| |
The Cossacks helped build it, Shevchenko wrote Kobzar there, the Tsar
issued the Valuiev Ukase there banning the Ukrainian language, countless
Ukrainian cultural and political figures were massacred there
PERSPECTIVES, by Andrew Fedynsky, The Ukrainian Weekly
Parsippany, New Jersey, Sunday, May 25, 2003
|
On May 27, 1703, Tsar Peter the Great placed the first stone for the Peter
and Paul Fortress, giving birth to St. Petersburg. Located just 450 miles
south of the Arctic Circle where the Neva River meets the Baltic Sea, the
city is young by European standards.
Kyiv, by contrast, is more than 1,500 years old, Paris nearly 2,000, Rome
more than 2,700 and Athens at least 3,500 years old.
Still, in its 300 years, St. Petersburg has truly been a city of destiny.
It was there that the tsars presided over the vast Russia Empire. The poet
Pushkin, novelist Turgenev, composer Tchaikovsky, along with world-class
painters, dancers and revolutionaries walked the city's streets and squares.
|
Taras Shevchenko
Fragment of a postard, Kyiv, early 1900's
(Private Collection)
|
At times, no doubt, they looked over at the grim fortress as they made their
way to glittering theaters, museums and salons and perhaps shuddered at the
memory of Peter supervising the torture-murder of his son inside its walls
or recalled how the defiant Hetman Pavlo Polubotok starved to death in a
dungeon there, how Fyodor Dostoyevsky was tormented with a mock
execution and how Lenin's brother was hanged.
For more than 200 years, St. Petersburg-renamed Petrograd during the First
World War-remained the political and cultural capital of Russia until the
spring of 1917 when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated. A few months later, the
Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd and moved the capital to Moscow.
In 1924, the city was renamed Leningrad. In 1991, it reverted to its
original
name.
Although it's more than 600 miles north of Kyiv, St. Petersburg looms large
in Ukrainian history and culture. Ukrainians first arrived there in
substantial numbers in 1709, after Hetman Mazepa's defeat at the Battle of
Poltava where he fought to free Ukraine from Russian rule.
To punish what he saw as disloyalty, Peter condemned tens of thousands of
Cossacks to build canals and drain marshes, clear forests, drag stones to
pave the streets, cut, hew and haul lumber to the banks of the Neva and
drive piles, build docks.
The slaves lived in crowded, filthy huts in the midst of swamps and squalor.
Many died from malaria, scurvy and dysentery. In the wintertime, they
froze. According to estimates from Peter's time, at least 100,000 people
died building his city.
120 years later, another slave arrived there: Taras Shevchenko. Soon, he
met fellow Ukrainians, notably, the painter Ivan Soshenko and writer Yevhen
Hrebinka who convinced some influential Russian friends to arrange for
Shevchenko's emancipation. The rest is history.
Once free, Shevchenko applied his genius to the Kobzar, the poetry
collection that tapped into the ancient songs he'd heard as a boy. The
wandering minstrels who sang them helped Ukraine's peasant-serfs maintain
their national consciousness more than two generations after the last
Cossack stronghold, the Sich, had been destroyed.
Published in 1840 in St. Petersburg, Kobzar is easily the most important
book in Ukrainian history. As for the orphan whose poetry mobilized a
defeated nation and changed the course of history, his story has been
elevated to mythological levels.
Ukraine in Shevchenko's day had been part of Russia for nearly 200 years.
Virtually everyone was reconciled to the reality of imperial rule. So, if
you had talent, ambition and opportunity, you went to the capital to build a
career. In the 18th Century, composers Bortniansky, Vedel and Berezovsky,
along with painters Borovykovsky and Levytsky left their homes in Ukraine
for St. Petersburg where success or failure was measured in the context of
the imperial court. They might have looked to their Ukrainian roots for
inspiration, but essentially they lived the lives of Russian gentry.
Still, a Ukrainian could do quite well in St. Petersburg. In 1831, when 17
year-old Shevchenko first set foot there, Ukrainian themes were very
fashionable, largely the result of Nikolai Gogol's book, Evenings on a Farm
Near Dikanka, about a fairy-tale Ukraine from long ago. Like Shevchenko, 24
year-old Gogol was Ukrainian. Writing in Russian for a Russian audience, he
was a best-selling author of quaint stories (Dikanka) about a quaint province
("Little Russia") with an unruly past (Taras Bulba).
Shevchenko, for his part, refused to cater to Russians. He was moved by a
mystical attachment to every Ukrainian who had ever lived or was yet to be
born. This was his audience and he deliberately chose their language to
communicate a blunt political message, born of his rage over the plight of a
disenfranchised nation of slaves.
-
Haunted by the ghosts of Cossacks who had perished building St. Petersburg,
Shevchenko called it "the Capital of Woe," and bitterly condemned Peter, its
founder:
-
O serpent that all earth should shun
What have you to my Cossacks done?
For you have glutted all these swamps
With noble bones!
-
Shevchenko also condemned the archeological expeditions that excavated the
Scythian treasures of Ukraine and put them on display at St. Petersburg's
Hermitage Museum:
-
And my dear mounds the Muscovite
Is shattering apart.
There let him ferret, let him dig;
He takes and is a thief.
In 1847, Shevchenko was arrested for his poetry and exiled to a penal
battalion on the Caspian Sea. It was more than a decade before he returned
to St. Petersburg where he died in 1861. Still in exile, he was forbidden
to go to Ukraine.
After Shevchenko's death, St. Petersburg continued to exert a profound
influence on Ukrainian culture, mostly disastrous. In 1863, the Tsar issued
the Valuiev Ukase banning the Ukrainian language. Only after the 1905
Revolution, which began with a demonstration in St. Petersburg, was the ban
lifted.
In 1918, a monument to Shevchenko was built in St. Petersburg, but in 1926
it was torn down. In 1937, the murder of Sergei Kirov, the thuggish boss of
the Leningrad Communist Party organization, gave Stalin the pretext to
launch
the Great Terror.
Probably, it was Stalin himself who ordered the murder. Countless Ukrainian
cultural and political figures were massacred, including 300 victims whose
bodies were found in 1997 in a mass grave just outside of St. Petersburg.
Looking back on 300 years, you have to marvel how the very best and absolute
worst of Russian culture were served up in St. Petersburg, seasoned with a
rich dollop of Ukrainian genius, some of it obediently offered the tsar by
courtiers seeking favor and some of it defiantly thrown in his face.
But give the city credit: in December 2000 it dedicated a new monument to
Shevchenko, barely in time for this year's birthday bash.
The Ukrainian Weekly, Sunday, May 25, 2003, Roma Hadzewycz,
Editor-in-chief, Ukrainian National Association, Parsippany, NY.
The Ukrainian Weekly Archive, www.ukrweekly.com
For personal and academic use only.
|
|
back
