The dramatic poems of Lesia Ukrayinka (Larysa Kosach) are some of our culture’s precious treasures. A truly national artist (attested by the pen name she deliberately chose at age 13 as a challenge and oath of allegiance to her native land, the one that immortalized her), Lesia Ukrayinka possessed a unique, natural, and God-given ability to see through or even presage the life, destiny, and history of the Ukrainian people, by making use of remote and what was then considered “exotic” material related to the distant past of the ancient Orient, Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages. Her works were peopled by such figures as Miriam, Ruth, Priscilla, or Cassandra; in the portrayal of the latter are certain autobiographical elements. In Lesia’s life there was an element of terrible divine punishment. The greatest tragedy was that the exclusive gift of prophecy was bestowed on a woman who was dauntless in spirit but frail in body, a woman whom no one believed or heeded when she was making apocalyptic prophecies, which always came true. When this Ukrainian poetic genius wrote about these characters, above all she had Ukraine in mind. The poetess, who possessed a spiritual vision enriched by a thorough knowledge of world history and culture, shone a miraculous, analytical spotlight on Ukraine’s path throughout the centuries and millennia, drawing on universal spiritual experience.
It should be openly acknowledged that during this period only Lesia Ukrayinka had this exclusive gift. In this respect, perhaps only her contemporary, Ivan Franko, who wrote the immortal Moses, and our contemporary, Ukraine’s great artist and premier poet Lina Kostenko (incidentally, a brilliant interpreter of Lesya’s heritage) are comparable to her in our 20th-century literature. I repeat: it was not just a natural gift but an extremely rare talent, an example of a Ukrainian-universal spiritual synthesis, the only talent that can save us from parochial narrow-mindedness and ignorance under the guise of “patriotic phrases,” as well as from morbid, ephemeral, and fruitless cosmopolitanism. In the last 12 years of her life, beginning in 1901, Larysa Kosach created most of her masterpieces in the exceedingly difficult and new genre of the dramatic poem — new not just for her but Ukrainian literature as a whole. Boyarynia (The Noblewoman) is one of these.
This poem stands apart from the other outstanding achievements of Lesia Ukrayinka the playwright. In contrast to Cassandra, In the Catacombs, In the Wilderness and The Stone Master (all these works were written or conceived approximately at the same time as Boyarynia, i.e., in 1907-1912), Boyarynia is Lesia Ukrainka’s only dramatic masterpiece based on Ukrainian history. Moreover, the tragic events in Lesia Ukrainka’s private life strangely coincided with the times described in Boyarynia — the terrible epoch of the Ruin: the drama was written in Egypt, where the poetess was undergoing treatment for what was clearly a fatal disease, when the time that was left in her creative and physical life was shrinking like shagreen skin. Unbelievably, the play was written in three days, between April 27 and 29, 1910.
Lesia Ukrayinka conceived and composed this drama in the conditions that, to put it mildly, were not conducive to creative work, masterpieces. In addition to kidney disease, the poetess also had severe, recurring pain in the legs, a sign that her chronic tuberculosis was advancing. The writer suffered from constant pain, weakness, and fever. Yet, despite the odds, Lesia wrote to Olha Kobylianska on February 26, 1906, “I am fully aware that I am still strong and that no human being will ever defeat me.” Working on Boyarynia, contrary to the vagaries of fate, the poetess never lost spiritual sight either of Ukraine of the 1660s (the setting of the play), or of 1910, both so close and distant at the same time, or Ukraine of the future.
What idea nourishes this dramatic poem? (Incidentally, Lesia Ukrayinka was in no way a master of “realistic writing” or thrilling plots: she was the creator of ideas, so it is futile to look for many realistic details in her works). The poetess must have been seeking an answer to the “accursed” and “eternal” Ukrainian (but not exclusively Ukrainian) question: Why did the people of Ukraine enter a vicious and diabolical circle of political and spiritual captivity and how could it break this circle? So the question here concerns the “image of native captivity,” for captivity, as well as treachery, perfidy, faith, and exploit, is one of the leitmotifs in Lesia Ukrainka’s entire oeuvre). Accordingly, this entails even more pain, anguish, and terrible discoveries.
The drama has a simple plot. Stepan, “a young fellow dressed in the clothing of a Muscovite boyar, although his face indicates that he is not a Muscovite,” arrives from Moscow for a visit to the manor of Oleksa Perebiynyi, “a not very rich, but distinguished Cossack officer.” Why did the young man move to Moscow in a time of treacheries and “compromises” bordering on treason, when the “gallant” Hetman Ivan Briukhovetsky “was paving the way” of servility and shame to Moscow, where he obtained the rank of boyar in exchange for renouncing Ukraine’s legitimate rights, when hetmans of various leanings (pro- Russian, pro-Polish, pro-Turkish) kept bleeding and tearing Ukraine apart? Stepan says, “If we were not slaving away here (in Moscow — Author), Muscovy’s voivodes would have trampled our families underfoot in Ukraine.” The youth seems to have found reasons to justify himself (incidentally, he has a difficult life at the tzar’s court: he has to take part in “sessions” presided over by the tsar and his boyars, write his signature as “lowly slave Stepan,” and suffer insults and taunts). His reasoning is as follows: “My late father left for Moscow not in search of property and money! He didn’t want to serve foreign landlords in his own country. Instead, he wanted to serve his true faith in a foreign land and thus help his oppressed brothers at least from afar, so that the tsar will bestow his grace on them.” The son fully shares his father’s stance. “Are they right?” the author asks. What are the consequences of such a compromise?
Life “by the tsar’s side,” in an atmosphere of malice, incriminations, cruelty, and ill wishes proves unbearable not only for Stepan, no matter how hard to tries to adapt himself, but also for his beloved wife Oksana, whom he also took to Moscow. The character of Oksana, the “boyarynia,” is full of genuine poetry. Casting her incomparable artist’s glance upon her, Lesia Ukrayinka in fact pictured the distant and inimitable Ukraine among the sands of Helwan. There are differing views on this point (e.g., one expressed by a group of well-known scholars at Den/The Day’s 2003 roundtable on the school literature curriculum): some scholars say that from the esthetic and artistic angle, Boyarynia, which is praised exclusively for political and ideological considerations, is by no means Lesia Ukrainka’s finest work. It is difficult to agree with this: even if Boyarynia were a total artistic failure, then, as Lina Kostenko once noted, “a great artist’s failures are out of the ordinary, too.” Moreover, are there not examples in the history of literature and social development, when the universal and prophetic discoveries of an artist have as great (if not greater) an impact as the purely esthetic perfection of his/her oeuvre? It would take a long time to discuss the mastery of Lesia Ukrayinka as the author of Boyarynia: let us merely point out that historical realities are outlined in the drama with subtle, sparse, and barely visible touches, hints and allusions, while there is not a single real-life figure of that epoch among the dramatic characters, which is not accidental.
A few words should be said about Lesia Ukrainka’s concealed prophetic discoveries. The poetess maintains that “native” captivity is terrible because, among other things, it is voluntary and that this type of slave or captive will always be able to comfort himself that “this is better” for Ukraine, and for his family and friends. And although Stepan realizes in a moment of revelation that he is a captive, the logic of the malignant compromise that slowly but steadily turns into treachery gets the upper hand. In her turn, Oksana cannot resign herself to the “death” of her soul and that of her husband; she can see what her creator clearly saw and discovered, namely, the incongruity of Muscovite tsardom’s spiritual atmosphere, where “there are whips and rods everywhere, and serfs are being sold” (Oksana quite aptly compares Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich to a Tatar khan), where the dignity of a human in general and a woman in particular is degraded (women “cloistered in their houses,” “do not see the light of day,” and have to cover their face), where tortures, denunciations, intrigues, and Byzantine policies reign supreme. Oksana cannot breathe this air, so her death is practically inevitable.
Is it any wonder that in Soviet times Boyarynia was strictly banned? (Hardly, even though the singer of “fires at dawn” could not have written a “nationalistic” work). Conscious of the difficult future that awaited this play, Lesia Ukrayinka even considered, in a letter to her mother dated December 28, 1912, signing it with a different pen name or cryptonym. Boyarynia was published posthumously in the Poltava-based journal Ridnyi krai (Nos. 1- 6, 1914). Without a doubt, this still underrated dramatic poem, into which Lesia Ukrayinka put so much of her suffering persona, still awaits full recognition.
