Chapter EIGHT: Ivan Levitsky-Nechuy

With the abolition of serfdom, there vanished from Ukrainian life the worst abuses which the earlier writers had experienced and described. The ruthless floggings were mitigated or abolished. It was no longer possible for the master to separate husband and wife or parents and children to suit a passing fancy or to indulge a mad caprice. A more humane spirit grew up in the villages and the old system gradually changed. The millenium was not reached, however, and new difficulties were added to the peasant lot, because with the abolition of the almost autocratic power of the landlord, the economic position of the peasant often became more complicated. Where he had formerly worked out his obligations, often at terrific cost to his well being, now it was necessary for him to secure by his labor the necessary money to pay his new obligations to the state and the land owner. The reform had not been far-reaching enough to put all the peasants on the road to material prosperity and the new conditions demanded a new type of literature.

The author who handled this new period was Ivan Levitsky, better known under his pen name of Nechuy. He was born in 1838, the very year when Shevchenko received his freedom and four years after the birth of Marko Vovchok. He was educated in the theological academy at Kiev, the very school which had been made famous in the seventeenth century by Peter Mohyla, and then he became a teacher of the Russian language, history and geography in the higher elementary schools. Here he toiled until he was able to retire on a pension. He still continued to live in Kiev and gradually became almost a recluse. He drifted away from active contact with his fellow men and gradually slid into an obscurity which was aided by his devotion to his own theories of what Ukrainian literature should be. Finally the Central Rada of the free Ukrainian Republic gave him a pension in 1918 as its first gift to a needy writer, but it was too late for it to be of service and he died in a very short time.

Levitsky was induced to write in Ukrainian through his reading of Shevchenko’s _Kobzar_ and also by the influence of the _Osnova_, the journal which Kulish had founded in 1861. These models determined the course of his life and led him to prose and the social novel. In a few cases he attempted to deal with the life of the peasants under serfdom as in _Mikola Dzherya_ but that period was definitely passed with the ending of serfdom and he turned his attention to the contemporary post-abolition scenes.

His first works were published in 1867 in the _Pravda_, a journal appearing in Lviv, and for many years during the time when the Ukrainian language could not be used in Russia for the publication of books, his works appeared regularly in the Galician capital.

The great bulk of his works dealt with the unjust and burdensome conditions of life immediately after the liberation of the serfs. Thus for example in _The Baba Paraska and the Baba Palashka_, we have a picture of the ignorance and lack of education that was hindering the economic development of Ukraine. The _Buried Alive_ is another example of the hardships of the people and in general most of his characters are completely overwhelmed by existence and represent the failures who are unable to master life and work out their own salvation.

It is not for nothing that in one of his tales, the _Zaporozhians_, he represents the return of one of the old time women after a lapse of a century to the same village where she had formerly lived. She finds that life has become even more intolerable than it had been in the days of the Hetman state, when at least there was the possibility for a determined character to break away and live on the steppes a wild and tempestuous but free existence.

Levitsky also noted the beginning of the growth of factories in Ukraine, especially in the _Burlachka_. In these conditions were worse than in the villages. Long hours, utter lack of protection, miserable pay and impossible living conditions marked the life of the poor unfortunates whom need had driven to the new life. It was worse than the old slavery which had been abolished with serfdom, for in the industrial communities there were not even those safeguards and that healthy atmosphere and fresh air that had existed in the village.

He noted too the other evils as militarism and the effect of army service that were weighing heavily upon the people as in the _Two Moscow Women_, but the thing that concerned him the most was the gap between the intelligentsia and the people and the great dangers which the former ran of being absorbed and remade by the two “aristocratic” cultures, the Polish and the Russian. There seemed to be a constant stream of young and vital forces sapped away from the people by the insidious power of example and of material reward.

Thus in the _Prichepa_ (_The Caviller_), Levitsky shows us pictures of Polish social influence in the neighborhood of Kiev and of the disastrous results that follow the attempts of the Ukrainians to adapt themselves to the Polish standards. Hanya, the daughter of the Orthodox priest, Father Fedir, marries a young Pole, Jan Seredynski. He is really of Ukrainian stock but his family has been Polonized for some generations. The young people get along well and improve their position financially, until the husband becomes infatuated with a Polish woman Zosya who offers him those superficial advantages that mark the Pole in the average Ukrainian story. For her he is willing to neglect his simple but wholesome wife. It breaks her heart. Finally her father thrashes him soundly and takes his daughter home but she pines away and dies and then her son dies and the unworthy husband is left alone without a position, for he has been discharged in the mess. The girl Zosya Przepinska is the daughter of a petty Polish aristocrat but a steward on an estate. She marries young Lemishka. This boy, the son of a prosperous Ukrainian trader, has been educated in Kiev and there has acquired a superficial Russian polish. Then as he comes under Polish influence he changes his name to its Polish form Lemishkovsky. He marries Zosya and for her sake and to keep up in her society, he sells his parental farm and goes to Kiev where he wastes his entire fortune. Then he comes back to a poor job as a steward and is ridiculed consistently by her aristocratic Polish friends, while she flirts unpardonably with Seredynski. Finally the whole family is engulfed in ruin, although she remains with him to secure her support while she continues her affairs with other men. Levitsky abhors the so-called aristocratic mode of life of the Polish nobles and of the Polonized Ukrainians which he contrasts to the simple existence of the ordinary peasants.

He bewails in _Prichepa_ the lack of a true enlightenment among the Ukrainians and he summarizes the situation in the following passage (p. 110ff), “Who in Kiev does not remember the time before the Sevastopol war? It was a heavy time for Ukraine, it was its bad time. The ordinary people groaned in heavy slavery under the _pans_, compelled to be silent and suffer, worse than before Khmelnitsky. And for every groan it was tortured in the Muscovite manner. Ukraine had forgotten its historical tradition and could not by knowledge reach its lost thoughts. On both sides of the Dnieper they were overwhelmed by foreign customs, in foreign skins, they heard a foreign tongue and forgot their own. Knowledge perished, education fell, remaining only in the scholastic Latin theological schools. The university knowledge was only the alphabet of European culture, cut on the official measure. This knowledge wished to train the people into Muscovites, for the army, for the administration. From the Ukrainian university and other schools came out bribers, grafting officials, unjust judges, who made the innocent guilty and the guilty innocent, those conservative teachers and professors, who twisted history on the Moscow orders, those Moskal officers who forgot their own people for profit. And the people were at forced labor, and the Polish and Muscovite landowners were stripping the last hide from Ukraine, at that time when our sincere Ukrainians for their young Ukrainian idea were sitting in slavery, in the distant Muscovite north. It was a hard time, may it never return!”

In the _Clouds_ which first appeared in 1874, Levitsky tried to show something of this period and of the evil results that attended the Russianization of the scholars of the day. Here the situation is reversed. The learned professor Dashkovich, entering the Theological Academy of Kiev as the only Ukrainian amid a group of Russians, lives an idealistic life but he becomes finally so interested in his philosophical studies that he forgets his native Ukraine and loses touch with his native village. Meanwhile as an adherent of Pan-Slavism, he talks incessantly about the Slavonic question in the Balkans but cannot see that there is anything to do at home. His daughter, a beautiful Ukrainian girl, is sent to fashionable Russian schools and comes out as a wilful and cynical Russian aristocratic girl who is perfectly satisfied to make a loveless marriage with a rich and distinguished colonel. She has been in love with a young and patriotic Ukrainian Radyuk, who wears Ukrainian costumes and speaks in public and private the Ukrainian language and who even tries to convert his beloved to the Ukrainian cause, but she rejects him because he is not fashionable enough and frivolous enough for her, despite the fact that she really loves him.

In 1890 he added several chapters to the novel to carry on the fate of Radyuk still further but they add little to the novel and still less to the character of the young man, for the hero finally submits to social pressure and takes a governmental position in the Caucasus where no one will know him and his past.

In other words the new man is no more effective than the old and the problem of how the Ukrainians were to secure a real understanding of European culture and such subjects as would be useful to them remained unsolved. Of one thing, Levitsky is absolutely sure. The teachers and all of those groups that stand for European culture are mere caricatures of what they should be. They have no appreciation of the deeper aspects of human life, the higher qualities of mankind, and they are really parasites on society. They and their institutions of learning are chiefly interested in the denationalization of the Ukrainians and they have no interest in true education, in truth, or in scholarship.

There are very sympathetic pictures of the life in the Theological Academy where Levitsky had studied himself in the dark days before the liberation of the serfs and he gives even more delightful pictures of some of the old Ukrainian landowners and business men who were continuing the old customs without bothering with the new fangled European notions and culture.

The novel shows some of the finest and some of the weakest points of Levitsky’s style but it has been generally considered his masterpiece and marks a definite epoch in the history of the Ukrainian novel.

Levitsky well represented the situation as it existed in his lifetime. He had grasped the fact that the final solution of the Ukrainian question was not so simple as the mass of the intellectual leaders might think. It was one thing to declare that Ukrainian culture should be kept inviolate. It was something else to modernize and develop it without falling under the temptation to abandon the solid virtues for a superficial polish which could profit no one. By this time it was clear that even the liberation of the serfs had not released the new spirit or produced a new and better life for everyone. The accomplishment of this was a task that called for the highest abilities and limitless self-sacrifice and the orators and the intelligentsia were not able to make these contributions. In a way his works were a condemnation of that educated class which in the name of a misunderstood European culture were cutting themselves off from all that was best in their people and who would not listen to reason, because they could not find it in the European garb that they envied. For the years after the liberation of the serfs, Levitsky was a good guide but his later avoidance of life led him to an isolation that marred the value of his works. However in his early years, he was a forcible and interesting writer and the Ukrainians need still to ponder the problems which he raised, even though he was unable to give a thorough and complete answer.