THE ISLAND
Any visitor to Stebliv cannot but feel enchanted by the poetic beauty of the Ros river. It flows quietly between its gently sloping banks in the vicinity of the town, but once in Stebliv, the river starts making whimsical bends, slipping through the granite canyon and deftly skirting big and small rock ledges on its way to the Dnipro. The big and small islands it thus creates stay there for centuries.
Well, not all of them. In one place, where the Ros traverses Stebliv, there was a local miniature version of Khortytsia that existed until 1951. It was a steep rocky island about a kilometer long. And then people started building hydropower plants on the Ros, the main current was blocked by a dam, and dike was built across one of the river’s branches that skirted the island. That was the end of “Khortytsia.” Now there is Stebliv’s “small Switzerland” there.
In addition to the beautiful environs, this island served as an excellent natural fortification for our forefathers. Not surprisingly, the surrounding area, known as Porossia, was noticed in the times of Prince Yaroslav the Wise. The Kyiv prince ordered to fortify it as part of Kyivan Rus’ southern border. Wandering in the outskirts of Stebliv, one can still find remnants of Old Rus’ settlements and Zmievi valy (Serpent Ramparts). Historians believe the latter were fortifications in Southern Rus’, designed to protect it against steppe nomads’ raids. They say the town of Torchesk, which was mentioned in chronicles, once stood in place of Stebliv. If so, the rock castle-like island must have been in its center.
Unfortunately, little is known about this place from the Middle Ages, but its Cossack past presents a much clearer picture. It is absolutely clear that, in the 17th-18th centuries, Stebliv with its castle island was an important Cossack outpost, a fortress with a standing garrison. Hetmans Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, and Petro Doroshenko often made stopovers there. Polish archives have preserved a letter written by Sahaidachny in Stebliv on June 2, 1620 and addressed to the starosta (elder) of Bohuslav. Sahaidachny asked him to instruct “the esteemed residents of Bohuslav” to supply to Stebliv “some sixty miras [mira ? 36 pounds avoirdupois, or 16 kilos — Ed.] of oats and as many cartloads of hay” (the hetman was going to spend the winter there with his troops). Lest the “esteemed residents of Bohuslav” refuse, Sahaidachny reminded them that their peace depended on his military protection. Living in peace required a strong army, so they shouldn’t mind parting with some oats and hay for its benefit.
The island offers a good view of Rizany Yar on the left bank of the Ros, near the village of Vyhraiv. The place name [Rizany Yar translates as Cutting Ravine — Ed.] dates back to the spring of 1648 when Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s troops dealt a devastating blow to the Rzeczpospolita’s army. Europe was shocked to learn that the Cossack troops had destroyed one of Europe’s strongest armies. For three weeks 8,000 Poles and 15,000 Tatars under the command of Stefan Czarniecki fought to seize Stebliv until a powder magazine exploded, starting a huge fire that destroyed the wooden church inside the fortress. Only then did the fortress capitulate and the Tatars were allowed to plunder it. Czarniecki, however, would not savor this victory for long. The Cossacks lured him and his troops into the woods near Bohuslav and he suffered a heavy defeat.
Five years later, in 1669, a time of ordeal came for Hetman Petro Doroshenko. Pursued by Zaporozhian Hetman Mykhailo Khanenko, he had to hide on that same island of Stebliv after a pitched battle. The outcome might have been fatal but for Ivan Sirko’s troops that came to his rescue.
The outskirts of Stebliv have witnessed a number of skirmishes and battles. This town also played a role in the life of Yurii Khmelnytsky. There he was captured by Petro Doroshenko and handed over to the Tatars.
After the destruction of the Zaporozhian Sich in 1775 the history of the Stebliv fortress also came to an end. It was demolished and Stebliv turned into an ordinary peaceful town, whose military glory remained probably only in oral stories.
In the 18th century Stebliv was for a long time owned by the Jablonowski aristocratic family. One of them, Mikolaj Jablonowski, cut a rather colorful figure. Being of Polish descent, he had completely embraced the Ukrainian tradition, spoke only Ukrainian, and wore folk clothes. At harvest time he would work in the field with the peasants and was fond of traveling as a chumak (wagoner and trader). The historian Lavrentii Pokhylevych wrote that peasants respected and even adored Mikolaj Jablonowski.
MICKIEWICZ
The great Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz visited Stebliv toward the end of February 1825.
What took him there? It all started with his arrest on Oct. 23, 1823. He was then a schoolteacher in Kowno [Kaunas] and the reason for the arrest was his membership in the Philomaths, a group of young people [that was a cross between freemason organization and learned society] with an eye to educational, scientific, and moral objectives. The Philomaths distanced themselves from politics, but were regarded as a suspicious clandestine society by the special services of the Russian empire, which at the time included Lithuania. What triggered the attack on them was the word “constitution.” A Vilnius high school student chalked “Vivat, Constantia!” on the blackboard, another one changed Constantia to Constitution, and someone else added “for Poles.” This was enough to cause a scandal.
Mickiewicz spent half a year in prison. After the trial and verdict, two dozen young people were exiled from the Polish gubernias. Mickiewicz was fortunate enough to be bailed out by Vilnius University lecturer Joachim Lelewel, so he did not have to serve the full term, but he could not escape exile. And so the 2-year-old poet found himself in St. Petersburg.
At the time the Neva flooded the city. Stunned by the flood, the city was like a doused lion and lost all its grandeur — and vigilance. Be that as it may, Education Minister Shishkov’s decision to appoint Mickiewicz as a teacher at the Richelieu Lyceum in Odesa was not the worst punishment he could have suffered. Strange as it may seem, Mickiewicz was allowed to choose the place of exile.
From St. Petersburg the poet and his friends Franciszek Malewski and Josef Jezowski set off for Odesa. They traveled in a sledge through Vitebsk and Gomel.
Later, in Odesa, Mickiewicz wrote to his friend Edward Odynec about the trip: “I have traversed Europe from north to south in, remarkably, one and the same sledge, which is something unheard-of over here.” Apparently, the Philomaths had a very loose travel schedule. They made stopovers, visiting with old and new friends. How could Mickiewicz have passed Vyshhorod without visiting his brother Alexander, later a professor at Kyiv University, who had an estate in the village of Kozarovychi? How could he have missed the famous annual fair on Podil near the old Kyiv Academy, an event that attracted the Polish szlachta from all over the gubernia?
At the fair Mickiewicz met Herman Holowinski who invited him to Stebliv, precisely to his estate on a steep rocky bank of the river. Mickiewicz wrote to Edward Odynec: “While in Kyiv gubernia, I turned from the main road and headed for the village (of Stebliv — V.P.) and saw the cliffs for the first time; this is something we knew only from books. For me it was a new breathtaking landscape… Too bad I couldn’t see any of this in summer when the place is adorned with water, greenery, and grapes.”
Indeed, had Adam Mickiewicz visited Stebliv in summer, he would have been bewitched by the environs. Amvrosii Levytsky (Ivan Nechui-Levytsky’s brother) worked as a parish priest in Stebliv. He recalled that the Holowinskis had an excellent park crossed by the scenic river Borovytsia. The house in which Mickiewicz stayed was at its confluence with the Ros. The landlord’s park had everything, wrote Levytsky, including pergolas, flower beds, greenhouses, cascades, entertainment pavilions, fountains, a luxurious orchard, natural grottos, and bridges across the Borovytsia. There is every reason to trust the Rev. Levytsky’s aesthetic taste: “In spring, when nature blossoms, Stebliv looks so lovely that it can match any Swiss town.”
Mickiewicz saw all this, but in the winter attire.
In Stebliv he wrote the poem “Travelers” in Emilia Holowinska’s album. It has these lines:
Life is a narrow path that joins two seas;
All of us are flying from a misty precipice
into the gloomy one …
Many years later, in the fourth book of his Pan Tadeusz (Mister Thaddeus) would share his idyllic memories of “these trees of my homeland,” which he hoped to see again. He would also mention the old linden by Holowinski’s mansion:
And Holowinski’s manor in the Ukraine,
On the banks of the Rus—do hawks still perch
In the towering linden, branches so spread
A hundred couples could dance
in its shade?
Miraculously, the old two-story wing of Holowinski’s mansion near which that old linden grew has survived the ravages of time. It is now part of the Korsun-Shevchenkivsky State Historical and Cultural Preserve, awaiting better times and better management. A short walk from the wing is the Mickiewicz Cliff. From its top one can marvel at the luxurious panoramic view of the Ros.
As far as the journey of Mickiewicz and his friends to Odesa is concerned, it had a romantic sequel. After Stebliv the poet visited Bonaventura and Joanna Zaleski. To do so, he had to make a long detour in the direction of the village of Pustovarivka, seven versts (over five miles) from Skvyra. The hosts enjoyed guests and entertainments, especially if the guests were special. The exiled romantic poet could not but attract Joanna Zaleska’s keen interest. Later they would meet again in Odesa. The poet’s biographers write that Joanna was Mickiewicz’s big love.
En route to the Black Sea, Mickiewicz visited Elisavetgrad [now Kirovohrad] where Count Jan Witt, the curator of the Odesa school district, was waiting for him. Witt was the son of the celebrated Sofia Potocka, the owner of the famous park in Uman that has long since been known as the Sofiivka Park. In Elisavetgrad Mickiewicz was told that there were no vacancies at the school to which he was posted. Nevertheless, he went to Odesa to admire the sea and experience new adventures and romantic affairs. “I rode through a boundless steppe, with nothing between the stations except the earth and the sky, and this for three hundred versts,” he wrote to Edward Odynec. It was the early spring of 1825.
Human destinies are indeed unknown. Mickiewicz was visiting Stebliv while Taras Shevchenko, an 11-year-old boy at the time, was only some 20 versts away, in the village of Kyrylivka. A month later his father would die, leaving Taras an orphan. He would then become a pupil and servant of dean Bohorsky. After a while he would call it quits and start searching for an painter who would teach him to paint. He would visit Stebliv but find no luck there.
In 1829 Shevchenko’s master took him to Vilna (Vilnius) where Mickiewicz was a university student in 1815-19.
NECHUI-LEVYTSKY
Stebliv, however, is associated with the name of Ivan Nechui-Levytsky in the first place. Without the Levytsky family the history of this town would be incomplete. Levytsky was the surname of most Stebliv parish priests, both in the late 18th and throughout the 19th century. They were buried in the graveyard of the Holy Transfiguration Church, where they had their parish. The church has not survived, but there are still two graves on a steep bank of the Ros, one with the writer’s grandfather and the other with his father. Both died in 1872.
Nechui-Levytsky grew up in a family that lives like a traditional peasant family. “That’s the way our clergy lived in the countryside once,” explains Amvrosii Levytsky. The parish priests plowed fields, sowed grain, and chopped wood. They put on cassocks only when going to church; they lived in peace and accord with their parishioners and took their families to christening parties, funerals, and weddings. They could not speak Russian and spoke only Ukrainian—nor were they reluctant to visit the local tavern.
Ivan’s father, Semen Levytsky, was ordained in 1838, the year of Ivan’s birth, and the above is true of him only partially. He was a rural intellectual, a local enlightener. Rev. Levytsky loved books and his private library boasted Mykola Markevych’s History of Little Russia, Dmytro Bantysh-Kamensky’s A History of Little Russia from the Time of Its Union with the Russian State under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, and Cossack chronicles. He took little interest in household and other chores. Ivan often saw his father reading books or writing sermons. (He wrote them in Ukrainian, much to the surprise of the metropolitan and lecturers at the Kyiv Seminary.)
“My father loved his native land, recalled Ivan Nechui-Levytsky, and he kept telling us that Ukraine was being oppressed by Polish landlords and the Jews and that Muscovy was cutting off our tongue and nationality, and he told us about Ukrainian history… On the way to Korsun he would point to Rizany Yar near Korsun, the site of Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s battle with the Poles, and he would show us Nalyvaiko’s Road that branched off the road to Korsun and led to the village of Petrushky.”
In 1845 Rev. Levytsky opened a parish school in Stebliv. It operated for only a year because the landowner Holowinski, as a Roman Catholic, made every effort to close it. He ordered his steward to get the pupils to work at the local cloth factory. The school reopened 14 years later (in 1859), once again at Rev. Levytsky’s initiative. In 1861 he finally succeeded in having a stone building constructed in Stebliv. One half of it accommodated the district administration with its chief clerk and his office and the other, the school and the teacher’s apartment. It took a great deal of selfless dedication and enthusiasm to overcome resistance from, or maybe passivity of, Stebliv’s community.
Nechui-Levytsky wrote that his mother, Hanna Lukianivna, came from the Lebedyn convent and was “very pious” but the same time “cheerful, agile, talkative, and fond of singing.” She loved to read stories about saints and instilled this love in her eldest son Ivan. Hanna Lukianivna died in 1851, when Ivan was only 13 years old.
Ivan Nechui-Levytsky’s memoirs are proof that “Grandma Motria,” his nanny, played a major role in his upbringing. “Our home was an old and compact structure… My brother, sister, and I slept on the floor in the bakery, beside our nanny Motria, for there was no sleeping room in the chambers,” Nechui-Levytsky wrote in his autobiography. In other words, two elements combined in his childhood: the countryside common folk element (the general lifestyle, folkways, and language) and the intellectual aspect (books, knowledge, and an interest in national history). Korsun with its luxurious natural environs was an important component of the world in which the future writer grew. The Ros river with neat whitewashed peasant houses on its banks and verdant landscapes left one with unforgettable impressions.
It would be strange if the writer did not mention Stebliv in his works. His novel Mykola Dzheria (1875) deserves notice in the first place. Where did Mykola head for after he ran away from his lord and his native village of Verbivka? To the sugar refineries in Stebliv. The first one was launched by Holowinski in 1852 and the second one, four years later. They specialized in granulated sugar and lump sugar, respectively. Serfdom was still in full force, so Mykola and his fellow countrymen took a big risk as runaways. If Bzozovsky, who picked up their scent and followed them all the way to Stebliv, had been smart enough, the local police would have caught the daring serfs and their punishment would have been severe. As it was, the fugitives got ahead of him and took revenge on their master.
Nechui-Levytsky described not only the life of the sugar refinery workers in Stebliv. He never missed an opportunity to glorify the beauty of Ukrainian lands. The story of Mykola Dzheria begins with a description of a “very scenic spot” by the Ros, including “sizeable rocky Castle Island,” rocky canyons in which “white waves churned and beat against the rock.” The author mentions Spas Cliff atop which “stands a church amidst the verdant trees; it is seen as though through a stone gate.“ This is the church in which the writer’s father, Semen Levytsky, was the priest.
Nechui-Levytsky’s novel Burlachka (The Wandering Girl) is also set in Stebliv. Its pages serve as the town’s guidebook.
Stebliv hosts the writer’s museum. Its curator of many years is Serhii Khavrus, a very dedicated man, enthusiastic student of local lore, musician, and singer. No matter what subject you discuss with him, he is bound to mention his celebrated fellow countryman Ivan Nechui-Levytsky after a couple of phrases. He will quote from him or relate an interesting part of his biography. Walking with him around Stebliv, you are sure to hear, “Now this is where Dzheria’s cabin stood… The Kaidashes live over there, you know, the descendants of that same Kaidash’s family… The Avramenkos lived in that corner over there…”
Another notable native of Stebliv, Vasyl Avramenko (1895–1981), was not generally known until his name returned to Ukraine only in the early 1990s. After the defeat of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR), this master of folk choreography lived abroad. He organized Ukrainian dance groups in various parts of Europe. The poet Olena Teliha was among his pupils in Podebrady (Bohemia). In 1929 Avramenko moved to the United States and organized a folk dance studio in New York City and numerous others elsewhere in the United States and Canada. He performed with the Ukrainian Dance Group and the Koshetz Choir in many countries. In 1936–37 he founded a sound film studio.
Avramenko wrote in his will that his remains be transferred to Stebliv. This was done in 1993 and a gravestone was erected at the expense of the US philanthropist Marian Kots, who knew the famous dancer. From this spot one can see the place where Avramenko spent his childhood years.
If you know and see all these things, Stebliv appears to be an open air museum. Add here the extremely scenic landscapes. The town stands at the confluence of two rivers—the Borovytsia and the Khorobra—with the Ros. From north and east Stebliv is surrounded by a pine forest where there are numerous tourist lodges and resorts. Although the Ros river suffers every year from industrial waste discharged in its upper reaches, it remains beautiful, flowing serenely between its rocky banks. Lavrentii Pokhylevych was right when he wrote, “Stebliv is remarkable for its location.” It is indeed, and it would be desirable it remained that way, so that man, going about his business, would feel like a doctor and remember his main professional commandment: “Do not harm.”
Volodymyr Panchenko is a professor at Kyiv Mohyla Academy
