(Conclusion; for beginning see No. 27)
What a difference between these words and the prophetic lines of Shevchenko! His Ukraine is not ossified or besieged but open to the future. Shevchenko presents bitter contemporaneity and the vicious circle of a profane time (“Day by day, night by night, you wonder in despair why the Apostle of truth and science is not there”) into a straight line that runs from the past into the future. The prophet Shevchenko debunks the myth and creates HISTORY the way divine prophets and messengers did.
Sleep, Chyhyryn, may the enemy’s children die.
Sleep, hetman, until the truth prevails in this world.
...
That church beneath the skies
May crumble down, but from its vaults
A new Ukraine will rise
...amid the roars of guns and swishing of axes,
the horseless Cossack will shatter the throne
and tear away the purple veil,
and crush your idol to death...
...
The tsars will never reap the lush rye!
The people will grow up.
The still-to-be-conceived tsarevitches will die...
And there will be no accursed devil on a new Earth.
But there will be the son, the mother -
There will be humans on Earth
N. Ulyanov aptly notes, “We find no other objects of his (Shevchenko’s — Author) rebellious pique than ‘tsars.’ There is one or two gibes against Ukrainian landlords, which essentially boils down to a kind of sociopolitical elegy rather than a rebellion.” Meanwhile, the progressive socialist-minded public needed “a protest against the political system of autocracy, not just censuring the ‘untruths’ of tsars in the manner of biblical prophets.” Or in the manner of what Burns manifested in his unpublished poems which he, rightly fearful of governmental reprisals, would spread (and thus preserve for generations to come) among his trusted, honest, and influential friends. “Laying the groundwork for the building of grassroots rights was the mission of his life” (John L. Clark).
This kind of human rights advocacy is not typical of Shevchenko. Apart from a few instances in which “the rebellious people or community is more or less clearly defined as the motive force, in the overwhelming majority of cases the system is being changed by non-human, supernatural forces... Accordingly, Shevchenko’s stand was caused by a confident but passive expectation of inevitable changes” (G. Grabowicz). This is the position of a prophet rather than a national poet, a theorist of nationalism, or human rights champion. Shevchenko’s artistic techniques are typical of a religious text. His poems’ characters represent a certain state of values and morals. As the words ‘Pharisee,’ ‘bit,’ and ‘Golgotha’ mean something more than just ‘representative of a Judaic branch,’ ‘small coin,’ and ‘a hill in Jerusalem’ in evangelical texts, so the words ‘Cossack,’ ‘Muscovite,’ ‘girl,’ ‘snowball tree,’ ‘Dnipro,’ ‘sea,’ ‘mountains,’ and ‘grave’ assume the meaning of a certain religious and metaphorical value in Shevchenko’s texts. “Shevchenko uses, for example, the word ‘nightingale’ in his poems not only in the meaning of a specific thing,” notes A Dictionary of Shevchenko’s Language. “Nor is the word ‘Danube’ applied to the name of the river... Some proper names are quite expressive and characteristic figures without which it is difficult to grasp the poet’s intricate creative concepts. Among them are Kateryna, the beggar, Maria, the Danube, et al.”
Moreover, Shevchenko’s imaginative world is altogether devoid of many signs of a real-life world or a world of mythological truth: his heroes, except for some historical persons, are as much depersonalized as possible (the madwoman, the beggar, the orphan, the widow), while a mythological character is usually supposed to have several names and epithets; his plants and animals are called upon to play, above all, a symbolic, not natural, role. Like ‘nightingale,’ the words ‘raven,’ ‘she-wolf,’ ‘pig,’ ‘periwinkle,’ ‘willow,’ ‘poison hemlock,’ etc., are used not only to denote a certain thing but, mostly, to denote no certain things at all. In this world a pig, for example, a common domestic animal in Ukraine, only serves as another way to denote a character, “...he took that hunk Saul from a she-goat and swine” (Saul), “...a little bastard grazed swine” (Petrus). In general, Shevchenko uses the pig as an essential definition of a certain individual or his condition: “...they fell asleep in captivity like a pig in a puddle;” “...then he will turn into a pig that rolls in the puddle as if it were a clover field of sin (...) You used to live like ferocious beasts, and now you’ve turned into pigs!”; “...like the pigs that have plunged into a gutter and wallow in pleasure.” Shevchenko exclusively uses the adjective “swinish” in this figurative meaning: “...and then the knife flashed, and swinish blood oozed, like coal tar, from your piggish liver.” This kind of pigs give a corresponding variety of fatback which is not exactly as mouthwatering as the Ukrainian national food item: “...the stinking fatback of those fed with living beings and human blood,” “is the lout fattening swine in the barn?”, “and the magi, chiefs and priests (like those of our days) were fed like boars in temples and pagodas for the kings to eat fatback...”
Nor will we find Shevchenko drawing the pictures of everyday home life, for which Burns won glory, — pictures understandable and close to every peasant. In The Cotter’s Saturday Night, for example, the bard studiously enumerates the items of a Scottish staple diet:
But now the supper crowns their simple board,
The halesome parritch, chief of Scotia’s food;
The sowp their only hawkie does afford,
That, ‘yont the hallan snugly chows her cood:
The dame brings forth, in complimental mood,
To grace the lad, her weel-hain’d kebbuck, fell;
And aft he’s prest, and aft he ca’s it guid:
The frugal wifie, garrulous, will tell
How t’was a towmond auld, sin’ lint was i’ the bell.
(Reading these lines, one cannot but recall Ivan Kotliarevsky’s kaleidoscope of everyday life scenes:
...Hog’s ears au gratin
and soup with boar’s guts.
There was a calf’s tongue
and a piece of lamb and chicken.
Three heaps of various cakes
and all kinds of biting spices.
...
They chewed ravioli with fatback,
swallowed oats and rice,
and swigged many a glass
of home-made beer...)
Here is a noteworthy reaction of a not so young and relatively well- educated peasant woman who read The Cotter’s Saturday Night: “She shook her head and said, ‘Maybe, ladies and gentlemen will like this, but what I see here I see every day in my father’s house’” (from the Comments to Burns’ Poems). The Russian “gentleman” Vissarion Belinsky loved the Scottish parritch and kebbuck very much, “What a nice idyll is the Scottish life that Burns describes!” Yet he had an aversion to all things (dishes, too) Ukrainian, “Oh these khokhly (an abusive term for Ukrainians — Ed.)! Stupid rams as they are, they bandy about liberal ideas in the name of their halushky and pork bacon.” Had the “impetuous Vissarion” not been spewing so much venom of hatred for Ukrainians and at least read The Kobzar, he would have seen that the Ukrainian national poet was infinitely far from everyday home life in his poems. For instance, Shevchenko never uses the words “borsch” and “varenyky” (a kind of ravioli — Ed.), and only once does he use the word “halushky” (also a variety of ravioli — Ed.) in the figurative meaning (“...halushky cooked in Sinope and Trebizond”). We have already mentioned Shevchenko’s “swinish blood” and “stinking fatback for a lout.”
Commenting on Shevchenko’s social description of the Ukrainian countryside, N. Ulyanov noted that “it is impossible to find in his works something that resembles Nekrasov’s God-Forsaken Village or Reflections at the Front Porch. The phrase ‘slave labor’ occurs extremely seldom, there are no pictures of an oppressing landlord at all, and the countryside he depicts bears no signs of serfdom.” Naturally, the fervent Russian critic somewhat exaggerates — let us at least recall the famous “If you, landlord’s sons, only knew...” Yet he correctly grasped the essence. Shevchenko’s is an abstract, supra- sensitive, and transcendental world of imaginations. It lacks customary links with the real world, it has no spirit of truth so typical of mythological observations and descriptions owing to which an ancient Greek could, for example, clearly show the entrance to Hades, the summit of the multi-head Olympus, where the gods would meet, or enumerate the descendants of Heracles. What can allow one to call, to some extent, Shevchenko’s world mythological are some secondary signs (for example, the sacred passage: “You can see Ukraine and the hetman’s whole land from the hut”) which do not reflect, however, the essence of the poet’s revelations (as the biblical myths do not reveal the gist of Christian religion).
Here is an example of our transcendental national poet describing the harvest:
Across the fields he goes,
Not in mere swaths he mows them down,
Not in mere swaths but in dark mountains:
The earth is groaning and the sea is groaning,
Groaning and roaring.
At night the mower
Is met by screech-owls;
The mower keeps on cutting ceaselessly,
He has no pity upon anyone;
No begging will avail.
I pray you, do not beg; do not beseech;
He does not even pause to whet his scythe;
Whether it be a suburb or a city,
The hoary fellow shaves as with a razor
Without discrimination, everyone:
The moujik, the taverner,
The lonely kobzar;
The oldster as he mows intones a song
And lays his swaths of corpses mountain-high,
He does not even miss a tsar.
Me too he will not miss,
He’ll mow me down in a far, foreign land,
Behind barred windows he will strangle me ...
No one will plant a cross above rny grave
And no one will remember me!
(The Mower)
Burns is an altogether different case. His way of poetic thinking is purely contemplative, hence, mythological. His poetry is abundant in endless names, various plots and situations. For it is names and definitions that are essential for mythological thinking. The Hellenes, unsurpassable myth-creators, interpreted Bosphorus, Cypress, Giant, Tartar, or Echidna as objects that have no other than literal sense — one is a hero only because his father or mother belongs to the circle of the immortal (it is stretching common sense to say that the heroes Tantalus or Sisyphus performed heroic exploits). He is like a child who has just learned to speak and lisps, pronouncing such things of life as ‘mum,’, ‘dad,’ ‘uncle,’ or ‘pooh.’ He is attracted by a bright flower, an agile animal, a tasty meal, a curly-haired sheep, a broad-leafed tree, an insect crawling up a stalk, or a stone by the roadside.
“To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough,”, “To a Louse... tow’rin height O’ Miss’ bonnet,” “To a Mountain Daisy... crush’d beneath the furrow’s weight,” “The Twa Dogs,” “The Auld Farmer’s New-Year-Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare, Maggie,” “Address to the Woodlark,” “Address to the Toothache,” “The Birks of Aberfeldy,” “Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie, the Author’s Only Pet Yowe,” “Address to a Haggis, Great Chieftain o’ the Puddin’-Race,” “Sweet Afton,” “The Banks O’ Doon,” “The Wounded Hare,” “”My Heart’s In the Highlands,” — this is the way the poet addresses his Scotland, describing a world so dear to his heart.
It is clear why and how the art of mythological thinking can consolidate a nation. “The halesome parritch, chief of Scotia’s food!” Reapers and haystack-makers, Burns’ boon companions, — the Scotsmen and Scotswomen that Goethe spoke about — saw the same insects and hares, talked to their old horses, heard the same woodlark, pulled the same plow, and met in the mist on the banks of the Afton or the Doon, perhaps complaining to each other about toothache. Goethe was right — here (in Scotland) something could really happen. It did happen: contemporaries noted that Scottish servants were ready to give away the last penny for a book of Burns’ poems. On the contrary, Shevchenko’s books came out in just a few hundred copies and were read “exclusively by educated people. Shevchenko’s poetry was virtually unknown under peasant huts’ thatched roofs in his lifetime” (I. Franko). “Drahomanov writes about a complete failure to put Shevchenko’s works across the grassroots. All attempts to read his poems to muzhiks would fail. The muzhiks remained indifferent” (N. Ulyanov). Shevchenko himself also noted this with bitterness. He wrote to himself in the steppes of Kos-Aral:
It is, forsooth, the tenth long year since I
Presented my own Kobzar to the people,
And now it seems as if their lips were sealed:
For no one even barks or snarls at me —
You might assume I never had existed.
Dear Lord! how ardently my soul desired
To hear from someone, anyone, at least
A word of comfort so that I might know
For whom I write, and wherefore I should write,
And why it is I love my own Ukraine.
Can she be worthy of my sacred flame?
The Scottish Bard’s songs, in the words of Goethe, “would instantly find a ready ear among his compatriots,” while the Ukrainian poet’s verses encountered cold indifference. How would the great German have explained the victorious historical success of The Kobzar’s transcendental symbols and meanings? Would he have been surprised at the Word that Taras said to us?
Strange as at is, N. Ulyanov, a confirmed Russian chauvinist, very cleverly (sic!) defined the essence of Shevchenko’s poetry, “Shevchenko’s true poetry lies in this fantastic, never existing, world in which there is artistic, not historical, truth.” “Dreams about the past,” which the dreamer’s contemporaries and descendants take as a truth, even though this truth contradicts the historical truth of the past , is really a myth of the author’s, the invention of a myth-making genius. Yet “dreams about the future,” the expectations that came true in spite of the same historical truth, is a prophecy, the work of one elected by the Providence, and therefore it cannot be the prophecy of a WONDER, the wonder (an unexpected nation) that the shocked world has been contemplating since 1991.
The above-mentioned David Sibbald says,
“There are two ways in which a baffled and frustrated nation can attempt to satisfy its injured pride.
1. It can accept the dominance of the culture of the country which has achieved political ascendancy over it and can endeavour to beat that country and achieve distinctions by any standard the dominant culture may evolve.
2. It can attempt to rediscover its own national traditions, and by reviving and developing them find a satisfaction that will compensate for its political impotence.
18th century Scotsmen chose both these ways. Adam Smith, David Hume, and Hugh Blair were among those who chose the first way (let us recall in this connection the Ukrainians Feofan Prokopovych, Oleksandr Bezborodko, Nikolay Gogol, and other Ukrainian “donors” of culture ford the empire — Author). Allan Ramsay, David Herd, Robert Fergusson, and Robert Burns were among those who chose the second (in our case this applies to Kotliarevsky, Hrebinka, Kvitka-Osnovyanenko, and other figures of Little Russian culture — Author).
To the former we owe the philosophical and scientific movements that made 18th century Edinburgh perhaps the most distinguished intellectual centre in Europe. To the latter group we owe the revival of interest in older Scottish literature, in Scottish folk traditions and in Scottish antiquities; Burns was the culmination of the movement, his letters are fine examples of Standard English yet he chose to use the Scots dialect and the old Scottish verse forms when he was writing poetry.”
But there is also a third way, the one our Kobzar went, the way of creating, not reproducing, a nation — by the spirit alone, ex nihilo, as befits a plenipotentiary envoy of the Creator.
And the last touch to the portrait of our characters. The empire finally managed to put its official clothes on the national rebels Burns and Shevchenko. The Scot had to don a white cashmere waistcoat, white tight-fitting trousers with leggings, a round-shaped busby with a gilded badge and black feathers, and the gold-buttoned red-sleeved blue coat of a Royal Dumfries Volunteer. The Ukrainian wore the olive drab of a Tsar Nicholas’ recruit — the vestment of a prophet.
