Chapter THIRTEEN: Vasil Stefanyk

A new realism appeared in the twentieth century but this was significantly different from the older form that had been handled with so much success by Marko Vovchok and Levitsky. Its centre of gravity was different. Where the older authors had indulged in stories of peasant life that had the avowed intention of awaking the educated classes to a realization of the problems confronting the Ukrainian people, the new authors sought to give pictures of the conditions as they existed at that period when the old patriarchal order was definitely breaking down. There is not the constant harping on the theme that changes in the social order might produce important results. Rather there is a representation of people who have been broken by life and we are asked to look at them as they are in their misery and despair.

It is definitely the underprivileged who are described. We are not told how or why they have become that way. The fact is that they exist and they form a sad spectacle for the keen observer. An atmosphere of fate broods over the whole and there is nothing that they or we can do to change their lot. Life has dealt them many blows. It has taken away their power of resistance and man becomes an individual, no longer one of a group that is bound together as a class, a family, or a member of society. He stands out by himself with his own problems with which he cannot grapple and if he has a family or friends beside him, they cannot do much to ease his solitude. We are born alone and we die alone and compared with those great truths, our petty human attempts to understand one another are doomed to futility, try as we will.

Gone are the days when we feel that the peasant, the serf, has within himself abundant resources of mental and moral and physical strength. Gone are the days when we are led to believe that these oppressed and insulted people are the backbone of society and can be led and taught to live a better and a more abundant life. The tide has turned and is running strongly toward other phases of existence. If there is to be a brighter future, we cannot expect it to come from the actions of the impoverished, drunken, broken peasants. We must seek it elsewhere, if we can.

The new style perhaps took its rise in French naturalism but it was certainly influenced by Dostoyevsky’s interest in broken souls, by the misunderstandings of Chekhov, and by the revolutionary heroes of Gorky. It was influenced to some extent by the teachings of Marxism and the growth of radical political parties which clustered around the factories and the cities.

The phenomenon was not confined to the Slavonic countries. We can trace it in English and American literature, in the almost unconscious efforts of the more modern writers to turn away from the picturing of virtuous peasants and farmers and to see in the country characters who possess all possible vices and perversions. The old view that the city is the source of corruption and decay and the rural districts are the home of virtue is looked upon as old-fashioned and the newer psychology endeavors to analyze, to explain or at least to picture almost photographically the warped and helpless types that are found everywhere.

The same movement made its appearance in Ukrainian and the great master of this school was Vasil Stefanyk, a consummate artist and a miniaturist in words. His pictures are short and concise. In a few phrases and a few paragraphs he pictures the sad state of the average Galician village and the strange creatures that inhabit it.

He had a good opportunity to study these people for he lived almost his whole life among them. He got to know the inner life of the village, the sorrows and the scanty joys of the people of a community where prosperity rarely occurs and where misery and disease are universal.

Vasil Stefanyk was born in 1871 in Western Ukraine in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. He received a good education at Krakow and for a while studied medicine but he left the university without completing his course. In the meantime he had become friendly with some of the leaders of the Young Poland movement and shared with them their infatuation for the life of the common people. Wyspianski and the others of the group were actuated by a new interest in the life of the ordinary Polish peasant and were trying to understand the psychology of the average villager. Stefanyk applied the same technique to the life of his own people. As a result he went back to his own village and settled down as a farmer among them. He got to know them and their modes of thought and expression. He studied their local and untutored dialect, he learned to appreciate the difficulties with which they were confronted and he began those stories of peasant existence that have made him one of the greatest prose artists of modern Ukrainian literature.

He was not a voluminous writer. He began to produce his masterpieces when he was about thirty years of age and for a decade he worked and developed his own gemlike style and his gift of portraiture. The task of composition was not easy and he toiled over almost every phrase and paragraph, tearing up copy after copy, until he had found exactly the right word and the right idea. Then he grew silent and for another decade, although he was recognized as a master, he produced nothing. The impact of the war and the temporary liberation of Ukraine roused him again to write and for the first time he used the word Ukraine and emphasized the unity of the people in both halves of the country. The disastrous situation that ensued as a result of the Ukrainian defeat and renewed division made him again give up writing and return to his former silence. He died in 1936, just before the new catastrophes were to overwhelm his country.

He does not reveal himself in his sketches. Far from that. If we read them carefully, we will find few clues to the author and his personality. He does not dwell upon any special theme with marked enthusiasm. He does not comment or give moral judgments upon his characters from which we could infer his own sympathies or his own point of view. He simply in a few well chosen sentences sets out a situation confronting some broken souls and bodies and he objectively pictures a little incident that explains the situation. It is useless for us to ask him why these things happen. They simply do and that is all there is to it.

In the beginning there was a slight touch of symbolism in his works as in the _Road_, the pilgrimage of a man through life, nameless and unidentified. He leaves his mother and starts out through the world. He sees people in their agony and despair. At night they lie like stones one by the other. His strength rises and wanes again when he finds his mother’s grave, he sobs with dry eyes. She does not answer him when he calls. “He ran from grave to grave, as autumn flowers. When he had passed one hundred graves, the one hundred first was his. He fell down to it, as he had long ago to his mother’s bosom.”

This was the early phase of Stefanyk’s work but he did not long remain at this level. His characters speedily become more individualized and if there is a special symbol that we may deduce from his works to describe the people whom he presents, it is as fallen leaves blown along on the autumn wind. No one understands them nor do they understand themselves.

So in the _News_. “In the village there was the news that Grits Letyuchy had drowned his little girl in the river. He wanted to drown the older one, but she begged off. After his wife Gritishka died, he suffered misfortunes. He could not care for his children without a wife. No one wanted to marry him, for besides the children there were also poverty and need. Grits suffered for two full years with his young children. No one knew about him, how he lived, what he did, although neighbors were very near. They said only that Grits for a whole winter never lighted a fire in the hut and he and his children passed the winter on the stove.” He takes the hungry children to the river and throws the youngest Dotska in. The older one Handzynya begs off, “Daddy don’t drown me, don’t drown me, don’t drown me.” He relents but tells her that Dotska will be better off than she. However she can go to the first hut and ask to spend the night and then try for a position to care for a child. He himself starts to ford the river but changes his mind and goes to the bridge.

There is no moral judgment on the action of Grits. The poor man is at the end of his physical and moral powers but Stefanyk does not explain it. He does not condemn him. He merely in plain, unadorned language describes the course of events.

No one in the village knows how Grits lives, although the neighbors are very near. The old village spirit has vanished. In the stories of Marko Vovchok, the peasants are ready to help one another. They sympathize with the unfortunate. They are ready to share their last crumb with one another. Here even that spirit is gone. The members of the village are enemies one to another or at best are impartial and neutral observers as is the author of the story. We have travelled far from the days when the chief cause of peasant suffering was the flogging by the arrogant and haughty lord. The peasants are free but they are free to starve and Stefanyk is not interested in those who have carved out a secure place for themselves in the village community.

Or let us take _The Family of Les_. Les steals a sack of barley from his wife to sell it at the inn and secure something to drink. She follows him with her two boys, one eight and one ten years old and makes a scene. Then she knocks him down and orders the children to beat their father roundly. Finally she goes home with them in mortal terror that their father will return in the night and take vengeance. All the tragedy of drunkenness is described, all the pathos and despair of the poor mother who cannot work enough to take care of her children and the inn keeper. There is no attempt at presenting a roseate view of peasant life. Misery, need, want, that is all the unfortunates know. It is what has been in the past and all that they can expect in the future. Yet there is more to it than this for again Stefanyk brings out the complicated psychology of an event which might seem at first sight simple. Thus the mother realizes that she could receive assistance from the state if her husband were crippled whereas she could have no relief, if he were merely drunk. Likewise the father is willing to suffer at the hands of his children and even takes off his overcoat so that their light blows can inflict greater pain upon him. Family feeling has taken a strange turn and the mother appears more like a female animal defending her young than she does as a member of a civilized community but Stefanyk gives clue after clue to the varied reactions of the individuals which are by no means simple.

We have the same sort of peasant cynicism in the _Blue Booklet_ (or is it really a picturing of the despair that comes when a man is finally broken?). Antin has lost his wife and his two children and alone in the world, he has no solace left but drink. He loses his land and then his little hut and takes the blue employment book to start out in the world alone. He flaunts his poverty in the village inn and names the people to whom he has lost everything but he boasts “I haven’t a cent, but I will drink. I will drink with our people, I’ll go to ruin with them. Let them know how I have left the village. Go, I have the blue booklet in my pocket. Now that is my hut and my field and my gardens. I’m going with it to the end of the world! A booklet from the emperor, I have all doors opened to me. Everywhere. Among gentlemen and Jews and every faith.” Antin has ceased to belong. He has passed out as so many of Stefanyk’s heroes from the normal humdrum life which at best may bring a normal respectable living or at least a slow starvation.

Death and preparation for death is another favorite theme. Take _Katrusya_ for example. The poor girl is dying of tuberculosis. With the last of their money the family take her to a doctor but the comment they make is “Peasants do not need to go to doctors. He tells you to drink a lot of milk, or eat some light meat or drink some liquor, or eat white bread or something like that (all things not obtainable on a peasant’s income). It can help the gentry, but it won’t help in our class. Therefore let her die as she is.” A neighbor replies. “Do you think the doctors give the peasants the same medicine that they give the gentry or the Jews? Therefore let her die as she is.” They look at Katrusya and say, “There is nothing on her as on a leaf that has been torn away from the tree.” So death comes on but this symbol of the fallen leaf is a favorite one with Stefanyk. Indeed most of his characters are just that. They are the unsuccessful, the poor devils who have been torn away from the tree of life and yet there is something human and touching in their misery and their despair.

For an example of characters drawn from the wealthier classes we have the _Basarabi_. They had been an old and brutal race which as overseers had mercilessly driven the peasants in the days of forced labor. One of them during the Turkish wars had murdered seven little children. Now in their decline they were little better although they are well-to-do peasants. The old vitality of the race is gone and with the ill concealed hatred of the other peasants and the disordered minds of the family, suicide becomes the rule rather than the exception. Tomas who has been cut down in time, tells the rest of the family of the pangs of conscience and of the weird spirits that hang around him and drive him to his deed. The doctors ascribe it all to nerves but even at this the gruesome story so impresses another of the clan, Mikolay, that he goes out into the night to commit the same deed to the consternation of the others. It is typical of the decline of a family and in the Galician setting there is something of the studied horror of Edgar Allen Poe and the other writers who set forth the degeneration of a once tyrannical family. It is longer than most of the works of Stefanyk, for it contains more of a story with a perspective over generations. It is rare that he refers back to the days of the past. For the most part his stories deal with an event in the present and he assumes as his background the whole degeneration of a community under the influence of alcohol, Jewish tavern keepers and grinding poverty. It is highly significant for Stefanyk’s attitude that he chooses as his horrible examples no outsiders but one of those Ukrainian families which had prospered in the past by devious and unmentionable methods.

For a long while Stefanyk gave up writing and then during the exciting years after the First World War he returned to literature. His later stories were of the same type as the earlier ones. They had the same compressed form, the same careful workmanship but there was something different about them. He had grown during the years of silence and had come to find more positive qualities in his poor folk. He shows their sufferings in the war, when the peasants of Western Ukraine came to feel toward the Russians, the Moskali, what had been mentioned again and again in the writings of the people from Great Ukraine. Thus in _Maria_, the old woman comes to meet the Kozaks in the village and she is surprised that they being Ukrainian also respect Shevchenko. In the _Sons_, an old peasant realizes that his sons have gone to fight for Ukraine. On his return from seeing the last one off, he finds his wife dead before the painting of the Blessed Virgin and in a fit of simple religion, not without a bitter undertone, he appeals to the Blessed Virgin to care for his home for he has given not one but two sons for a great cause.

There has come a new enlightenment in the village, a new feeling that the people have some part to play other than to be mere hewers of wood and drawers of water. It is a sign of the deepening of the national consciousness, of that tendency that Franko had hoped for and in which he had believed. The Ukraine is now a real thing even to the humblest and the most underprivileged and along with this there is a growing tendency of hostility to the Polish landowners and bureaucrats. They had hardly appeared in the earlier stories where Stefanyk had been describing merely little sketches of peasant life taken without any background except the misery and suffering of the village.

It brings about a new atmosphere of hope, a deeper confidence in the capacity of the peasants. There is more thought, more conscious guiding of their own affairs. They are no longer satisfied to accept their fate without questioning and to pass from the scene without a murmur. Yet they are fundamentally the same people. With the same temptations and vices.

Take for example, “_She is the Earth_,” where the Bukovina refugees make their way to the north. Old Danilo has brought his family with him but his wife is silent. From the time when they abandoned their little farm before the onrushing armies, she has remained still and silent. Old Semen, the same type of man, advises the newcomer to go home. “An old bird must not leave its old nest, for it is not able to build another. It is better that its head grows cold in its old nest than in a hollow on a strange road.” He warns against following the lords and the Jews. “The Emperor has his purse open for them, but the purse is closed for you....” “Our work is with the earth; you abandon it, you are lost, you cling to it, it rakes out all your strength from you, it fills your soul with its hands; you fall down to it, you bend your back, it fills your veins, for that you have flocks and herds, and haystacks. For your strength it gives you a hut full of children and grandchildren, who laugh as silver bells, and bloom like poplars.... Don’t go, Danilo, with the lords and the Jews, don’t seek the tsar, for you do not need the tsar; there is always someone to come to the farm to collect the taxes.” And it is only then that the old woman finds her voice and says,--“Let us go home, Danilo, let us go home.” “And when the sun rose, the old men parted, they kissed their black hands, and the red sun threw their shadows across the boundary far along the earth.”

This is the creed of the peasant, the creed of the earth, and it was a new note for Stefanyk. It is perhaps too optimistic. It perhaps shows a narrow conception of life but it is the fundamental essence of the peasant wisdom put in a simple form. It opens a new vista to the reader, it gives a psychological motive and a philosophy that had been hitherto lacking in his work. Now in his later stories he ventures to give the world and his characters some elements of philosophy other than the cynical or coldly unmoral picture of human dissolution and disaster.

Stefanyk was working toward a deeper and a more satisfactory philosophy of life under the pressure of the events of the World War. Yet his basis was the impartial observation of the poor material condition of the average Galician village in the period when the old safeguards had been removed by the abolition of feudal powers and when the individual peasant was not yet effectively trained to stand for himself.

He writes of a transition period when the peasant was left almost entirely alone to stand upon his own two feet and when he was not prepared to do so. The peasant exists under the implacable rule of the erstwhile master and the no more tender mercies of the tavern keeper in the village (usually a Jew) and hence it is that again and again Stefanyk attacks the gentry and the Jews, the two classes in Galician society that seemed to get along, while the hard working peasant gave to both all of his hard earned money. For those peasants who had solved the problem and who were able to live and get along, Stefanyk has nothing to say but in his time the refuge for all of these was ultimately America. The still living ambition to succeed drove the peasant to sell everything and emigrate to the United States or Canada where he could be free to become a man and had some prospects of solving his own problems.

This was the period that Stefanyk described and his knowledge of the lives and thoughts of the people he set forth in exquisite and carefully worked out stories in which every word is important. No writer up to this time in Ukrainian had been so economical in his use of material. No one had been so compressed in his style and language. Stefanyk was a supreme artist in a particularly difficult medium. His stories had the finish of a miniature but they are not to be neglected because of the brevity of their material. With the exception of Franko, he was the leading author produced in Western Ukraine during the past seventy-five years and his sense of literary values, his command of language and his appreciation of the significant episodes in life make him an author of whom any literature may well be proud. He dealt with a restricted field but in this field he knew how to show the important elements not only for his people but for humanity and he is one of those authors who under the guise of picturing the down and downtrodden, the failures and the misfits, have known to show them as human beings with many a toil and sorrow but still profoundly human and profoundly worthy of pity and assistance, yet without any attempt to include any form of propaganda and without adding anything that conflicts with pure literature in the strictest sense of the word.