The Table on Lion’s Legs
At the very end of last year, Den’ carried my feature “ New Year’s Eve Skiing” (not carried in this digest), in which I offered my telephone number, due to certain reasons. I have received many calls, even from Canada, and the last one came in mid-January from a Mr. Tychyna in Ichnya, Chernihiv oblast.
“You did visit us and read lectures, didn’t you,” he asked.
“I think so, but it was a long time ago.”
“It was on February 29, 1988. Can you remember? Then perhaps you’ll remember me as well.”
I did not remember about the leap year, but the name rang a bell and then I recalled a hefty young fellow sporting a Shevchenko mustache and a vyshyvanka shirt (that was not extremely popular in the official eye then). I further remembered delivering a lecture at a distillery or maybe a food combine, and that the big fellow wore a pince- nez, making him stand out in the audience. After the lecture he walked over and asked if I could help him sign a relative of his in at the Gerontology Institute’s clinic. I said I’d try and gave him some directions, which he carefully put down in his notebook and then abruptly asked if I loved Taras Shevchenko.
This was a question which is hard to answer. How would you reply when asked if you love bread, salt, and water? Thank God, I had got a copy of Shevchenko’s Kobzar long before they began teaching it in school. To say that I love Shevchenko would be to say nothing; for me, he simply not exist separately from his cultural aura. I think I said something like that in response to Mr. Tychyna’s answer, to which he smiled the way a child does, openly, without any second thoughts, and proudly said: “Perhaps you’ll be interested to know that Taras Shevchenko spent a night at my great grandfather’s.”
I could not comment on this, as the district party committee’s instructor accompanying me for every such lecture (trimmed eyebrows, thick oily hair, and a funeral-home-style necktie) walked up impatiently, cutting our brief conversation short.
“Look, comrade (addressing Mr. Tychyna), the comrade lecturer has come all the way from Kyiv and he has to deliver several more lectures today. Do you understand?”
And then firmly guided me toward the exit. We are lazy and incurious. How well said! Later, I picked P. Zhur’s Lito Pershe [The First Summer; Dnipro Publishers, Kyiv, 1979] off my home library shelf and read, “On January 19, 1844, Shevchenko stayed for the night at the Rev. Havrylo Tychyna’s.” Taras Shevchenko found himself in Ichnya on his way from Yahotyn to Kachanivka, and then on to Moscow and St. Petersburg. He was leaving Ukraine after a most eventful episode of his life, when he, only recently paid out of serfdom, had turned down Varvara Repnin’s offer of love (the young woman’s family tree boasted the name of Ukraine’s last Hetman Kyrylo Razumovsky as her great grandfather on her mother’s side).
While in Yahotyn, Taras Shevchenko lived in the wing of Prince Repnin’s mansion where the old aristocrat used to receive his guests. There was a study dominated by an ornate table on lion’s imperial legs. It was on that table that Shevchenko wrote his Tryzna [The Funeral Feast] with an epigraph dedicated to the princess, with these closing lines:
Your guardian angle spread
His immortal wings above me
And spoke to me
In his soft and melodious voice,
Awakening in me sweet dreams about Paradise.
Shevchenko’s Russian-language writings do not seem popular with the critics. Previously, attempts were made to associate them with the ill-famous notion of proletarian internationalism and use them in the Russification policy, saying even your Kobzar wrote in Russia, so why should you complain? In fact, I recently heard this from one of those people’s deputies championing two official languages in Ukraine (although he and those like him would never be able to correctly pronounce palianytsia [Ukrainian for unleavened bread] or oseledets’ [forelock/tuft of hair left on a shaved head, in the manner of Cossacks], not even at gun point). In fact, some “decent Ukrainians” appear ashamed of Shevchenko, saying oh well, he was brilliant, but it’s also true that he wasn’t loath to use that horrible Moscow vernacular. Of course, we must forgive him that sin, but he also kept his diary in that speech. What a shame! To which I say, horse hockey! They don’t know the difference between using Russian and living in the Russian Empire. There was Taras Shevchenko, a learned Ukrainian intellectual who had a perfect command of Russian, but who turned out a mediocre prose writer in Russian. There was no Russian-writing poet by the name of Shevchenko, because his Tryzna and, later, Slepaya [The Blind Woman] were written not by a genius, in his own blood, but at a poetaster. Still, every line written by Shevchenko in Ukrainian and Russian remains a precious legacy, evidence of his cultural evolution.
Getting back to that table on the imperial lion’s legs. That year Taras Shevchenko was on his way to Ukraine. He wanted to do some painting, thus to earn some money, maybe for a trip to Italy or to buy his relatives out of serfdom. He accomplished neither. While in Yahotyn, he painted many pictures. His Varette Repnin is extremely romantic, refined, exalted, naХve. She fell in a love with a young handsome man. She was an old maiden, by the existing standard, being over thirty years of age, and this cause sharp changes of mood. She was shocked to see the poet drunk and wrote a note scolding him in an allegoric but rather transparent form, implying he was failing to measure up to her maidenly ideal standard. Shevchenko responded with Tryzna several days later. Contrary to the encouraging epigraph, the poem turned out to be an allegory making it clear that there would be nothing but friendship between the two of them. One is again faced with the lastingly unanswered question of why a man loves one woman and not another one. The princess wept. Shevchenko painted portraits as commissioned, wrote verse, and chased women, in between sitting with friends over vodka. He was macho. We should not see him through the romantic Varette’s eyes. After all, poets who resist carnal temptations prove unable to write brilliant verse.
Four years passed. Imagine Orsk Fortress in 1848, winter, at 11 p.m. A single candle is lit, casting racing shadows across the sleeping barracks. Taras Shevchenko sits at a desk, with this single candle on it, pen in hand poised over a sheet of paper, composing a letter to the princess (the scene rates a Rembrandt canvas). He writes, “Done this 29th day of February of the current leap year. Having read and re-read your letter, I have noticed the following line only today: ‘You remembered me, while in a faraway land.’ My Precious Kind- hearted Varvara Nikolayevna, let me tell that I have always remembered you, and that I shall do so for as long as the Lord allows me to retain a spark of what is generally considered as good in my soul. You are praying. This is good. Keep praying, for everything you say addressing the Lord will please Him. Your prayers will protect me against this dreadfully insensitive atmosphere, which is beginning to penetrate my sanguine soul.” The first year in exile was the hardest ordeal. The brilliant poet, now just another Russian army private, without any rights and only one duty — unquestioningly obeying superiors’ orders — found himself tortured by spells of oppression and despair, yet none of this proved strong enough to destroy his soul. Shevchenko’s letters to Princess Repnin help trace one of his creative ideas. One such letter (March 7, 1850) reads: “I am reading the New Testament. I am overwhelmed by its divine wisdom. And it has inspired me to write something about the Virgin Mary, the way she suffered as the Mother of God.” Shevchenko wrote his poem Maria ten years later, in the spring of 1859. Read it again and you will probably share my conviction that there is strong likelihood between the poet’s sister Kateryna and Saint Mary. Does not each of them personify maternity laid waste? We were taught once [under the Soviets] that Shevchenko was an atheist and that his biblical verse was a means of combating Russian autocracy. True perhaps, considering that he was prepared to “disown God” who had “an ax behind His door” if He refused to help Ukraine. We often hear now that Shevchenko’s cultural potential is rooted in Christianity, and that our national revival is measured by the number of Christian churches built anew. Perhaps (if we consider the poet, not the number of new religious construction projects). However, the truth is never found anywhere halfway. Summing up Shevchenko’s religious motifs, I think it would be correct to infer that he saw The Holy Bible as a literary work serving as the underlying principle of European culture.
Shevchenko’s poetry is made up of the recognition of Christian moral priorities, creative interpretations of biblical subjects, and an undisguised skeptical attitude to mortals meant to act as earthly representatives of the Creator (in fact, similar trends would be registered in Ukrainian literature at subsequent periods) — and with a discourse on Europe. One should also consider his personal likes and dislikes (maybe irrational at times). Taras Shevchenko was versed in ancient mythology and Aleksandr Pushkin in Christian mythology. Shevchenko, nevertheless, treated antique and Christian themes with maybe in the same benevolent [possibly condescending] manner as did Pushkin.
That night, that leap year [still under the Soviets], Mr. and Mrs. Tychyna visited me at the hotel. I had not expected guests and had nothing to put on the table, but Mr. Tychyna’s wife Kamena [i.e., Carmenta, q.v.] brought homemade egg and sauerkraut cakes and I used my own glass-size immersion heater to fix coffee. Afterward, the young couple sang Zore Moya Vechirniaya [My Evening Star] and Mr. Tychyna recited Shevchenko:
No-one loved or comforted me,
Likewise, I felt estranged from everyone...
Carmenta is the Roman goddess of childbirth and prophecy, one of the Camenae. Taras Shevchenko dreamed of his Carmenta all his life, but his destiny was set, once and for all. Another thing is whether Princess Repnin would be prepared to follow him to his exile the way her aunt did with her Decembrist husband Volkonsky in Siberia? Personally I am inclined to assume that she would, in which case the Russian Princess Repnin would have survived the Ukrainian poet Shevchenko by thirty years.
