Chapter FOUR: Hrihori Kvitka-Osnovyanenko

Kotlyarevsky had paved the way for a Ukrainian literature and he had set standards for it in poetry and the drama. He had shown that the Ukrainian language was a proper vehicle for literature and he had given to it a strongly democratic quality. Yet the task of winning a proper place for the literature was not yet completed.

It was still necessary to break through the stubborn opposition of the gentry who then formed the bulk of the educated class. Most of these had been Polonized or Russianized and while they knew the language, they were ashamed to use it in their writings. They felt the charm of Ukraine and of the Ukrainian scenery and customs, but they preferred to write about it in the more popular and supposedly aristocratic languages. As a result there appeared in both Polish and Russian literature a large number of books which dealt with Ukrainian themes as if they were a special subdivision of the culture of the master groups. The authors regarded the Ukrainian language as suitable only for works in a lighter vein and as a source of amusement. The Ukrainians were often caricatured and derided and this procedure only increased the tendencies toward assimilation.

In Polish we find the _Maria_ of Malczewski and in Russian we have Gogol’s _Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka_ and the collection of _Mirgorod_ with the great story of _Taras Bulba_, a brilliant description of Kozak life as Gogol conceived it. Yet Gogol had an attitude of unbending loyalty to the Russian Tsars. He knew relatively little of Ukrainian history, although he was proud of the fact that his family had been famous in the Sich and his father had written several plays in Ukrainian after the tradition of Kotlyarevsky.

It was necessary to widen the range of the Ukrainian subject matter and to create new forms of writing but this was no easy task under the conditions of the day. As at Poltava, so at Kharkiv there was a great interest in things Ukrainian, especially after the foundation of the university there in 1805 but there was a general aristocratic tone to the entire social life and the same tradition that Kotlyarevsky had opposed at Poltava.

Despite these handicaps certain steps in the development of the literature were taken by Hrihori Kvitka, a landowner of the neighborhood of Kharkiv. He was born in 1778 and received the usual superficial education of the day and of his class. He had little regular instruction and that little was entirely in Russian. Largely through the influence of Skovoroda, he became deeply religious at the age of twelve and wanted to enter a monastery. His parents prevented it and they finally put him in the Russian army. In a short time he left it and entered the civil service. Then he tried the army again and when he was twenty he entered a monastery as a lay brother. This life too proved uncongenial and finally he left it and returned home to busy himself with the social life of the day and to dabble in intellectual pursuits. Of course he read the _Eneida_ but it did not inspire him to imitate it or to use the Ukrainian language.

Instead of that, he began to write in Russian under the pen name of Falaley Povinukhin. His stories attracted a certain amount of attention in Kharkiv but they made no impression on the literary world of the two capitals. They were merely stories written by a provincial Russian for a provincial audience. Kvitka would have remained unknown and unnoticed, had chance not led him to try his native Ukrainian.

He was joking one day with a writer who was endeavoring to compose in his native tongue and Kvitka asked him to write something serious and sentimental in it. When the author replied that the language was unfit for such subjects, Kvitka became displeased and to prove his friend wrong, he decided to write himself some stories in Ukrainian and soon he turned out two of his main works, _The Soldier’s Portrait_ and _Marusia_. Their success was immediate in Ukrainian circles and it was not long before they were translated into Russian and brought the author that fame which he had never achieved in his Russian writings.

Before this in 1812 he had become the director of the theatre in Kharkiv and this inspired him to write dramas and especially comedies. In 1831, he gave up most of his interests in Kharkiv and retired to his estate at his native village of Osnova, from which he took the pen name for his Ukrainian writings, Osnovyanenko. From that time he came to the city only once a year to carry out his duties as Marshal of the local nobility. Thus absorbed in society and his estates, he died in 1843 at a ripe old age.

It is curious that in his later days the very success which he had won for the Russian translations of his Ukrainian works, many of which he had made himself, led him back to Russian and he again tried without success to achieve fame in that language, while he prepared Ukrainian translations of his Russian books. The result was a weakening of the value of his works, for it can be truthfully said that Kvitka wrote nothing of importance except in Ukrainian.

To a large extent Kvitka was typical of the vegetable existence of the nobles of the day. The timeless life on the big estates gave to the masters abundant and placid happiness and isolated them from the life that was proceeding at an ever increasing tempo in both Ukraine and Russia. Kvitka maintained the old conservative attitude toward life and was always the talented amateur and the respectable reactionary in his views. Thus in his _Letters to my dear Countrymen_ which appeared in the thirties, he definitely set forth a type of reactionary doctrine which had long since been repudiated by the great writers of the same period in Moscow and St. Petersburg. He unhesitatingly declares “As God is heaven, so is he (the tsar) on earth” and he explains to his countrymen of the government of Kharkiv the glories and the virtue and the divine origin of the imperial regime. Radical critics attacked him for his views but we must never forget that throughout his entire life he was a provincial nobleman who accepted uncritically the slogans of the day as they were accepted in the Russianized circles of Kharkiv society.

If these _Letters_ could be taken as the whole of Kvitka’s work, he would hardly deserve mention but it was only a small part of his activity. _The Little Russian Tales_ published in Moscow in 1834-37 and in Kharkiv in 1841 were very different.

Let us take _Marusia_ as an example. Marusia, a young Ukrainian girl and a paragon of all virtues, is the daughter of a fairly well-to-do farmer. She falls in love with a poor young man, who, as an orphan, has to serve in the army. To escape this and to make money to buy himself off from this obligation, he leaves home. This moves the heart of old Naum, Marusia’s father, and he consents to the wedding but sends the young man on a business trip before the marriage takes place. The lovers part in the cemetery and Marusia promises to meet him there. Soon after she is taken ill and dies and her funeral is being held as the future bridegroom returns. Broken-hearted, he gives up his career and becomes a priest but after a short time he dies of grief in a monastery.

The story is filled with ethnographical details. Kvitka knew the colorful life of the peasants and the vast number of customs that were carried out with almost religious scruples and he inserted them into his tale. We learn of all the ritual of courtship and of love making and in the hands of a less skillful writer, these details would make the story drag. Kvitka avoids the danger and _Marusia_ is one of the best tales of village life on its brighter side.

Yet the heroine is almost cloyingly sweet. There is little or nothing of the earthly about her and she is a typical heroine of the sentimental era which was attendant upon the introduction of Romanticism. This fashion had been started by Zhukovsky in Russian with his translation of the German ballads and now Kvitka adapted it to Ukrainian. The theme bears striking similarities to the contemporary Czech ballads of Erben and Celakovsky where we find the same over-sentimentality particularly in the case of young girls.

In his tales Kvitka had adapted this ballad material to prose and strange as it may seem, they really antedate similar works in French, German and Russian. This heavily Russianized nobleman who admired and almost worshipped the tsar wrote in Ukrainian a very strong plea for the people and produced realistic peasants who shared the thoughts and emotions of their fellows. He knew the life of the peasants around Kharkiv and depicted them sympathetically and in glowing colors.

He also noticed the differences between the Ukrainians and the Russians. He shows it in their reactions to various motives and he makes at least a passing reference to the hostility or at least the aversion that existed between them. Thus Vasil, the lover of Marusia, says when he tells about his entrance into the business world, “I got along at once with my companions, although they were Moskals.” In the same way in another of his early stories, _The Soldier’s Portrait_, the peasant artist who takes his painting to the fair for criticism, is not impressed when a Russian is deceived by its realism, “for it is no feat to deceive a Moskal.”

In his early peasant stories, Kvitka has a rather light and somewhat humorous touch and many of his sketches of peasant life are distinguished by the general gaiety that pervades the atmosphere. Yet he soon became aware of the darker sides of the picture. Thus in the _Unfortunate Oksana_, he gives us the same theme that was used with such great effect by Shevchenko in _Katerina_, the story of the unfortunate girl who is seduced and carried off by a Russian captain who promises to marry her and then abandons her with her baby. She finally returns to her home to her aged mother. Petro, a young man whom she had formerly loved, now becomes her brother and when the captain returns and gives the child, his child, a few coins for nuts, the mother throws them out of the window into the street. The evil desires of the captain have been helped by the pride and the beauty of Oksana who has hoped and dreamed of a husband who would be of higher social station than she is and it is this desire to rise above the other girls of the village that leads to her downfall and tragedy.

In the dramas which Kvitka wrote for the Kharkiv stage, he has the same attitude but he very often uses the same mixture of Ukrainian and Russian that was the vogue before the dramas of Kotlyarevsky. Thus in _Shelmenko the Orderly_, the hero who is saved from military service into which he has been plunged by the scheming and unscrupulous village clerk, talks Russian consistently whereas the orderly usually speaks Ukrainian. The way in which the governor unmasks the rascality of his subordinate and punishes him is typical of Kvitka’s attitude toward the imperial regime. The crooked clerk is also a good example of the climbing and corrupt Ukrainians who desire to get away from their peasant past. As the inn keeper says, “The village clerk, a peasant with money, is ashamed to be with his brothers and wastes money for a costly meal and expensive wines,” because he thinks that this represents enlightenment and improvement.

Again and again in these plays as in his stories, Kvitka the reactionary does not hesitate to put down the truth as he sees it, even though it runs counter to many of the preconceived ideas which he elsewhere stubbornly defends. He does not idealize many of his characters and almost unconsciously he gives us the attitude of the people to their Russian rulers. Thus Nikita says in this same play, “My father did not teach me to write in order that I should become evil and worthless and he tried to put me on the right path.” It is also interesting that he, speaking Russian, still cannot read and write his native tongue, for he knows only the church language, that arbitrary and artificial system to which Kotlyarevsky had given the death blow with his _Eneida_.

After giving such rich and varied pictures of Ukrainian life, it is strange that he returned to Russian and in such stories as _Pan Halyavsky_, he describes in a fairly amusing manner the life of a typical rich cub with his stupid Polish tutors and his inability to accomplish anything. In great detail the author shows how he is tyrannized over by his ambitious wife who succeeds in sending him to the country, so that she can play around with the army officers who seem to her more attractive. Perhaps in a way Kvitka is not so untrue to his own feelings, for he draws a sharp differentiation between the native life of the villages and the gay existence of the capital.

Kvitka then stands in a curious position in Ukrainian literature. He undoubtedly deserves the praise which was showered upon him for his ability in describing Ukrainian peasant life in excellent and readable prose. He marks a definite advance over Kotlyarevsky in the greater range of emotions and themes which he handles and in the more serious moods that appear at times. Yet it was not in him to be a champion of the cause of his people. It was not in him to break definitely with the polished world of the great estates and to start a definite movement for the assistance of the peasants. He recognized the dubious position of Ukraine in its contacts with the Russians but at the same time he appreciated the advantages which the connection with Russia had given him and his aristocratic friends and he was constantly torn between the two ideals.

Kvitka was really a passing phase in the development of Ukrainian literature. In many ways he can be compared to Gogol who had definitely stepped across the line into Russian. Kvitka was held back by his success in his Ukrainian stories. He knew the village life around him and felt that it was only from that life that he could draw his best themes. Yet he did not analyze or think through his position. He remained within the framework and lived the life of the average Russianized Ukrainian nobleman and hence it was, as he swayed back and forth, that he was condemned by Shevchenko and the ardent young patriots of the next generation.

At the same time he found a deeper appreciation at home than in Russia. Byelinsky, the great Russian critic and liberal, expressed himself very strongly against the peasant stories of Kvitka, for he did not believe that peasant life could furnish the material for serious literature and despite his marked democratic leaning, he was opposed to the use of the Ukrainian language for literary purposes. Hence he condemned Kvitka on all counts. Nevertheless Kvitka has held his own for his peasant stories especially in Ukraine. They have been often edited and reedited and still find large masses of readers, despite the sentimental style in which many were written. Had he been inclined to rest his fame upon his Ukrainian stories, his place would have been higher, and he could have polished them even more highly. As it is, his Russian work has been forgotten, his Ukrainian stories have lived, and we must consider him as another milestone in the resurrection of the Ukrainian consciousness and in the development of the language. The great master had not yet appeared to crown the work but Kvitka was one of the men of the transition period who builded better and more solidly than they knew or dared to imagine.