Chapter ONE: The Background of Ukrainian Culture

Ukrainian literature in its present phase may be modern but Ukraine and the Ukrainians are not a new phenomenon in the world’s history. They have played their part under one name or another for over a thousand years on their native soil and they have had a rich past which furnishes the present with the soil on which it can operate.

What then is Ukraine? Who are the Ukrainians? What is the Ukrainian language? A simple answer to these questions opens up the entire Ukrainian problem, one of the most complicated in the whole of modern Europe and yet superbly simple if the idea is once adopted that the Ukrainians are a separate people who wish to live their own lives in their own way in their own land.

The Ukrainian language is an East Slavonic tongue which is closely akin to Russian but which differs from it very sharply in many important grammatical and phonetic ways. The language is spoken by a people of some forty millions in number who inhabit an area that was included between 1939 and 1941 almost wholly in the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic and was after 1941 occupied by the Nazi invaders. Before the Second World War, the country was divided between the Soviet Union, Poland, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia. Before the First World War, it was divided between Russia and Austria-Hungary, and we have to go back for centuries before we find a free and united Ukraine.

Yet at that time the land was not called Ukraine but Rus, and even before that it had had a long and complicated history revealed only by archaeological exploration and scattered references in ancient authors. There are many gaps in our knowledge but enough remains to show that the organization of the state in the ninth century was but the last act of a drama that had resulted in the development of an important pre-Christian culture. After the adoption of Christianity, its history is better known and we realize the importance which the country played in the world. Under the name of Kievan Russia, it has been treated by Russian historians who wish to deny that there ever was a Ukrainian culture which differs in any degree from the northeastern neighbor, Moscow. Its name, its culture, and its literature have all been preempted by Moscow which refuses to admit that there ever was a culture in the south which might develop in its own way and along other lines than did the tsardom of Moscow or Muscovy.

Yet in those days the ancient Rus or Ukraine embraced territory that was never again to be brought under the control of the tsars. Ancient travellers talk of a Rus that extended from the neighborhood of Prague to the east and they then speak calmly of passing from there to Muscovy for the old state was markedly different in area from many of the common conceptions.

In the beginning, and here was the geographical root of the tragedy of Ukraine, the Slavs who spoke this language lived in a belt of greater or narrower width from the Carpathian Mountains to the sea of Azov. Their land was longer from east to west than it was from north to south and it cut across the central portions of all those great rivers that flow from the north into the Black Sea. Nowhere except in the west were there any natural boundaries in the form of mountain ranges. To the north and east there were only the great plains of eastern Europe which were open to every invader from the depths of Asia and these invaders had appeared for millenia in an almost uninterrupted sequence, when the first Slavonic state was erected around the city of Kiev.

It was an unfortunate geographical situation, for it imposed upon the princes the constant and never-ending task of guarding a long and indefensible frontier with a relatively small population and enormous distances. Without modern methods of communication, the task was hopeless. The princes were unable to hold more than a small area under their personal supervision and the evils that were attendant upon feudalism were not slow in making their appearance.

In vain the more competent and conscientious rulers tried by almost superhuman efforts to hold their positions. Almost without their knowledge large regions grew up into quasi-independent realms and civil war was the result of the interference of even the best beloved monarch. The provinces and regions went on their own sweet way with little thought of obedience to a distant central authority and they were far too ready to seize a momentary advantage by an alliance with some one of their neighbors. At some time during the last thousand years, part at least of the people of Ukraine have been allied with Muscovites, Poles, Lithuanians, Rumanians, various Mongolian tribes, Turks, and Tatars of the Crimea. For a long period Lithuanians and Poles were able to assert a secure political control and today the Soviet Union and Germany are fighting for the same area.

Ukraine paid bitterly for all these feuds of her neighbors, for her position was difficult and desirable. As we have seen, the state cut across all the rivers that ran into the Black Sea. They were the natural method of communication between the Baltic and the Black Seas, even as Ukraine contained the normal land route from Asia to Europe. It is small wonder then that the rich agricultural land was the welcome and alluring prize to many an invader from time immemorial to 1941.

Bad as all this was, the situation was made worse by the fact that the territory of Ukraine became the battleground between the Byzantine and Latin cultures. The great cleavage in the Christian world was often fought out on Ukrainian soil and religious feuds were added to the personal quarrels and ambitions of the neighboring sovereigns.

Ukraine received its Christian culture from Constantinople. In the first centuries of her existence, this was an advantage for the intellectual hegemony of Constantinople was unchallenged. It is hard today to understand that the great city on the Bosphorus with its unparalleled church of Hagia Sophia was the real centre of Christian culture and civilization. The Emperor of Byzantium was the Christian secular ruler _par excellence_. His wealth and his power were unrivalled save perhaps by the Mohammedan Caliph of Bagdad. Rome looked with envy at the riches and the splendor of the great city of Constantine. It remembered what it had itself lost at the hands of the Germanic barbarian tribes and was proudly jealous. The West envied the glory of the East and sought diligently to seize control of the border lands and to extend its control wherever possible.

It was at this period that the Kievan state was organized and St. Volodimir formally accepted Christianity, largely it is said because of the splendor of the service in the Church of Hagia Sophia. Soon a second Hagia Sophia was erected at Kiev and if it did not equal the splendor and the amazing beauty of the elder church, it was still one of the richest and most impressive structures north of the imperial city. The state adopted the standards of Constantinople and the legends and folk tales tell us of the wealth and power of the princes of Kiev, of their gold and precious stones, of their glory and their pride, yes, and of their intelligence and learning.

We must not think of education in early Kiev in terms of modern public schools and a high degree of literacy. There was none of that but where was it to be found? At a time when such kings of England as William I and Richard Coeur de Lion were barely able to sign their names, Volodimir Monomakh was able to carry on the business of state in seven languages. The princesses of Kiev were sought in marriage by the most powerful rulers of the day and the blood of the royal family passed into the veins of the sovereigns of England, France, Sweden, Hungary, Poland, and Byzantium itself.

The new state had difficulties in the way of internal organization but no more than the neighboring countries. There were civil wars and heavy taxes and oppression of the people but those were universal failings. All the virtues and the vices of Byzantium were copied on a reduced scale in Kiev and its dependencies and the countries of Western Europe were in an even more deplorable condition.

Yet Byzantine culture was a strange phenomenon. It is hard for us to conceive of a great city and a great empire with powerful armies in which religion was the all-absorbing subject of interest. Constantinople was a fusion of the remains of Greek civilization, of many elements of the Roman Empire, and of ideas, habits and customs that had been brought in from Asia Minor, north Africa, Arabia, and points further east. Its religious art was based on principles which were far from realistic. Its ikons and its mosaics are still the wonder of the world, as the cleaning of the mosaics in Hagia Sophia is showing us. Its wealth, luxury, and formalism are proverbial, and yet the slightest acquaintance with its history shows us that there were very human aspects of life hidden under the stately pomp and the cold splendor of display.

It is small wonder that the Rus and the pagan Slavs were attracted by this outstanding and beautiful culture. Constantinople had no objections and Saints Cyril and Methodius created the first Slavonic alphabet and carried the Liturgy in Slavonic to Moravia and Bulgaria and the other Slavonic lands. Finally it penetrated to Rus in the days of St. Volodimir and Christian Kiev was on its way.

Soon all the books of the Church and the lives of the saints which had been translated into Church Slavonic were available in the capital and were gradually corrected into a language which was intelligible at Kiev. But such works as the _Russka Pravda_ (the Russian law code of the eleventh century), the writings of Daniel the Palmer and the _Instructions_ of Volodimir Monomakh speak of the high level which had already been achieved. There was little secular literature of which we know except the writings of the princes and their supporters. The only outstanding specimen of imaginative writing is the _Tale of the Armament of Ihor_ which has presented as many problems as it has solved.

Yet with all of the drawbacks and the troubles, life in Kiev was good in the twelfth century, until in 1169 Prince Andrey Bogolyubsky of Suzdal in the north sacked the city and moved the centre of the state to his native town and then later to Moscow. The interpretation of this action has long been a bone of contention between Ukrainian and Russian scholars. To the latter it was a necessary and logical step in the development of the Russian Empire. To the former it was a brutal conquest of a civilized government by foreigners and strangers. It did cause a sharp break in history which was emphasized still more by the fact that the new centre was never able to assert its authority over Galicia and Volynia to the west. The dynasty reigning there even was able for a time to call themselves the Kings of Rus. Whatever the merits of the controversy over the relations of the princes of Suzdal and Moscow to those of Kiev and the south, the fact remains that Kievan Rus and Ukraine was now split in half and was not to be brought together again fully except for a few months in 1918 and 1919.

Perhaps the damage would have been alleviated, if time had allowed the normal development of Moscow. The coming of the Mongols and Tatars changed everything. When the hordes of Genghis Khan swept over the land, Kiev bore the brunt of the desolation at a time when it had hardly recovered from the sack of the preceding century. The princes of Moscow readily submitted and henceforth the Tatar element and traditions grew in the northern capital. This process continued for two centuries and at the end of that period, when Ivan the Great finally declared his independence and assumed the title of Autocrat and Tsar of Russia, the manners and customs of Moscow were very different from those which had prevailed at the time of the coming of the Tatars.

Ukraine had a different fate. The western provinces formed a dangerous wedge between Poland and Hungary and extended into the area claimed by the Latin world. The Holy Roman Empire was pressing eastward with the Germans as the nucleus and the predominant power. Poland and Hungary confronted with this turned east in their turn. Both were Roman Catholic powers and western in culture and organization. Both were in frequent alliance and their dynasties were related by marriage. It was to the interest of both to crush Rus with its Orthodox traditions and its Byzantine culture. To the north was Lithuania, still pagan but with able rulers. To make a long story short, the end came in 1349 when the Western principalities of Ukraine fell under the power of Lithuania and Poland. At about the same era the people in the Carpathians passed under the control of Hungary. Lithuania acquired control of the area around Kiev, so that by the time of the marriage of Jadwiga of Poland and Jagiello of Lithuania in 1385, a large part of Ukraine was under the control of Catholic rulers and the remainder was under the Tatar yoke.

With Moscow drifting eastward in its point of view owing to the influence of the Tatars and Ukraine gravitating westward under the control of Poland and Lithuania, the breach became wider than in the beginning and Ukraine was unable to work on its own behalf or to resist the encroachments of the West. Especially after the Union of Lublin in 1569 when Poland and Lithuania were formally united into one kingdom, Western influences grew stronger. More and more pressure was exerted upon the people to join the Roman Catholic Church, to adopt Polish, and to lose their identity in the new state. This was especially true in the case of the nobles and the wealthier classes. More and more they were Polonized and as they became ardent advocates of their new culture, they endeavored to force it also upon their people. Ukraine and its national spirit seemed to be doomed.

Ukrainian opposition to this process was bitter and continuous but the successes were few after many of the feudal lords passed over to the new regime. The lesser nobles continued the struggle. Deprived of any means of expressing their opinions to the heads of the state and without skilled and daring leadership, they saw their traditional privileges whittled away and themselves reduced to greater and greater straits. For a while it seemed as if Protestant ideas might seep in, but this stopped with the suppression of the Reformation in Poland. A few of the nobles as Prince Constantine Ostrozky endeavored to develop and strengthen the Orthodox (Byzantine) culture of the people. He tried to secure teachers from Constantinople for his schools but the Patriarch after the fall of the city to the Turks was weak and powerless and he was not in a position to carry out any strong policy. A few able monks as the young Cyril Lukaris, later the celebrated Patriarch of Constantinople, arrived for a short time, but they could have very little success and again and again the sons of a devout Orthodox father themselves Polonized and thus undid all that the older men had accomplished.

Then too in cities as Lviv there were various brotherhoods interested in education. They tried to establish schools and printing presses and to defend the old faith and customs and they did noble service. Still even these efforts did not bear too much fruit. They were checked at every stage by the government and their work was so tied up with the defence of the Orthodox Faith that they were not interested in giving much secular learning to the young and that little was largely influenced by the Latin intellectual manner of thought. They used the old Church language which was becoming steadily more distinct from the vernacular tongue and created a sterile and polemic culture which often had little real value.

Finally in 1596 through the Union of Brest a part of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine acknowledged the supremacy of the Pope. There was however great resistance to the new measure, the Orthodox hierarchy was reestablished by the efforts of the faithful and they regarded the Uniat Church as an agent of Polonization. The Academy of Kiev under a series of able leaders, as the Metropolitan Peter Mohyla, did splendid work in maintaining the Faith. Mohyla worked out a form of Orthodox scholasticism which retained most of the Orthodox manner of thinking and was yet available as a weapon again the Polish and Jesuit propagandists. Yet the Academy like the schools of the brotherhoods was never able to break with a narrow ecclesiastical tradition and to launch itself on a program of progressive education.

A more effective, if cruder, method of opposition lay in the rise of the Kozaks, peasants who fled to the east to live their lives in freedom as they desired. These men were prepared to fight against any foe, whether he were Pole, Muscovite, Tatar or Turk. At first they were a wild and turbulent group but their leaders finally forged them into an efficient force. Now and then the Kings endeavored to secure their assistance by payments and by enrolling some of them in units in the Polish army but the Kozaks remained independent and a pillar of strength to all Orthodox movements. Finally in the seventeenth century the hetman Bohdan Khmelnitsky won with them for a short time practically complete independence and again Ukraine could breathe freely. Bohdan died before he had established the new state on a firm basis and won for it international recognition. In his last years he found it necessary after the Kozak Wars which started Poland very definitely on the downward path to put himself and the Kozaks more or less under the protection of the Tsar of Russia. There was thus reestablished an official seal on that relationship which had been interrupted when the Tatars invaded Rus four centuries before. The result was none too satisfactory for the autocratic Moscow of the day constantly interfered with the liberties of the Kozaks and in 1667 in a treaty between the Tsar and the King of Poland, Ukraine was again divided between Russia and Poland, with the Dnieper as the dividing line.

The next century and a half is a sad tale of broken promises and of political intrigue. Moscow and Poland alike repudiated every agreement which was made with the Kozaks and the Ukrainians. Discord arose in the ranks of the Kozaks between the officers and the privates, for the former tended to adopt the manners and customs of the neighboring nobles. As Russia steadily increased in power, she kept attempting to reorganize the whole of Russian Ukraine on the same lines as the rest of the Empire. Then Catherine the Great abolished the post of Hetman. She followed that up with the destruction of the Kozak centre, the Zaporozhian Sich, and finally liquidated all Ukrainian institutions and rights and bound the peasants to the soil.

Things were little better on the Polish side. There were the revolts of the Haydamaki and other groups but they were put down by Russian troops who were lording it over Poland. Finally when that unfortunate country was divided by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, Austria took most of the Ukrainian section of Galicia and Bukovina and added the Ukrainians to the ethnic confusion that formed the Hapsburg Empire. For this group Lviv was now the principal centre but the mode of living there and the methods of control of the Ukrainians or the Ruthenians as they were usually called in Galicia were very different from that exercised in Russia.

There was by the end of the eighteenth century really two Ukraines. There was the Great Ukraine under Russian control with its religious culture mainly Orthodox and there was Western Ukraine or Galicia under the Hapsburgs with the Uniat Church as the predominant religious body. Life moved at a different pace in the two sections but there were the same tendencies to denationalization, Russian in one case, Polish in the other, and the future of the people and their culture seemed very dark.

Yet in the seventeenth century at the time of the temporary flourishing of the Hetmanate, Ukrainian scholarship and spirit won one of its most signal victories. Moscow during its long period of subjugation to the Tatars had lost touch with the outside world, and its relations even with the Orthodox Churches of the east had become limited to a mere readiness to give liberally to the wandering Patriarchs who came to collect donations. The dangerous legend of the Third Rome and the accompanying belief that Moscow was the centre of Christian civilization had taken root, and the Muscovite scholars, if they could be called such, objected to all contact with the rest of Europe. Kiev was a possible exception, for the princes of Muscovy still had a traditional respect for the city and its culture. When the tsars finally realized that they needed some outside learning, it was the scholars trained in the Academy at Kiev who were called in to assist. Some of these were invited to Moscow. Others went to escape Polish pressure. Yet all that was done in the way of intellectual progress was done by these men. The reforms in the Russian Church, incomplete as they were, were spurred on by the Kievan scholars and it was they also who inspired the beginnings of Russian literature, halting as they were.

Not enough attention has been paid to this movement and to the influence that Kiev exerted upon Moscow during the seventeenth century. It was a time when Russian military power was making itself supreme but in the world of culture it was the scholarship of Ukraine that was the master. The names of men from Kiev appear with monotonous regularity as the intellectual leaders of Moscow. Many of the greater Muscovites studied at Kiev and it is not too much to say that if Kiev had given Moscow its intellectual start at its foundation, so again in the seventeenth century it was Kiev that started the northern country on its return to Western intellectual ways.

Unfortunately most of this was in the narrowly religious sphere. The Academy of Kiev was still predominantly interested in theological polemics. During the long struggle with Poland, the Western ideas which had penetrated the Academy were largely connected with religion. There was little or no attempt to study the achievements of the West in literature and art and other secular subjects. Those who sought secular learning were usually absorbed in the Roman Catholic Church and in Polish life. Those who maintained the old traditions were usually peasants who were themselves suspicious of all innovations and the masters treated more and more the speech of their Ukrainian peasants and serfs as an object of scorn and of amusement. Along with the decline in Ukrainian liberties, there came a steady reduction in the number of educated or even partially educated persons. As a people the Ukrainians were losing and losing rapidly all the marks and even the traditions of an educated class. Their interests were becoming those of serfs and peasants and they seemed destined to be swallowed up in the mass of the dominant races about them.

Thus at the end of the eighteenth century, the vast majority of the Ukrainian people had ceased to figure in the world of culture. They still had their folk songs which told of the exploits of the Kozaks and their great Hetmans and leaders of the past. They spoke among themselves in the vernacular but whatever schools there were still taught the Church Slavonic language which was hoary with age and which was by now very different from the daily spoken speech. Ukraine had drifted into an intellectual backwater. It is small wonder that many young men trying to escape from this stagnation looked for a more active life and became lost to the cause of the people. The whole question was whether the forces of destruction would sweep the country before there came a new inspiration to lift the people intellectually and to rekindle a healthy life. Fortunately a solution was found.