Chapter TWELVE: Mikhaylo Kotsyubinsky

During the greater part of the nineteenth century it was the task of the Ukrainian authors to arouse and educate their people. The nation in its darkest hour had lost to Russia or to Poland practically the whole of its educated class and the national habits and characteristics were preserved in the villages among the illiterate peasants. The first and most pressing duty was to form a new educated class, to give a knowledge of the past of Ukraine to those people who were but dimly conscious of their existence as a separate entity and to lay the foundation for a deeper study of their own traditions and habits. At the same time the harsh censorship and the regulations, especially of the Russian government, practically required that this work be carried on under the guise of the study of ethnography and archaeology. The very names of the journals that appeared in Russia as _Bulletin of the Archaeological Commission_ and the _Kievskaya Starina_, (_Antiquities of Kiev_) the only ones that were allowed to appear during the periods of repression show the truth of this statement and it was only natural accordingly that the writers who were compelled to work with one eye on the censorship tended to exploit these possibilities. There grew up in Ukrainian literature a definite ethnographic school and the writers with pleasure and profit gave long descriptions of the manners and customs of the villagers. The time, however, had to come, when the authors would no longer be content with these self-imposed limitations and would branch out into a broader field. The author who was to do this in prose was Mikhaylo Kotsyubinsky, one of the greatest artists in this field.

Kotsyubinsky was born at Vinnitsa in Podolia in 1864. His father was a poor official but during his father’s lifetime he was able to study in the bursa and the theological academy. He did not finish the course and after his father’s death he made his living for a while as a private tutor. He continued his own studies especially of literature and finally entered the government service. In the early nineties he was attached to the commission for the elimination of the phyloxera which was ruining the vineyards in the south and he passed several years in Bessarabia and the Crimea, where he had extensive opportunities to study the lives of the villagers. He then served in the statistical office in Chernihiv. During this time the Revolution of 1905 broke out and Kotsyubinsky became very friendly with Maxim Gorky and many of the leaders of the Social Democratic party of Russia. He finally retired on a pension in 1911 to devote himself entirely to literature. He went to Italy and lived near Gorky on the island of Capri. His heart grew steadily worse and he returned to Kiev for a long period of treatment but it did no good and he passed away in 1913 at the age of forty-nine.

Kotsyubinsky started to write in the same ethnographic realistic style that had been popularized by Levitsky-Nechuy. He had been inspired to write in Ukrainian by the _Kobzar_ of Shevchenko and the stories of Marko Vovchok but he very soon broadened his literary range by the diligent reading of later Russian authors such as Chekhov and also by the careful study of the French and Scandinavian naturalists as Zola, Maupassant, and Hamsun. All of these affected his style in passing but he gradually worked out his own attitude toward literature and developed that individual style in which his main works were written.

As he developed, he came more and more to understand the importance of beauty in writing. He realized that there was always one correct word artistically for every situation and he made great efforts to find that right word, so as to secure the maximum effectiveness of his work. He had a lyric and almost a sentimental appreciation of nature and his power of casting a roseate glow over a scene and giving a poetic picture in a few simple words of prose is marked. Perhaps of his contemporaries only Korolenko shares that power and he too was of Ukrainian origin, although he wrote in Russian. The ability to transfigure an unpleasant and sordid scene and make of it a thing of beauty without preventing the reader from realizing its real character is a marked feature of Kotsyubinsky’s style. It definitely advances him above the level of the great majority of the Ukrainian authors and makes him a European writer in the best sense.

Side by side with this is a delicate appreciation of human psychology. In his short stories with a remarkable economy in means, he is able to penetrate the human heart and to express the most poignant feelings and the most secret ambitions of a man or woman.

These characteristics are most clearly seen in his last collection published just about the time of his death and especially in the _Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors_, a story of peasant life in the Beskid Mountains which he visited in 1911. It is the account of the life of the shepherd boy Ivan Paliychuk. We see the young boy under the shadow of the family feud with the Gutenyuk family in which his father is killed, and his love for young Marichka of the rival clan. There is a really idyllic picture of the young love of these two children of nature, but Ivan is compelled by poverty to take a position as herdsman for the summer in the mountains and during that summer Marichka is drowned. Later he marries the wealthy Palagna and all seems to prosper but there is not that affection and sincerity between them that had existed between the young Ivan and his first love. His wife misbehaves shamefully with the sorcerer Yura and the two plan to kill Ivan by magic but he, broken hearted and in despair, wanders off into the woods and mountains, lured on by a spirit, a Nyavka that took the form of his beloved Marichka. Finally he fell over a precipice and was killed. Then came the funeral rites, the entertainments and the games that were customary while all through the neighborhood resounded the death strains of the Hutsul pipes. How far at this moment Kotsyubinsky is from the cold realism of the earlier authors can be seen from the way in which he enters into the realm of the peasant superstitions and makes plausible the appearance to Ivan in his despair of all those supernatural beings, the Nyavka and the Chugaystyr. He carries his readers into the spirit of the mountains not in any cold archaeological sense but as a living world apart from the ordinary affairs of men.

If this was the culmination of the work of Kotsyubinsky, he had covered a long path in his creative development. He had started with little sketches and it was only in the pictures of the south in _Under the Minarets_ and _In the Paths of the Devil_ that he had begun to work out this finely chiseled style, the success of which depends so much upon his ability to evoke the beauty and the artistry of untutored nature.

The style is still only partially developed in such tales as _At a Great Price_ published in 1902. It might easily be a historical novel for it refers back to those days when the persecuted and oppressed Ukrainians were seeking to escape into Turkey in the hopes of founding there a new Sich after their own had been destroyed. Ostap starts on the difficult journey and his wife, the devoted Solomeya, overtakes him and goes with him and shares his hardships. They try once to cross the border but the Cossack guards intercept them. A little later Ostap is badly wounded in another attempt and is nursed back to life by the care of his wife. They are helped and plundered by the Gypsies and finally Ostap is rescued by his wife and a friend from the hands of the Turks, but she is drowned in the Danube in the attempt. So he lives alone, and he shows his bare back to those who will listen and look at the marks left by the cruel floggings which he had received in his lifetime. “Here on my back is a memory from my master, and in front between my ribs is my present from the Moskal. Well placed ... with them I will go to God.... I paid well for my liberty, I paid a bitter price. Half of me lies at the bottom of the Danube and the other is waiting and cannot wait to join it.” Here is the germ of the later development with its appreciation of nature and of the undying call of liberty and democracy.

Kotsyubinsky was keenly aware of the wave of unrest that was sweeping Ukraine along with the rest of Russia just prior to the Revolution of 1905 and in the _Fata Morgana_, he gives us the first rumblings of the coming storm in the picture of the poor peasant Andriy and his wife Malanka and his daughter Hafiyka. The father has long since given up the struggle to become independent. His wife has married him for want of a better suitor and they have one daughter, beautiful as a picture but still with no dowry and faced with the possibility of a joyless life. The father dreams that a factory may be built, so that there can be work. The mother still has the unsatisfied craving of the Ukrainian peasant for the land. She muses “How splendid thou art, O earth. It is pleasant to sow thee with grain, to adorn thee with green, to decorate thee with flowers. It is pleasant to work thee. Only thou are not good in this, that thou art not kind to the poor man. For the rich thou glowest with beauty, the rich thou pleasest, thou clothest him, and the poor man thou receivest only in a grave.... But our hands are waiting to work our meadows, our cities, our gardens.... They will divide thee, O land, and ‘our benefactor’ will come to the plough. Oh, God, God, even in my old age grant me this happiness to bring out my child among people.” Into this environment come the first students who are arrested by the police, the first outbursts of hostility against the established order. Kotsyubinsky had planned a trilogy on this theme but he only finished two parts and the whole remained a mere skeleton.

There are many other stories dealing with the Revolution and the revolutionary movement and Kotsyubinsky tries in each to illustrate the psychology of the various participants, as the _Birthday Present_ where the bureaucratic father decides to give his son the pleasure of seeing a hanging but the boy fails to appreciate the honor which is shown him. He interferes, and at the end, the father fears that he will be put out of the service, that the boy will be excluded from the school, while the young Dorya is thinking for his part that he must somehow punish the people responsible for such an outrageous act. Or _The Horses are not to Blame_ gives us the reactions of a family on the very eve of the time when the peasants demand from them their land.

Yet perhaps the best stories of Kotsyubinsky are not those that have this kind of content but those where an ordinary man faces some sharp crisis. Thus in _What is written in the Book of Life_, an old peasant woman feeling herself in the way and wearied that death does not come, persuades her son to take her out into the woods to leave her to die. He does so, but at the very moment when she is determined to leave this world, she shows so much interest in the chatter about her neighbors, that the son finally changes his mind and goes back for her. He thinks of all the rites and customs that surround the average funeral, the drinking, and the entertainment and these things done for the good opinion of the neighbors are almost as potent in making him change his mind as is the actual sorrow for the fate of the poor old woman whom death has forgotten. Or there are such stories as the _Letter_ where a young and idealistic boy is brought face to face on his return home with the killing of a little pig for his dinner. The stain of blood separates the family and without knowing why, he loses all contact with them. He is horrified by the church and its services and he looks perfectly calmly at the fighting and the drunken brawls that go on around him for blood will have blood.

One of his most striking stories is the _Dream_, and here we see one of the underlying ideas of our author. The scene is the prosaic life of an ordinary family. When they were young and first married, Antin and Marta had something to live for. They had love and affection but the dull routine of life had carried all that away and now they were living well but uninterestingly. There were the prosaic facts of daily life, the ordinary cares and petty household and office activities. Marta was unconscious of the loss. Antin was and in his dreams which he tells his wife, he resurrects the past and imagines a new romance with a girl in Italy. There is beauty, there is love, there is passion, and it is all a dream. At first the mere idea that her well-known husband could become a problem to her, that there were in his being elements that she had effectively stifled in herself was too much for her. Yet at the end it did rouse her to make an attempt to bring back something of that past, and “She did not know whether she would have the strength, whether storms would rage at some future time, but now oftener than before roses adorned their dining table.”

It was the fault of routine. “She had not known to guard life, to preserve its beauty. Daily she had been throwing it away in trifles, in the useless filth of existence, until she had turned it into a foul pit. Poetry cannot live in such an atmosphere, and without it, life is a crime.”

That is the real gist of the work of Kotsyubinsky. In his memoirs Gorky emphasizes this quality of the author and it takes precedence over all other aspects of his work. Life can be made interesting. Life can be made good. Sympathy and love and kindness can be universal and perhaps they are so natural to man that they can even pass over into the consciousness of dogs and other animals that are near to man. It is a law of life and he who neglects does so at his infinite peril.

It is this spirit that moved and inspired all of his writings. It gave him the feeling and the desire to penetrate the human heart and mind to understand man as he really can be. Humanity, beauty, the people, Ukraine--these were the things for which Kotsyubinsky lived and about which he thought and wrote and dreamed. Between him and Levitsky and the older novelists there was a great gulf. They had been as eager to help the people as he was. They were as self-sacrificing as he was, but they did not try to take into account those other values which he regarded so highly.

Like them in style he was realistic and naturalistic. He endeavored to deal with life as it was in the rough and the unmild as in the _Intermezzo_, where life among human beings is like that among the wolves for the people ruined by syphilis, poverty, alcohol, and illiteracy, know nothing better than to fight and destroy one another, but there was something more, for he wished not only to tell a story to impress the minds and hearts of his readers, but he wanted also to evoke a mood so as to stir their emotions and to rouse their sense of beauty.

Beauty and harmony appear in all the later works of Kotsyubinsky. It is a deliberate beauty and a deliberate harmony, not like that natural spark of the genius Shevchenko who seemed from the very beginning to know what to say and how to say it. With Kotsyubinsky it was something acquired. The feeling was natural to him. He had that finely balanced character that was favorable to its growth but there was a conscious training of that feeling. It is small wonder that Kotsyubinsky was not a voluminous writer. It was impossible to imagine him combining literature and journalism or entering the rough and tumble arena of life. It is impossible to picture him careless or indifferent. The very methods that he borrowed from impressionism and grafted on to his realistic settings are those which are the results of a real understanding of the finer points of culture. Without poetry, life is a crime. It is a new note in Ukrainian literature, a note of a growing maturity, a greater refinement, a sign that Ukrainian literature is taking its place as one of the culture literatures of the world. The problems of Ukraine are still as pressing, they have not been solved but Kotsyubinsky feels that it is no use to harp only on the external and the immediate. The Ukrainians still have souls and if they are to be really civilized people, they must share the emotions and the sensations of civilized people. They must deepen their life as well as broaden it. From his earliest efforts Kotsyubinsky steadily deepened and broadened his range of subjects. He did for prose what Lesya Ukrainka and others had done for poetry and when he died in 1913, he could look at the world and say, as he had always thought, that life was good, that mankind had enormous potentialities, and that he had done his part in making them available and accessible for literature.