By all accounts, the true price of a nation’s cultural heritage reveals itself not only in its highest achievements, not only in the creative work of titans of its national spirit who are acclaimed the world over. Also important are those on whom these titans rested, the self-denying, modest, and inconspicuous architects of culture, always ready to make the supreme effort (in concrete deeds, not words) to accomplish the great mission of rousing the sense of national identity in people and helping them hear the voice of their own spirit.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the grandiose figure of Ivan Franko towered over the rest of Western Ukrainian literature and culture. It is through the prism of his genius that we naturally look at the cultural and intellectual life of Halychyna and to a large extent of Ukraine as a whole. Yet, in addition to Franko, a group of other extremely talented people, such as Vasyl Stephanyk and Olha Kobylianska, Les Martovych and Marko Cheremshyna, Vyacheslav Budzynovsky and Andriy Chaikovsky, also worked to implement the idea of the national rebirth. The creative heritage of prominent Western Ukrainian writer, teacher, and public figure Osyp Makovei (1867-1925) stands out even against the backdrop of this matchless constellation. Although Makovei himself shunned all self-advertisement and was very critical of his own achievements, we must admit now, almost eighty years after his death, that his rare gift as an implacable and biting satirist and simultaneously the profound lyricism and humanistic persuasions that he acquired through hard experience of life, would have brought honor to the literature of any European nation.
Osyp Makovei was born August 23, 1867, into a peasant family in the small town of Yarove (now a district center in Lviv oblast). In spite of the eternal hardships, the young man managed to get the education he wanted: he graduated from Lviv’s Ukrainian Middle School (the only one in Halychyna at the time) in 1887 and from Lviv University’s Philosophy School in 1893. What had a crucial effect on his sensibilities was a meeting with Ivan Franko (1885) and the oath that Makovei took at the same time and adhered to throughout his life: “You must work and live for the people.”
This was not just an empty phrase. Makovei devoted forty years to serving his native culture — from 1885, when the Lviv-based journal Zoria (Dawn) published his translation (approved by Franko himself) of Heinrich Heine’s poem The Messenger, until his death on August 21, 1925. Consider but a few facets of Osyp Makovei’s unique talent: a prominent Western Ukrainian man of letters; a gifted critic; senior editor of the Chernivtsi newspaper Bukovyna (in the mid-1890s, when Makovei and great writer Olha Kobylianska struck up a tender, heartfelt, and decades-long friendship); deputy editor of the journal Zoria, a person who “brought” Marko Cheremshyna, Yevheniya Yaroshynska, Tymofei Borduliak, Stepan Kovaliov and many other writers into the world; one of the leading figures at the famous all-Ukrainian literary, cultural, and scholarly monthly Literaturno-naukovy visnyk (1897-1899); an extraordinary scholar, researcher of Slavic languages and literature (to this end, he went to Vienna in 1899, and in 1902 Chernivtsi University awarded him his well deserved Ph.D.); and, finally, a self-denying pedagogue, an instructor at and then principal of teacher-training seminaries in Lviv and Zaleshchyky, Ternopil oblast.
It should be noted that Makovei could actually embark on his literary pursuits only in the hours free from his main public and teaching activities. This leaves you all the more impressed with what he created — not so much in terms of its quantity as by its truly high artistic value. Some of Makovei’s satirical stories should be, for fairness’ sake, viewed as pearls in the crown of our literature, above all, How Shevchenko Looked for a Job (1912), where the author relentlessly and bitingly censures conformism, cowardice, and immorality of a certain part of the then intelligentsia. In any case, this work is still full of its original message.
After a concert “for a narrow circle of the elect” in honor of Taras Shevchenko, all the listeners “went to bed, full of good impressions, beer, wine, and so forth.” Then it suddenly seemed to “Mr. Ambassador L.,” chairman of a “patriotic” party, that Shevchenko’s bust, “which stood under a potted palm in the corner of a dark adjacent room,” ...came to life! When Mr. L. got over his surprise and fear, it turned out that the Bard called on him with an unusual request, “Give me some job! Take me to the editorial board of Dilo (Lviv’s Ukrainian newspaper of record — Author), I can still be of some use!”
But, surprisingly (or, maybe, not so surprisingly, for this was and still is typical of our “fathers of the nation” and “martyr patriots”), nobody was in any hurry to meet the Great Bard’s request. “Stop kidding! You’re neither a doctor, nor an Austrian, nor a taxpayer.”
“Mr. Ambassador L.” says to the poet. “Good, good, but you, sir, are not an active member of the Shevchenko Society,” Taras hears from the lips of “Professor G.” “How can you? Without a doctorate! Without exams! Without dissertations!” “Mr. Professor and Ambassador K.” resentfully shouts at our genius. Naturally, Shevchenko had to leave empty- handed... Even now, this brilliant story deals a staggering blow to those who sing the praises to Shevchenko, in or out of place, but still remain absolutely alien to the spirit of the poet’s creative life.
Another true gem in the heritage of Makovei as a satirist is the novella, A Difficult Operation (1923). A stupid, uneducated (to the extent that he is even unable to count his own riches), and incredibly stingy old Vasyliuk feigns illness, and when a doctor comes to him late at night, this tightwad reveals a terrible secret, “I want you to count my money.” After lengthy and persistent appeals, “hospital director Doctor L.” finally agreed to perform a “difficult operation” on Vasyliuk, i.e., to count the old scrooge’s millions (in Polish zlotys, Austrian kronas, US dollars, tsarist rubles, and hryvnias of the Ukrainian People’s Republic...) The whole scene is clearly drenched with the spirit of Gogol and his immortal Pliushkin, the epitome of stinginess.
Political satire was one of the writer’s favorite genres. A brilliant example of this is The Tale of an Unsatisfied Ruthenian (1895). It features a certain patriotic figure, “an unsatisfied one” who, “as soon as he was brought into the world, immediately marked his opposition with a shrill cry which neither the family nor the servants understood. Had he been the son of a poor man, this opposition would have surprised nobody; but the point is he had various perquisites of high society, everybody tiptoed around him, and he wept bitter tears for years on end.”
What did this unsatisfied Ruthenian in fact strive for? Serving his people? Not at all: he hankered for a parliamentary seat in Vienna (an MP was then called “ambassador”). So “he was elected ambassador. Unfortunately, one voter was stabbed to death and 37 kept in jail for several moths or even years because of him. But this was only natural: every politician must gobble up a certain number of people if he wants to live. Should one mourn as few as dozens of dead souls if it is the question of millions?! Sacrifices are inevitable.” Is this not an ample illustration of Makovei’s keen vision and ability to delve into the essence of his — and not only his — epoch?
The short novella KVD (1921) is also a piece of scathing satire on the programs of many Ukrainian political parties of the time. One program was essentially “terse and clear: where the wind blows” (KVD in Ukrainian abbreviation). Makovei even coined a new word (maybe, it will come in handy for us some day), kavedek, an absolutely unprincipled and hypocritical politician or person in general. A brilliant example of a kavedek is the respectable police inspector who, “under the Ukrainian government (perhaps in the times of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic — Author), brought a birth certificate that proved that he was a true Ukrainian,” but when “the Poles came to arrest him... because the inspector was in step with time, wearing the emblem of Halychyna on his chest and that of Ukraine on his cap, chanting ‘Comrades! We are workers and peasants!’ at public rallies, cursing priests and landlords, he readily showed the Polish chairman of the board of trustees a different birth certificate which proved that he adhered to the Latin rite and was a Pole.” Impressive, is it not?
Today, we badly need Makovei’s biting, at times character-assassinating, satire because it would help us expose so many full-time and self-proclaimed patriots. The more so that this satire stems from a deep and sincere love for Ukraine. For the writer believed:
“The blood was not spilled in vain — the wheat field will sprout up, and Ukraine will be happy.”
These patriotic feelings never stirred up enmity against other nations. For example, in the historical novelette Yaroshenko (1905), set in the times of the famous Khotyn campaign of 1621-1622, Polish Crown Hetman Chodkiewicz says, “A time will come when Poland will regain its senses and be Ukraine’s sister... I also see that the Cossacks are not our enemies. They have helped and still will help us so much. God willing, we will also help them. When I watched you taking the oath of allegiance, I thought that we must always live humanely, fraternally, without any infringements...” Hetman Petro Sahaidachny replies openly and sincerely, “I like this, gentlemen! We must really live the way the honorable hetman says, not the way we have lived before. You know yourselves very well what we have gone through. So do not recall evil things as night falls.” A true testament for today’s Poles and Ukrainians.
A highly well-mannered and modest person, Osyp Makovei considered himself a working man par excellence. He says in one of his letters, “When I write, I am convinced that a structure like literature needs not only keen-minded engineers but also those who carry bricks — they are indeed indispensable!” Yet, we can rightfully assert today that such writers as Mokovei are true ornaments of Ukrainian fiction.
