Making Verse in a Precarious Language: Poetry in Late 19^th-Century Ukrainian Culture between Silence and Music, Present and Future

1 A precarious literature? Ukrainian poetry after Ševčenko and before modernism

Ukrainian poetry in the years roughly between Ševčenko’s death in 1861 and the beginning of the 20^th century is a chapter of Ukrainian literary history that has not yet been studied in detail. One might even gain the impression that critical consensus dismisses most of the poetic texts written after Ševčenko’s breakthrough and before the Revolution as symptoms of Ukrainian culture’s long and awkward transition toward modernity. In one of his lectures on Ukrainian literature, for example, the poet and literary historian Mykola Zerov (1890–1937) described the poetic output of Ukrainian writers of the 1860 s as qualitatively inferior to the prose of the period, lamenting the epigonal character of most of the poetry produced in the two decades following Ševčenko’s death in 1861 (Zerov 1977: 251–253).^[1]

In the national canon and in much of the criticism dedicated to her work, the lyrical output of Lesja Ukrajinka, a leading figure of Ukrainian literature of the fin de siècle, does not bear comparison with her dramatic poems, which are lauded as the backbone of her contribution to the modernization of Ukrainian culture at the dawn of the century.^[2] After the Valuev circular of 1863 and even more so after the Ems ukase of 1876 with its more far-reaching ban on publications in Ukrainian, Ukrainian literature in the Russian Empire was condemned to juggle between the precarity inflicted by its semi-illegal status and the high responsibility imposed on it by virtue of its being the voice of a nation struggling for survival while undergoing a process of self-rediscovery.^[3] Torn between romantic duty towards the to-be-(re)created nation and aspiration to artistic complexity in light of Ševčenko’s model – which had been able to combine romantic pathos with stylistic diversity –, Ukrainian poetic culture of the late 19^th century was precarious in more than one way.^[4] Reflecting on the debates on Central-European cultures “from a Ukrainian perspective,” Vitaly Chernetsky has foregrounded the intrinsic precariousness of Ukrainian writers, quoting, for example, a speech delivered in April 1992 by Oksana Zabužko at the “Intellectuals and Social Change in Central and Eastern Europe” conference at Rutgers University: “After all, when you return to consciousness after a prolonged coma, you need desperately to be recognized by other people – in order to be sure that you do exist.” (Chernetsky 2016: 75). Other Ukrainian writers of the 20^th century have also reflected on the inner precarity of being a Ukrainian writer. Not so many years before the Rutgers conference, in one of his letters from his captivity in Mordovia, Vasyl’ Stus (1938–1985) wrote of the clash typical for the relationship between Ukrainian writers and history and the resulting normalization of precarity as the default existential condition of Ukrainian intellectuals: “It’s interesting to see how hard it is for our poets to move reality on their shoulders, how hard it is to feel that instead of helping you your own reality is blocking, hampering, hindering you.”^[5]

In this article, I analyze poetic self-representation in texts by Ukrainian authors of the second half of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, including key writers and intellectuals such as Pantelejmon Kuliš (1819–1897), Lesja Ukrajinka (1871–1913), Mychajlo Staryc’kyj (1840–1904), and Borys Hrinčenko (1863–1910), but also less studied poets such as Volodymyr Samijlenko (1864–1925) and Volodymyr Šaškevyč (1839–1885). This article does not explicitly follow a chronological order but treats Ukrainian poetry of the post-Ševčenkian era up to the establishment of modernism as a diverse but cohesive segment of Ukrainian literary history. The examples and the authors I discuss obviously cannot cover the entire range of texts that might be drawn upon in a discussion of literature as a theme of literature in late 19^th-century Ukrainian poetry. I do not underestimate the importance of changes in the attitude toward the repressions directed against the Ukrainian language over time, nor the significant differences between its status in the Ukrainian lands under the Russian Empire and those that were parts of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Nonetheless, in light of the relative stability of the cultural situation in Ukraine in the years from Ševčenko’s death to the beginning of the new century, I claim that the poets and the texts under examination may be regarded as representative. I argue that in those decades Ukrainian poetry, within both the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, perceived itself as a precarious institution aware of its importance for the reawakening of the nation but deprived of resonance in the present and unsure about its future. I will devote particular attention to the nexus between temporality and the poetic voice, with the latter attempting, or failing, to imagine a future in spite, or as a consequence, of the lack of a present, which seems to condemn the Ukrainian subject to silence and hopelessness. I will also reflect on the intrinsic ambiguity of poetic texts that thematize silence and incommunicability. Such texts, I propose to show, performatively contradict the artistic impotence that they declare, while also hinting at a need for self-justification and restraint, and thus at a sort of artistic inhibition. I offer some reflections on the role of aesthetic judgment in the evaluation and interpretation of texts, especially those written in precarious conditions and reflecting the experience of social and aesthetic precarity. Finally, I make some observations on the challenges that the precariousness of Ukrainian poetic endeavour in the period under consideration may represent for literary history and its reassessments.

2 In search of words, an audience, and Ukraine

In one of Pantelejmon Kuliš’s most famous poetic texts from the 1880 s, the lyrical subject identifies his inspiration with the very survival of Ukraine and its culture before the political rebirth of the nation:

Кобзо, моя непорочна утіхо!

Чом ти мовчиш? Задзвони мені стиха,

Голосом правди святої дзвони,

Нашу тісноту гірку спом'яни.

Може, чиє ще не спідлене серце

Важко заб'ється, до серця озветься,

Як на бандурі струна до струни.

Хто не здоліє озватись,

Хай обізветься німими сльозами;

Ти ж своє слово дзвони-промовляй,

Душам братерським заснуть не давай.

[...]

Кобзо! ти наша одрада єдина...

Поки із мертвих воскресне Вкраїна,

Поки дождеться живої весни,

Ти нам про нашу тісноту дзвони.

[...]

(Kuliš 1908: 1)

[Kobza, my innocent joy!

Why don’t you speak? Play gently to me,

Sing with the voice of the holy truth,

Our bitter oppression remember.

Maybe someone’s not yet corrupted heart

Will start to beat again, will speak to my heart,

Like one string of a bandura to another.

Those who won’t manage to speak –

Let them answer with mute tears,

While you play, while you sing your own word,

So that the souls of your brothers don’t sleep.

[...]

Kobza! You are our sole consolation...

Until Ukraine arises from the dead,

Until a vibrant spring comes upon her,

Ring out to us of our pain.

[...]

A leading name of the Ukrainian national movement of the second half of the 19^th century and a modernizеr of the Ukrainian literary language, Pantelejmon Kuliš authored both lyric and narrative poetry.^[6] The subject of [“Kobzo, moja neporočna uticho!”]^[7] posits poetry as the voice of truth, a voice expected to be able to function in the present and to imagine a future, while also recollecting memories of a painful past. However, the expectation that the subject has for poetry are initially frustrated by its silence, its incapacity to resound and convey a message. It is the absence of a Ukrainian nation that condemns the subject’s utterances to the status of monologues. At the same time, the subject also expects other subjects to be willing to react to (his) poetry, which he indirectly presents as an expression of his own heart, but the absence of a community capable of responding to the subject’s opening up of his heart risks frustrating the subject’s efforts at communication. In spite of this apparent failure of communication, the subject exhorts his kobza to continue playing, in the hope that overcoming silence will be possible in the future. In the present, even the seemingly weak act of crying may be seen as a sign of national reawakening and a precondition for speaking up and acting for change. The equation of poetry with a kobza posits literary communication as a substitute for open, explicit national conversations, or at least as a fundamental part of the nation-(re)building process. The penultimate stanza posits poetry as the only joy for Ukrainians at a time when their country is yet to arise from its vegetative state. Poetry is at the same time a source of delight and a constant reminder of suffering, which the lyrical subject sees as a precondition for political struggle. Condemned to thematize unease, poetry is programmed to act as a medicine against national oblivion. Combining the themes of pain and musicality, the poem balances between despair and hope, the desolation of the present and the much-needed hope for the future rebirth of the Ukrainian nation from its state of lethargy.

While in [“Kobzo, moja neporočna uticho!”] Pantelejmon Kuliš offers a kind of poetry that thematizes both dejection and faith, Mychajlo Staryc’kyj, a leading name of Ukrainian theatre of the late 19^th century, portrays the lyrical subject’s solitude as a consequence of his community’s failure to act as a community:

Нема світу, темрява на дворі

А на серці-ж, як у бурю в морі...

Хожу-нужу круг сумної хати

І нема з кім серця розважати,–

Розпитатись, побалакать стиха

Про недолі та про наші лиха,

Яку в скруті собі дати раду?

Ех! немає у нас, братці, ладу–

Всюду ніч, хоч виколи ти око,

А до Бога, сказано, – високо!

(Staryc’kyj 1883: 10)

[There’s no light, it’s dark outside,

But my heart is like a stormy sea...

I walk around my mournful house in boredom

And there’s no one with whom to unload my heart,

To take counsel, to chat in peace

About our misfortunes and woes,

How we might stay alive in spite of all?

There’s no order among us, my friends.

It’s always night, as black as pitch.

And God is so, so far away!]

At the core of the poem is the contrast between the subject, bursting with vitality and anxious to share his experience with his community, and the absence of the said community. The subject’s neurotic moving around the “mournful house,” which fills him with discomfort, is made even more distressing by the impossibility of sharing one’s own pain with a like-minded other. The subject envisages a modest, quiet form of communication, centred around the imagined, but missing community’s suffering, but the total lack of an interlocutor condemns the subject to solitude and silence.^[8] The last lines of the poem postulate the presence of a series of potential interaction partners, who remain unable to share their torment with each other because of the missing “order” of the still-to-be-built (Ukrainian) home. The night of silence, which makes Ukrainians detached from both their peers and God, leaves the subject condemned to keep talking with himself, possibly alluding to an idea of poetry as a solitary, pointless activity unable to reach out to a significant audience and make an impact.

Other examples of poetry centred around impossible communication are to be found in Lesja Ukrajinka’s first collection Na krylach pisen’ [On the Wings of Songs] (first published in 1893, with a 2^nd edition in 1904). Na krylach pisen’ includes an 1890 seven-poem cycle dedicated to Ukrajinka’s uncle and leading Ukrainian intellectual Mychajlo Drahomanov (1841–1895), titled “Sim strun” [“The Seven Strings”], which elaborates on typical romantic themes such as the connection between poetry and music, the beauty of nature, and the plight of the motherland. The fifth poem, or song, of the cycle, titled “Sol (Rondeau)”, thematizes a profound disjunction between the present time and the free flow of poetry:

Соловейковий спів навесні

Ллється в гаю, в зеленім розмаю,

Та пісень тих я чуть не здолаю,

І весняні квітки запашні

Не для мене розквітли у гаю, –

Я не бачу весняного раю;

Тії співи та квіти ясні,

Наче казку дивну, пригадаю –

У сні!..

Вільні співи, гучні, голосні

В ріднім краю я чути бажаю, –

Чую скрізь голосіння сумні!

Ох, невже в тобі, рідний мій краю,

Тільки й чуються вільні пісні –

У сні?

(Ukrajinka 2021: 65)

The spring magic of May’s tender green

Floods the woodland with nightingale singing,

Yet my heart barely hears the sweet trilling,

And the fragrant spring flowers, it seems,

Not for me through the woodland are springing.

I am blind to the vernal awakening.

But the flower, the birdsong serene

Will come hunting me, always enchanting,

In dreams...

For my land I have one wish supreme:

That free song resound joyous and ringing –

Yet I hear but the wail of the keen!

And my heart, shall I hear happy singing

Nowhere else in my native demesne –

But in dreams?

(Ukrainka 1975: 33)

Poems of this kind may strike the reader with their simplicity, their naïf character. In spite of its more or less seeming modesty, a poem such as “Sol (Rondeau)” provides interesting metaliterary reflections on poetic self-perception in late 19^th-century Ukraine. The stereotypical identification of the Ukrainian voice with the nightingale’s song is followed by the appearance of the lyrical subject, who presents herself as incapable of hearing and seeing. There is no connection between the subject and the world that surrounds her, with the only possibility of hearing songs and seeing flowers being provided by dreams. In the second part of the rondeau, the lyrical subject presents herself as able to perceive the world that surrounds her, but she hears only lamentation, not the “free song” that she hopes for. The poem ends with a question, with the subject asking herself whether it is only while dreaming that she can hear free songs. This seemingly innocent question can be seen as casting doubt on the artistic value of the very poem through which the question is asked. The ambiguous status of the poem and of the cycle that includes it is reinforced by their respective titles and by the fact that the poems of the cycle combine a narrative and a reflexive approach with an aspiration towards musical purity. Presented as musical variations – i. e., as a “pure” text – these poems may be viewed as questioning their own ability to provide readers or listeners with an intelligible message, something that a literary culture in a condition of precarity must do in order to have a chance at fighting for its own survival. On the other hand, although the poem does not refrain from openly naming Ukraine’s enslavement, the musical framework might function as a strategy aimed at relativizing the subversive potential of the text, thus easing its dissemination in a context marked by colonial oppression and helping create a wider readership for Ukrainian texts.

In the first poem of the cycle, which announces that Mother Ukraine is the primary addressee of these poems, the absence of a present seems to be at least partially compensated by faith in the future, in which songs will be free to flow “from the heart.” Interestingly, in spite of the initial evocation of Ukraine and its/her suffering, the path that the subject envisages for her future songs is one that is only partially linked with Ukraine’s destiny. Although the poem begins and ends on a patriotic note, it is the song’s, or the poem’s autonomous journey that constitutes the bulk of the poem’s content:

“Do”:

До тебе, Україно, наша бездольная мати,

Струна моя перша озветься.

І буде струна урочисто і тихо лунати,

І пісня від серця поллється.

[...]

І, може, зустрінеться пісня моя самотная

У світі з пташками-піснями,

То швидко полине тоді тая гучная зграя

Далеко шляхами-тернами.

Полине за синєє море, полине за гори,

Літатиме в чистому полю,

Здійметься високо-високо в небесні простори

І, може, спітка тую долю.

І, може, тоді завітає та доля жадана

До нашої рідної хати,

До тебе, моя ти Україно мила, кохана,

Моя безталанная мати!

(Ukrajinka 2021: 61)

Doh

Hymn. Grave

To you, our dear Mother Ukraine wracked with misery boundless,

I pluck the first string of my lyre.

And softly the sound will flow out with a solemn profoundness,

A song that my heart will inspire.

[...]

Somewhere in the world it may be that my lone-winging song

With birdsongs will meet and will blend,

Then over far trails strewn with thorns in a clamorous throng

The songsters their passage will wend.

The flock will cross mountains, the flock will cross seas of dark blue,

Fly over the fair fields of grain,

And high, oh so high, the heavenly vaults passing through,

May find there the fate of Ukraine.

And maybe that long-desired happiness will appear,

And over our hearths it will reign,

Will come to you, land that I love, my country so dear,

My ill-fated Mother Ukraine.

(Ukrainka 1975: 27)

The circular structure of the poem, which begins and ends with a celebration of Ukraine, does not deny its being at the same time a praise of pure poetry, thus paving the way for the slow, difficult establishment of modernist aesthetics in Ukraine with its negation of the idea that literature must directly, explicitly pursue a civic duty and be immediately comprehensible by conveying an unmistakable message. The path that the song will follow is marked by uncertainty (see the frequent repetition of može, maybe) and suffering (šljachamy-ternamy, thorny paths), but the song is also led by a striving towards purity and freedom (see the čyste pole on which it is set to fly) that appears to be a condition for its eventual reunion with Ukraine.^[9] Lesja Ukrajinka’s poetry – more profound and intellectually challenging than is generally acknowledged – embodies the ambiguity of the self-positioning of Ukrainian poetry after Ševčenko, torn between duty towards the national cause and the necessity to further enrich the stylistic and thematic spectrum of Ukrainian literature after Ševčenko’s breakthrough.

The absence of the (poetic) word, the negation of the ability to communicate in the present so central to Lesja Ukrajinka’s early metaliterary poems is also crucial in an 1881 poem by Borys Hrinčenko titled “Doky?” [“How long?”]. Hrinčenko, mostly known as a lexicographer – his Slovar’ ukrajins’koji movy [Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language] is a milestone of Ukrainian lexicography – was also active as a poet and a prose writer. “Doky?” links the present with its lack of freedom to silence:

Минає час, минають люди;

Ми всі ждемо того, що буде,

І кажем всі: давно вже час,

Щоб воля та прийшла й до нас,

А все її нема, не йде,-

А час не жде, а час не жде!..

[...]

І тяжко так, що, може, ми

Гіркими плакали б слізьми,

Якби не гніт цей днів тяжких,

Щоб нас, за довгий час, усіх

І одслід навіть з мук навчив

Ховать в душі без сліз і слів.

І так на світі живемо,

На плечах лихо несемо.

І доки будемо так жить?

Ніхто не скаже – все мовчить!

(Hrinčenko 1965: 48–49)

[Time passes, people pass.

We’re all waiting for what is to come,

And we all say: it’s high time

That freedom came to us,

But she’s not there, to us she won’t come,

But time won’t wait, it will not wait!

[...]

And we’re so heavy at heart that maybe

We’d weep so many bitter tears

Were it not for the oppression of these days

That over many years has taught us all

To hide even the traces of our pain

In our souls, shedding no tears and uttering no words.

And so we live on earth,

Carrying pain on our shoulders.

How long shall we live like that?

No one can tell, there’s only silence!]

Hrinčenko’s poem is largely based on the traditional Ševčenkian characterization of Ukraine’s destiny as tragic.^[10] The absence of freedom in the present means the impossibility of speaking. The plight of the Ukrainians is presented as so dehumanizing that it even prevents them from crying, with words (sliv) being equated with tears (sliz) through paronomasia. The collective subject of the poem – which can be read as a sign of Hrinčenko’s populist belief in the social function of literature^[11] – is only able to speak to express its need for freedom (volja) before succumbing to muteness. The triumph of silence in the last line of the poem anticipates the coming of a future that looks much like the present, with the poetic voice acting as the only mouthpiece of Ukraine, partially and precariously making up for the voicelessness of the people. In contrast to Lesja Ukrajinka’s vision of a brighter future, one in which the song and the motherland will be able to meet their own shared destiny, Hrinčenko explicitly thematizes the urgency of speaking up to prevent Ukraine’s muteness from becoming chronic and irreversible, to fight against the given fact that “the subaltern cannot speak” (Spivak 1988: 104). Poetry being the only voice still available to the Ukrainian people to express their suffering, the poet maintains his role as a leader of a people deprived of agency, in line with the Ševčenkian model. The paradox of the poem’s pointe, with its exclamation mark concluding a sentence decrying the pervasiveness of silence, lies in its possible allusion to the Russian romantic tradition of poems such as Vasilij Žukovskij’s “Nevyrazimoe” and Fedor Tjutčev’s “Silentium!” whose final lines («И лишь молчание понятно говорит» and «Внимай их пенью и молчи!», respectively) celebrate the communicative power of silence and its alleged pre-eminence over words. Conversely, Hrinčenko rhetorically depicts silence as the pathological condition of an oppressed nation unable to imagine a future for itself.

The need to create or strengthen a community on the basis of communication also plays a role in the poetry of Volodymyr Samijlenko (1864–1925), a less well-known writer from the Myrhorod province who published mostly in Western Ukraine. With Ivan Franko’s help he published his collection Ukrajini. Zbirnyk poezij 1885–1906 [To Ukraine. A Collection of Poems 1885–1906] in Lviv in 1906. In his 1885 poem “Perespiv” (“Refrain”), originally published in 1885 in the literary journal Zorja, Samijlenko offers one more depiction ex negativo of contemporary life as based on a lack of everything that makes human existence meaningful:

В кого в серці нема весни,

Той весни й не взнає;

Хто сам мовчить, тому луна

Не відповідає.

Хто не поет, тому шкода́

Зрозуміть піїта;

Хто не коха, той не найде

Ні в кого привіта.

На що думка, коли вона

Не дбає нікому?

На що розум, що зачинивсь

У собі самому?

Що з писання, поки його

Хто не прочитає,

Або з душі, що другої

Душі не шукає?

Кожде життє повинно єсть

З другим життєм злитись;

Нема серця, котре-б могло

В самоті розвитись.

І тілько той, хто збувсь себе –

Сирота безродний;

Не взнать тому весни по вік,

Хто серцем холодний.

(Samijlenko 1906: 4)

[Those who have no spring in their hearts

Will know no spring;

Those who say nothing

Will hear no echo.

Those who are not poets will not

Understand the poet;

Those who don’t love

Will find no welcome.

What is the good of a thought

That doesn’t care about the others?

What is the good of a mind

If it’s closed in on itself?

What is the good of a writing

If no one will read it,

What is the good of a soul

That won’t seek another?

Every life must merge

With other lives;

There’s no heart that can thrive

Being alone.

And only those who have lost themselves

Are orphans without kin;

They’ll never see the spring,

Those with a cold heart.]

Samijlenko’s poem postulates absence of communication as a given fact that makes community impossible. Although this condition is not apparently deprived of an alternative – with the poem plainly describing how things are when something is missing – the poem offers no positive counterpart to the silence, cold, and isolation that dominate the world, in line with Hrinčenko’s grim picture of the present and of the lack of a voice able to lament suffering or act to make a change. The poem abstains from concrete historical or geographical references, but the title of the collection, Ukrajini (To Ukraine), makes it clear that the horizon of Samijlenko’s poetic world is a national one. Writing, poetry, and the ability to think and live are interconnected, but the current state of things deprive all human activities of validity and effectiveness. In contrast to Lesja Ukrajinka, Samijlenko in his poem does not present poetry as having value per se. Without an audience, poetry is meaningless. Nonetheless, as in Lesja Ukrajinka’s cycle Sim strun, the title of Samijlenko’s poem might hint at poetry’s ability to function as pure sound, seemingly transforming its more or less veiled political content into pure music, words into notes, thus confirming the lack of communicative potential thematized in the poem itself.

Samijlenko’s poem also shares with Lesja Ukrajinka’s and Borys Hrinčenko’s texts the pivotal role of the negative particle ne in shaping the poetic world as based on absence and negation. In an article on the rhetoric of negation in poetry, Lisa Nahajec argues that “the stylistic effect of creating meaning through negation adds appreciably to the meaning-making potential of a text” (2009: 110), fostering readers’ appreciation of its “pragmatically relevant meaning” (2009: 110) and allowing them “to describe their relationship both with what is realized, and what remains unrealized” (2009: 111). In spite of its apparent negation of itself, poetry enables both writers and readers to imagine the unrealized potential of the Ukrainian national community, thus laying the basis for its future political embodiment.

From a slightly different perspective, and in line with Ševčenko’s much-quoted image of the word standing guard to protect the helpless slaves,^[12] the opening poem of Samijlenko’s collection posits poetry, or songs, as weapons in the fight for the motherland:

[...]

Прийми ж мої пісні, як дар малий

Великої і вірної любови!

Що зможе дати мій талан слабий

В скарбницю любої твоєї мови,

Він певно дасть, і знай, що в час страшний

Твій син тобі не пожаліє крови

І що не спинить страх усіх погріз

Моїх пісень, моїх за тебе сліз.

(Samijlenko 1906: 2)

[Accept my songs as a small gift

Of great, of faithful love!

What can my feeble talent give

To the treasure-house of your beloved language?

For certain it will give much. And know that in some awful hour

Your son will spare no blood

And that no fear of threats will stop

My songs, my tears for you.]

In this poem, titled “Ukrajini” (“To Ukraine”) like the collection as a whole, both Ukraine and Ukrainian songs are sure to have a future («Він певно дасть»), with poetry playing a significant role in guaranteeing Ukraine’s survival in spite of fear and menace coming from the outside. However, it is not only songs themselves that are able to provide a significant contribution to the battle for the survival of the mother(land). It is the subject’s active role in the fight and his awareness of his (literary) talent that prove crucial in laying the basis for the regeneration of what is currently a suffering, aching family or society. The subject’s poetic activity is also fundamental to preserving and enriching the national language, without which it is impossible to conceive of the national community as such. Interestingly, the poem ends with the same identification of tears with words, here presented as songs, that Hrinčenko’s subject or collective subject uses to refer to censorship, self-censorship, inhibition, and frustration among Ukrainians as a result of forced silence.

Other Ukrainian poems from the second half of the 19^th century confront their readers with the issue of poetic language and its role in the social and political fight. In a poem from his 1863 collection Zil’nyk (Flowerbed), Volodymyr Šaškevyč (1839–1885) offers his readers an attack against the “hopeless singers”, whose lack of faith is a threat to the common cause:

Ви малодухи, маловіри!

Гнилі трупи, джума ви!

Свободно гнити вам без віри

І без надії й без любви,

Лиш не свободно ту отрую

Народам лляти у пісні,

Троїти віру ще живую...

В живій здоровій ще сем’ї!

В народу рани є глибокі,

Но він не впав же так як ви;

В его є закон і пророки

Є мученики, віщуни!

[...]

(Šaškevyč 1896: 33)

[You cowards, you infidels!

You rotten corpses, you are a plague!

You can rot there with no faith,

With no hope and with no love,

But you cannot pour

Your poison into songs,

You cannot poison the faith that’s still alive...

A family that’s still alive and healthy!

The people’s wounds are deep,

But it’s not fallen as you are;

It has its law, it has its prophets,

It has its martyrs, it has its seers!

[...]

[Vy maloduchy, maloviry!] posits contemporary poetry as opposed to the truth of the people. Following the model of Ševčenko’s “Zapovit” (“Testament”), the lyrical subject portrays the national community as a family. In spite of the deep wounds it bears on its skin, the national family is portrayed as healthy and capable of resisting the decay that has affected the venomous hopelessness of (most) contemporary poets. In the third stanza the subject specifies that it is the people’s prophets and martyrs that save it from moral decline. The relationship between the people and its mouthpieces is ambiguous: on the one hand, the subject presents the people as an autonomous source of ethical integrity; on the other, its wholesomeness is the result of its being represented and voiced by cultivated, highly committed representatives, who act as agents of the law that the people has in itself.

[Vy maloduchy, maloviry!] comes after a poem dedicated titled “Do moho bat’ka” (“To my father”), in which the father’s heritage is being dishonoured by the voices that have taken his place after his passing. Volodymyr Šaškevyč was the son of Markijan Šaškevyč (1811–1843), a member of the Rus’ka Trijcja poetic group and hence one of the most influential voices of pre-Ševčenkian Ukrainian poetry. In “Do moho bat’ka” the subject summons his dead father to come back to life in order to silence the obnoxious crows that are occupying the space of contemporary Ukrainian poetry:

Батьку рідний, соколоньку,

Ти руський співаче!

Та ти чуєш, яку ворон

Пісню тобі краче?

[...]

(Šaškevyč 1896: 32)

[Father my, my dearest,

You Rusian singer!

But can you hear the song

The crow is croaking to you?]

Significantly, while looking for a poetic language able to reflect the present and guide the people towards a dignified future, the subject looks at the past. Although it is my argument that Ukrainian poetry of the second half of the 19^th century can be regarded as a relatively cohesive segment of Ukrainian literary history, Volodymyr Šaškevyč’s texts of the 1860 s show how in the aftermath of Ševčenko’s death the practical and symbolic weight of the past, Ševčenkian and pre-Ševčenkian, was too high to allow significant attempts at a true modernization of literary styles and themes.

With the onset of a modernist sensibility in the last years of the 19^th century and the first years of the 20^th, thanks to the modernization efforts of such writers as Ivan Franko and the members of the Lviv-based Moloda Muza literary group (1906–1909), the social solitude of the subject tends to be substituted by his longing for a distant woman whose love is as coveted and vital as it is impossible to enjoy. A poem such as Volodymyr Šaškevyč’s may be said to have anticipated the discussions of the first years of the new century on the tasks of Ukrainian literature, which saw a traditionalist, or “populist” front facing the early modernists. While the populists believed in an idea of literature as a public institution with clear pastoral tasks, based on accessible texts that would cater to the educational needs of a wide audience, the modernists strived for a refined literary culture prospectively able to attain the same quality and diversity as Western and Central European literatures. As Volodymyr Šaškevyč’s poems clearly show, the populists’ resistance to a kind of literature not directly and primarily aimed at giving voice to the nation and its voiceless masses had deep roots, harking back to the mid-century and the years following Ševčenko’s death.

Finally, the theme – evident in Samijlenko’s poetry – of trust in the strength of the poetic word but unease at its present inability to enact change, can also be observed in the early poetry of Ivan Franko, the most influential Galician writer of the fin de siècle. In his poems from the first half of the 1870 s, which he republished in 1914 in a volume titled Iz lit mojej molodosty [From the Years of My Youth], Franko combines faith with despair, optimism with fatalism. In “Narodna pisnja (Sonet)” [“Folk Song (Sonnet)”], the opening text of his 1914 collection, the spirit of the people is compared to a mysterious well able to move the subject’s heart:

[...]

Криниця та з чудовими струями,

То люду мого дух, що хоч у сум повитий,

Співа до серця серцем і словами.

Як початок тих струй усім закритий,

Так з темних жерел ті слова повстали,

Щоб чистим жаром серце запалити.

(Franko 1914: 9)

[That well that pours that magic water

Is the spirit of my people, that though wrapped up in sorrow,

Can sing to my heart with its heart and its words.

The source of those waters is closed,

It’s from a secret spring that they have come

To ignite my heart with their pure ardour.]

The subject draws his strength and inspiration from the presumably inexhaustible source of the words of the people, which in spite of their intrinsic sadness are capable of nourishing his spirit and inflaming his heart. The relationship between the people and the subject appears symbiotic: the subject is unable to create without the spirit of his people, while the people risks remaining unheard without the subject functioning as its mouthpiece. However, another early poem by Franko titled “Mohyla” [“The Grave”] shows the protagonist – in one of the previous stanzas hailed as a prophet (prorok) – confronting the deafness of his potential interlocutors:

І виросла над ним могила,

Пісок вкрив віщеє лице,

Померли ті, що чтили та любили,

Ніхто тепер не сплаче, не спімне,

Кругом як в гробі душно, тихо,

Житє поникло, жар палить,

Мов в серці схованеє лихо –

Не чути, а душа болить.

(Franko 1914: 16)

[And the grave has grown over him,

The sand has covered his foreboding face,

And those who loved and honored him have died,

No one’s crying, nobody remembers,

As silent and as narrow as the grave,

Life has gone down, the heat is burning,

Like evil hidden in a heart.

You can’t hear it, but my soul is aching.]

With the passing of the prophet and of those who could enjoy his living words, the community has lost its connection to the past and hence its vital force and ability to resist evil. The lyrical subject, who is still aware of the prophet, has no one with whom he can share his knowledge and his feelings. His suffering is doomed to remain unheard, at least for the foreseeable future.

3 Conclusion: aesthetic judgment and/or contextual reading

In conclusion, I shall reflect on the place of this kind of poetry in the still-to-be-(re)constructed canon of Ukrainian literature and in our perception of its value as readers of the 21^st century, in a context in which the Russian full-scale aggression against Ukraine has boosted the need to reassess the history of the national literature, foregrounding its diversity, its struggle for autonomy from imperial narratives, and its place in the European cultural map. This involves very contentious issues such as the role of judgments about aesthetic value in literary history and the related question of literary merit, of what deserves to be read, analyzed, and also translated, and thus made part of the canon of European and world literature.^[13] If one accepts the validity of an interpretation based on aesthetic judgment, one could claim that the poetry of authors such as Hrinčenko and Samijlenko, or even that of Lesja Ukrajinka if compared to her experiments in other genres such as drama, does not bear comparison with that of Ševčenko before them or the mature modernists after them. The same could be, and has been, said about the very early modernists of the first years of the 20^th century, such as the molodomuzivci. If one refrains from judging such texts on the basis of their supposed, and objectively undefinable, aesthetic worth, one will likely use other parameters to analyze them, including their role in developing the Ukrainian language, keeping it alive as a literary language, and diversifying the arsenal of post-Ševčenko Ukrainian literature.^[14] Monroe Beardsley has defined “the aesthetic value of anything as its capacity to impart, through the adequate apprehension of it, a marked aesthetic character to experience” (1981: 239). A definition such as Beardsley’s leaves ample room for diverse modes of appreciation not limited to judging the aesthetic product under scrutiny against stringent, though questionable, criteria such as innovation and poignancy. In her The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski has pointed out “scepticism as dogma” as the trademark of contemporary critique (2015: 9), which condemns the critic’s eye to keep looking for pitfalls in texts and their established readings instead of freely appreciating them in their complexity and diversity. In an earlier book, Felski had written about the many “uses” of literature. Felski observed that “aesthetic value is inseparable from use, but also that our engagements with texts are extraordinarily varied, complex, and often unpredictable in kind” (Felski 2008: 8) If literature has to be viewed, among other things, as a potential instrument of change, its value as a platform or workshop for the development of new aesthetic tastes and capabilities should be also acknowledged, which implies that its evolution will contain phases of literary exercise and possibly clumsy experimentation.

In the introduction to his prize-winning anthology with the telling title Krim Kobzarja (Besides Kobzar), Mychajlo Nazarenko has invited his readers to put aside their prejudices against Ukrainian literature of the long 19^th century: History – including cultural history – should be freed from teleology and finalism. As John Crowley put it, if we can imagine another past, we can also create a different future.”^[15] Discussing Dmytro Čyževs’kyj’s reflections on the incompleteness (nepovnota) of Ukrainian literature under the empire, Nazarenko stresses how in the long 19^th century Ukrainian literature was part of other cultural systems, which resulted in its forced dependence upon strictly regulated, multilayered aesthetic systems driven by clear political goals. The path of 19th-century Ukrainian literature shows the passage from its subordination to imperial classicism to its being an integral, if not altogether leading part of the national project. As human beings we cannot exclude aesthetic judgment from our apprehension of literary texts. Likewise, it is hard to conceive of literary history otherwise than as manifesting a certain degree of teleology. However, this should not prevent scholars and readers from appreciating the value of a text or group of texts in the context of the historical circumstances of a given period. In spite of its being conditioned by external censorship, late nineteenth-century Ukrainian literature acted as a workshop of national (re)construction, aware of its importance for the building of a modern Ukrainian community and of the limits of its space of action. In her article on the contingencies of value in Anglophone literatures, Barbara Herrnstein Smith wrote that:

the value of a literary work is continuously produced and re-produced by the very acts of implicit and explicit evaluation that are frequently invoked as “reflecting” its value and therefore as being evidence of it. In other words, what are commonly taken to be the signs of literary value are, in effect, also its springs. (Herrnstein Smith 1983: 30)

In the Ukrainian context, marked by frequent historical ruptures and external pressures, such a process of continuous, multi-layered re-evaluation of one’s own literary heritage was generally impossible, condemning certain segments of the literary process to remain unexplored. The intrinsic precarity of late-imperial Ukrainian literature, which it explicitly shared with its few readers, and its need to combine aesthetic quest with accessibility and intelligibility meant a constant compromise, a continuous need to strike a balance between the many functions and uses that Ukrainian literary texts had to perform, and could have performed in a less rigid environment. A fuller understanding of pre-modernist and early modernist Ukrainian literature’s ability to function in its context and more nuanced invocations of the criteria of aesthetic value in its study are among the many tasks awaiting scholars of Ukrainian culture. Moreover, such an endeavour would be a first step towards a broader, comparative study of the role of poetic subjectivities in (re-)imagining (national) communities in Central and Eastern Europe after the breakthrough of Romanticism and before the new beginning that came with modernism.