Here is the text for Part 1 of Janice Kulyk Keefer’s illustrated lecture about Ukrainian poet Lesia Ukrainka. (Watch the video for this section of Janice’s talk.)
Janice was a professor of literature at Guelph University, with a focus on modernist authors. Of Ukrainian background, she has written two novels on Ukrainian themes, a family memoir (Honey and Ashes), and numerous other volumes of poetry, criticism and fiction.
Lesia Ukrainka’s statue in High Park.
A Walk in the Park
If you’ve ever visited Toronto’s High Park, and walked along the southern stretch of Colborne Lodge Drive, then you have met Lesia Ukrainka. Or at least, walked past a version of her, in the form of Mykhaylo Chereshniovsky’s larger-than-life bronze statue erected 47 years ago on a plinth of black granite. But perhaps you never did notice Lesia’s statue, fenced off and hidden away as it is among the evergreens. You may, of course, have stopped to read the explanatory plaque fastened to the fence, informing you of the remarkable facts of Ukrainka’s life, but then again, how many of us do take time to read explanatory plaques? Especially if you can’t make much of a connection between the words on the plaque, the dark sculpted figure hidden several metres away, and the person who inspired them. Now, imagine that you’ve decided to flout the rules, hop over the fence and make your way to the statue. There you encounter a second fence, this one made of black-painted iron railings. Unlatching the stubborn gate, you walk inside; the first thing to meet your eyes is the granite plinth on which you notice inscriptions in two languages, English and a foreign tongue written in a foreign alphabet. Let’s assume you don’t read, even if you recognize, Cyrillic; you stick with the English: Lesya Ukrainka, The Greatest Ukrainian Poetess. Curious, you stand back to stare up at a queenly bronze woman, her draperies like those of a Byzantine madonna, her face both stern and serene. But the sculptor has humanized–or should we say feminized–this monumental figure by giving her a posy of flowers to hold, flowers that seem to whisper ‘poetess’.
But what of the flesh and blood sealed inside the bronze? I always thought I knew Lesia Ukrainka -— knew her with the certainty you feel you do know someone first encountered in your childhood. I’d often encountered the faces of Ukrainka’s male counterparts —- poet and painter Taras Shevchenko and prose writer Ivan Franko -— on the walls of church basements, or hung in the dining hall at Oakville’s Camp Kyiv, where my sister and I spent several summers in our pre-adolescence. In my ignorance, or should I say, irreverence, I’d secretly named those great patriotic figures Shevchenko and Franko the “moustache men,” because their facial hair featured so prominently in their portraits, giving them what I would now call a concertedly patriarchal air. I’m afraid I associated them with the Kommandant at Camp Kyiv who, when we were assembled at the flagpole to raise the blue and yellow banner of Ukraine, would strike the insides of my knock-knees with his swagger stick, as if reproaching my very bones for not paying reverent-enough attention
Shevchenko of course, is Ukraine’s national poet: the Kobzar or Bard who endured a decade of harsh exile before dying in 1861: Franko was the first Ukrainian writer to be nominated for the Nobel prize in literature: had he not died in the year of his nomination, 1916, he might have won. Alongside their portraits would sometimes hang a likeness of Lesia Ukrainka: forbidding, and utterly withholding: her lips compressed, her hair pulled sternly from her face. Staring up at her, I felt she wouldn’t suffer children gladly, especially spoiled Canadian-Ukrainian children oblivious to the sufferings of captive, faraway Ukraine. What Adversity Teaches is the rather daunting title of her only book for children.
During our summers in the 1960s at Camp Kyiv my friends and I rebelled against having to learn by rote yards of patriotic Ukrainian verse—verse to be, not recited but declaimed in the ringing tones adopted by the adults who taught us. Those adults were mostly DPs, Displaced Persons who had been forcibly transported from Nazi-invaded Ukraine to perform slave labour in Germany. We children knew about DPs in an abstract way, and thought of their traumatic situation as something rooted in the distant past. Little did I know then that all through the 1960s the situation in Ukraine, that is, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, was dire.I knew that it was subordinate to Moscow, and relentlessly Russified but I only learned years later that many artists, intellectuals and ordinary people — the Sixties’ Generation they were called — had actively resisted the oppressive conditions forced upon them. Their insistence on speaking and working in the Ukrainian language, and in the field of Ukrainian culture, meant arrest and imprisonment in gulags for what we might call culture crimes. This memorial to one of the Sixties’ people reads: In this building lived painter and famous daughter of Ukraine, Alla Horska, 1929-1970, who perished tragically here.
In my adolescence I discovered things about Lesia Ukrainka that freed her from the prison of her portrait. I learned that she’d died young of tuberculosis, and that she had travelled to Egypt to try to palliate her illness. But I never attempted to learn who she was in the best way possible—through reading her writing. My Ukrainian was sketchy, and the translations available of her work sounded forced and archaic. Take, for example, the lines carved on the plinth of her statue in High Park, rendered in English as “By own hands freedom gained is freedom true / By others freedom given is a captive’s doom.” I have recently found a more fluid and powerful version which with some gender-swapping becomes “Whoever frees herself will remain free, but whoever tries to free another takes her into captivity.”[1]
What really drew me to Ukrainka then was the fact of her life having been cut so short; the romance of that ‘artists’ disease,’ tuberculosis. Here was a link with writers like Emily Bronte and John Keats, those beacons of the English Romantics! I even attempted an ode to Lesia Ukrainka which began—in my complete ignorance of her formidable strength of will— “Frail-winged poetess.” What irks me now, more than the frailty I ascribed to her, was my unthinking adoption of the word “poetess,” as carved into the plinth of her statue at High Park: not, “a great Ukrainian poet,” but “Ukraine’s greatest poetess.” In my adolescence I didn’t even recognize “poetess” as a patronising term—although I did register the fact that a mere woman had accomplished enough in her 42 years of life to earn a place on the ethno-cultural wall of fame alongside the Moustache Men: to earn a kind of immortality.
But it’s only now that I’ve truly become acquainted with this astonishing nineteenth-century woman, who, like England’s Elizabeth Barrett Browning, wrote forceful political poetry, and who, like George Eliot and George Sand, created a public name and persona for herself quite different from the private name into which she’d been born. Lesia Ukrainka means, in English, ‘Lesia the Ukrainian Woman’. This nom de plume was chosen for Larysa Kosach by her mother when 13-year-old Larysa published her first poem. Larysa’s mother, Olha Drahomanov Kosach (1849-1930), an active feminist, was herself the possessor of a nom de plume—Olena Pchilka— under which she published poems and ethnography, translated both adult and children’s literature, and edited the journal Ridniy Krai (Native Land).
Her Childhood
Larysa Kosach was not born into an immiserated peasant family, as was Taras Shevchenko, or even into a well-to-do farming family, as was Ivan Franko, but instead into the upper bourgeoisie. Her parents were highly educated, highly cultured people, wealthy enough to have an estate at which they spent their summers, and to have their six children privately educated. They were also important members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia of their time and place. Although many charming childhood photographs exist of Larysa and her siblings dressed in Ukrainian folk costume, it’s clear from other photos that the Kosach family were very much 19th Century urban people: they wear the fashions that were current in Paris or London or St. Petersburg, and were much more at home with pen and paper than scythe and sickle
Yet their occasional adoption of folk costume was by no means an affectation: rather it was part of a general European neo-romantic revival in which the narod or peasantry — what Germans refer to as das Volk — were idealized as the keepers of authentic national values and traditions, most prominently spoken language, folk songs and dances, legends and fairy tales, and vocal or instrumental music. To dress in the traditional costume of the Kosach’s home region, Volhynia, and to speak that region’s dialect; to learn the intricate embroidery stitches, as well as the songs and stories of Volhynia’s peasants, were acts of cultural piety and continuance as well as defiance. It was for a similar reason, I now realize, that while my friends at Canadian summer camps called Oconto or Pathfinder learned to paddle canoes, my friends and I sat under the oak trees at Camp Kyiv, that quasi-replica of a Ukrainian village, torturing scraps of unbleached linen with our feeble attempts at cross stitch. As for Larysa Kosach, she became an expert embroiderer; in her later life, when she was in too much pain to be able to write, she would take up her embroidery.
What was she like as a child, an adolescent and adult? Certainly she was much loved and loving: hers was a close-knit family in which parents and children spent a great deal of time together, children not only being seen but expected to be heard from. Because their parents wanted them educated in Ukrainian, not Russian, Lesia and her siblings were not sent away to boarding schools to begin their formal education. In Lesia’s case, there was an equally pressing reason for keeping her at home: from her tenth year onward, she was the prey of tuberculosis of the bone. At first only her right foot was affected with spasms of severe pain; later it was the bones in the palm of her left hand, and then the disease reached a point at which she had to spend months in bed with both arms and her left foot in plaster casts.
Many artists have had childhood illnesses severe enough to keep them bedridden, experiencing life through printed pictures and the pages of books. This was certainly true of Larysa Kosach: tales of chivalry and enchantment were the source of her idealism, her fascination with ‘noble failure’—for example, the vanquished knight who, even at the point of death, refuses to surrender. Her precocity was multi-faceted: she learned to read at the age of four, and she gave early signs of being intensely musical; a gifted student of the piano, she had to give it up forever when she underwent an operation on her hand when she was twelve. She later confessed that she might have been a better musician than poet; in any case, she retained her passion for all forms of music. After her death her husband transcribed and edited a two-volume collection of over 200 folk melodies she had sung to him from memory.
During periods of remission Larysa enjoyed the company of her siblings during long stays in the countryside near their family estate. She idolized her elder brother Mykhaylo; the two remained inseparable, even after he left home to study at a prestigious gymnasium, our equivalent of high school. In 1885, Larysa and Mykhaylo collaborated on a Ukrainian translation of Gogol; in 1888 when Larysa was 17 and her brother 19, they organized a literary circle called Pleyada (The Pleiades), focussing on Ukrainian literature and the translation of foreign-language literature into Ukrainian. Mykhaylo became a mathematician and teacher of physics and meteorology at Kharkiv university, as well as a writer of short stories and a translator from Russian into Ukrainian. He died young, aged 34.
Yet neither he nor his younger brother Mykola seemed to have received privileged treatment because of their gender. Their four sisters were educated to be their brothers’ equals—or more. And while Larysa was the most brilliant of the siblings and the greatest writer among them, her sisters led lives equally free of the intellectual curtailments imposed by “femininity,” all of them balancing marriage with the pursuit of a profession. Her younger sister Olha Kosach-Kryvyniuk became a physician as well as a translator and a writer focussing on the formation of Ukrainian national culture and identity; she was imprisoned for belonging to a secret Ukrainian society when she was a student at the St. Petersburg Women’s Medical Institute. A feminist, she insisted on a civil partnership with the man she fell in love with rather than a Church-blessed wedding, much to her parents’ chagrin. Another of Larysa’s sisters, Izydora, who, like her younger brother Mykola, trained as an agronomist, became the longest-lived of the siblings, dying in 1980 at the age of 92. And the youngest sister, Oksana, trained as an engineer and also translated from French into Ukrainian—she studied in Lausanne and knew three other languages. Shortly after her marriage in 1908, she moved to Czechoslovakia with her husband, never living in Ukraine again, but working as a translator at the Centre for Ukrainian Emigration in Prague.
Her Parents
Olha and Petro Kosach were both supportive and demanding of their children, all of whom grew up to be fighters for the Ukrainian cause. They were a family in which the mother appears to have dominated; certainly Olha Kosach shaped her children’s intellects and loyalties, choosing their tutors, translating foreign-language works into Ukrainian for their studies, and critiquing and editing her daughter’s poems. But Larysa was especially close to her father Petro (1842-1909). Of Bosnian ancestry, he was an ardent Ukrainophile who devoted much of his personal fortune to publishing works in the Ukrainian language and to supporting Ukrainian scholars and cultural causes. Petro studied mathematics at university in St Petersburg before studying law in Kyiv—both programs of study would have been taught in Russian only. Taking up an administrative post in the tsarist bureaucracy in the oblast or region of Volhynia’ did not prevent him from becoming a member of the Stara Hromada, or Old Society, “the centre of all social and cultural life of [Russia-controlled] Ukraine” (Bida, 4) and which, from 1876-1890, headed the underground Ukrainian national movement. I will speak later about the reasons why secrecy and underground activity were essential; what I want to emphasize here is Larysa’s appreciation of her father’s quick wit and bent for irony: qualities that were not, perhaps, the strong suit of his wife. Father and daughter not only resembled each other physically, but also shared a strong belief in the inherent dignity of every human being, whether child or adult; given their acute sense of honour, they stood up for their beliefs and vigorously defended their principles.
Her Mentor
Petro Kosach never suffered professionally for his Ukrainian sympathies, unlike his great friend Mykhaylo Drahomanov[2], whom he met at university, whose sister he married and who became Larysa’s most important mentor. Drahomanov was a colossus in the Ukrainian intelligentsia of the 19th century: a philosopher, ethnographer, economist, political theorist, translator, and historian, he was also so persistent and prominent a champion of Ukrainian rights that he was forced into exile in 1876, when Larysa was only five years old. Her close, continuous relationship with him developed in her early teens and was carried on by letters. Her uncle Mykhaylo took over her mother’s pedagogical role, sharpening his niece’s critical faculties and encouraging her talents as a linguist: a student of ancient Greek and Latin, she also learned English, French, Italian, German and—of course—Russian, as well as other Slavic languages such as Polish and Bulgarian. He helped her to extend her literary knowledge, so that she became familiar with a wide range of western European writers, among them Heine, Shakespeare and Byron, Hugo and Ibsen, Ovid and Homer, Mickiewicz and Pushkin. Reading them in the original, she went on to translate many of them into Ukrainian, as well as adapting foreign models to her own Ukrainian purposes. She read the Bible, Old and New Testaments, with scholarly attention and also with a poet’s appetite for imagery, story and phrasing; at her uncle’s urging she also read a magisterial history of the Jewish people.
Thus it was due to Drahomanov that Lesia Ukrainka became an authentic cosmopolitan; moreover, his socialist politics were an equally strong influence on his ‘well-born’ niece. When he was dying in Bulgaria, where he’d settled as a professor of pre-Hellenic history at the University of Sofia, the 24 year-old Larysa travelled to his home to be with him; characteristically, he encouraged her to the end to make use of his superb library. Presciently enough, she adopted his motto: “There are no other aims than those of all Europe; there are no other means.” (Bida, 18)
Ukraine’s Complicated History
For anyone unfamiliar with Ukrainian history, I need to show how Lesia’s vocation was shaped by Ukraine’s submerged existence as a colony of the Russian Empire. That empire was immense, comprising nearly a sixth of the earth’s landmass and stretching from Finland to Central Asia, from the Arctic Ocean and Bering Sea to the Black and Caspian Seas, from the Siberian taiga to the plains of Mongolia, from the Urals in the near east, to the Caucasus in the south west, and the Kolyma mountains in the north east. The history of the country now called Ukraine — Ukraina — is complex and conflicted: the same events have been interpreted or valued quite differently depending on whether the historian is Russian, Ukrainian or Polish; Christian, Muslim or Jewish. I am approaching this topic from a Ukrainian point of view, though I am cognizant of competing claims; I will have to simplify and inevitably, be reductive, but I hope to give you some idea of the political, social and linguistic pressures under which Lesia Ukrainka came to maturity as an artist. As her nom de plume insists, writing, for this woman, was hardly a matter of mere self-expression or of a delightfully entertaining jeu d’esprit: to use a term from 1950s France, Lesia Ukrainka – Lesia the (in-your Tsarist-face) Ukrainian – was engagée.
So, let’s begin with where she was born, in the town of Zvyahel, now Novohrad-Volynskyi, in Volhynia Oblast or region, Ukraine. Except that at the time of her birth in 1871, there was no country called Ukraine. The 19th Century was the great age of nationalisms and new nation states: 1871 was the year that the scattered principalities that had once been the Holy Roman Empire coalesced into the new state of Germany; it was also the year that the Risorgimento effected the consolidation of Italy. But in 1871, the vastness of the Russian Empire contained not Ukraine, but rather, a south-central region called Malorossiya: Little Russia to the hegemonic Great Russia.
The term Ukraina—meaning borderland-–first appears in documents almost two and a half centuries before Larysa Kosach was born, and pertained to lands which came to be known in the late 19th Century as the Hetmanate. It was founded in 1649 by the great Cossack leader or hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky who, it must be said, is no hero to the Poles whose lands he invaded or to the Jews subjected to the pogroms his military campaigns unleashed. But for Ukrainians he is the Great Liberator, and reproductions of a famous painting of Khmelnitsky triumphantly entering the Golden Gates of Kyiv used to hang in many of the Ukrainian homes I knew as a child. The polity he established covered a large area between the Ottoman empire and Tatar-ruled Crimea to the south, to well north of Kyiv, and from Vynnytsia in the west, to Poltava in the east: some 80,000 square miles of Ukraine’s current 603,700 square miles. His Hetmanate flourished for a brief eight years before constant civil wars ushered in a period known as “the Ruin.”
Under the leadership of a new Hetman, Ivan Mazeppa, who ruled from 1687-1708, stability and unity returned and the fine arts flowered, especially architecture and literature. But the Hetmanate was poised between competing great powers: Russia and Poland, with the Turks thrown in for good measure. An alliance between Russia and the Hetmanate appearing to be the only way to ward off the Poles, Khmelnytsky signed the Treaty of Perieslav with Russia. Recoiling from this constricting embrace Mazeppa famously—or infamously, depending on your point of view—switched his allegiance to Charles XII of Sweden; after Charles and Mazeppa were defeated at the battle of Poltava in 1709, Russia hounded and diminished the Hetmanate. Catherine the Great hammered the nails into the coffin by disbanding the Cossack Sich or proto-state in 1775; by 1781 the Hetmanate itself had become the Malorusskaya Guberniaor “Little Russian Governate,” a colony of the Russian Empire.
Nevertheless the Hetmanate became the basis for a modern Ukrainian nation. Lesia Ukrainka treats this watershed in Ukrainian history in her verse drama Boyarynya, whose hero Oksana is the daughter of a Cossack lord serving Hetman Petro Doroshenko (1665-1676). Oksana, who moves to Muscovy—Russia—with her Ukrainian husband Stepan, who has taken service with the Tsar, finds herself enmeshed in an increasingly imprisoning, patriarchal and foreign world. She dies of grief at her homeland’s defeat in battle with the Muscovite forces, a defeat in which her husband’s betrayal of his own people through his passive loyalty to the Tsar plays its part.
Lesia Ukrainka’s choice of a couple from the nobility—a boyar and boyarynya—for her protagonists is significant given her own social origins. The emergence of a Ukrainian-identified nobility during the Hetmanate created a class with the wealth and influence to encourage an enduring Ukrainian identity through the written and printed word. Some of the Hetmanate nobility went on to serve the Russian state, like Oksana’s hapless husband; some Ukrainian writers chose to make their career in the Russian language, as was the case of the great prose writer Mykola Hohol, known in Russian as Nikolai Gogol, who left his Ukrainian father’s and Polish mother’s estate to make his literary fortune as a Russian in the imperial capital, St. Petersburg.
It was from the Hetmanates’s Cossack nobility that Larysa’s mother’s family, the Drahomanovs, derived — Olha Drahomanov (though none of her daughters) was a graduate of Kyiv’s Academy for Young Ladies of the Nobility. When Larysa was in her early twenties she moved with her family to Kyiv, to an area nicknamed “Parnassus” due to the number of cultural leaders living in the wealthy neighbourhood.
An Important City
By the 1890s, the metropolis of Kyiv had become the third most important city in the Russian Empire, and possessed enormous prestige as the capital of Ancient Rus’. Kyiv — Kiev to Russians — is claimed as a mother city, or cradle of civilization, by Russians and Belorussians, as well as by Ukrainians. Founded in the late 5th century by Slavic tribes and established as a major trading centre in the 9th century by Scandinavian adventurers from Novgorod, the walled and gated city on the great Dnipro river became a crucial trading hub and, with the conversion of the population to Greek Orthodox Christianity, a city of golden-domed churches and a centre of learning. The city’s most revered monuments—the 11th century cathedral of Saint or Sviata Sofia and the 10th century Monastery of the Caves or Pecherska Lavra—became pilgrimage sites, flourishing despite periodic plundering by local raiders who were irresistibly drawn by the sheer wealth and splendour of Kyiv.
Attacks by Tatar tribes, and most devastatingly, by the Mongol invasion of 1240, left the upper, administrative section of the city in ruins, and the lower, commercial area, desolate. After a period of revival under the Hetmanate, Kyiv sank back into decline, until Russian money and influence poured into the city, which became a major administrative centre of the empire. In the mid-19th century the sugar industry brought in enormous wealth: mansions such as the famous House of the Chimeras on Bankovaya Street were built, as well as the palatial home that now houses the magnificent art museum left to the city by the Khanenkos, whose wealth and connoisseurship stemmed from the lowly sugar beet. Universities and colleges (all Russian-speaking), museums and art galleries were established; banks, libraries and an opera house appeared, and in 1869-70, a railway line connected Kyiv with Moscow and Odessa. From the city’s inhabitants, temporary or permanent, arose a formidable array of scientists, scholars, and artists, many of them active during Larysa Kosach’s lifetime. Many of them were Russian-affiliated in terms of culture and language, like Mikhail Bulgakov author of The Master and Margarita, or musician Vladimir Horowitz or aircraft designer Igor Sikorski. Others, like sculptor Oleksander Archipenko or filmmaker Oleksander Dovzhenko, identified themselves as Ukrainian.
Russian Subjugation
The Russian Empire spawned a gigantic bureaucracy, satirized by Gogol, but powerful despite being a “dead hand” in relation to reform and creativity. Absolute Rule — the kind of Autocracy achieved in western Europe by figures like Louis 14th, the Sun King of Versailles — was the backbone of Tsarist Rule. It is true that the councillors of any given tsar or tsarina could manipulate and exploit a weak or unintelligent ruler; the two “Greats” of Russian history, however, Peter and Catherine, exerted draconian power over their lands and the lives of their people. Catherine, Prussian by birth and upbringing, encouraged the emigration of German Mennonites to what is now southern Ukraine, prizing their sophisticated agricultural skills, and absolving them from military service.
There is one 19th-century tsar — the one who issued the notorious Ems Ukaz forbidding the use of the Ukrainian language—whose reign is of crucial importance to Lesia Ukrainka’s life and work. This tsar, Alexander II, can’t be properly understood without knowledge of his predecessor, Nicholas I, and his successor, Alexander III. One of the key events in 19th Century Russia was the failure of the Decembrist Revolt of 1825, in which army officers attempted to diminish the Tsar’s absolute power and to press for liberal reforms. The arch-conservative Nicholas I, who ruled from 1825-1855, was obsessed by this challenge to supreme authority. To root out all treasonously independent thought among his nobility, and to unify and subdue his Empire, he adopted the policy proposed by his minister of education Sergey Uvarov: Russian Orthodoxy in religion, absolute autocracy in government, and Russianness in national character. This meant no freedom of religion, no representative government reflecting the wishes of the (wealthy and privileged) people, and no acts or even gestures of defiance from any social class, including the peasant masses to whom the Tsar purported to stand in the place of a Father. Nothing must deflect the people from unthinking obedience. In 1833 Uvarov pronounced: “I am convinced that every professor and teacher, being permeated by one and the same feeling of devotion to the throne and fatherland, will use all his resources to become a worthy tool for the government and to earn its complete confidence.”
Accordingly, “Western” concepts such as the free exchange of ideas, and critical and analytical thinking were anathematized as irreligious and politically subversive. Nicholas I became increasingly paranoid that secret societies were springing up throughout his empire to overthrow him. He was terrified by the revolutions which broke out in Europe in 1848, despite the fact that all these revolutions failed and that reactionary, arch-conservative governments came to power in their wake.
Alexander II, Nicholas I’s successor, came to power as a liberal reformer in 1855. He abolished serfdom, a form of peasant-based slavery, in 1861 — but became increasingly conservative after an unsuccessful, 18 month-long uprising in occupied Poland and a series of assassination attempts against him. In 1863, a new Ukrainian translation of parts of the New Testament though “vetted and passed by the Imperial Academy of Sciences” was vetoed as politically suspect by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, that is, the secular Ministry of Religious Affairs. (An analogous translation into Russian met a similar fate.) The Kyiv Censorship Committee, deciding that “the Ukrainian language never existed, does not exist, and shall never exist,” went on to ban the publication of secular and religious books in Ukrainian, apart from belles-lettres, on the premise that the distribution of such publications was a tool to foster separatism. [3] Thirteen years later, the infamous Ems Ukaz of 1876 appeared, outlawing any printed form of the Ukrainian language except for historical documents. It forbade the staging of plays, the importation of books in Ukrainian from abroad and the giving of lectures in Ukrainian.
In 1881, on the assassination of Alexander II by a group called “The Peoples’ Will,” his son Tsar Alexander III amended the Ems Ukaz to allow the lyrics of Ukrainian songs and also Ukrainian dictionaries to be published, but only if Russian orthography were used. Teachers deemed pro-Ukrainian were fired, and suspect newspapers and organizations shut down. The creation that same year of the Okhrana, or Russian secret police, who were charged to pulverize any signs of insubordination within the populace, gave brutal teeth to the ukaz. As a result in Russian-controlled Ukraine “self-aware Ukrainians remained a small intelligentsia … that was out of touch with a much larger rural population, which lacked the opportunity for a cultural education…. Russian imperial ideology dominated the schools and the army, and the Russian language was the only one used for official business in the urban workplace, government offices, and public services.”[4]
During Nicholas I ‘s reign, secret pro-Ukrainian Societies had existed; in the early years of Alexander II’s rule a student organization turned itself, in 1859, into what was to become the all-important Hromada (Society) of Kyiv: by 1874, three years after Larysa Kosach’s birth, the Hromada was disseminating its views, largely through the agency of Larysa’s uncle, Mykhaylo Drahomanov, through a Ukrainian-language newspaper, the Kyiv Telegraf. After the issuing of the Ems Ukaz, all such organizations and activities went underground. The Hromada was able to publish material in Russian only, which it did, through the periodical Kievskaia Staryna (1882-1906). And secret Ukrainian-language literature and political writing from the Russian Empire was smuggled into Lviv, in the Austria-controlled province of Galicia or Halychyna, where free use of the Ukrainian language was permitted by the Habsburg authorities. This material, in printed form, would be smuggled back into Russian-controlled areas, to be distributed, read and discussed—in secret, of course—in Kyiv and other centres. One of Lesia’s close friends, Lyudmyla Staryts’ka-Chernyakhivs’ka described the effect of such smuggled literature on the circle who regularly gathered at her parents’ home. In 1892 Lesia, then in her early twenties, showed up with a first volume of her poems which she gave to Lyudmyla’s father, a renowned playwright and theatrical producer. He “put on his pince-nez, picked up the paper knife, gently patted the greyish-blue volume as if it were a child, and began to cut the pages carefully. This was not the feeling with which we now pick up a new Ukrainian book — this was a feeling of special joy: this book which had travelled from abroad in such danger — either in an envelope or deep in someone’s pocket — lay now in front of us—new and fresh, like a message about the possible fate of the Ukrainian language, about some far away future life.” (Bida, 11)
The weakening of Tsarist autocracy during Nicholas II’s reign gave Ukrainian culture a brief reprieve: before her death in 1913, Lesia Ukrainka would have profited from the liberalization that occurred in 1905, which meant the repeal of the Ems Ukaz and a resurgence of Ukrainian-language writing and publishing. Periodicals proliferated, publishing houses were founded, and in 1906 Lesia helped to establish a Kyiv branch of the Prosvita or Enlightenment movement, which had originated in Lviv in 1868; Prosvita promoted Ukrainian cultural awareness by sponsoring lectures, readings, concerts and plays as well as publishing popularly-accessible works in Ukrainian. Four years later, Prosvita was abolished; most of the fledgling Ukrainian cultural forums and schools that had sprung up after 1905 were also shut down after the onset of World War I.
For three years after the Russian revolution of 1917, some 14 to 18 different governments attempted to take power in Kyiv: among them a Ukrainian Republic was declared from 1919-21. By 1922 the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic had entrenched itself. For the first eight years or so of its existence, it implemented pro-Ukrainian policies in language use, education and the arts: “Away from Moscow!” became a rallying call of Ukrainian artists. But Russification returned in brutal form with the forced collectivization of farms from 1928-33, and the devastating famine of 1930-33, largely orchestrated by Stalin, and afflicting major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Empire. It has been estimated that in 1932-33 some 4 million Ukrainians perished of forced starvation; many Ukrainian historians argue the famine or Holodomor was a deliberate attempt to annihilate the traditional Ukrainian village, that key and cherished element in the national culture.
As for the impact on Ukrainka of her nation’s cultural and political subjugation to Russia, it was profound: in a letter written from Berlin in 1891, she expresses the psychology of abjection: “I do not recall whether I ever experienced such difficult, unbearable and bitter desires as here in the free world. It affected me so often. … that one can notice on my hands and neck the red traces of the yoke and the chains. Everybody sees these traces and I am shamed before the free world. As you can see, my hands are chained, but my heart and thoughts are free, perhaps even more so than those of the people around me….” (Bida 84)
The only antidote for her was work. In a poem titled “Epilogue” she wrote of the “sweetness” of struggle, berating the weakness her illness imposed upon her. Yet somehow she managed to write more in her 42 years of life than many writers accomplish in a life twice as long. Thus, during a six-year period of extreme ill health she managed to write a series of essays and articles on topics as diverse as contemporary writing in Italy and Poland, on Utopian themes in world literature, on modern drama in German, French and Norwegian and on the emancipation of women. She also published two collections of poetry: Thoughts and Dreams (Dumy i Mriyi), 1899 and Echoes (Vidhuky),1902. And literally days before her death, she managed to complete a short story exploring the life of an Arab woman, “Ekbal’hanem.” She was a doubly ‘driven’ writer, not only by the nature of her disease, but also by her need to resist political repression. And while it’s important to remember that Russian writers were also the victims of government censorship and surveillance, the very right of their language to exist was never at issue: not only Ukrainians, but also Poles, Belarusians and other ethnic minorities within the Russian Empire were forbidden the free use of their native language.
Click here for Part 2 of Lesia Ukrainka: A Rage of Fire
[1] https://euromaidanpress.com/2020/03/25/the-many-faces-of-ukrainian-writer-feminist-lesia-ukrainka
[2] The Ukrainian form of his name is ‘Drahomaniv’: I use ‘Drahomanov’ since it is the form overwhelmingly used in encyclopedia entries and on internet sites
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ems_Ukaz
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ems_Ukaz