In 1920, Lviv-based poet Stepan Charnetsky published a collection, “Сумні Ідем” (Sorrowfully We Go). Sorrow? Of course. The world had just emerged from “The Great War,” which claimed millions of lives. Everyone lost family and friends. Beginning almost by accident, the war engaged half a dozen European empires, four of which were gone by the Armistice on the Western Front in November 1918.
When it started in 1914, Ukraine as a country did not exist. Neither did Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and other European states today. Ukraine was partitioned between the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires; Poland between Russia, Austria and Germany. The Baltic states were in imperial Russia. With the demise of empires, a dozen countries emerged, including Ukraine, but that that did not stop the conflict there as multiple armies: Russian, Polish, Ukrainian and others fought for control; the outcome has consequences today.
Charnetsky’s collection focuses on the horrific experience of the just-concluded war. Mourning the loss of young Ukrainian lives, he expresses sympathy even for the invaders:
I pity you too, gray son of the North
You march day and night not knowing where …
Walking hungry in a ragged greatcoat
To an unknown world in a foreign land
To be greeted by artilleries’ roar,
Or perhaps a more quiet welcome: well-crafted steel…
Charnetsky, remembered for composing “Chervona Kalyna,” the patriotic hymn inspiring Ukrainians for a century, is now relatively obscure. I was introduced to him by Hryhoriy Golembiowsky – a scholar who worked at the Ford plant in Cleveland during the week and on Saturday taught at the heritage school, Ridna Shkola, instilling in me, and no doubt others, a love of Ukrainian literature. His library is now at the Ukrainian Museum-Archives. I’m reading Charnetsky from the same book he read to us back in the early 1960s. I’m struck by its continued relevance. Consider: “На Зимовий Вечір (On a Winter’s Eve).” An elderly woman sits by the fire with her grandchildren: “Tell us a story…about a bluebird,” one child asks; “about a storm,” another requests. And then the youngest says “How about something scary? And the grandmother complies:
“In the North there lived Tsar Nicholas
Who drove Siberian savagery our way…
And she fell silent…”
In 1920 there was sorrow, but with peace restored, the world exploded with creativity: the Roaring ’20s and Harlem Renaissance in the U.S.; groundbreaking artists and writers in Paris, Rome, Vienna, Berlin. Ukrainians, having tasted independence and with a nominally independent Soviet Ukrainian Republic, launched an unprecedented movement – theater, literature, art, music, scholarship, film, statecraft – an era also dubbed “Renaissance,” during which cultural activists interacted with audiences in both eastern and western Ukraine. Stepan Charnetsky was but one of tens of thousands of talents who contributed.
Which brings us back to his poem about Winter’s Eve. “Tell us something scary…” The grandmother speaks about Nicholas but she could just as well have meant Tsar Peter, Empress Catherine, Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev or Vladimir Putin.
Perennially, Russia has defined its neighbors as either vassals or enemies. Having lost half of Europe with the demise of the USSR in 1991, Russia under President Putin now seeks to re-establish an empire, claiming authority over what he calls “the near abroad,” starting with Ukraine. Recall how he told President George W. Bush that Ukraine is not a country, echoing the tsarist edict from 1863 banning the “Little Russian” language, because “it does not exist, never has and never can.” How do you ban something that doesn’t exist and never has? In 1948, George Orwell defined such reasoning as “doublethink,” a mindset that still exists. I’ve encountered it myself when a chauvinistic Russian insisted that the two languages are the same and then reacted in fury when I agreed and continued in our “common” language, Ukrainian. For Russia, language and sovereignty are intertwined, and the Ukrainian language is an existential threat.
Charnetsky in Polish-administered Lviv was a contemporary of Mykola Khvyliovy in Soviet Ukraine. A member of the Communist Party, Khvyliovy became leader of his country’s literary, and therefore political, revival. To establish itself, Ukraine, he argued, had to distance itself from Moscow and orient on Europe. The 1920s cultural revival affirmed his call. By 1930, having become de facto tsar, Stalin crushed the Renaissance. Thousands of Ukraine’s cultural-artistic-intellectual class were arrested and subsequently executed, sent to Siberia or cowed into obedience. Even blind bandura minstrels were murdered. Khvyliovy and others were driven to suicide. The language itself was assaulted to the point of absurdity: to bring Ukrainian closer to Russian, the letter “g” was banned. People were killed for using it (an affront Golembiowsky took personally.)
For generations under the tsars in the 18th and 19th centuries, Ukraine’s relationship with Russia was defined by misery and ignorance. The 20th century was worse, horrific beyond comprehension: the Holodomor when millions were deliberately starved; the Great Terror; the Stalin-Hitler collaboration in 1939 and the war afterwards when millions more died violently, the number of war victims (1939-1945) equaling or exceeding those of the 1930s Famine and cultural extermination. After the war, totalitarianism and Russification followed (or rather continued) with its concomitant grey uniformity and poverty. The nuclear catastrophe at Chornobyl, resulting from an irresponsible experiment run from Moscow in 1986, rendered an entire region of Ukraine uninhabitable for thousands of years.
Russia has always claimed Ukraine as its own, even as Ukrainians have perennially sought to escape their neighbor’s murderous rule. And why wouldn’t they? Charnetsky recognized that; so did Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, Lesia Ukrainka and millions who came to the Maidan in Kyiv in the last quarter century for three revolutions, all echoing Khvyliovy’s message: “Away from Moscow… Face toward Europe.”
Today, the fight continues: to restore Crimea, defend the Donbas, assert the independence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and, now, fend off aggression in the Azov Sea. Defending against a non-existent attack on the Russian language, the Kremlin sends soldiers “To an unknown world in a foreign land” where grandmothers still shudder at the horror of “Siberian savagery.”
Looking at Ukraine’s relationship with Russia since Charnetsky, not much has changed. But then much has. Ukraine has many more patriots and allies, and a message to send the world about freedom and its beneficial consequences. Let’s hope the world continues to listen. And that Ukrainians continue to defend their own.