Chapter FOURTEEN: Oles

At the end of the nineteenth century a new poetry spread rapidly over Europe. Directly or indirectly this traced its source to the French symbolists and decadents, to Verlaine and Mallarmé and the other writers of that period. Then came the influence of Maeterlinck and the movement was in full course. However, as the movement with its emphasis on aestheticism and beauty and its frequent desire to shock the bourgeoisie spread among the Slavs, it gradually sought a philosophical basis for the new developments.

The new authors rapidly advanced the technique of poetry and at the same time they broadened the range of materials which were regarded as proper subjects. For a half century there had been predominant a form of realism which conceived as within its scope only the contemporary lives of the people. It remained to go outside of the conventional and to choose subjects from the entire field of recorded history. Lesya Ukrainka had started this with her dramas and sketches from the antique world. Even this was not enough and as the symbolistic movement expanded, the authors flew from the earth to the heavens, to other planets, to imaginary scenes and they sought in all these areas that which they considered beauty in their own imaginations. Many schools of thought arose among the new artists and basking in the light of self-adulation, they cared little for the old-fashioned social motifs which had been instrumental in training the people for the last half century. They cared little more for the enthusiastic admiration of the great masses who were beginning to appreciate at long last the older writers and were content to read new and ever new reinterpretations of the old themes.

Ukrainian literature was no exception to the general rule, and around 1890 at the very end of the century the new movement made its appearance. It rapidly forced into the background the older writers. In the meanwhile life was changing and the symbolists and decadents were being attacked on all sides. The champions of the old order had not spared even Franko for his _Withered Leaves_ and they were even more concerned with the vagaries of the still younger authors.

Yet it cannot be denied that with all their weaknesses, these new men were doing a great work in the adaptation of Ukrainian literature to world models. They were rapidly forcing the literature from a narrow and almost provincial field to a world arena and if in the beginning they cut themselves off from their less fortunate fellow men, the greater writers, once they had mastered the forms steadily began a return to the world which they had formerly scorned. Yet that return was no mere repetition of the past, no slavish abjuring of the ideas that they had formerly admired. It was rather a realization of the fact that literature did have other purposes than the purely photographic repetition of details of ethnography and social philosophy, that it could affect the readers by the evocation of various moods, and could give them a deeper understanding of some phases of human psychology by the use of symbols more or less easy to penetrate than it could by plain matter of fact narration and bald statement. In other words there was again a conscious approach to that method of exposition which had been unconsciously present in the mind of a great genius as Shevchenko. His _Great Grave_ is as much of a symbolistic poem as is any work of the present writers but he did it with the spark of genius and with his eye directed at the history of his nation even more than at individual psychology.

The author who was to develop this new poetry to its height was O. Oles, the pen name of Oleksander Kandyba who was born in Russian Ukraine in 1878. Like many of the more modern writers, he was well educated and from 1903 on, he was recognized as the most outstanding poet since Shevchenko. Yet at no time could he have the appeal of such a man as Franko, for Oles with all of his talent was still pitching his works on a level which was inaccessible to the average educated man and he could be admired and understood in many cases only by a relatively small audience.

The early years of the twentieth century saw many changes in Ukraine both in Russia and Galicia. In Russia there were the high hopes at the time of the Revolution of 1905, when it seemed again as if with the abolition of the strict rules of the censorship there would be presented favorable conditions for work. Almost over night there sprang into existence new journals, new writers, new hopes. Then again the clouds descended and the reactionary regimes that followed tried to go back to the old days when Ukraine seemed non-existent. Between 1905 and 1910 many of the new journals again passed out of existence and the despairing may have thought that all hope was again lost. Yet much had been gained. The Ukrainians had learned to group themselves into political parties and other organizations. They had secured a larger nucleus of a reading public and that public could not be easily disintegrated again. The time was past when an imperial fiat abolishing the very name of Ukraine and wiping out the Sich could discourage and almost destroy the entire movement.

So too in Galicia. The Ukrainian population there was becoming more self-conscious. The students were demanding more and more vigorously the introduction of Ukrainian courses in the University of Lviv. The contacts with the Russian Ukraine were growing stronger and that exchange of writers and published books which had been going on for nearly a half century was no longer a tender plant which could be shattered by the slightest blow.

Then came the stirrings of the First World War and the final collapse of the two empires of Russia and Austria-Hungary. For a few months Ukraine was again free. The two republics of Great Ukraine and Western Ukraine came together with Professor Hrushevsky as the President of the Rada and there came a rapid flowering of the national culture. The work of the preceding century had borne fruit. Alas! It was only for a short time and then with the renewed division of the country, between the Soviet Union, Poland, Rumania and Czechoslovakia, it seemed as if the hopes of all had died again.

During all this period Oles continued his work, grouping together words of encouragement and lamentation, personal lyrics and poems with a definite social content which had a real meaning for his countrymen. His moods varied with the political conditions. They were strong and cheerful when the outlook was hopeful. They were sad and depressed in moments of adversity but he never lost hope and he never felt that his work in the service of social ideals bound the wings of his talent or interfered with the artistic value of his poems. When misfortune finally came to Ukraine, he withdrew to Galicia and then became one of that group which moved to Prague and from there he poured out his poems of despair, of the sadness of the emigré but always with the superb confidence that Ukraine would rise again and that her sons would some day be happy and free in their own land.

In moments of encouragement he can sing:
I’ll weep no more. My sorrow I will fetter
In chains of strongest steel.
My people are still burdened with their fetters

Their wounds their woes reveal.
And all my soul
I show forth with their wounds.

I’ll sing no more. And nightly in the struggle
The iron swords sing loud.
The swords cut deep into the people’s vitals
And call a race uncowed.
Then let my sword
Sing for me in the strife.

Or again Oles with his eye upon nature and the same hope in his breast will sing:

Thou marvelous and wondrous night!
Just yesterday a coverlet of snow was sifting down,
And now to-day a change ... so warm and bright,
With here and there a pushing upward from the frozen ground.

Know this: ’twill be the same with man....
Such miracles there be!... Upon a certain day
Men everywhere, free and of equal rank shall stand
And seize the visions dreamed along the way.

So too with his confidence in man’s power to gain his goal by fighting and denying even the powers of nature that endeavor to stop him....

Make sport of us, ye winds, and mock us, thunder,
Unswerving we tread a beckoning pathway,
Our young breasts we raise to defy the wind’s power,
Thunder we deafen with paeans of victory.

Only he wins his goal who, unmoved, presses forward,
Who burns with a passion that never consumes.
Life’s carpet spread out lures his youthful steps onward,
The crown Death shall weave him immortally blooms.

More faith in our cause! Raise higher our banner!
Tears, groans, and misgivings ... begone from the fray!
Life rides a winged charger,
Spreading flowers on our way.

(Translated by A. P. Coleman)

In his early poems as _Anxiety and Joy Embraced_, Oles harps on that theme which was so dear to the early symbolistic authors in all European countries that sorrow and joy are closely connected, that in nature the extremes meet and that it is the duty of the individual to embrace both as parts of the great existence of the universe. In moments of depression he returns to the same theme with an almost pantheistic interpretation of nature as but an external manifestation of what is within the human heart.

It was an age of symbolism. In Russian literature it was the time of Aleksander Blok with his symbolic dramas and of Leonid Andreyev with such grim and disillusioning plays as _The Life of Man and Anathema_ where the characters are universal types as man and woman. Oles follows in the same traditions and produced many lyrical and symbolistic plays as _On the Road to a Legend_ and the _Tragedy of the Heart_. They are really literary dramas better suited to be read than produced.

Very rarely are the characters personalized. There is He and She and a Girl, a Gentleman and a Lady. They are merely symbols for Oles to indicate the involved and contradictory, self-including and self-excluding universe and man. They deal with the memories of the past and the hopes for the future but Oles realizes that there is no clear line of demarcation and that no one of the alternating and contradictory emotions of the human heart and emotions and mind can ever win a clear and definite triumph. Man and the universe are mysteries and we can only hope to approach their underlying meanings by indirection and symbols. All of this makes them very difficult for theatrical representation but they easily belong in the masterpieces of Ukrainian literature.

Again following the tastes of the day, Oles translated into Ukrainian Longfellow’s _Hiawatha_. It was one of the many translations of this poem that were made early in the twentieth century into the Slavonic languages. Of all the masterpieces of American poetry, not one has taken a firmer hold on Slavonic thought and feelings than has the story of the Indian chief and lawgiver. Hiawatha became almost a symbol of America and Oles in making his translation marked an enormous step in the placing of his native literature on the basis of a world literature, in which the world masterpieces existed in adequate and poetical translations.

Oles belongs to the greatest masters of his people’s literature but he can never be popular in the sense of a Shevchenko or a Franko. He will always be a poet’s poet, a man whose art requires sympathy and understanding. At times in the height of national indignation or of national jubilation, he emerges from his cultured seclusion and his study of human moods to express something clear and definite. For the most part he remains within the mystic shrine of pure art and deep thinking and feeling as one of those poets who represent the higher aspirations of modern civilized man.

The recognition of Oles as a great poet by his people is a sign of the growing maturity of modern Ukrainian literature. It is a sign that the people are securing a new intellectual class, are acquiring a modern culture, are thinking in modern ways, and sharing modern emotions. It is a sign that Ukrainian culture is deepening constantly and that with favorable conditions it would include all those gamuts of emotion and thought that have been fitted into those literatures which have developed naturally and freely over long periods of time.