Borderland (14 page)

In the absence of a large body of people consciously identifying themselves as Ukrainians, the early evangelists for Ukrainia-nism had to stress what distinguishing features were to hand – history and language. At the beginning of the nineteenth century knowledge of either was rare. Tales of the Cossack uprisings had become the preserve of folk-tale and legend, transmitted by wandering bards. Ukrainian itself had turned into a peasant tongue, the language in which one addressed the servants, if one spoke it at all. In the cities, it was hardly heard. For a long time even Ukrainophiles expected it to die out completely, comforting themselves with the thought that Irish nationalism had survived the demise of Gaelic.

The first man to try producing literature in Ukrainian was a Russian-speaking bureaucrat, Ivan Kotlyarevsky. Significantly, he used the language for comic effect – his ballad
Eneida,
published in 1798, is a burlesque on Virgil’s
Aeneid,
full of rollocking Cossacks and lusty village maidens. Though
Eneida
was a bestseller, even Kotlyarevsky did not think Ukrainian could be used for serious writing. But at the same time, work began on codifying the language. Ukrainian got its first grammar in 1818 (the compiler thought he was recording ‘a disappearing dialect’)
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and its first short dictionary in 1823. Given birth by eccentric antiquarians, national consciousness remained incongruously bound up with the dusty world of libraries and learned journals, academic rivalries and obscure linguistic disputes. It is no coincidence that the president of the first Ukrainian Republic, of 1918, was a historian.

The lateness and fragility of the Ukrainian cultural revival was nothing unusual. Czech, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Romanian and Russian itself were all only just beginning to turn into literary languages. Czech got its first dictionary in 1835, and for a long time the language of the Bohemian cities was German. The first Hungarian grammar appeared in 1803, at which stage the Magyar nobility still spoke a mixture of French, German and dog-Latin. The Russian Academy published its pioneering six-volume Russian dictionary in the 1790s, followed by an official grammar in 1802. Pushkin, the first great writer in the vernacular, worked in the 1830s, and for much of the century the Russian nobility preferred French. Pushkin’s Onegin is charmed by girls who can’t speak their own language correctly – ‘I find a faultless Russian style/Like crimson lips without a smile’
⁵
– and Tolstoy has Anna and Vronsky quarrelling in French as late as the 1870s. Hence, perhaps, Russia’s vicious defensiveness over the development of rival Slavic tongues.

Ukraine’s equivalent to Pushkin, and the man who contributed more than any other single individual to the creation of a Ukrainian sense of national identity, was Taras Shevchenko. Though rather scorned by young Ukrainians today, who have been force-fed his works at school, he single-handedly turned Ukrainian into a literary language, remains Ukraine’s greatest national hero, and led a life that must surely be one of the most remarkable in all literature.

Shevchenko was born in 1814 in a village south-west of Kiev, to a poor serf family. His father worked as a carter in summer and a wheelwright in winter; his mother died when he was nine. From an early age he struck people as an unusual little boy, scratching pictures on walls and fences with lumps of coal or chalk, making clay whistles in the shape of nightingales, and getting lost in the fields looking for the ‘pillars that hold up the sky’. His father, whose death left Shevchenko an orphan aged eleven, is supposed to have bequeathed his odd son nothing, on the grounds that he would obviously grow up a ne’er-do-well or a genius, and money would be no help either way.

Aged fourteen or fifteen, Shevchenko joined the household of the local landowner – Pavel Engelhardt, a great-nephew of Potemkin and a fashionable lieutenant in the Guards – as a servant-boy. His tasks were to wash the dishes, heave wood and empty slops. But at night, so tradition has it, he crept down the manor-house corridors making sketches of Engelhardt’s paintings. One account even has him hanging his drawings, Orlando-like, from the trees in the park. Later the same year he was sent to Warsaw, where Engelhardt had been posted to the Russian garrison. Here Shevchenko met and fell in love with a young seamstress – not, like him, a serf. ‘It was the first time,’ he wrote later, ‘that I began to wonder why we unlucky serfs were not free people like everyone else.’ The romance was not destined to last: November 1830 saw the outbreak of the Polish rising and the Engelhardt ménage decamped to St Petersburg.

In the capital, Shevchenko’s life changed. Apprenticed to a house-decorator, he painted friezes on palace walls by day, and spent the eerie ‘white nights’ sitting on a paint pot in the Summer Gardens, taking copies of its mythological sculptures. Early one morning he struck up conversation with another Ukrainian, a student at the Academy of Fine Arts, Ivan Soshenko.Soshenko showed him how to use watercolours, took him to galleries, and introduced him to friends – including Karl Bryullov, creator of a celebrated salon picture of the time, the melodramatic
Last Days of Pompeii.
Bryullov took an instant liking to the ‘unserflike’ young artist, and called on Engelhardt to try to talk him into granting Shevchenko freedom. The meeting was not a success. Bryullov ended by calling Engelhardt ‘a feudal dog-trader’ and ‘a swine in slippers’; Engelhardt thought Bryullov a ‘real American madman’. The only way to get Shevchenko’s release would be to buy it. After much negotiation this was finally accomplished, the necessary 2,500 roubles being raised by Bryullov’s donation of a portrait to a charity raffle. Aged twenty-four, Shevchenko ceased to be a serf.

A free man at last, he started enjoying himself. ‘At that time,’ wrote Soshenko disapprovingly, ‘he changed entirely. Introduced by Bryullov to the best St Petersburg families, he frequently went out in the evenings, dressed smartly, even with some pretensions to elegance. In a word, he became possessed, for a while, with the social demon.’
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In his memoirs, Shevchenko remembered gloating ‘like a child’ over a new coat:

At the same time he began to write. In 1838 he was showing verses to friends, and in 1840 he published his first collection, titled
Kobzar
after Ukraine’s race of wandering bards. The book created a sensation. The Ukrainophile intelligentsia instantly recognised it as a landmark – ‘so good’, wrote one, ‘that you can smack your lips and clap your hands’;
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Russians, of course, couldn’t understand why anyone should want to write in Ukrainian at all.

Shevchenko’s poems are an odd mixture of pastoralism, xenophobia and self-hatred. His themes are the beauty of Ukraine’s landscape, her lost Cossack greatness and her shame in labouring under the Russian and Polish yokes. Though Russians, Poles (and, embarrassingly, Jews) all get short shrift, most of his bile is directed at the treachery and complacency of the Ukrainians themselves. Ukraine is a serf-girl seduced and abandoned by a heartless officer, a widow deserted by ungrateful children, a plundered grave, ‘mould-grown’, ‘rotting’, ‘covered in weeds’. Ukrainians are ‘asleep’, ‘worse-than-Poles’, even cannibals. Again and again, he lets fly at Russified compatriots:

Russian reviewers praised Shevchenko’s talent, but regretted that it should be put to work on a useless peasant tongue. Ukrainian was ‘artificial’, ‘dead’, ‘a joke and a whim’. It was incomprehensible that writers should ‘occupy themselves with such stupidities’. The Ukrainian ‘dialect’ was fated to ‘die in the archives’ and it was sad to see it ‘used by people who might adorn the all-consuming Slavic [i.e. Russian] literature’.
¹⁰
The best-known critic of the day, Vissarion Belinsky, took him to task – with some justification – for ‘naïveté’. ‘There is everything here which can be found in every Ukrainian poem,’ he wrote of Shevchenko’s
Haydamaky,
a long and gory ballad on the peasant rebellions of the eighteenth century. ‘The Poles, the Jews, the Cossacks; they swear a lot, drink, fight, set things on fire, and butcher each other; in the intervals, of course, there is a
kobzar
(for what Ukrainian poem can be without one?) who sings his elevated songs without much sense, and a girl who weeps in a raging storm.’
¹¹

Shevchenko had his reply ready:

Between 1843 and 1847 Shevchenko made two year-long trips to Ukraine, being lionised by the Ukrainophile intelligentsia and sketching Cossack monuments. Accounts from the period describe a short, thickset man with reddish hair, a plain face and strikingly bright and intelligent eyes. He made friends everywhere, and was evidently good company: Princess Varvara Repnina, who fell in love with him while he was painting her father’s portrait, described him to a friend as ‘one of those who are so congenial in the country . . . and whom one can leave alone without any fear that some trifle will offend him’. He was ‘simple and unpretentious’, ‘relaxed and tactful in society, and never used clichés’.
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In the spring of 1846 Shevchenko fell in with My kola Kostomarov, a young historian at Kiev’s St Vladimir University. Kostomarov was leader of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, one of the many semi-secret discussion groups which produced the radical political thinking of the time. Comprising only a dozen or so members, the Brotherhood’s Utopian aim was to abolish serfdom and monarchy and form a new pan-Slavic democratic federation, with Ukraine at its head. This programme was set out in ‘The Books of Genesis of the Ukrainian People’, a pseudo-biblical document which Shevchenko may have helped write. Early in 1847 the Brotherhood fell prey to an informer. Disembarking from a Dnieper riverboat on his way to act as best man at Kostomarov’s wedding, Shevchenko was arrested and sent to St Petersburg for interrogation by Count Alexey Orlov, head of Nicholas I’s secret police. Orlov decided he was not actually a member of the Brotherhood, but an ‘important criminal’ none the less. ‘Shevchenko has acquired among his friends,’ he reported, ‘the reputation of a brilliant Ukrainian writer, and so his poems are doubly harmful and dangerous. His favourite poems could be disseminated in Ukraine, inducing thoughts about the alleged happy times of the hetman era, the exigency of a return to those times, and the possibility of Ukraine’s existence as a separate state.’
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The tsar’s reply was unequivocal. All the Brotherhood members were to be sent into internal exile, and Shevchenko was to be consigned to penal service with the Orenburg Corps, on the Ural river near Russia’s present-day border with Kazakhstan. A note appended to Orlov’s report in Nicholas’s own hand reads: ‘Under the strictest surveillance, prohibited from writing or painting.’

Shevchenko’s ten years of exile took up over a third of his adult life. But they were not as grim as they could have been. Merciless in theory, the tsarist penal system was notoriously slapdash in practice. Exiles with contacts, charm or money could live in relative ease, and Shevchenko had all three. The bored governors of distant barrack-towns were not about to let this charismatic celebrity – with his ability to sing, paint, tell funny stories and dance the
hopak
– pass unappreciated, and put him to use tutoring their children, taking portraits of their wives or directing amateur theatricals. Though there were periods when Shevchenko was forced to stay in barracks doing drill and guard duty, and suffered acute boredom and loneliness, most of the time he was able to paint, send and receive letters and books, wear civilian clothes and live in private quarters. He also continued to write poetry, hiding his notebooks with friends or tucking them inside his boots.

By far the harshest period of his exile were two and a half years with a military expedition sent to chart the Aral Sea. In May 1848 a caravan of 2,500 carts, 3,500 camels, 600 Bashkir cavalry, 200 Ural Cossacks and an entire disassembled schooner, the
Constantine,
set off south from Orenburg. Shevchenko’s role, despite Nicholas’s ban on painting, was as official artist. As the caravan crawled across the steppe – as flat ‘as if it were covered with a white tablecloth’ – he took sketches of a huge grass fire and of a holy poplar-tree, to which the Bashkirs made sacrifices. The expedition safely crossed the Karakumy desert – a waste of sand-hills and glaring salt-plains, strewn with skeletons of men and animals – arriving at the bleak coastal fortress of Raim in June. Here the
Constantine
was reassembled, and with surveyors and a geologist as well as Shevchenko aboard, embarked on a two-year odyssey of gales and rocks, scurvy and boils. At one point the ship spent a fortnight anchored at sea riding out a storm, and the entire crew was forced to drink salt-water. Having mapped hundreds of miles of coastline and discovered several new islands, the expedition finally returned home in the autumn of 1850. The following year Shevchenko accompanied a much less arduous geological expedition to the coal-rich Mangyshlak peninsula on the Caspian Sea, spending pleasant days riding into the mountains with a sketch-pad, or reading and writing with friends in the back of a covered cart.