In the early 1880s, visitors to Petersburg’s archives and libraries could see the same scene almost every day, an elderly gentleman with a long gray beard sitting in his library chair and absorbed in writing something from the archival documents. Many of those present knew this person: he was Mykola Kostomarov, a historian well-known in Russia and throughout the world. But far from all knew he was working on a book about Ivan Mazepa, Hetman of Ukraine.
It was difficult for Kostomarov to write. The historian was well over sixty, he had recently suffered two strokes and become half-blind after a sudden impairment of his sight. Kostomarov felt the description of Mazepa’s life might be his last oeuvre (it was precisely so: two and a half years after this book’s chapters had begun to appear in the journal Russkaya beseda, the great scholar died in April 1885).
Yet, the more unbending his willpower was: by writing the biography of a hetman cursed by official imperial ideology and historiography, he intended to complete a grandiose series of the historical portraits of Ukraine’s great people (for many decades before that, Kostomarov had described the life of Yaroslav the Wise and Volodymyr the Great, Bohdan Khmelnytsky and Danylo of Galicia, Petro Mohyla and Pavlo Polubotok, Hetmans Ivan Briukhovetsky, Demyan Mnohohrishny, and Ivan Samoilovych). Now it was the turn of Mazepa. Mykola Kostomarov was eager to finish this book at any cost. And he did, exerting the last ounce of his strength.
“To follow the thoughts of a great man is a most interesting pursuit,” Pushkin once wrote. This is especially to the point here: a great historian (Kostomarov was also endowed with a rare literary gift: he was a talented prose writer, poet, and playwright) began writing about Ivan Mazepa, the most controversial figure in the nation’s history. It was in fact the first scholarly work on Mazepa in imperial Russia. What further complicated Kostomarov’s position was his entire previous life, especially his political persuasions in his salad years.
Mykola Kostomarov was never been an armchair pedant indifferently contemplating the cataclysms of the surrounding world. In the 1840s he dreamed of a democratic federation of Slavic republics based on juridical equality, with free Ukraine holding a fitting place. He wrote The Book of Ukrainian People’s Existence, where he, in particular, explained the developments after the 1654 Pereyaslav recognition of Muscovite suzerainty this way: “Ukraine saw soon that it had got into captivity due to its na Х vet О , without knowing what the tsar was, while the Moscow tsar is nothing but a pagan and a tormentor” (the author seems to have known how to present his historical concept simply and clearly). And take his appraisal of Peter I: “He put hundreds of thousands of Cossacks into ditches and built the capital city on their bones” (this approach is obviously close to that of Taras Shevchenko).
It is common knowledge that participation in the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood, where Kostomarov tried to implement his democratic political views, cost him a year of incarceration in the Peter and Paul Fortress and seven years of exile in Saratov. It was not until Alexander II gave his “merciful” permission that the scholar was able to return to Petersburg, and only in 1856 did the authorities sanction that Kostomarov could “be printed but strictly censored.” The minister of public education considered that the historian should not be allowed to teach at a university: all he could do was work, “perhaps as a librarian.” To be elected professor extraordinary at St. Petersburg University, Kostomarov needed the personal agreement of no less a personage than the Emperor of All the Russias.
Hence, the world-famous historian and author, once “pardoned” by the authorities, began writing about the figure perhaps most fearful for these authorities. Moreover, this was the first attempt (Pushkin’s Poltava is a work of fiction after all, as is Ryleyev’s brilliant poem Voinarovsky, which also featuring the image of Mazepa).
Kostomarov’s work is of a special genre: it is a fiction-cum-documentary biography rather than a dry historical treatise. It is obvious that the author, for all his phenomenal knowledge of the historical sources (there are hundreds, such as documents from Ukrainian, Polish, Swedish, and Russian archives), also has a clear human vision of the hetman. Presenting the facts with maximum precision, as far as the then level of historical knowledge and censorship could allow, Kostomarov vividly displayed his orientation toward moral and ethic values and quite often from the angle of the author’s own times rather than those of Mazepa. This is simultaneously a source of the historian’s strength and weakness.
Starting his story in fact with the election of Mazepa as hetman (1687), Kostomarov thus narrows the subject of his research: this is not the whole life of Mazepa but the period of his being in power.
For this reason the author cannot bypass the eternal problem: power, morality, and people (much earlier, the great Romans Suetonius and Tacitus wrote about this). He thus briefly characterizes the Ukrainian hetman’s main trait: “an amazing ability to intrude into the hearts of all.” The historian thought Ivan Mazepa did so almost always throughout all the twenty years of his hetmanship. Mazepa, Kostomarov notes, “strove to get rid in good time of those who might make dangerous intrigues against him, but, not knowing for certain if he would succeed, he did not want to incur any accusations of injustice. Thus he used double standards: he overtly assisted and covertly denigrated the same people in order to secure the trust of Moscow should those people decide to do him harm.”
This was a severe moral verdict (and, at the same time, an exact analysis of political techniques not only in his subject’s time). But this is only one side of the story, for almost immediately after this, the author gives eloquent facts revealing the extent to which denunciations and intrigues were typical of the political atmosphere in the Muscovite Tsardom of that time and in Ukraine as a constituent part of it (in particular, the tsar personally received reports against Mazepa almost every day). That the hetman resorted to the same methods in this situation only testifies to one thing: he was a past master in the struggle for power. The main question is: what did he need this power for?
Kostomarov here puts forth an unsparing opinion about Mazepa, which looks like a court sentence. The scholar writes: “Hetman Mazepa, as a historical personage, did not represent any national idea. He was an egoist in the full sense of the word. A Pole by education and way of life, he defected to Little Russia and made a career there, currying favor with the Muscovite authorities and resorting to all kinds of amoral methods.” In other words, the author’s opinion is generally that the hetman needed power exclusively for satisfying his personal ambitions. It should be added that the image of Peter I in this book is far more attractive morally and politically than it is in his Book of the Ukrainian People’s Existence.
It should be admitted that the outstanding historian was in this case undoubtedly under the pressure of the imperial political guidelines about Mazepa’s “treason.” The ideologemes of this kind influence, inevitably and subconsciously, the studies of even the greatest savants of the past: it was like this in Ancient Rome, it also remained in force in part of the twentieth century democratic countries with a censorship much more tolerant than in nineteenth century imperial Russia.
Yet, it is worth noting that even when the Ukrainian language was banned (let alone ideas of building a Ukrainian state; do not forget about the time the book on Mazepa came out: the Ems Ukase had been in force for six years!), Mykola Kostomarov thought it necessary to include this idea in his study: “Subsequent history showed that Russian power underestimated even more than Russian historians the common sense of Little Russian (Ukrainian — Ed.) people in this matter (victory over Swedish King Charles XII — Auth.) and the favor they did to the Russian state. Mazepa’s treason made Russian power suspicious for a long time, if not forever, of the Little Russians. Throughout all his subsequent reign, Peter showed caution concerning Little Russia, which more than once turned into violence. Mazepa’s successor, Skoropadsky, was so much restricted by the mistrust of the central authorities that he had to put up with the breach of his legal rights.”
Having described, in terse but precise terms, the systematic restriction and then destruction of Ukrainian statehood in the eighteenth century, Kostomarov concluded: “Were those changes to the people’s good? If so, only a little. On the contrary, because of political considerations, the well-known maxim, divide and rule, was adopted... Little Russia, like the rest of Russia, was long subjected to the ignominy of serfdom, from which it was liberated only recently.” Taking into account the circumstances of the time, these words mean a great deal.
Every reader who acquaints himself with Mykola Kostomarov’s work now cannot, of course, avoid the question of how we should assess it from the standpoint of contemporary historiography. The problem is all the more pressing because even now Russia very often uses the figure of Hetman Mazepa as proof of the “perfidiousness,” “criminality,” and “lack of any future” of “Ukrainian separatism” (read: the people’s aspiration to create their own state).
It seems to us the main thing is to clearly distinguish Ivan Mazepa’s personal traits from the line of political independence he embodied. Even if we forget the hetman’s charitable deeds (building churches, schools, hospitals, and the tremendous alms he paid), which Kostomarov did not emphasize, even if we remember, as the historian did, that the hetman owned a 100,000 peasants in Ukraine and 20,000 peasants in Russian lands adjacent to Ukraine (this is a fact), the question should be worded as follows: Do the social and ethical limitations in Mazepa’s viewpoints mean that independence is in general an unjust cause? The more so that we are now far better aware than the reader of Kostomarov’s day about the flagrant acts of violence committed by the tsarist regime (the summary massacre of Baturyn, incarceration of Hetman Pavlo Polubotok, abduction in Hamburg of the hetman’s nephew, Andriy Voinarovsky, etc.).
But we must also add one more thing. Ivan Mazepa’s is an incredibly complex and dramatic figure, who need not to be idealized or, even more, made into a myth (as it is now occurring in Russia, to a certain extent, with the image of Peter I). Our historical figures should be treated and known the way they really were without any new black and while legends. And the book of this great scholar and historian, our compatriot, Mykola Kostomarov can do us an invaluable favor if read atten tively and critically.
