The grandeur of Mykhailo Drahomanov

(Conclusion. For Part One, see The Day, no. 22-23)

Back in Kyiv, Drahomanov was convinced that Europeanism that does not reject national forms was the best foundation for Ukrainian autonomist movements, and in the early 1870s he advocated resistance to all kinds of scholarly or political activities on an international basis. However, this was the time of an administrative crackdown. Among its victims were prominent researchers and entire academic institutions, for example, the Southwestern Division of the Russian Geographic Society whose activities the Ukraine-hater and denouncer A. A. Yuzefowich defined as a manifestation of anti-governmental Ukrainian separatism.

The crackdown sometimes assumed ridiculous forms: swayed by his informer’s reports about Drahomanov’s lectures, the minister “cleverly” blended sociology with socialism, an undesirable notion for Russia. As a result, Drahomanov was banned from lecturing even on primary culture. Then he was “asked” to resign in connection with an absurd and unjust charge.

Even a vacation outside the country did not save Drahomanov, who went abroad carrying funds raised for the insurgents of Herzegovina. After his return he was dismissed, as they said in Russia in those days, “under paragraph three,” which was tantamount to a ban on obtaining any official post. After completing several studies on the folkloric prose of “the Bard of Bukovyna” Yuriy Fedkovych, the Cossacks, Tatars, and Turks, Drahomanov managed to obtain a passport for foreign travel.

After settling in Geneva in 1876, Drahomanov established a free Ukrainian print shop and worked on the publication of an anthology called Hromada. In collaboration with M. Pavlyk and S.Podolynsky, he published five volumes of this work. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this fundamental study for social development. The historian Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky was right to call Drahomanov’s foreword to Hromada “the first Ukrainian political program, a turning point in the development of modern Ukrainian political thought.”

Drahomanov was also the publisher of Ukrainian literature banned in Russia under the Ems Ukase, e.g., the works of Shevchenko, Kulish, Panas Myrny and Ivan Bilyk’s novel Do the Oxen Low When the Manger Is Full?, folklore studies, and popular brochures in Ukrainian. M. Tymoshyk estimates that the Geneva-based Ukrainian print shop published a total of 112 books, including about 40 in Ukrainian. These became a precious gift-ideological capital for those tsarist army Ukrainian prisoners of war, who were returning home from Austrian and German cities in the spring and summer of 1917 to build an independent Ukrainian state.

The scholar’s articles, appearing in Western publications, familiarized the world with Ukraine, a forgotten country in the center of Europe. Drahomanov provided ample proof that the more than two centuries that Ukraine had spent under Muscovite tsardom was “lost time” because “arbitrary tsarist rule has eroded Ukrainian liberties.” His speech at the Literary Congress in Paris in 1878 was a voice of protest against the destruction and near-total isolation of Ukraine’s national culture by a despotic and autocratic regime. Ukrainian literary works banned by the Russian government were published in French, followed by an expanded edition in Italian. Thus, Drahomanov established a political emigration cell in Switzerland, which, according to Franko, turned into a center of Ukrainian thought, if not the Ukrainian movement, for a period of 25 years.

Drahomanov was infuriated by tsarist bans even abroad. The Russian authorities closed the Petersburg newspaper Molva for eight months for printing his article “A Clean Cause Needs Clean Methods” (these words were his personal motto). This Ukrainian advocate of Western European social democracy, who was a threat to authoritarian regimes everywhere, was increasingly taking issue with Russian revolutionaries because of their Great Russian centralism, anti-cultural tendencies, and their elevation of terrorism to a principle of revolutionary struggle.

In general, Drahomanov was a strong polemicist and critic of obscurantism. In the press he debated with many people and parties, enduring and parrying blows from all sides, although nothing depressed him more than polemics. He only resorted to the latter when it was impossible to reach an understanding, and he would engage in polemics only until the two sides clarified their differences. There was very little that Drahomanov could learn from his opponents, although he wished he could. His adversaries, however, most often preferred to distort his ideas and at the last moment hurl unfounded accusations against him.

An important page in the history of Drahomanov’s activities was his collaboration with the emigre newspaper Volnoe slovo [Free Word] for which he wrote a series of articles in favor of reforming Russia, solving the nationalities question according to the Swiss-type cantonal pattern, and applying moral methods to fight the autocracy as a counterweight to the dominant “dynamite-anarchy epidemic.” Invited to edit the newspaper, Drahomanov turned it into a mouthpiece of ideas promoting political freedom and zemstvo-type local government. His principle of Russia’s federal setup proved so revolutionary that even diehard Russian Marxists rejected it. Thus, in his civic and political struggle he was not afraid of following Ernest Renan’s maxim: “To be of some significance in the future, one should be able at a certain moment to dare to be unfashionable.”

In this dark period for Russia Drahomanov launched the Free Union, arguably the first democratic constitutional program in the country, which earned high praise from the distinguished professor, M. Weber. Also noteworthy are such publications as The Political Songs of the Ukrainian People, the complete edition of the Kobzar, and numerous scholarly studies, including articles on the influence of Western Protestant ideas on Ukrainian religious poetry, and Bulgarian devotional legends (translated by his daughter Lydia).

Franko was right to characterize the researcher not as an armchair academic but a scholar who had his finger on the pulse of the times. As a historian, Drahomanov taught his students to see past tsars and wars to the broad masses and their “quiet and unceasing work.” He was also the first scholar to study state-church relations (The Struggle for Spiritual Authority and Freedom of Conscience in the 16th-17th Centuries) and many other problems.

As a folklorist sensitive to the anxieties and sufferings of the people’s soul, he explored the creative folk spirit as a manifestation of the glorious past of a people who had fought for national freedom, uncovering the traces of the centuries-old cultural links between the Slavs and other peoples against a wide Eurasian background. He did it so masterfully that some foreign scholars even learned Ukrainian to be able to read the original folk literature and Drahomanov’s studies.

As a pedagogue, he devoted many articles to the system of schooling in Ukraine (e.g., “Public Schools,” “The Zemstvo and the Local Element in Public Education,” “On Schools in Ukraine,” “On the Pedagogical Importance of the Ukrainian Language”) the necessity of reviving public schools based on traditional pedagogy, in-family education, and the Ukrainian language as a medium of instruction. He wanted the rural schoolteacher to stop being a social outsider in Russia, living under the regime’s siege “like a jackrabbit among wolves.”

As a literary critic, Drahomanov was demanding, often merciless so, and sometimes unfair, but he was thus setting the standards of genuine sincerity in public and personal relationships. As a citizen, he “always battled against all kinds of disunity, which stem from slavery, ignorance, and blind self- adoration.” He constantly emphasized that everyone who had abandoned Ukraine, every kopeck that was not being used for the Ukrainian cause, and every word spoken in a language other than Ukrainian, was a mindless waste of the Ukrainian people’s assets. As a far-seeing politician, he was governed by the slogan “cosmopolitanism in objectives, nationalism in forms and methods,” interpreting the former term as European-style thinking.

Drahomanov’s ideas on the Ukrainian cause — the national unity of Ukraine, its territorial integrity from east to west, democratic transformations and decentralization, administrative autonomy, local self-government, the “growth of public order and human reason,” and cultural reforms — have retained their importance in the 21st century and are beginning to be reconsidered in today’s context. This is no surprise, as these ideas reflect the self-sufficient, urgent, and constructive concepts of social evolution, state building, and sovereignty in Ukraine. We cherish the hope that this time the integration of Drahomanov into “the overall canon of national memory” (George Grabowicz) will be marked by important new studies that will outline more vividly and clearly the true significance of this towering figure.

Drahomanov was a humanist, a carrier of high moral and intellectual culture, a multifaceted seeker of the universal truth common to all nationalities, a citizen of the European state of spirit, the founder of Ukrainian intellectual and critical thought, a spokesman for human and civic progress, and a champion of European constitutionalism and the idea of the great political future of the Ukrainian language as a national sanctum. Thus, Drahomanov’s faith in a better future, the splendor and permanence of his scholarly and creative achievements, and his undying grandeur as a thinker is striking even today.