On the deadly path to freedom

The multifaceted legacy of the distinguished Ukrainian writer Bohdan Lepky (1872-1941) was consigned to obscurity under the Soviet totalitarian regime. The primary reason was the system of values that was advocated and expounded by this highly talented man of letters, poet, prose writer, and public and cultural figure. A native of the picturesque village of Krehulets near Husiatyn (Podillia, Ternopil oblast), Lepky placed Ukraine’s independence, unity, and freedom above everything. His system of values was incompatible with the ideology of the Stalin-Brezhnev empire, which claimed to promote the noble ideal of the “friendship of peoples” but in reality subjected all the nations of the “unbreakable Union” to the merciless pressure of Russification and dumped them into one melting pot in order to create a unique and unprecedented community of people-”one Soviet nation.” Without a doubt, the true interests of the Russian people had nothing in common with this policy, but this is the subject of a scholarly paper.

Lepky would never have accepted the Soviet system of values because he was raised on the truly national and highly moral ideals of Ukrainian and world culture, progress, and humanism. The future writer’s father, Sylvestr Lepky, who wrote under the pseudonym Marko Murava, was a well-educated man of outstanding talent. He graduated from the Department of Classical Philology and Theology of Lviv University and was a proud bearer of the traditions fostered in his ancient family, which traced its origin to the 16th century. The Lepkys cherished the Ukrainian culture, customs, and language, and Ivan Franko, Vasyl Stefanyk, and other prominent cultural activists were frequent visitors in their home. Late in life Bohdan Lepky would write wonderful literary memoirs about Franko and Stefanyk.

It must have been from his father that Bohdan heard the story of Ivan Mazepa and his extraordinary, tragic life. However, only decades later, in the mid-1920s, did the talented writer begin working on his historical epic about Mazepa and the fate of the Ukrainian people. By that time, Lepky had experienced the bloody atrocities of the First World War and witnessed the penury, starvation, and sufferings of ordinary Ukrainians whose freedom and life had turned out to be small change in the ambitious political games played by Ukraine’s neighbors- Russia (later the USSR), Austro- Hungary, Poland, and Germany.

Lepky’s Mazepa consists of five novels: Motria (1926), Ne vbyvai (Do Not Kill, 1926), Baturyn (1927), Poltava (1928-29), and Z-pid Poltavy do Bender (From [the Battle of] Poltava to Bendery, published posthumously in 1955 in the USA, after which the entire prose epic finally appeared in New York under the general title Mazepa). Lepky’s historical epic remains the pinnacle of Ukrainian literary Mazepiana. This reputation, however, does not rule out a critical analysis of how successful the master was in achieving his grand design. Looking just at one factor, length, Lepky’s Mazepa surpasses such masterpieces of world literature as The Forsythe Saga, And Quiet Flows the Don, and Les Thibault, all of which were published or written at around the same time.

However, I do not want to talk about the merits of the Mazepa epic per se. Lepky’s courage and his ability to overcome the stereotypes concerning his literary production is noteworthy. After the first critical reviews of his work the future author of the Mazepa cycle was dubbed “a poet of wistfulness and sorrow,” far removed from creative explorations in the epic genre because, it was claimed, he was and would remain a “pure lyricist” even in prose.

Even more important is the topic itself. The Mazepa era was a complex, painful, and “politically sensitive” topic even two centuries later, but it attracted Lepky like a magnet.

In 1911 Lepky had written a cycle of poems entitled Baturynski ruiny (The Ruins of Baturyn) whose leitmotif was bitter and painful reflections of the terrible lot that had befallen Mazepa’s glorious residence. In November 1708 Prince Menshikov’s frenzied hordes gained access to the fortified city with the help of Ivan Nis, one of the most hideous traitors in Ukrainian history, and killed everyone-women, old people, and children. They burned, plundered, and wreaked total death and destruction.

Lepky’s poem begins with a rousing call to raise the old hetman’s house from “ruin and decay” (“We shall move the broken statues; Marble walls will be rebuilt; And it will sparkle, it will shine; As it did in the good old time.”) Suddenly the poet hears “moaning, as though it were coming from the grave”: Holy icons shattered lie,
O, how brutally the temple’s been defiled!
The palace and its steps are bloody,
The holy shroud is muddy.
Drop it, leave it!
Is it for kings from afar that you’re building
A home in this hollow place?
Your own offspring is who you are killing.
They’ll be poisoned before seeing the light!

The thread running through this cycle of poems is the ruins of Baturyn as a symbol of Ukraine’s general (or permanent?) bondage. Remember: these stanzas were written in 1911. The First World War, the tragic defeat of the 1918- 21 Ukrainian national revolution, and the annexation of Galicia and Volyn by Pilsudski-ruled Poland, which was followed by an aggressive Polonization campaign, were the images evoked in the mind’s eye of the author, urging him toward a broader, epic reflection of the most fundamental causes behind the national catastrophes that had beset Ukraine. It is no wonder, then, that Lepky’s attention was once again riveted to the symbolic and definite figure of Mazepa, the national leader who, more than others, embodied the overwhelming strivings of the Ukrainian nation for its spiritual awakening and political freedom.

Well-versed in world literature, Lepky was very familiar with the works of Byron, Hugo, Voltaire, Slowacki, and other European intellectual figures in which Mazepa figured as a character or often the protagonist. However, these authors were more interested in Mazepa’s romantic adventures and often referred to the story of young Mazepa’s love for a beautiful Polish woman of noble birth or the old hetman’s “crafty” and “illicit” love affair with the lovely Maria, as in Pushkin’s “Poltava.” Perhaps the only exception where Mazepa’s love of freedom is emphasized is Ryleev’s poem “Voinarovsky.”

In contrast to these accounts, Lepky’s Mazepa is primarily a statesman of the highest rank and a diplomat forced by circumstances and the cruelty of his day and age into maneuvering, as if between Scylla and Charybdis, in the wake of the great powers-Muscovy, led by Peter I, desperate to become a belligerent empire, Sweden, Poland, Turkey, the Habsburg Empire, etc. However, even in his most complicated political and diplomatic schemes Mazepa never strayed from his fundamental goal: to free Ukraine from the despotic yoke of the Russian tsar. The tsar did not, and never intended to, fulfill his obligations vis-a-vis Ukraine: to respect its sovereign rights and defend it from its enemies. According to the political and legal norms of the time, if a sovereign, in this case Peter I, was unwilling or unable to meet his obligations, then the subordinated ruler, Mazepa, had the full right to consider himself freed from the commitments he had once made under oath. In other words, these commitments were mutually binding rather than built on the master-slave pattern. Lepky was fully cognizant of this fundamental fact.

It is noteworthy that Lepky’s work covers only the last three years of Mazepa’s life. The action begins with Peter I’s arrival in Kyiv for an inspection in July 1706. The author evidently had no intentions of recreating the hetman’s tragic and convoluted path. He focused on the landmark events of 1706-09. A kind of lyrical prelude to the ensuing clashes in the plot-the love story (the “illicit” and “cursed” love between the old hetman and young Motria Kochubeivna-is depicted in the first novel Motria. The conflict and mortal combat of Mazepa, Kochubei, and Iskra is the subject of Ne vbyvai. The dread picture of the tsarist forces led by the bloody butcher Menshikov, who devastated the hetman’s capital, is portrayed in Baturyn, perhaps the strongest novel of the entire epic. The turning points of the military action and the disastrous day of June 27, 1709, which doomed Ukraine to centuries of colonial bondage, is the subject of Poltava.

The final weeks in the life of the fugitive Mazepa and his death in the Ottoman Empire is portrayed in Z-pid Poltavy do Bender. Departing this earth, the hetman addresses his faithful comrade-in-arms, the Zaporozhian otaman Kost Hordiienko, with these words: “There is nothing we need more than single-mindedness, and nothing ruined and weakened us more than our disagreements and discord. This was beneficial only to our enemies, but brought us great losses. Let us at least be wise after the event if we were unable to have wisdom before the event.” Lepky concludes his epic with these bitter and painful lines, which are as important and relevant today as they were three centuries ago.

Thousands of characters, each with his or her own unique personality, spring from the pages of Lepky’s historical epic, a work that is simply a good read. The narrative begins with a tragicomic episode in which Tsar Peter I wipes his forehead in the unbearable July heat and carelessly throws his handkerchief away. It falls on the head of the monarch’s lackey, who “stood stock-still with the handkerchief, not daring to remove the highly precious relic.” Other characters include Andrii Voinarovsky, Mazepa’s fiery, ambitious, and courageous nephew, and Kochubei’s wife Liubov, a perfidious and power-hungry woman, who cherishes a dream of becoming the wife of a weak-willed hetman.

As far as the protagonist, Ivan Mazepa, is concerned, the author may be criticized for his excessive idealization of the hetman and, in places, insufficient depth of the psychological motivation behind the hetman’s actions. However, one thing is irrefutable: in this narrative Mazepa lives and serves one goal-to release Ukraine from the imperial yoke of Muscovy. He is utterly believable when, at the beginning of the first novel, he addresses the Cossack colonels and officers, his closest aides: “I shall not exchange either Ukraine or you, my faithful comrades, for the title of a prince of the Roman state. I did not devote so many years of hard labor to our mother, our dear country, so that now, when I am perhaps one foot in the grave, I would betray and sell it and you in exchange for a vain title and worthless honor. I would rather put my mace into other, perhaps younger and stronger, hands and become a monk, like my mother who entered a religious order, than strike such a wretched and disgraceful deal.”

In reply to the question from Colonel Danylo Apostol, “What do they [Peter and his associates] want?” Mazepa offers a crystal-clear explanation: “What do they want? They want a lot. You see, we have fertile land, the sun shines stronger here, and the rivers flow into the Black Sea. And what rivers! How precious is the Dnipro alone! You heard the tsar say that he would smash the Dnipro rapids. Why, I ask you? To take his ships from the Baltic Sea to the Dardanelles and farther so that, like bees bring honey to the beehive, they can bring goods from every part of the world to his cold and poor capital. It is not advantageous and even quite unsafe for the tsar to do this as long as we have at least some vestiges of our freedom guaranteed by the Pereiaslav Articles on which the Muscovite tsars take oaths, placing their hands on the Holy Gospel and kissing the holy cross. So, you see, they need gradually and almost imperceptibly to extirpate all the hetman and Cossack officers, abolish the rights and privileges of cities, install his voievodas and governors everywhere, and dispatch garrisons of soldiers here, to the misfortune of our people. And if the people are not willing enough to submit and carry all these burdens and suffer scorn, he will exile them beyond the Volga River region and replace them here in Ukraine with his own people-this is what they want, gentlemen!”

It would be difficult to formulate the essence of Moscow’s imperialist policy more precisely. For the sake of fairness, it should be acknowledged that Mazepa himself was at one time forced to participate actively in the violent actions of the tsarist regime-a fundamental feature of our national tragedy. It is no surprise, then, that the Bolsheviks’ criticism of Lepky’s epic was marked by fierce hatred. During the Stalin period, in 1936, the literary critic Volodymyr Derzhavin wrote the following about Mazepa: “Lepky’s trilogy is a complete historical falsification and hand-picked collection of fascist notions and ideas clumsily masked by objective historical analysis. Peering through this analysis is the face of a class enemy-a western Ukrainian fascist!” To the communists of the Stalin school everything that was national was fascist. Interestingly, during the war this same Derzhavin escaped to the West from the USSR, settling first in Germany.

Bohdan Lepky’s Mazepa is a valuable achievement of Ukrainian literature and has yet to be properly assessed and understood. The epic account of the great hetman will retain its proud place in Ukrainian culture.