation, and complexes. For the real Dostoyevsky comes through in his books, extremely realistic and fantastic at the same time.
I think only the envious, wicked, and those with inferiority complexes stoop to comparing people of talent and even genius with the man in the street in an attempt to prove that the former are as sinful as the latter because they have shortcomings big and small, strange habits, because they can be like us, stingy and peevish, drink too much, womanize, etc. Those who try to debunk national or world-class geniuses are simply unable to understand that all this does not matter in the least. What really matters is what was written, painted, sculpted, acted, or sung.
But let us get back to our subject. Why has the wave of “exposing” Shevchenko been raging without respite for a century and a half? Why does the Russian Orthodox Church waste money reprinting an obsolete and sordid (the right word indeed) pamphlet written by an ignoramus? For what reason do some of our own contemporary Russophile intellectuals try so hard to smear the image of Shevchenko?
Very much has been written about this. An answer I find convincing is in Oksana Zabuzhko’s book Shevchenko as the Myth of Ukraine. Here come a few quotations from this book.
“Shevchenko believed that the main problem of Ukrainian literature is what we can today call escapism, that is, alienation from our authentic ethnic culture. This is why he defines Aeneid as ‘Moscow-style burlesque,’ reproaches Kvitka-Osnovyanenko and Hulak-Artemovsky for inadequate attention to the language, the result of them having been brought up in a foreign culture. Skovoroda, too fails to pass the test of a ‘Ukrainian Burns’ because he ‘was led astray by Latin and then by Muscovite attitudes.’ Shevchenko urges his contemporaries ‘not to ape Muscovites; let them write in their own way, and we will do it in our own. Both they and us have a people and a tongue. It is up to the public to judge whose is better.”
Shevchenko carried out “a Copernican revolution in the history of Ukrainians’ sense of their own identity. Before him, absolutely all figures of Ukrainian culture were rabid monarchists (Russian).” Shevchenko cut this chain and helped raise the national intelligentsia, a qualitatively new modern Ukrainian elite. All through his creative lifetime, he waged “a civil war of Ukraine against Little Russianism...’ Yet, he never showed any contempt for the Russians as a nation even when he opposed himself to the them.”
Thus perhaps this is the war of Ukraine versus Little Russia, first declared by Shevchenko, that keeps advocates of a “united and indivisible Russia” awake at night.
