The life of Vasyl Kapnist (1758- 1823) is perhaps the most convincing confirmation of the outstanding Ukrainian historian’s aforesaid words. Prominent Russian poet and playwright, a friend of Gavrila Derzhavin, Ivan Dmitriyev, Nikolai Lvov, and other famous of letters during the period of Catherine II, Kapnist was among those who kept in his heart the memory of bygone freedoms in his native Ukraine and tried as far as the censorship allowed to disseminate the ideas of freedom and humanism among the broadest strata of society. He thus became the precursor of future Ukrainian democrats and fully deserved the following epitaph: “He was a friend of the Muses and the Fatherland...”
We see our hero’s face in the portrait: a somewhat sentimental man with dreamy and affectionate eyes and subtle facial features. Meanwhile, Kapnist’s forebears were people very far from any kind of reflections — they were bold and belligerent individuals partly by force of their origin. His grandfather, Petro Kapnist, an ethnic Greek, fought Turks for many years and sided with the Russian troops during Peter I’s Prut campaign in 1711 (Orthodox unity must have been the decisive factor), at the head of an armed detachment of Greek volunteers. Then Petro Kapnist entered the hetman’s service and settled in Ukraine forever.
Petro’s son, Brigadier General Vasyl Kapnist, married Sophia Dunik-Borkovska, the daughter of a purebred Cossack officer. It is at their family estate in the village of Obukhivka near Myrhorod, Poltava province, that the future poet was born on February 23, 1758.
The father did not live to see his son: commanding five Cossack regiments, he was killed in battle against the Prussians near Gross Egersdorf on August 19, 1757. Since then the boy was exclusively brought up by his mother, a woman who managed to preserve an exceptionally high level of national identity — her contemporaries said that even when Sophia Borkovska was beneficently granted an audience with Empress Elizabeth, she showed up in a Ukrainian folk costume.
But it was quite clear for Sophia that instilling love for the Ukrainian homeland in the little Vasyl was too small a thing to do. What he really needed was a genuine and sound classical education. And the young man got it. First of all, Kapnist brilliantly learned Latin, German, and French, then acquainted himself with world literary classics. That he had already been signed up at age 13 as a corporal of the Izmailovsky Life Guards Regiment was no barrier (that was common practice in those times: children of the nobility used to be enrolled for military service even at the age of two and have their commission at 16-18). As to Vasyl, he left service as a lieutenant in 1781.
Contemporaries who knew Kapnist well unanimously confirmed that he never strove to pursue a career at the Petersburg court in spite of being assigned quite serious offices in Ukraine (for example, he was for some time general judge of Poltava province and the Poltava General Court, marshal of the nobility in Myrhorod district and, later, in Kyiv province). The Greek- Ukrainian Cossack descendant did not seem to be exactly in rapture over his achievements on the imperial service (in 1801, after the accession of Alexander I to the throne, he left St. Petersburg for good as State Counselor and returned to his native Obukhivka, where he lived the last 22 years of his life).
Kapnist found the true sense of life in writing poetry and fighting against social injustice; moreover, in his opinion, these two things were often indivisible because he regarded poetry as, above all, doing a high civil duty. He devoted himself to defending the downtrodden, poor, and underprivileged, doing so with an almost poetic inspiration. The poet’s daughter Sophia Kapnist- Skalon recalled, “My father passionately loved his homeland and was prepared to forsake all his property for the benefit of Little Russia; on hearing about the slightest oppression or arbitrary rule, he would fly to Petersburg, drop his business, run up debts, and, often go to war against well-known people, almost always emerging victorious. His only wish was to restore the erstwhile well- being and prosperity of Little Russia, to revitalize, so to speak, the people who still remembered their freedom...”
This must have been the main reason why our poet performed his most daring exploit. In 1791 Vasyl Kapnist arrived semi-secretly in Berlin, seeking an audience with the royal chancellor, Count Herzberg, and asked him if the Prussian government could render moral, political and perhaps military assistance to those Ukrainians who have begun to struggle against Muscovite tyranny and Potemkin’s despotism. Incidentally, it is still unclear which concrete noble or Cossack social strata Kapnist represented in this case. What is clear is that the Ukrainian society of those years was highly heterogeneous and by no means unanimous as to goals and views, with only the most radically- minded people sharing the poet’s ideas. It is also clear that, in spite of the not so good relations between Prussia and the Russian Empire, Vasyl Kapnist ran a very high risk because it was quite possible that the Prussian government might report to Petersburg about his adventure. Fortunately, although Herzberg gave a very evasive answer, he never divulged the secret to the St. Petersburg government. Let us add that this story was unveiled only in 1888 from papers accidentally found in Prussian archives.
Yet, it is the Muses, not politics, that dominated the life of this friend of the Fatherland and the Muses. Kapnist put all his indignation, the bitter sarcasm seated deep in the poet’s outraged heart, all the might of his mind and soul in the famous Ode to Slavery (1783) written immediately after Catherine II imposed serfdom in Ukraine. Let us not rail against the archaic and somewhat heavy style of Kapnist’s verses: without exaggeration, there would have been neither Pushkin, nor Kotliarevsky, nor Shevchenko but for this work of a high civil value. Let us read:
“Where there was a free flow of people’s good and happiness/now slavery reigns supreme./Alas! Fortune would have it/that one word turn our bright day into a dark night.”
Contemporary Ukrainians understood all too well that the word was the nakaz of Empress Catherine II. Still, the author managed to remain an optimist: he believed “...there will be no more wailing in the place where I first saw the light of day.”
Kapnist still more reinforced his all-Russian glory with the satirical comedy The Telltale (1798). The play presents a damning indictment of the mores in a state where a chief judge cannot handle a case without being bribed and a prosecutor was rewarded with the author’s following words:
“His sharp eye will see only too well what lies unattended,/he won’t take only what he is unable to reach.”
It is not accidental that the comedy Telltale, which the contemporaries called “the mirror in which many people will see themselves,” was soon banned by Emperor Paul.
What was Kapnist in human terms? Historian Dmitry Bantysh- Kamensky described the poet thus, “He was of middle stature, lean, had a good-looking face on which the fiery eyes and a derisive smile brightly reflected his intellect and lively nature. In society, he was distinguished for suavity, witty conversation, and gaiety. Having absolute command of the Russian language (to which his origin is testimony), he spoke superb French and German. Yet he liked best to speak Little Russian, which still more attracted listeners to his gripping and simultaneously jocular stories. A son of Little Russia, he loved indolence: he would write lying in bed, surrounded by books and papers.” Yes, he seemed to be an indolent and mawkish person. But let us not forget that his sons sympathized with the Decembrists, a relative of his, Petro Kapnist, took part in the Decembrist movement, and in the year when the poet died the nine year-old Taras Shevchenko was walking Cherkasy province.
