CHAPTER FOUR Only look well, only read
That glory through once more,
From the first word to the last,
Read, do not ignore
Even the least apostrophe,
Not one comma even,
Search out the meaning of it all,
Then ask yourself the question:
Who are we? Whose sons? Of what sires?
– Taras Shevchenko, 1845
All that I can find to say is that a nation exists when a significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one.
– Hugh Seton-Watson, 1977
IHOR PODOLCHAK IS an artist, and like all good artists, he has a mission. He is trying to persuade the Lviv city authorities to erect a statue to Count Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the erotic novelist who gave his name to masochism. Sacher-Masoch was born in Lviv in 1836, son of the local police chief. ‘We have three problems,’ admits Ihor. ‘His father was an Austrian official, he wrote in German, and he left Lviv when he was aged fourteen. But I say he was one of the greatest Ukrainian writers because his creative work was very closely connected with Ukrainian culture. It doesn’t matter what language he wrote in – there are more important things.’ Lviv remains unconvinced. ‘The official reaction,’ says Ihor, ‘is – “so now we have people who want to make out that Ukrainians are masochists!’” But Ihor has achieved the impossible before. A few years ago he arranged for one of his lithographs to be taken aboard the space station Mir – demonstrating, as he puts it, that ‘art can exist outside the cultural context’. A video of the event shows a grinning astronaut floating in zero gravity, picture in hand. To celebrate the millennium, Ihor wants the billionaire financier George Soros to fund the construction of an ice pyramid on top of Mount Everest, symbolising ‘humanity’s striving for eternity in time and space’. Even if the ice pyramid doesn’t happen, the project won’t have been a failure, because it’s the idea that matters, not the actuality. As if Ukraine didn’t have problems enough already, Ihor is determined to give it Concept Art.
That Lviv should adopt an Austrian novelist as a local celebrity is actually not such a bizarre idea. Fifty miles east of today’s Polish-Ukrainian border, Lviv was ruled by Austria from the first partition of Poland in 1773 until the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918. Christening the city Lemberg, the Austrians made it the capital of the ‘Kingdom of Galicia’, a patched-together province stretching east from Cracow to the river Zbrucz. With the rebirth of Poland the city went back to its ancient Polish name of Lwow, and in 1945 it fell, for the first time in its history, to the Russians, who deported the Polish population and renamed it Lvov. It only became Lviv in 1991, with Ukrainian independence.
Visually, it is Polish Lwow and Austrian Lemberg that have survived best. The Poles built a forest of churches – Dominican, Carmelite, Jesuit, Benedictine, Bernadine – and the inevitable monument to their beloved poet Mickiewicz. The Austrians gave it parks, cobbled boulevards, Jugendstil villas, a flamboyant opera house, municipal buildings painted the Hapsburgs’ reassuring mustard yellow, and the matronly bronze caryatids that grace the lobby of the George Hotel. Though the Austrians themselves have long gone, Lviv is still a Mitteleuropean city, full of students carrying violin cases, the smell of warm poppyseed buns, the tap of footsteps on stone – a shabbier Salzburg, blessedly devoid of von Karajan posters and Mozart souvenirs. In the overgrown Lychakiv cemetery, the initials K & K – Kaiserlich und Königlich, motto of the old Austria – can still be made out on the tumbled gravestones, epitaph to bygone generations of colonial bureaucrats. For them, Galicia was a far-flung posting, chilly with ‘the vast breath of the huge hostile tsarist empire’, a place where, in the words of the novelist Joseph Roth, ‘the civilised Austrian was menaced . . . by bears and wolves and even more dreadful monsters, such as lice and bedbugs’ and soldiers in forgotten barrack-towns ‘fell prey to gambling and to the sharp schnapps . . . sold under the label 180 Proof’.1
Of all Lviv’s rulers, it is only the Austrians for whom Ukrainians retain any sneaking fondness. It is still just possible to find old men who can whistle the marching song ‘Ich hat’ einen Kamaraden’, and babushki who, when asked the time, reply ‘Old or new?’, their clocks still being set to the hours kept under benign, bewhiskered Emperor Franz-Josef. The Hapsburgs might have been foreign autocrats, but at least they weren’t as bad as the tsars. And it was under their indulgent rule, in Galicia, that the Ukrainian national movement was able to take root and flourish, providing Ukrainians with their first modern political parties, and, eventually, with their first short-lived Republic.
Ethnically and socially, nineteenth-century Galicia was an unbalanced, unhappy place. Poles owned the land; Jews the shops and inns. Ukrainians – 40 per cent of the province’s population overall, the majority in the east – laboured out of sight in cottages and fields. Over this uneasy mixture lay a thin layer of Austrian officialdom (among them Oberpolitzmeister Sacher-Masoch). Lviv itself was not a Ukrainian, far less a Russian city, but a Polish-Austrian-Jewish one. A Baedeker of 1900 makes the point:
Lemberg. – Hotels. HOTEL IMPERIAL; GRAND HOTEL; HOTEL METROPOLE; HOT. DE L’EUROPE; HOTEL DE FRANCE; HOT. GEORGE.
Cafés. THEATRE CAFE, FERDINANDS-PLATZ; VIENNA CAFE, HEILIGE-GEIST PLATZ.
Lemberg, Polish Lwow, French Léopol, the capital of Galicia, with 135,000 inhab. (one-fourth Jews), is the seat of a Roman Catholic, an Armenian, and a Greek Catholic archbishop. There are fourteen Roman Catholic churches, a Greek, and Armenian, and a Protestant church, two synagogues, and several Roman Catholic and Greek convents . . .
The handsome Polytechnic Institution, in the Georgs-Platz, completed in 1877, contains a large chemical-technical laboratory and is otherwise well-equipped. In the Slowacki-Str., opposite the Park, is the large new Hall of the Estates. In the Kleparowska-Strasse rises the fine Invaliedenhaus, with its four towers. At the Theatre (closed in summer), in the Skarbkowska-Str., Polish plays and Polish-Italian operas are performed (the solos generally in Italian, the chorus in Polish).
Ossolinski’s National Institute, in the Ossolinksi-Strasse, contains collections relating chiefly to the literature and history of Poland, including portraits, antiquities, coins, and a library . . .
To the S. of the town is the extensive Kilinski Park, the favourite promenade of the citizens, with a statue of Jan Kilinski (1760–1819), the Polish patriot, by Markowski. Fine views of the town may be enjoyed from the Unionshügel, and from the top of the Franz-Josef-Berg.
But out of sight of the Franz-Josef-Berg, the views were not fine at all. Like Ireland, Galicia was a byword for rural poverty. In the 1880s it was calculated that of all the ex-Polish territories, Galicia had the highest birth and death rates and the lowest life expectancy. The average Galician ate less than half the food of the average Englishman, yet paid twice as much of his income in taxes. Every year 50,000 people in the province died of malnutrition, and only one in two children reached the age of five. The population grew regardless, and peasant plots shrank from an average of twelve acres to six. What spare cash the peasants did have went on drink: in 1900 eastern Galicia had one tavern per 220 inhabitants, compared to one hospital per 1,200, and one elementary school per 1,500. Though speculators struck oil in the region in the 1860s, the resulting wealth flowed away to London and Vienna. A joke of the period has a Polish socialist being stopped by a policeman as he crosses the Galician frontier. Asked what he means by socialism, he says it is ‘the struggle of the Workers against Capital’. ‘In that case,’ replies the policeman, ‘you may enter Galicia, for here we have neither the one nor the other.’2
The escape route for many was emigration. In the twenty-five years before the First World War more than 2 million Ukrainian and Polish peasants left Galicia, including an extraordinary 400,000 people, or almost 5 per cent of the province’s population, in 1913 alone. Some went to the new factories of Polish Silesia, some to France and Germany. But most took ship to Canada and the United States, founding today’s 2-million-strong North American Ukrainian diaspora. The New World was glad to have them. Some of the first Ukrainians into America were shipped over as strikebreakers by a Pennsylvania coal mine; the Canadian government used them to settle the prairie – not very different, they were assured, from the Ukrainian steppe. Fleeced by predatory commission agents, their first homes were often no more than brushwood wigwams; in time they progressed to mud-and-thatch huts and elaborate wooden churches just like the ones back home. As a Canadian home minister wrote: ‘I think a stalwart peasant in a sheepskin coat, born on the soil, whose forefathers have been peasants for ten generations, with a stout wife and half-a-dozen children, is good quality.’3
The second great wave of emigration came at the end of the Second World War, when hundreds of thousands of Galicians fled west before the advancing Red Army, finding their way via Displaced Persons’ Camps in Allied-occupied Germany to Canada, America and Britain’s industrial Midlands. The stories they have to tell are amazing: tales of midnight knocks, abandoned feather beds and dowry chests, carts strafed from the air, divided families, last trains. The journey was well worth it, for no better argument for nurture over nature exists than the tragicomic contrast between the escapees’ ‘hyphenated’ descendants – multilingual, well travelled, university-educated – and their cousins who were left behind to grow up in the Soviet Union. One young Ukrainian-American Reuters journalist I knew always had her swish Kiev flat piled high with sacks of potatoes, lugged into town by kindly relatives on a remote collective farm. ‘They really think,’ she would groan, ‘that otherwise I won’t have anything to eat.’
Born of a mixture of political rivalry and Romantic preoccupation with peasant culture, the nineteenth-century Ukrainian national movement relied, like all national movements, on a large element of invention, not all of it even on the part of the Ukrainians themselves. Though it came to fruition in Galicia, it had its roots in eastern Ukraine, where Russia saw the Ukrainian peasantry as a potential counterweight to Polish influence. Most early Ukrainophile writing and research came out of Kharkiv University, founded in 1805 to train imperial bureaucrats, and one of the first histories of Ukraine, History of the Russes or Little Russia, was published by Moscow’s Imperial Society for the Study of Rusian History and Antiquities. In the 1860s the movement passed into the hands of a group of young Kiev-born Poles, who took to the villages in embroidered peasant shirts to demonstrate their opposition to serfdom and discreetly lobby for support for Polish emancipation, and towards the end of the century it drew encouragement from Austria, which intermittently used the Ukrainians to counter Polish pretensions in Galicia.
For the educated inhabitant of Ukraine, national identity was a question of personal taste. In many families, some individuals turned into prominent ‘Ukrainians’, while others continued to think of themselves as Russians or Poles. Volodymyr Antonovych, professor of history at Kiev University and leader of the Ukrainian national movement in the 1860s and ‘70s, was born of a noble Polish family, as was Andriy Sheptytsky, Metropolitan of the Uniate Church in Galicia from 1900 to 1944. Asked his nationality, he would say that he was ‘like St Paul – a Greek to the Greeks, a Jew to the Jews’. Andriy’s brother Stanislaw, meanwhile, remained a conventional Roman Catholic Pole, spelling his surname Szeptycki and ending up as minister of defence in one of the interwar Polish governments. Though the Ukrainian peasant knew very well he was not a hated Pole or moskal, it was not until the end of the century that he started thinking of himself as a ‘Ukrainian’. Asked his identity, he would probably have replied that he was a muzhik – a peasant – or ‘Orthodox’, or simply one of the tuteshni – the ‘people from here’.
In the absence of a large body of people consciously identifying themselves as Ukrainians, the early evangelists for Ukrainianism 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’)4 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.’6 In his memoirs, Shevchenko remembered gloating ‘like a child’ over a new coat:
Looking at the skirts of this shining coat, I thought to myself: was it so long ago that, wearing a dirty smock, I did not even dare to think about such shining clothes? But now I spend a hundred roubles on a coat . . . Truly, the metamorphoses of Ovid!7
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’;8 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:
Here and there; they carry on
In Russian, laugh, and curse
Their parents who’d not had them taught
To jabber, while still children,
The German language, so that now
They would not be ink-pickled . . .
Leeches, leeches! For, maybe,
Your father had to sell
His last cow to the Jews, till he
Could teach you Russian well!9
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:
. . . If you want to sing
For money and glory,
Then you must sing about Matriosha
And Parasha, and subjects
Like the sultans, parquet floors, spurs,
That’s where glory lies. But
He sings – ‘The blue sea is playing.’
While he himself is crying. Behind
Him stands a whole crowd,
All in peasant coats . . .12
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’.13
In the spring of 1846 Shevchenko fell in with Mykola 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.’14 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.
In 1855 Nicholas I died, to general rejoicing. Two years later Aleksandr II gave permission for Shevchenko to return from exile, on condition that he submit to police surveillance and not ‘misuse his talent’. Fêted by admirers all the way, Shevchenko sailed from Astrakhan up the Volga to Moscow, and on home to the ‘sinful paradise’ of St Petersburg. In astrakhan hat and grizzled Cossack moustache, he resumed life as a literary celebrity, campaigning for an end to serfdom and joining Turgenev and Dostoyevsky at public poetry readings. A final trip to Ukraine, in the spring of 1859, ended in arrest and despatch back to the capital. There, after a tipsy night’s Christmas carolling, Shevchenko developed dropsy and died, aged forty-seven. Twelve days earlier he had written a final poem:
Should we not then cease, my friend,
My poor dear neighbour, make an end
Of versifying useless rhymes?
Prepare our waggons for the time
When we that longest road must wend?
Into the other world, my friend,
To God we’ll hasten to our rest . . .
We have grown weary, utter-tired,
A little widsom we’ve acquired,
It should suffice! To sleep is best.15
Straight away, Shevchenko’s supporters began elevating him to sainthood. After lying in state in the chapel of the Academy of Arts, his corpse was given temporary burial in a St Petersburg cemetery. Two months later it was disinterred, put inside a new metal coffin draped with red taffeta, and borne by students down Nevsky Prospekt to the railway station. At Orel and Moscow the coffin left the train for requiem masses, and on arrival in Kiev it was met by a large crowd and shipped, amid much speech-making, downriver to Kaniv, a picturesque village where Shevchenko had been planning to buy a house. Here, on a high bluff overlooking the river, the poet was finally laid to rest. The grave was covered with a Cossack-style mound and marked with an oak cross. In the 1880s the wooden cross was replaced with an iron one, in 1931 with an obelisk, and in 1939 with a hideous monumental bronze statue, which still stands today.
In death, Shevchenko has been subjected to serial hijack, dragooned in support of a string of causes which he never knew or dreamed of. For nineteenth-century Russians he was an icon of liberal opinion. In Ilya Repin’s conversation-piece, They Weren’t Expecting Him, which depicts a family open-mouthed at the reappearance of an exiled relative, a portrait of Shevchenko hangs in the background, silent marker of the family’s progressive political sympathies. The Soviets recast him as a prototype revolutionary, erecting busts and statues all over Ukraine. (One, opposite Kiev University, replaced a statue of Nicholas I; the plinth, thriftily, remained the same.) Trees under which he might have mused turned into sacred ‘Shevchenko oaks’ – the Ukrainian equivalent of Russia’s omnipresent ‘Pushkin rocks’. Beetle-browed and glowering, this Bolshevik Shevchenko is a massive, militant presence, equally at odds with the snub-nosed, twinkling fellow of the sketches made from life and with the dreamy, Byronic figure of the self-portraits.
His latest reincarnation is as hero of Ukrainian independence. The man who in life loved pig-roasts, rum and servant-girls (his last romance fell to pieces when he found the girl in question in the arms of the butler) has been turned into Ukraine’s national martyr, doe-eyed embodiment of a suffering people. Nationalist parliamentary deputies sport the Shevchenko moustache, bushy and turned down at the ends, and his works are quoted ad nauseam, in the portentous singsong of Slavic poetry recital, on every conceivable occasion. The first of many times I heard Shevchenko quoted aloud was, unsuitably enough, in the company of a tipsy Russian businessman. Taking me to dinner at the Salyut Hotel, a feast of beige carpeting, foxed cheeseplants and Rosa Klebb-lookalike waitresses, he lifted a vodka glass, told me his wife did not understand him, and proceeded to recite Shevchenko’s famous Testament in a resonant baritone: ‘When I die, then make my grave/High on an ancient mound,/In my own beloved Ukraine . . .’16 Knowledge of Shevchenko, I was intended to understand, was proof positive of sound democratic principles. As a pass-making technique it was a non-starter – but it sounded terrific.
A well-known joke has two old men sitting on a bench drinking beer – pyvo in Ukrainian. ‘You know what the filthy Russians call this?’ asks one, ‘Pi-i-i-vo!’ ‘Horrible!’ replies the other, spitting on the ground; ‘I could shoot them for it!’ Despite its similarity to Russian (the two are about as close as Dutch and German, or Spanish and Portuguese), the Ukrainian language plays a starring role in the Ukrainians’ sense of national identity, making it a delicate political as well as cultural issue. If an Englishman cannot open his mouth without half his compatriots hating him for his accent, a Ukrainian cannot utter a word without half his fellow-citizens despising him for his choice of language.
For people who speak Ukrainian as a first language, those who have no Ukrainian at all, or who speak it badly, are not true co-nationals. Russian-speakers, on the other hand, suspect determined Ukrainian-speakers of zealotry or opportunism. In Bulgakov’s The White Guard, set in Kiev during the Civil War, the reader immediately realises that the Turbins’ Baltic-German brother-in-law is a bad hat when he is spotted poring over a Ukrainian grammar. Today’s bom-again Ukrainian – the political hanger-on who was never heard to utter a word of Ukrainian until 1991, or the pundit who speaks Ukrainian on the conference platform, and switches back to Russian in his office – is still a stock figure of fun. Prominent among them is President Kuchma himself, who was rumoured to be taking two Ukrainian lessons a day during the election campaign of 1994. ‘You ask them to speak Ukrainian,’ my friend Roma would complain of her interviewees, ‘and they say fine. But then all of a sudden they start sticking in Russian words every now and then, and the next thing you know they’ve switched completely to Russian.’ Even the sincerest Ukrainophiles are prey to this tendency. The director of the Kiev City Museum, a nice man beset with worry that his beloved collection was about to lose its premises to the new High Court, once gave me a peroration on the superiority of Ukrainian over Russian culture. ‘When we were building Santa Sofia, over there’ – waving an arm vaguely eastwards – ‘there was nothing but wolves.’ For my benefit, he said, he was talking in Russian. But did he speak Ukrainian at home? He blushed a little and shifted in his chair: ‘Well, you know how it is, it isn’t easy . . .’
Ukrainian is still in a state of flux. Its technical vocabulary is underdeveloped, necessitating extensive borrowings from German and English (anything but Russian.) There are also variations between the Russian-influenced Ukrainian of the central provinces and the Polish-influenced Ukrainian of Galicia, anathematised under the Soviets as not Ukrainian at all, but a bastard form of Polish. A Ukrainian friend brought up near Lviv remembers being told at school that ‘the language we were talking was improper, very bad, incorrect, some kind of dialect . . . and that somewhere there is this correct Ukrainian language, but somehow different – not the language we were talking of course’. There is also a gap between the everyday Ukrainian of the street and the formal, flowery language of books, speech-making and television. People who actually speak the literary version in real life are rare enough to be celebrated for it. ‘You must go and interview him,’ I would be told of this or that person, ‘he speaks such beautiful Ukrainian’ – as though speaking the language ‘properly’ were an achievement in itself.
Despite pressure from nationalists, the post-independence governments have held to a sensible line on the language issue. Unlike the ethnic Russians of Latvia and Estonia, Ukraine’s Russians do not have to pass language tests to get voting rights and citizenship, and Ukrainianisation of the education system is taking place on a gentle ad hoc, school-by-school basis. Students have to master basic Ukrainian to enter university, but once there, many of their books and lectures are still in Russian. In the Donbass and Crimea, contrary to what the Russian press would have one believe, nearly all schools remain Russian-speaking. In Lviv, on the other hand, a generation of schoolchildren is growing up, for the first time in fifty years, who speak no Russian at all. But through most of the country, urban Ukrainians look set to become what many of them are already – bilingual. Though the language problem is not going to fade away – Russian is too deeply entrenched for that – it has already ceased to be quite the political football it was in the immediate post-independence years.
Shevchenko’s work, though a great boost to Ukrainophiles, did nothing to soften government hostility to Ukrainian cultural revival. His death in 1861 was followed by the century’s second great Polish uprising, provoking a new wave of Russian paranoia. All religious and educational publications in Ukrainian were banned, and a new generation of activists was sent into exile. ‘A Little Russian language never existed, does not exist and never shall exist,’ the interior minister instructed the censors. ‘Its dialects as spoken by the masses are the same as the Russian language, with the exception of some corruptions from Poland.’17 Restrictions eased slightly in the early 1870s, only to tighten again with the Edict of Ems in 1876. Under the Edict’s malign influence, the national movement evaporated. Dissent flowed instead into the empire-wide anarchist and revolutionary movements, climaxing with Aleksandr II’s assassination (by a terrorist group led by a Ukrainian from Odessa) in 1881. From the mid-1870s, therefore, the pressure for national revival came not from Kiev but from Austrian-ruled Lviv. Small, poor and backward, Galicia became the unlikely Piedmont of Ukraine.
As in Kiev, the national movement in Lviv got much of its initial impetus from imperial efforts to play Ukrainians off against the more powerful Poles. Austria experimented with the technique in 1848, during the Europe-wide popular risings known as the ‘Springtime of Nations’. When the barricades went up in Cracow and Lviv, the governor of Galicia, Count Franz Stadion, encouraged Ukrainian leaders to submit a loyal petition to the Emperor, asking for official recognition for their nationality and for Galicia to be split in two. He helped organise a ‘Ruthenian Supreme Council’ under a Uniate bishop, and gave funding for the first Ukrainian-language newspaper. An elected parliament with Ukrainian representation was, however, dissolved once order had been restored.
In 1861, following Austria’s defeat at the hands of the French in Italy, parliament and constitution reappeared, this time permanently. As well as sending delegates to the Reichsrat in Vienna, each province had its own local Diet, with jurisdiction over schooling, health and trade. But the electoral system was designed to give solid majorities to the conservative landowning class – which in Galicia meant the Poles. Whereas only fifty-two votes were needed to elect a deputy to the landlords’ curia, peasant delegates needed almost 9,000, and urban workers had no votes at all. The result was that although Ukrainians made up about half Galicia’s population, they never held more than a third of the seats in the Lviv Diet. Moreover, the Galician government was notoriously addicted to vote-rigging: ballot-box stuffing, intimidation and non-registration of candidates and voters were all common. Though Galicia introduced direct and universal suffrage in 1907 – several years after Vienna, thanks to Polish opposition – Ukrainians remained heavily under-represented.
In 1867 Austria lost another war, this time with the Prussians. The result was the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, giving the Hungarians direct rule over about half the empire, and reducing the Austrian-Hungarian connection to a shared monarchy and army. In exchange for Polish support for the battered empire, from then on Vienna gave the Poles a free hand in Galicia. Poles replaced Germans and Austrians in the local bureaucracy, Polish became the language of education, and Poles took the Galician governorship. ‘Whether and to what extent the Ruthenians may exist,’ said an Austrian politician, ‘is left to the discretion of the Galician Diet.’18 Ukrainians’ acquiescence in the arrangement, and continued loyalty to the Hapsburgs, was bitterly satirised by the Ukrainian socialist Ivan Franko in his short story, ‘Budget of the Beasts’. In it the Lion, ruler of the animal kingdom, proposes a ‘budget’ of Sheep and Chickens (Ukrainians) for the Wolves, Bears and Eagles (Poles) to eat:
Pages distributed the printed figures among all the animal deputies. The deputies glanced at the figures and icy shivers ran up their backs. But what could they do now? . . . ‘Secretary,’ ordered the Lion, ‘read the budget aloud, maybe someone will want to take the floor in debate on this question!’ Then one very old Ass rose and said: ‘I move that the secretary be relieved of the necessity of reading it. We have all read the budget, and we realised at once that we couldn’t manage without a budget. We all have faith in our emperor and are ready to do anything for his sake. Therefore, I move that this House adopts this budget at once and without debate. Everybody in favour, please stand.’ All rose. The budget was adopted. From that time on true heavenly peace reigned in the animal kingdom.19
Despite everything, Galician Ukrainians were far better off than their cousins over the Russian border. With freedom to publish and associate, real though limited participation in imperial politics, and the proverbially well-organised Czechs and Germans on hand as inspiration, they developed a remarkable penchant for activism. The largest and oldest of the Ukrainian organisations in Galicia was the Prosvita or ‘Enlightenment’ society. Established in 1868, it concentrated on teaching peasants to read. By 1914 it had 200,000 members and nearly 3,000 village libraries and reading-rooms. Around the reading-rooms sprang up choirs and theatre groups, gymnastics clubs and voluntary fire-fighting associations, taken from Czech models. The 1880s and ‘90s saw the appearance of hundreds of rural cooperatives and credit unions, allowing peasants to raise cheap loans and cut out middlemen. Ukrainian-language newspapers multiplied, and in 1890 the Galicians finally formed their first political party, a decade before Russia’s Ukrainians were able to follow suit. Led by Franko, it put socialism before independence. The rival National Democratic Party made its appearance nine years later, quickly overtaking the Radicals on a platform of loyalty to the Hapsburgs and moderate liberal reform.
As well as a literary language and a burgeoning sense of national identity, Ukrainians now had a full roster of cultural and political institutions. But as the Ukrainians gathered strength, they came into increasingly sharp conflict with the Poles. For both, Galicia was the place where their political opportunities were greatest and their national movement strongest, and they clashed on all fronts. Ideally, the Ukrainians would have liked Galicia to be split into eastern and western halves, each with its own Diet. Failing this, they wanted more Ukrainian schools and their own university. In 1894 they won what turned out to be an important victory, when the Austrian government reluctantly allowed the foundation of a new chair of Ukrainian history at Polish-controlled Lviv University. (‘Ruthenian history,’ the Austrian education minister had complained, ‘is not real scholarship.’20) Given the euphemistic title ‘The Second Chair of Universal History with special reference to the History of Eastern Europe’, the professorship went to 28-year-old Mykhaylo Hrushevsky, one of a string of bright young Kievans who were making their way to Lviv. His agenda – establishing a historical basis for the Ukrainian identity – was clear right from the start. The ‘nation’, he told the audience at his inaugural lecture, was ‘the alpha and omega of historical discourse’, ‘the sole hero of history’.21 His ten-volume History of Ukraine-Rus, published over the next several decades, did for Ukrainian history what Shevchenko had done for Ukrainian literature. Henceforth nobody, whatever else they might say about it, would be able to pretend it didn’t exist.
Despite the Ukrainians’ gains, relations with the Poles went from bad to worse. Students fought in the lecture-halls, and in 1908 the Polish governor of Galicia was assassinated in protest at continued vote-rigging. It is hard to imagine how the two sides could have been reconciled. Both saw Galicia as an integral part of a future nation-state. Poles called the province ‘Eastern Malopolska’ or ‘Little Poland’; Ukrainians were already talking about it as a potentially independent ‘Western Ukraine’. In July 1914, during a massive Ukrainian rally in Lviv, news came through of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Here, in a war which was to destroy both the empires – Romanov and Hapsburg – which ruled them, Poles and Ukrainians each had their chance to turn dream into reality.
What Lviv was to Ukraine in the late nineteenth century, it was again in the closing years of the Soviet Union. It produced most of Ukraine’s dissidents and demonstrators, and the political party – Rukh – which led the movement for Ukrainian independence. Uncompromisingly Ukrainian (speak Russian on the street, and you will get some dirty looks), it still epitomises the enthusiastic sense of self of western Ukraine over the downbeat cynicism of Kiev, and the grim disillusion of places like Donetsk.
But now that it is no longer a political centre – on independence, politics moved to Kiev – the old city is having to learn new tricks. The first person I got to know well in Lviv was Oleh, a gangling youth full of political theory and burning ideals, deeply into the student movement. I took him to the Grand Hotel, a Western-owned outfit with real linen napkins, proper cutlery and fleets of nervous newly trained waiters. Oleh was nervous too – he’d never been anywhere like this before, and seven dollars was a terrifying amount of money to be spending on lunch. When we next met, gangling Oleh was transformed. He produced roses, chocolates: this time, he was taking me out to supper. We went to a newly opened café round the corner from his flat. Since we had seen each other last, he said, he had got into the printing trade. Here was a calendar his firm had produced – the butterflies had come out well, but he’d got the dates muddled, so they’d had to do a rerun. He was exporting Christmas cards to Austria and Hungary, and he’d worked out a nice little arrangement with the manager of a local bottling plant: ‘Two hundred dollars for him; 100,000 labels for me.’ Things were going so well that he was even having to pay protection money – 25 per cent of profits – to local racketeers. Wasn’t that rather a lot? ‘No, because they don’t know how much profit we’re making.’ A girl who had been sitting in the lobby as we came in materialised in front of our table in a belly-dancer’s outfit, wiggling energetically. With a flourish, Oleh produced a wad of notes and stuck them in her bra. Not quite Sacher-Masoch, but getting there.