The village of Yaropolets was called Yaropolche before the nineteenth century. It is situated 120 kilometers northwest of Moscow, near the town of Volokolamsk. It is there that our “gallant hetman,” as Taras Shevchenko called him, found his eternal rest. The village was called after its first owner, Prince Yaropolk, elder son of Kyivan Prince Sviatoslav the Great, as long ago as the tenth century, when perhaps even the cocks did not crow about “Mother Moscow.”
As is known, Petro Doroshenko had to lay down the hetman’s insignia to Ivan Samoilovych, the creature and hireling of Moscow, in January 1676 under the walls of Chyhyryn. At that time Muscovy was in fact ruled by the boyars on behalf of weak Tsar Fiodor Romanov. Prominent among those boyars was the Gorchakov family, the descendants of former princes of Przemysl, with whom Doroshenko had long had some mysterious relationship rumored to be based on some kind of family ties.
Whatever the case, the hetman — “the traitor, thief, and enemy of Moscow” — was, instead of being executed, sent into honorary exile to Khlynov (Viatka from 1781) “so that he could promote the conversion to Orthodoxy of the Votiaks and other infidels.” A nice “assignment” for our hetman! But now everything is “purely Russian” there!
In 1682, as soon as the reins of power in Muscovy had gone to the tsar’s daughter Sophia (sister of the future Peter I), the hetman was “pardoned,” again with the help of the Gorchakovs, and was granted as a benefice the village of Yaropolche inhabited by a thousand peasants. Word has it that he did well.
So what did we Galicians see in Yaropolets in May 1992?
In the weed-grown village center, behind a miserable metal grating, stands a large stone block and nothing else. On the stone’s side, you can barely discern what has remained of a Cyrillic, now almost illegible, inscription.
Once, next to the grave, there was the altar of a small wooden church in honor of great martyr St. Paraskeva. No trace of it was left even by the eighteenth century.
The tomb itself and the overbearing chapel were built between 1702 and 1705 thanks to the memory and care of the hetman’s friend and fellow countryman, Dmytro Tuptalo (1651- 1709), the outstanding theologian scholar who occupied the post of the Metropolitan of Rostov and Yaroslavl from 1702 with Yaropolche part of his diocese. Tuptalo hailed from Makariv, Kyiv region, and was educated in the Kiev-Mohyla Academy. Moreover, he shared the views of Doroshenko and Ivan Mazepa. “The Rostov saint,” as Taras Shevchenko called him, could not bear the Poltava tragedy of 1709 and suddenly died in the summer of that year. Rumor blamed his death on Peter’s henchmen. Who knows? Tuptalo was the author of big popular Ukrainian church books, Cheti-Mineyi, on the lives of saints. Taras Shevchenko recalled in the epilogue to his Haidamaky his father quoting them: “...and Father... would close his Minea on Sunday...”
The inscription on the hetman’s tomb was first copied on August 30 (Julian calendar), 1824, by artist Yakov Arturov at the request of the Ukrainian historian Dmytro Bantysh- Kamensky (1788-1850) who eventually presented it, also for the first time, in his History of Little Russia in 1830.
The inscription announced (in the then Ukrainian language and calendar): “In the year 7206, on this 9th day of November, God’s slave, Hetman of the Zaporozhzhian Host, Petro Dorofeyev Doroshenko passed away at the age of 71 years from his birth and was laid to rest in this place.” “The year 7206” meant 1698, when the hetman died. In his historical poem “A Black Cloud Has Cast Over...,” Shevchenko writes abou t the eternalization of Petro Doroshenko’s memory by Dmytro Tuptalo:
“...Only you,
Saint of Rostov,
Remembered your great friend
In the dungeon
And ordered a chapel built
Over the hetman,
And prayed to God
For Hetman Petro’s eternal
peace... “
The original chapel was ruined in the early nineteenth century. Hence, when Shevchenko was writing this poem in his Kos-Aral exile, on August 2 the same year a new chapel was blessed, built by order of Natalia Goncharova, the hetman’s granddaughter and poet Aleksandr Pushkin’s mother-in-law.
She died that same day.
Petro Doroshenko had three sons from the marriage with the maid Yeropka: Petro, Oleksiy, and Oleksandr. The hetman’s sons were not so lucky with male descendants: they begot only daughters.
Oleksandr’s daughter, beautiful Kateryna, married quite late the well-to-do old “Little Russian,” Oleksandr Zahriazhsky (1716-1786) and gave birth to six children. Their elder son was father of the mentioned Natalia, Pushkin’s mother-in-law. She was also the wife of Nikolai Goncharov, owner of the “Yaropolets estate,” a half-landlord and half-merchant. It was they who became parents of the other Natalia or, as Pushkin said, “Natalie,” his beautiful wife.
It is known that the mother- in-law could not stand her son-in-law, so when he visited her, a widow, only once on August 22-24, 1833, by the Julian calendar, he received (deservedly so!) from her a public snub, the epithet of black devil. For it is common knowledge what kind of skirt chaser her son-in-law was.
After planting the flowers we had bought in Volokolamsk around the grave, praying for the hetman’s soul, and singing “Ukraine is Not Yet Dead,” our delegation headed for the ethnographic museum, the Museum of Pushkin. Its curator, Antonina Kozhemyako, a historian by profession and a “Belarusian crazy about Doroshenko and Pushkin,” showed us the treasures around her.
What enchanted us the most was a 70 centimeters high beautiful bust of Carrara marble. “This is how your handsome Hetman Doroshenko looked,” Ms. Kozhemyako said proudly. Sculpted in 1776, the bust had a post-revolutionary Odyssey worthy of an adventure story which this newspaper’s pages cannot retell.
The marble portrait was created by the Swiss German, Alexander Trippol (1744-1793), a renowned eighteenth century sculptor, Copenhagen Art Academy graduate, and honorary member of the British and Prussian Academies of Art.
It is still unknown who requested the bust and where exactly it was made. Yet, the embassy of Switzerland in Moscow has several times tempted the museum to sell their compatriot’s work, perhaps the only one to survive to this day.
But Ukraine has not yet said a single word about this bust!
The plaque under the bust quotes a letter Pushkin wrote to Natalie, his fiancee at the time: “... of all hetmans, he (Doroshenko) hated Russians the most.” Writing notes to his Poltava, Pushkin was still more frank: “Doroshenko is a hero of old Little Russia, the implacable enemy of Russian domination.” He must have known for certain what and about whom he was writing. I am convinced.
The courteous museum curator read for good measure an extract from the letter of a Muscovite contemporary of Doroshenko: “Hetman Petro was a very handsome man.” Indeed, looking at the hetman’s bust with a characteristic hat, you cannot help thinking: “In all probability, he handed down his genetic pulchritude and nobility, through his son and granddaughter, to Pushkin’s future wife, whose beauty cost him his life.”
The chapel built by Pushkin’s mother-in-law was torn down not long ago, in 1953. Only a sketch of it remains. Legend has it that the chapel’s shape resembled the gates of Chyhyryn Castle in Doroshenko’s time. Answering our question if it is possible now to rebury the hetman’s mortal remains in Ukraine, for a moment Ms. Kozhemyako panicked, “Oh, no, you don’t say so, this is part of Pushkin’s life story.” Such is the case.
When, then, will Ukraine venerate its glorious hetman? For he lived and acted in and for Ukraine under his motto Salus Ukraine suprema lex esto! This call seems to be reaching out to us, the contemporaries:
Was it once
That our mind,
Our blood,
And our strength
Served Moscow?
