Years ending in the number 6 are significant not only for Ivan Franko but another native of Halychyna — Ilarion Svientsitsky. He was born in the ancient princely town of Buzhsk (now Busk) on April 7, 1876, in what was then known as the suburb of Dovha Storona (now Markian Shashkevych Street) and died on Sept. 18, 1956, in Lviv, where he was buried in the famous Lychakiv Cemetery.
The house where he was born in the family of a schoolteacher was a few dozen meters from the unique octagonal wooden Church of St. Paraskeva, now dated to 1708. God obviously heard this man’s first prayers in this very place.
Vegetable gardens still stretch down to the flood-plain meadows of the small river Solotvyna that meanders between low and high banks. Here the young Ilarion saw a riot of flowers — from reed blooms on the riverside to a host of flowers on the floodplain meadows on the higher and drier bank, which tended to vary depending on the season. Svientitsky grew to love flowers, including those he himself grew and tended near his house in Lviv.
During Eastertime, when everybody was allowed to ring the church bells, he probably tugged at the belfry ropes, like all the youngsters on the street. “His” church on the street created a special aura, a homelike atmosphere, and may have had certain superiority over other street communities of this city.
There were much larger floodplain meadows just behind the church, and a dam and a bridge were built downriver along the Solotvyna (now Kyivska Street). In spring and summer floodwaters would spill over the meadows and unfortunately remain there for a long time. The waters formed a large lake, so the residents of Dovha Storona had to make a considerable detour to reach their homes from the center of town and vice versa.
In the 19th century the burghers of Lviv used a 100-meter-long narrow wooden causeway (made of two or three planks) to cross these meadows during the flooding season. The causeway was almost a meter above the water and had no handrails. It was difficult to cross in windy weather. Even now, at the end of Shkilna Street, which used to connect downtown with the meadows, you can see bumps underneath the asphalt. These bumps are remnants of pillars that used to prop up the causeway: unlike the sandy and sagging ground, the pillar remnants never sink.
This sizable structure may have made a strong impression on the young Ilarion: a pillar here and a plank there, and you don’t have to fear such a destructive element of nature as a flood. The floods were occasionally so strong that they easily tore down narrow bridges and causeways, sweeping along stacks of mown hay, inundating vegetable gardens, and destroying crops.
In later years Svientsitsky, nailing plank to plank and sinking one pillar next to another, quietly and without ruinous panic or idle talk, built a causeway of his own, which would lead his people through the formidable floods of foreign lies and hatreds and enable them to save their language and monuments of the past, defend their honor, and occupy a praiseworthy place among other peoples of the world.
It took Liudmyla Paniv, a bibliographer at Lviv’s Ivan Franko University’s research library, three years of hard work (1993-1996) to compile a bibliographical reference work on Ilarion Svientsitsky. In her brief foreword she writes: “This reference book is being published in conjunction with the 120 th birth anniversary and 40 th death anniversary of Ilarion S. Svientsitsky, the prominent Slavist and paleographer, distinguished art historian, and researcher of Bulgarian, Serb, Polish, Czech, Russian, and other languages and literatures, a scholar whose research field was unfathomable.”
It is clear from the last sentence of the foreword that the attitude to Svientsitsky’s work has practically not changed in Ukraine in the past 10 years. “The archival materials, manuscripts, and epistolary legacy of this outstanding scholar are still awaiting their researcher,” Paniv writes.
I am generally interested in only one work by our acclaimed compatriot, which the Lviv-based historian Ivan Krypyakevych mentions in his History of Ukraine (Lviv, 1990). With Ms. Paniv’s help, I found the book Rus’ and the Polovtsians.
In the introduction, Svientsitsky dedicates his work to Aleksei Shakhmatov (1864-1920): “May the dedication of this study to him be the expression of the author’s own feelings, because he had the long-lasting honor of enjoying the friendly attention of this spokesman of unbiased scholarly truth. The population of Halychyna also expresses its sincere gratitude to him for rescuing, during the 1917 revolution in Petrograd, the valuable archive of the Halychyna Diocese from the 15th to the 19th centuries and many important documents from the National Museum archive that the Russian gendarmerie removed from Lviv in 1915. Ukrainian academia has long regarded A. Shakhmatov as a connoisseur of the historical development of the Ukrainian people’s language and life, and a defender of their rights.”
Svientsitsky then notes that Rus’ and the Polovtsians is based on the lectures of a university course that he taught in 1938-1939, and that he reported the results of this research at a meeting of the Shevchenko Scientific Society on April 1, 1939.
Four months later the entire Western world began to sink into the terrible inferno of the Second World War. It was an open secret that war was imminent. Perhaps for this reason Svientsitsky gave a rather cursory account of events described in Rus’ and the Polovtsians. He simply did not have enough time for a more detailed and comprehensive study. Moreover, it is quite clear that this renowned scholar considered these issues obvious and easy to understand.
For example, he writes on page 34: “The prince, his retinue, and the chronicler are all devout Christians. This means that the motifs of active religiosity amply prove the connection between this literary work and real life.”
If you compare The Tale of Ihor’s Campaign to pages from actual chronicles, the difference is enormous. The Tale contains no Christian attributes of the time, references, etc.
In the second chapter, “Problems of Content and Form in The Tale of Ihor’s Campaign,” the author states: “What must be a striking fact for every reader of The Tale today is the excellent knowledge of history of the 11 th and 12th centuries together with details that can only be learned from a harmonized, comprehensive chronicle. This harmony of historical and geographical information can only be found in the works of Russian historiographers in the age of Catherine II.”
Evidently, these facts have not impressed contemporary fans of the Tale.
Here is another well-balanced sentence that stands like a mighty buttress of a causeway surrounded by a sea of casuistic floodwaters (p. 38): “What also raises doubts is the mysterious emergence of the monument after it had lost all its traces in ancient Rus’ literature for centuries on end and was thus unavailable for research and copying from the day of its discovery in 1795 until the day of its irreversible demise in the 1812 Moscow fire.”
On p. 39 Svientsitsky notes that pagan gods are only occasionally mentioned in the chronicles, and only The Tale revealed them all for the first time and described their “functions.” This is followed by another interesting literary comment: “What also raises some doubt is the inimitable nature of this monument, although a very large number of similar works was found in the 16th-18th centuries.”
On p. 53 Svientsitsky even attaches a mathematical formula to his evidence (he had a mathematics degree from Lviv University). It is common knowledge that if mathematics is not exact in its calculations, proofs, and conclusions, it ceases to be mathematics.
In its turn, history resembles the crafty art of magicians, which hushes up, fails to see, and rejects obvious things that do not fit outdated patterns. Svientsitsky makes quite an interesting discovery on p. 55: “That the Ukrainian territories had completely forgotten about the Polovtsians since the times of the Tatar yoke is proved by the fact that Innokentiy Gizel’s Synopsis does not mention them or the 1185 event at all.”
Svientsitsky notes in conclusion: “Nevertheless, The Tale was destined to play a great and extremely important role in the history of ancient Ukrainian literature. Its appearance signaled the beginning of comprehensive research on language, literary forms, and even links with folklore. Research on the lacunae in The Tale contributed to the overall study of the history and culture of ancient Rus’. All this research laid the firm groundwork for a comprehensive review of ancient Rus’ literature as a powerful root of national and social life in the Rus’ lands and related principalities.”
Unfortunately, the present-day situation has markedly changed: there is not a single branch of Ukrainian culturology, or even part of it, that does not make references to The Tale of Ihor’s Campaign as the “immortal work of genius” of the late 12 th century.
It is now clear that the major problem is not to convince the majority that The Tale is a fake but to agree that modern Ukrainian scholars will have to make a strenuous effort to remove the many years of sludge that has accumulated around the spurious Tale.
The world’s first serious critic of The Tale is the French Slavist Andre Mazon, who published Le Slovo d’Igor in French in 1940.
An Oriental proverb says, “I and time will overcome any kind of enemy.” So, with such a prominent compatriot helping us, we are bound to rout this enormous army of words.
