A Brief History of Ukraine

With the situation in Crimea apparently resolved, at least for the time being, attention is turning to other sites in Ukraine and beyond. The withdrawal of Ukrainian forces at the beginning of this week – after Russian troops seized the Belbek airbase and Feodosia naval base – marked the interim Ukrainian government’s tacit acceptance that Crimea has been lost. Russian military action in the region following the Crimean referendum on 16 March has been efficient – threatening rather than violent, utilising unidentified pro-Russian groups to storm bases, backed up by official military personnel – as a lack of explicit direction from Kiev has left Ukrainian troops seemingly little more than caretakers, waiting for Crimea to pass into Russian hands. Six of the eleven senior Ukrainian officers held by Russia following these takeovers have now been released. Meanwhile, following the assent of the Crimean parliament, the city council of Sevastopol, and Vladimir Putin, both the Federation Council and the State Duma have ratified Crimea’s integration into the Russian Federation. Two Crimean senators are scheduled to join Russia’s Federation Council from 16 April.

Across the West, the international community continues to decry Russia’s intervention in Crimea, and will not accept the legitimacy of Crimea’s separation from Ukraine. A symbolic vote in the UN on Thursday saw 100 countries affirm that the Crimean referendum took place illegally; 11 countries disagreed, while 58 abstained. The US, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Japan have opted to temporarily suspend Russia from the G8 group of nations, and will continue to meet without Russia, reverting to the G7. Russia has described this as ‘no great tragedy’; while other commentators, including former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, have dismissed this and other sanctions as ineffective, stressing that the G8 has been superseded as an economic forum by the G20, which incorporates emerging economies and still includes Russia.

There is a certain pragmatism in all parties accepting the current state of affairs in Crimea. Putin has achieved a show of force, asserting his position back home and emboldening nationalist sentiment, while bolstering Russia’s military authority across the Crimean peninsula. As things stand, Ukraine has maintained the territorial integrity of its mainland, and the ability to move towards presidential elections and constitutional reform come May. The sanctions imposed by the EU, the US and Canada will continue to be decried as weak, especially by those on the right of politics; but they went perhaps further than expected in targeting some prominent Russian officials and businessmen. Both Ukraine and the West must really content themselves with their mutual sympathies, and with Russia’s loss of international sway, given the impracticality of attempting to keep Crimea as part of Ukraine. While Ukraine’s interim Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, has stressed that the country’s financial position remains perilous, the International Monetary Fund has promised it $18 billion in loans – which, for good or ill, will provide the IMF and its backers with significant influence over the country’s future economic development. The US Congress has guaranteed a $1 billion loan of its own, plus $150 million in direct aid. It is the Crimeans themselves who have arguably lost the most, in so far as they have been forced to choose between Russia on the one hand and Ukraine and the EU on the other; but the choice they have made seems clear, and it enables them to retain their crucial economic and close cultural ties with Russia.

Still, what spoke for the Russians restraining their ambitions, and embarking on a lesser show of force in order to secure only military access to Crimea – while leaving the region perhaps with greater autonomy from Ukraine, but still politically part of the country – was that it would have maintained Russia’s influence over Ukraine, ideologically and electorally. Russia will not settle gladly for an antagonistic Ukraine: it values its economic role in the country; their shared cultural bonds; and Russia has always protected itself in terms of land, seeking to maintain buffer regions between its capital and the outposts of its supposed enemies. But Putin perhaps presumes that by manipulating tensions in eastern Ukraine when it suits, and owing to Ukraine’s financial dependence on Russia, especially when it comes to gas, Ukraine can scarcely afford to sever their relationship completely.

It is to Ukraine’s east that attention has now turned. Ukraine and the West allege that Russia is poised to launch an invasion into eastern Ukraine, which has seen a wave of demonstrations since the ousting of President Yanukovych towards the end of last month. The region has a significant ethnic Russian populace, and its economy is reliant on Russian trade. A history of separatist feeling in the east extends back to the foundations of the Ukrainian state. Russia has carried out military exercises on the Ukrainian border, but the extent of its interest in eastern Ukraine is hard to gauge amid inevitable claim and counterclaim. Russia asserts that it has no desire to divide Ukraine, and argues that violence in the east has been incited by far-right Ukrainian nationalists and by American defence contractors. Ukraine and the US suggest instead that Russian soldiers have infiltrated the east, that pro-Russian protesters are being transported across the border into Ukraine, and that Russia is amassing its military with intent. NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Philip Breedlove, has raised additional concerns that Russian forces could sweep through southern Ukraine into neighbouring Transdniestria, which broke away from Moldova in 1990 as the Soviet Union began to fall, but has never been given international recognition. The half-million population of Transdniestria is evenly split between Moldovans, Russians, and Ukrainians. Russia has continued, since Moldovan independence in 1992, to maintain a contested military presence of 1,200 troops in the region. Fears over Russian incursions into the Baltic states appear at this point unfounded, and would be impeded by their memberships of the EU and NATO.

————

Following my history of Crimea – which summarised the course of the region until its absorption into the Russian Empire in the 1700s; from which I looked at events in Crimea in more depth, through the eyes of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Nabokov – what proceeds is a brief but involved history of Ukraine. It begins in the early middle ages, with Kievan Rus as a loose federation of the East Slavic peoples. Taking a paragraph from my earlier piece:

Kievan Rus flourished from about 882 – when Prince Oleg moved the capital of the Rus from Novgorod to Kiev – until the 13th century, when the Mongol Empire invaded and destroyed their major cities. While Russia gradually threw off the ‘Mongol-Tatar Yoke’, and began to emerge round the city of Moscow as a powerful independent state, Kiev and much of what is now northern and central Ukraine came under Polish-Lithuanian control. The Russo-Polish War of 1654-1667 ended in a truce, but one which forced the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to relinquish Kiev and the lands east of the Dnieper River (plus Smolensk further north) to the Tsardom of Russia. These lands continued to rule themselves with some autonomy for the next hundred years, the period of the Cossack Hetmanate; but this autonomy was successively diminished during the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-1796), and the region came to be fully incorporated into the Russian Empire. Russia often considers the union between Kiev and Moscow to extend back to the beginnings of the the Russo-Polish War in 1654.

The partitioning of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late 1700s added to the Russian Empire the lands west of the Dnieper. Together, the lands won from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between 1654 and the end the 18th century would come to comprise much of modern mainland Ukraine. With the span and diversity within the enlarged Russian Empire, the concept of an All-Russian nation was promulgated as an attempt to unify its collected peoples under one state. The concept recognised the differences between the peoples of modern-day Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, but endeavoured to subsume them, positioning them as deviations which obscured a fundamental cultural and historical unity.

Nevertheless, within the Russian Empire the people spread east and west of the Dnieper came to be called Little Russians, while the region was referred to as Little Russia (‘Малороссия’, Malorossiya). These labels were readily embraced by those wealthy members of the populace who quickly rose to positions of prominence within the Empire. However, the larger population identified instead as Ruthenian – a historical term for the East Slavic people who lived in an area between modern west-Ukraine and Poland, broadly equivalent with the geographic territory of Galicia. This larger population of the region maintained a common language discrete from Russian: while both were rooted in Old East Slavic, which had been established during the period of Kievan Rus, the language they spoke had developed differently, owing to internal forces and to the influence of Polish-Lithuanian rule.

Fearful that nationalist sentiment would emerge among their ‘Little Russians’, in the early 1800s the Russian Empire banned the use of the regional language and enforced Russian as the language of political administration and education. Nationalist sentiment still arose, notably in Kiev, where in the middle of the 1840s it grew around the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius. This secretive nationalist political society had as one of its party the poet Taras Shevchenko. Born on 9 March 1814 in Moryntsi, a couple of hundred kilometres south of Kiev, Shevchenko moved to Saint Petersburg in 1831, and towards the end of the decade enrolled there in the Academy of Arts. Painting landscapes, portraits and rural idylls, he began writing poetry in the language of his homeland. His first collection, Kobzar, was published in 1840.

Shevchenko visited the regions of ‘Little Russia’ on several occasions in the following years; then in 1847, he was arrested, preliminarily owing to his connection with the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius. As an artist rather than an activist, he was set to escape severe punishment, until Emperor Nicholas I uncovered one of his poems which mocked both the Emperor and his wife. Shevchenko was imprisoned in Petersburg, then exiled to Orsk near the Ural Mountains, where he would spend the next decade. After a further two years in Nizhniy Novgorod, in May 1859 he was finally allowed to return to Kiev; but this respite proved short lived, for in July he was arrested again, remaining in Petersburg until his death on 10 March 1861. Buried initially in Petersburg, his remains were transported by his friends to a hill on the banks of the Dnieper River, near Kaniv.

Shevchenko is esteemed today as Ukraine’s national poet; the anniversary of his birth celebrated several weeks ago was the occasion of marked clashes between opposing groups in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. His poetry is considered foundational in the development of Ukrainian literature, and influential too in the emergence of the modern Ukrainian tongue. As he wrote in the regional language, and expressed nationalist views in a number of his works, to call Shevchenko a Ukrainian poet seems entirely warranted. In the case of Nikolai Gogol – the most famous of writers born on Ukrainian soil – attempted recastings of him as a Ukrainian writer remain controversial, open to the charge of anachronism. Gogol was born on 31 March 1809 in Sorochyntsi, on the left-bank of the Dnieper, and grew up in a family that spoke both Russian and the regional language. He moved to Saint Petersburg in 1828, then travelled abroad in 1836, spending most of the next twelve years in Rome. After returning to the Russian Empire in 1848, via a curtailed pilgrimage to Jerusalem,  he died in Moscow on 4 March 1852.

Gogol drew for his earliest stories from Ukrainian settings, customs, folklore, and theatre. His first collections of short stories – Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, published in two volumes in 1831 and 1832, and Mirgorod, published in 1835 – are set with fondness in the rural ‘Little Russia’ of his youth. Working on these in Petersburg, Gogol would write home for points of detail on which to elaborate his fiction. He maintained until his final years friendships with scholars of Ukrainian language and history, who shared friendships also with Shevchenko. At the same time, Gogol wrote solely in Russian. His mature stories are set predominantly in Petersburg. According to Gogol, several of them took their plot from ideas given to the author by Pushkin. The loosely political sentiments which may be derived from Gogol’s letters and his notoriously peculiar Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, published in 1847, speak towards a vaguely pan-Slavic spiritual identity, conceived as Russian, rather than to any nationalist movement. He would write:

‘We Little Russians and Great Russians need a common poetry, a calm, strong and everlasting poetry of truth, goodness and beauty. The Little and the Great Russian are the souls of twins who complement each other, who are closely related and equally strong. It is impossible to prefer one of them at the cost of the other.’

Gogol’s art was adopted so wholly into the great body of Russian literature which followed, from Dostoevsky to Bely to Nabokov – three of his most perceptive interpreters – that disengaging him from this mainstream of Russian letters proves difficult, and would appear to bear relatively little fruit. On the other hand a full understanding of his art must contemplate its distinctly Ukrainian beginnings. Whatever, unlike Shevchenko, Gogol today is not regarded in any way a symbol of Ukrainian statehood.

While national sentiment began to grow on the banks of the Dnieper, it was not until the late 1800s that the concept of a ‘Ukrainian’ people – and of the word ‘Ukraine’ as the proper name for the region – began to appear. This marked a rejection of the diminutive ‘Little Russian’ and of the historical term ‘Ruthenian’, considered insufficient to represent the sense and the aims of the emerging nationalist movement. The word ‘ukraina’ had been used from the 1500s to essentially mean ‘borderland’: derived from the Proto-Slavic ‘krajь’, meaning border or edge, the term had referred to the frontiers of the Kingdom of Poland in and around Kiev. It was used informally to denote the region during the rule of the Cossack Hetmanate. By the 1840s, the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius were calling the people of the region ‘Ukrainians’ – though the appellation was never adopted by Shevchenko, who used ‘Little Russian’ even in his nationalist texts. By the turn of the century, the usage ‘Ukrainian’ was entrenched among nationalists, and referred to themselves as a distinct ethnic group. The usage would only become standard beyond the banks of the Dnieper over the next two decades.

Politically, Ukraine’s existence as an independent state can be traced back to 1917 and the February Revolution which effectively marked the end of the Russian Empire. Within days of the Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky forming in Saint Petersburg (then called Petrograd), the nationalist movement in Kiev consolidated and established a central council, called the Tsentralna Rada. The Tsentralna Rada issued an early declaration calling on ‘the Ukrainian people’ to support Kerensky’s Provisional Government. It then elected the prominent nationalist academic Mykhailo Hrushevskyi as its head, and formed a parliament of 150 which effectively began administering Ukrainian affairs. Towards the end of June, after back-and-forth with Kerensky, the Rada issued its ‘First Universal’, declaring Ukrainian autonomy as part of the Russian Republic. A Ukrainian government was formed, called the General Secretariat and comprising nine ministers, and it was recognised by Kerensky.

Disagreements between the Provisional Government in Petrograd and the Tsentralna Rada regarding the degree of autonomy the General Secretariat should possess were rendered irrelevant following the October Revolution, which saw the Bolsheviks seize power in Petrograd. Initially maintaining relations with the Bolsheviks, in November the Rada, via another ‘Universal’ decree, proclaimed the Ukrainian People’s Republic. The extent of the autonomous state’s jurisdiction was also defined: it would govern over the majority of the regions which comprise modern Ukraine, including the Kharkiv region, but not including Crimea. As relationships with the Bolsheviks broke down, and with the Bolsheviks setting up base in Kharkiv, in late January 1918 the Tsentralna Rada issued its ‘Fourth Universal’, declaring the full independence of the Ukrainian People’s Republic.

The Bolsheviks had continued to press within the newly emerged state. Regions within the Ukrainian People’s Republic were encouraged to break away, and to establish their own Soviet republics. Lacking a strong military capacity, the Ukrainian People’s Republic sought foreign aid, turning to the Russian Empire’s opponents in the ongoing First World War, the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The first treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed by the Ukrainian People’s Republic and the Central Powers on 9 February, in theory secured Ukrainian sovereignty, but in practise made the Republic a German protectorate. Amidst Ukrainian resentment, on 29 April a German-backed coup saw the Tsentralna Rada dismissed and a former Russian General, Pavlo Skoropadskyi, installed as the state’s new ruler.

Skoropadskyi styled himself Hetman of Ukraine. Where under Hrushevskyi’s leadership the Tsentralna Rada had been broadly socialist, the new Hetmanate was conservative. When it too fell following the defeat of the Central Powers in World War I in November, a socialist Directorate was formed to govern; but within a month, fighting broke out as the Republic became fully embroiled in the Russian Civil War. At the same time, Austria’s defeat saw its province of Galicia become divided between the claims of Ukrainians and Poles. Ukrainians in the region proclaimed the West Ukrainian People’s Republic days before the restoration of the Polish state on 11 November 1918. On 22 January 1919, a Unification Act was signed between the West Ukrainian People’s Republic and the Ukrainian People’s Republic in Kiev. The Polish-Ukrainian War over Galicia lasted until July, and ended in a Polish victory.

Meanwhile Ukraine saw battle between the Soviet Red Army and the anti-Bolshevik White Army, and authority in Kiev fluctuated back and forth between the Ukrainian People’s Republic and the Bolsheviks. By the spring of 1920, the Ukrainian People’s Republic was again in desperate need of foreign intervention, and now allied with Poland, whose forces over the coming months repelled the Bolshevik advance. A decisive Polish victory at the Battle of Warsaw in August forced Soviet Russia to sue for peace. The drawing to a close of Polish-Soviet hostilities, allied to General Wrangel’s defeat in Crimea – the last bastion of the White Army – in November, effectively ended the Russian Civil War. The Treaty of Riga – signed between Poland and Soviet Russia on 18 March 1921 – ensured for Poland Galicia and a significant area of western Ukraine; while Soviet Russia established control over the central and eastern Ukrainian mainland. Poland’s victory in the Polish-Soviet War was crucial in the development of 20th century Europe: beyond securing the status of Poland, it is perceived as halting Soviet ambitions towards ‘international revolution’, the spreading of communist revolution by force. The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic – Soviet Ukraine – was confirmed, and inaugurated as part of the Soviet Union on 30 December 1922.

Power in the Soviet Union was centralised by Stalin in Moscow, and nationalist sentiment in the Soviet Republics was suppressed. The Holodomor of 1932-33 saw from 2 million to as many as 7 million Ukrainians die of starvation, owing to famine. It remains contentious whether the famine was a product of negligent economic policy, in the period of rapid Soviet industrialization and forced collectivisation; or whether it was in fact deliberately engineered, thereby constituting a genocide of the Ukrainian people. At the close of World War II, the Soviet Union would retain those Polish regions adjoining Soviet Ukraine which it had annexed during the war. It thus regained all of the western territories which Ukraine had lost by the Treaty of Riga in 1921: including, most controversially, Lviv, the old capital of Galicia. Ukraine would gain its independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, in a process depicted in my most recent post.

————

While the above deals with western Ukraine and the formation of the Ukrainian state, it is necessary to consider in more detail the major cities of eastern Ukraine. Many of the major cites of today’s south-eastern Ukraine once comprised the Yekaterinoslav Governorate, established in the Russian Empire in 1802, and continuing in its administration through until 1925. The Yekaterinoslav Governorate included Yekaterinoslav – a city on the Dnieper which was renamed Dnipropetrovsk in 1926, and became closed to foreigners, serving as a centre of the Soviet arms and space industries – and extended east to the cities of Luhansk, Mariupol, and what would become Donetsk. Briefly, the Yekaterinoslav Governorate even took in Rostov-on-Don, deep into modern-day Russia; though the port of Taganrog remained outside the Governorate, with special city status and its own Governor. Taganrog and Rostov-on-Don would both become part of the Don Host Oblast in 1887, the precursor to today’s Rostov Oblast.

Donetsk traces its history to 1869, when a small settlement built up around a metal works developed by the Welsh industrialist, John Hughes. The settlement took the name ‘Hughesovka’, rendered Yuzovka, and grew rapidly as the metal works became one of the most productive in the Russian Empire. In 1917, Yuzovka was given the status of a city. During the Russian Civil War, it became part of the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic. This was one of the self-proclaimed republics encouraged into fruition by the Bolsheviks: it sought to break from the fledgling Ukrainiain People’s Republic, and comprised the cities and towns of the Donets Basin, the cities of Yekaterinoslav and Luhansk, parts of the Kherson Governorate and the Don Host Oblast and, momentarily, also Kharkiv. Kharkiv then Luhansk served as the short-lived breakaway republic’s capital: established in early February 1918, it went unrecognised and collapsed the following month with the second treaty of Brest-Litovsk. This second treaty, signed between Soviet Russia and the Central Powers on 3 March, removed Soviet Russia from World War I, with the Central Powers ensuring that the Bolsheviks recognised the Ukrainian People’s Republic, by the time effectively a German protectorate.

As part of Soviet Ukraine, Yuzovka was renamed Stalin in 1924, then Stalino in 1928. In 1920, the Donetsk Governorate had been formed, taking from the Yekaterinoslav Governorate administrative control over the Donets Basin. In 1932 – following the transitional ‘okruha’ system of administration, which saw Soviet Ukraine’s Governorates subdivided into smaller districts – the Donetsk Governorate became the Donetsk Oblast. As the population of Stalino and of the wider region quickly grew – with the city building new tram lines, theatres and opera houses, and installing a water system in 1931 followed by a sewage system two years later – in 1938 the oblast was split into two, with the creation of the Stalino Oblast and the Voroshilovgrad Oblast. The Nazi occupation during World War II devastated the city’s development, and it was forced to rebuild. In 1961, Stalino became Donetsk.

Luhansk too traces its foundation to a British industrialist, growing out of a metal works established by Charles Gascoigne in 1795. Luhansk achieved city-status in 1882. It was renamed Voroshilovgrad in 1935, and became the centre of the oblast created in 1938. After suffering Nazi occupation during the war and rebuilding, the city was retitled Luhansk in 1958; Voroshilovgrad was restored as its name in 1970; and Luhansk reemerged again in 1990. Both Donetsk and Luhansk remain today important centres of industry, particularly in coal and steel.

Kharkiv in the north east has a longer past. The Cossack uprising which prefaced the Russo-Polish War of 1654-1667, and the civil war which continued until the ascension of Ivan Mazepa as Cossack Hetman in 1687, caused many to flee from the banks of the Dnieper. Settlers had formed what would become the city of Kharkiv by 1656. Voivodes were appointed by Moscow to govern the new settlement, and soon a fortress had been built to secure it from quarrelsome neighbours. The settlement grew into a city as part of the Russian Empire, establishing the University of Kharkiv in 1804 (the second oldest in Ukraine, after the University of Lviv), and acquiring running water in 1870.  Throughout the 1800s it became an important centre of nationalist sentiment outside Kiev: a nationalist society was formed, and the city saw published the first newspaper in the Ukrainian language. The prominent nationalist Mykola Mikhnovsky gave a speech in Kharkiv in 1900 – during celebrations commemorating the anniversary of Taras Shevchenko – which would be published as the pamphlet ‘Independent Ukraine’. Mikhnovsky was the first to propound the idea of independent Ukrainian statehood, and was one of the founders of the Revolutionary Ukrainian party and the radical Ukrainian People’s party, which would propel the nationalist cause in the first decade of the 1900s.

After the Bolsheviks had used Kharkiv as their base of power during the Ukrainian War of Independence from 1917, and after its brief role as part of the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic, Kharkiv served as the capital of Soviet Ukraine following its establishment, until the capital was transferred to Kiev at the end of 1934. The Kharkiv Oblast suffered severely during the Holodomor; and it was the site of major battles during World War II, as the city of Kharkiv passed between the Soviets and Nazi occupation. Much of the city was destroyed, and tens of thousands killed; including 30,000 people from the city’s sizeable Jewish minority. As the city was rebuilt, it became a centre of Soviet science and industry.

Today the cities of the east are some of the most populous in Ukraine. Kharkiv is the country’s second most-populous city, with 1.5 million inhabitants. After Odessa and Dnipropetrovsk, with about one million citizens each, Donetsk is fifth, with 960,000. Nearby Makiivka has a population of 360,000, and is merging with Donetsk as the two cities expand, forming a conurbation. Mariupol has a population of just under 500,000, including the largest Greek population in Ukraine, with more than 50,000 Greeks living in the area. 450,000 people live in Luhansk. The Luhansk Oblast is the easternmost oblast in Ukraine, with the Kharkiv Oblast immediately west, the Donetsk Oblast to the south-west, and the Rostov Oblast east, across the border in Russia. Comprising the cities of Donetsk, Mariupol and Makiivka, the Donetsk Oblast is Ukraine’s most populous. Where ethnic Russians make up about 17% of Ukraine’s total population – against 78% ethnic Ukrainians – in the east this overview is skewed: 44% in Kharkiv are ethnic Russian, 50 % ethnic Ukrainian; and in Donetsk, 48% are ethnic Russian, 47% Ukrainian. Again, the east is the industrial heart of Ukraine, and remains heavily dependent on the Russian economy, with which it carries out most of its trade.

While there have been smaller protests in Dnipropetrovsk, in Odessa, and in Mykolayiv (a shipbuilding city in the south), it is Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv which have seen the strongest pro-Russian expression. These cities have seen protests gathering in excess of 10,000 people, as rival pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian – or pro and anti-interim government, or pro and anti-Ukrainian far-right, or pro and anti-Yanukovych, or pro and anti-Putin – demonstrators have clashed, sometimes violently, amid the waving and hoisting of national and regional flags (the old flag of the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic has made several appearances). At the beginning of March – compelled in part by the inclusion of members of Svoboda in the interim Ukrainian government, and by the proposed repeal of a law establishing Russian as an official second language – pro-Russian supporters took control of administrative buildings in Kharkiv and Donetsk. ‘People’s Governors’, calling for referendums on union with Russia, were elected in Donetsk and Luhansk. The proclaimed ‘People’s Governor’ of Donetsk, Pavel Gubarev, was arrested on 6 March by Ukraine’s Security Service, the SBU, charged with separatism. On 10 March, Mikhail Dobkin, the pro-Russian former Governor of Kharkiv Oblast and Mayor of Kharkiv, was also arrested by the SBU. The interim Ukrainian government has stated its hope to try such individuals at the International Criminal Court.

These conflicts turned bloody when, on 13 March, a pro-Ukrainian protester was stabbed to death in Donetsk, as rival groups fought on the city’s Lenin Square. On 15 March, two men – reportedly a pro-Russian protester and a passerby – were shot dead in Kharkiv, by a group of Ukrainian nationalists. Since then, and in the aftermath of the Crimean referendum, the situation in the east has calmed. Both Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, have repeatedly stressed no desire to invade or annex eastern Ukraine. In the speech he gave to both houses of the Federal Assembly last week – full of his own increasingly nationalistic rhetoric as Crimea’s integration with the Russian Federation moved a step closer – Putin asserted ‘we do not need a divided Ukraine’.

————

One of the most important facets of many major revolutions is the degree to which they have centred on capital cities. The French Revolution was spurred when – seeking to uphold the newly formed National Constituent Assembly, and fearful of the gathering foreign mercenaries who might fight to preserve the old regime – the people of Paris rioted and stormed the Bastille.  The Russian revolutions of February and October centred entirely on Petersburg (then Petrograd): the former the result of a series of protests culminating on International Women’s Day; the latter achieved when the Bolsheviks seized an empty Winter Palace, from which proceeded the Russian Civil War. In a related vein, whatever one terms the culmination of events in Ukraine last month – whether they constituted a revolution, an uprising, or a coup – the impetus for the ousting of President Yanukovych was in Kiev. The public feeling and the political machinations displayed there were not acutely representative of the shades of feeling elsewhere in the country.

Given the situation in Kiev – the removal of an elected though significantly disgraced president, the formation of an interim government containing protest leaders and members of a controversial right-wing group, the broad lack of diplomacy, and the local nature of the protests – it could hardly have been objected on moral or democratic grounds if the people and the political instruments of Crimea had called and voted in their own referendum. Many Crimeans may understandably feel themselves entitled to determine their region’s future – and regardless of the Ukrainian constitution, for after all, it was the Ukrainian parliament which unilaterally diminished Crimea’s autonomy in 1995, abolishing the post of President of Crimea and forcing the Crimean parliament to redraw and renegotiate Crimea’s constitution. The overt and intimidating Russian military presence must render the referendum which did take place illegitimate – a vote held under duress can never be acceptable – but it does not render it meaningless, because the will of Crimeans seems clear. Impelled to take a position in grossly unsatisfactory circumstances, the majority of Crimeans prefer to retain close connections with Russia.

The scenario in eastern Ukraine is different, however. It must be remembered that Crimea was – and will remain, in name at least – an autonomous republic, with its own parliament. It already possessed a significant degree of independence from the rest of Ukraine. This sense of distinctness has been enhanced by the continuing presence on Crimea of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, which has been based at Sevastopol since the city’s founding in 1783. There is in fact no history prior to 1991 of the Ukrainian mainland and the Crimean peninsula existing together as one independent state: after the fall of Kievan Rus, the history of mainland Ukraine is one of Polish-Lithuanian control and the Cossack Hetmanate, while the history of Crimea is of the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire. Crimea only joined the Ukrainian SSR in 1954, transferred by Soviet Russia, and together they would remain tied to the Soviet Union until Ukrainian independence.

Ethnic Russians are in the majority in Crimea today: 59%, compared to 24% ethnic Ukrainians and 12% Crimean Tatars. In the east, where the ethnic balance is more even, there is a sense that economic attachment to Russia does not equate to close cultural attachment: people define themselves based less on narrow ethnic definitions, more in relation to their shared culture and their experiences building their cities together. If referendums were somehow called in the east on the issue of independence from Ukraine or integration with Russia, it is not clear which side would win. The east – bound in its past to the banks of the Dnieper as much as it is to the Russian Empire, and having suffered so much as part of the Soviet Union – has perhaps less cultural resonance for Russians than Crimea; while its loss would be much more costly for Ukraine, inevitably leading to a protracted and militarised engagement were Russia to try their hand.

Once more, any suggestion that Russia will do so amounts, at this stage, to speculation, carrying with it a palpable degree of scaremongering. For its part, Ukraine must look firmly ahead to the presidential elections scheduled for 25 May. These seem set to draw an array of candidates: from the oligarchy, the political elite, and the professional classes, and covering the whole of the political spectrum. Former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko yesterday confirmed her candidacy, which may – along with the prospective candidacies from Svoboda and the militant Pravy Sektor – be cause for lament, as Ukraine needs neither divisive politics nor symbols of the persistent corruption that has been at the government’s head. Other potential candidates include the former boxer and opposition politician Vitali Klitschko, and the ‘Chocolate King’ Petro Poroshenko, an independent businessman who stands as the current favourite in polls despite not yet formally announcing his candidacy. Interim Prime Minister Yatsenyuk – who signed last Friday part of the Association Agreement with the EU whose suspension instigated the Euromaidan protests – could also still stand. Open elections and a real willingness to reform the political structure will guarantee nothing, but still affirm themselves as the best means for securing true Ukrainian independence, and for calming ongoing tensions in the east.

————

And why not give Gogol a final word? His Cossack horror story ‘A Terrible Vengeance’ – translated here by R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky – contains one of his most famous descriptive passages. It depicts the Dnieper:

‘Master Danilo sits and looks with his left eye at his writing and with his right eye out the window. And from the window the gleam of the distant hills and the Dnieper can be seen. Beyond the Dnieper, mountains show blue. Up above sparkles the now clear night sky. But it is not the distant sky or the blue forest that Master Danilo admires: he gazes at the jutting spit of land on which the old castle blackens. He fancied that light flashed in a narrow window of the castle. But all is quiet. He must have imagined it. Only the muted rush of the Dnieper can be heard below, and on three sides, one after the other, the echo of momentarily awakened waves. The river is not mutinous. He grumbles and murmurs like an old man: nothing pleases him; everything has changed around him; he is quietly at war with the hills, forests, and meadows on his banks, and carries his complaint against them to the Black Sea.’

————————

Further reading:

The standard history of Ukraine in English is Ukraine: A History by Orest Subtelny (University of Toronto Press, 2009). Other acclaimed English-language histories of the country include Paul Robert Magocsi’s History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples (University of Toronto Press, 2010) and Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine by Anna Reid (Phoenix, 2003). Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Vintage, 2011) provides a close reading of the devastation of Ukraine during the 1930s and 1940s. The most sustained study of Gogol’s works within a Ukrainian context is Edyta Bojanowska’s Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism (Harvard University Press, 2007).

A selection of news sources:

The BBC profiles Luhansk, from last December: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25406861

Reuters reports on the death of a protester in Donetsk: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/13/us-ukraine-crisis-donetsk-idUSBREA2C20Z20140313

The International Business Times on the death of two in Kharkiv: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/two-killed-ukraine-protesters-clash-kharkiv-1440436

A Guardian opinion piece following the deaths in Kharkiv: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/20/ukraine-nationalist-attacks-russia-supporters-kremlin-deaths

Putin signs a bill on the integration of Crimea with the Russian Federation: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26630062

Reuters on the Ukrainian withdrawal from Crimea: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/24/us-ukraine-crisis-crimea-base-idUSBREA2N09J20140324

NATO commander Philip Breedlove on concerns over Transdniestria: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/23/us-ukraine-crisis-idUSBREA2M09920140323

Former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt comments on the sanctions: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/helmut-schmidt-verteidigt-in-krim-krise-putins-ukraine-kurs-a-960834.html

The Scythians and The Rite of Spring: Documents

Here are a selection of documents and sources – videos, images, and text – relating to and referred to in the piece I just published, on the influence of Nicholas Roerich and Asiatic culture on Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.

____

Mikhail Glinka, Ruslan and Lyudmila (1842) – Overture

____

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade, Op. 35 (1888)

____

Vladimir Soloviev, ‘Pan Mongolism’ (1894)

–

Pan Mongolism! The name is monstrous

Yet it caresses my ear

As if filled with the portent

Of a grand divine fate.

–

While in corrupt Byzantium

The altar of God lay cooling

And holy men, princes, people and king

Renounced the Messiah –

–

Then He invoked from the East

An unknown and alien people,

And beneath the heavy hand of fate

The second Rome bowed down in the dust.

–

We have no desire to learn

From fallen Byzantium’s fate,

And Russia’s flatterers insist:

It is you, you are the third Rome.

–

Let it be so! God has not yet

Emptied his wrathful hand.

A swarm of waking tribes

Prepares for new attacks.

–

From the Altai to Malaysian shores

The leaders of Eastern isles

Have gathered a host of regiments

By China’s defeated walls.

–

Countless as locusts

And as ravenous,

Shielded by an unearthly power

The tribes move north.

–

O Rus’! Forget your former glory:

The two-headed eagle is ravaged,

And your tattered banners passed

Like toys among yellow children.

–

He who neglects love’s legacy,

Will be overcome by trembling fear…

And the third Rome will fall to dust,

Nor will there ever be a fourth.

____

Golden bull figurine, from the Maikop kurgan (excavated 1897)

____

World of Art magazine, 3rd Edition (1901)

____

Nicholas Roerich, Guests from Overseas (1901)

____

Nicholas Roerich, Set Design for Act III of The Polovtsian Dances (1909)

____

Nicholas Roerich, Preliminary Paintings for ‘The Great Sacrifice’ (the working title of The Rite of Spring) (1910)

____

Nicholas Roerich, Costume Designs for The Rite of Spring (1913)

____

Nicholas Roerich, Set Designs for The Rite of Spring (1913)

____

Original Costumes for The Rite of Spring (1913)

____

Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring (1913)

____

Alexander Blok, The Scythians (1918)

–

You are millions. We are hordes and hordes and hordes.

Try and take us on!

Yes, we are Scythians! Yes, we are Asians –

With slanted and greedy eyes!

–

For you, the ages, for us a single hour.

We, like obedient slaves,

Held up a shield between two enemy races –

The Tatars and Europe!

–

For ages and ages your old furnace raged

And drowned out the roar of avalanches,

And Lisbon and Messina’s fall

To you was but a monstrous fairy tale!

 –

For hundreds of years you gazed at the East,

Storing up and melting down our jewels,

And, jeering, you merely counted the days

Until your cannons you could point at us!

–

The time is come. Trouble beats its wings –

And every day our grudges grow,

And the day will come when every trace

Of your Paestums may vanish!

 –

O, old world! While you still survive,

While you still suffer your sweet torture,

Come to a halt, sage as Oedipus,

Before the ancient riddle of the Sphinx!..

–

Russia is a Sphinx. Rejoicing, grieving,

And drenched in black blood,

It gazes, gazes, gazes at you,

With hatred and with love!..

 –

It has been ages since you’ve loved

As our blood still loves!

You have forgotten that there is a love

That can destroy and burn!

 –

We love all- the heat of cold numbers,

The gift of divine visions,

We understand all- sharp Gallic sense

And gloomy Teutonic genius…

 –

We remember all- the hell of Parisian streets,

And Venetian chills,

The distant aroma of lemon groves

And the smoky towers of Cologne…

 –

We love the flesh – its flavor and its color,

And the stifling, mortal scent of flesh…

Is it our fault if your skeleton cracks

In our heavy, tender paws?

 –

When pulling back on the reins

Of playful, high-spirited horses,

It is our custom to break their heavy backs

And tame the stubborn slave girls…

–

Come to us! Leave the horrors of war,

And come to our peaceful embrace!

Before it’s too late – sheathe your old sword,

Comrades! We shall be brothers!

–

But if not – we have nothing to lose,

And we are not above treachery!

For ages and ages you will be cursed

By your sickly, belated offspring!

 –

Throughout the woods and thickets

In front of pretty Europe

We will spread out! We’ll turn to you

With our Asian muzzles.

 –

Come everyone, come to the Urals!

We’re clearing a battlefield there

Between steel machines breathing integrals

And the wild Tatar Horde!

 –

But we are no longer your shield,

Henceforth we’ll not do battle!

As mortal battles rages we’ll watch

With our narrow eyes!

–

We will not lift a finger when the cruel Huns

Rummage the pockets of corpses,

Burn cities, drive cattle into churches,

And roast the meat of our white brothers!..

–

Come to your senses for the last time, old world!

Our barbaric lyre is calling you

One final time, to a joyous brotherly feast

To a brotherly feast of labor and of peace!

____

Vaslav Nijinsky

____

 

Stravinsky and Nijinsky

____

Credit for the two poems goes to From the Ends to the Beginning: A Bilingual Anthology of Russian Verse; a project hosted at: http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Demo/index.html

A Redesign of My Various Tumblr Pages

Towards the end of last week, I revamped those various tumblr. pages which relate to this site. The ‘tumblr’ link in the menu at the top of the site serves as a gateway to these; and they are all linked at the very bottom of the site, in the section suitably headed ‘My Other Sites’.

culturedarm serves to summarise and link to the pieces published here; it contains shorter and slightly looser posts on topics from music to comedy to architecture; audio and video files; and occasional photographs. visualarm provides a sort of visual compendium of what is posted here, at culturedarm, and less frequently amsterdamarm: it allows me to expand visually on whatever I’ve posted elsewhere. audioarm and poetryarm are collections of poetry and music.

My revamp essentially saw me replace the four distinct themes which characterised each of the four pages in turn – and which were drawn and edited from various sources – with a single theme, consistent throughout with minor visual differences. I owe to ‘blink and it’s over’ from http://themecloud.co/ for the new theme. I felt like a change, I appreciate the consistency, and I really like the theme’s layout: I think it is lively and engaging yet still structured and clear, and it supports all manner of posts and insertions faultlessly.

culturedarm:

visualarm:

audioarm:

poetryarm:

The appearance of amsterdamarm remains the same:

Rabindranath Tagore, E. E. Cummings; Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Björk

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Bengali polymath, best known as a poet. Born in Calcutta – then part of the Bengal Presidency, and the capital city of British India – Rabindranath was the youngest child of Debendranath Tagore, the first leader of the Brahmo Samaj, a religious and social reform movement prominent in the development of the Bengal Renaissance.

The Brahmo Samaj was a coming together of the Brahmo Sabha, founded in 1828 by Raja Ram Mohan Roy; and Debendranath’s Tattwabodhini Sabha, a related movement which he founded in 1839. Both Ram Mohan Roy and Debendranath Tagore sought to reform Hindu religion, culture and society along humanist lines, based upon a clear conception of the Upanishads, the philosophical texts which comprise the closing texts of the Vedas. When Ram Mohan Roy died in 1833, the Brahmo Sabha declined as a force; and the movement merged with the Tattwabodhini Sabha to become the Brahmo Samaj, under Debendranath, in 1843.

The Bengal Renaissance which Ram Mohan Roy fathered, and to which Debendranath and the Brahmo Samaj were central, essentially entwined the teachings of the Upanishads with the political and cultural influences of the European West. In this it served to shape modern Indian society. Rabindranath – himself often considered a later character of the Bengal Renaissance – was brought up in the conflux of these religious and secular, these spiritual, philosophical, cultural and political rivers.

Many of his seven brothers and four sisters became notable figures in the arts and sciences. Rabindranath eschewed formal schooling in his youth, preferring to learn and to discover in his own way, from the expanse of resources located at the family’s Jorasanko mansion. At sixteen, he published his first collection of poetry under the pseudonym Bhanusimha (‘Sun Lion’). It was well received –  taken as a lost seventeenth century classic – and he would continue to write poetry throughout his life; completed eighty-four short stories, four novellas and eight novels; several pieces for the theatre; over two-thousand musical compositions, many drawing their lyrics from his literary works; and took up painting later on in life, at the age of sixty.

Rabindranath’s artistic reputation across the Indian subcontinent is unsurpassed. Two of his compositions, Jana Gana Mana and Amar Shonar Bangla, serve as the national anthems of India and Bangladesh respectively. In the West, he is best known for his Gitanjali (‘Song Offerings’). This collection of 157 poems was originally published in Bengali on 14 August, 1910. Over the following two years, Rabindranath set about translating fifty of these poems, plus other pieces, into English, into free verse. Travelling to England in the summer of 1912, and staying with the artist William Rothenstein, Rabindranath’s translations were passed about literary circles and led to the publication of the Gitanjali in English in November of the same year. The English Gitanjali were readily and widely acclaimed.

They came accompanied by an introduction by W. B. Yeats. Yeats compares Tagore to St. Francis and William Blake; and writes that the poems ‘have stirred my blood as nothing has for years’, and that,

‘I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me.’

Yeats met Rabindranath for the first time on 27 June, 1912; the two remained friends until Yeats’ death in 1939. Their friendship has been described as an important influence on both: ‘To Yeats, Tagore represented the wisdom and dignity of the East, and justified the faith that he had placed in the strength and vitality of Asian philosophy. For Tagore, Yeats was a vibrant symbol of the creative energy of the West’.

Owing much to the reception of the English Gitanjali, Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 – becoming the first non-European to receive the award. He was knighted by George V in 1915, but repudiated the honour after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919. Rabindranath’s poetry would go on to be translated across Europe, notably by André Gide into French (Gide and Tagore met in Paris in 1921, and shared correspondence in 1930), and by Anna Akhmatova into Russian.

A number of Rabindranath Tagore’s poems as translated in the Gitanjali share similarities with some of the works of E. E. Cummings: both poets made use of free verse forms, a gently rhythmic syntax, and formal and archaic phrases and pronouns. A point of comparison and an additional point of connection may be found through the music of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (the pseudonym of Will Oldham) and Björk.

In 2000, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy collaborated on an EP with Marquis de Tren – a name used by the Australian musician and artist Mick Turner. The EP, Get on Jolly, includes a song entitled ‘2/15’, whose lyrics are drawn from the second and fifteenth songs of Tagore’s translated Gitanjali. Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy performed ‘2/15’ live during a 2003 performance in Coney Island (as part of a festival at which Björk also appeared); the performance segued into ‘New Partner’ from Viva Last Blues, and was captured on video by the filmmaker Lance Bangs.

———

Gitanjali 2

———

When thou commandest me to sing it seems that my heart would break with pride; and I look to thy face, and tears come to my eyes.

All that is harsh and dissonant in my life melts into one sweet harmony – and my adoration spreads wings like a glad bird on its flight across the sea.

I know thou takest pleasure in my singing. I know that only as a singer I come before thy presence.

I touch by the edge of the far-spreading wing of my song thy feet which I could never aspire to reach.

Drunk with the joy of singing I forget myself and call thee friend who art my lord.

———

Gitanjali 15

———

I am here to sing thee songs. In this hall of thine I have a corner seat.

In thy world I have no work to do; my useless life can only break out in tunes without a purpose.

When the hour strikes for thy silent worship at the dark temple of midnight, command me, my master, to stand before thee to sing.

When in the morning air the golden harp is tuned, honour me, commanding my presence.

———

Bonnie Prince Billy – ‘2/15’ / ‘New Partner’

———

———

Björk has adapted three poems by E. E. Cummings to music. Questioned by Interview Magazine in 2004, at the time of Medúlla, Björk considered her relationship with Cummings, whose poetry she first became familiar with five years previously. She recalls immediately wanting to sing his words; evokes his poetry as ‘euphoric, but humble at the same time’; and notes that ‘It goes so well in the mouth!’.

Björk’s first adaptation of Cummings came in 2001, on Vespertine. The album includes the song ‘Sun in My Mouth’, with lyrics from Cummings’ 1923 poem, ‘I Will Wade Out’. ‘Hidden Place’ was Vespertine‘s first single; ‘Mother Heroic’, featuring an excerpt from Cummings’ ‘Belgium’, appeared on the second of the singles’ two discs. Then on Medúlla, her subsequent solo album, released in 2004, the tenth song, ‘Sonnets/Unrealities XI’, is an adaptation of Cummings’ poem of the same name.

———

‘I Will Wade Out’ (1923)

———

i will wade out

till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers

I will take the sun in my mouth

and leap into the ripe air

Alive

with closed eyes

to dash against darkness

in the sleeping curves of my body

Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery

with chasteness of sea-girls

Will i complete the mystery

of my flesh

I will rise

After a thousand years

lipping

flowers

And set my teeth in the silver of the moon

———

‘Belgium’ (1916)

———

Oh thou that liftest up thy hands in prayer,

Robed in the sudden ruin of glad homes,

And trampled fields which from green dreaming woke

To bring forth ruin and fruit of death,

Thou pitiful, we turn our hearts to thee.

–

Oh thou that mournest thy heroic dead

Fallen in youth and promise gloriously,

In the deep meadows of their motherland

Turning the silver blossoms into gold,

The valor of thy children comfort thee.

–

Oh thou that bowest thy ecstatic face,

Thy perfect sorrows are the world’s to keep!

Wherefore unto thy knees come we with prayer,

Mother heroic, mother glorious,

Beholding in thy eyes immortal tears.

———

‘Sonnets/Unrealities XI’ (1917)

———

It may not always be so; and I say

That if your lips, which I have loved, should touch

Another’s, and your dear strong fingers clutch

His heart, as mine in time not far away;

If on another’s face your sweet hair lay

In such a silence as I know, or such

Great writhing words as, uttering overmuch,

Stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;

–

If this should be, I say if this should be —

You of my heart, send me a little word;

That I may go to him, and take his hands,

Saying, Accept all happiness from me.

Then I shall turn my face, and hear one bird

Sing terribly afar in the lost lands.

———

Björk – ‘Sun in My Mouth’

———

———

Björk – ‘Mother Heroic’

———

———

Björk – ‘Sonnets/Unrealities XI’

———

———

Björk and Oldham have worked together on several occasions and are linked in a number of ways. Valgeir Sigurðsson, who produced both Vespertine and Medúlla, also produced Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s 2006 album, The Letting Go. A year later, Oldham covered ‘I’ve Seen It All’ – from the soundtrack to Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark – on Ask Forgiveness, an EP comprising a collection of covers. More closely, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy toured with Björk in 2003. With Björk working around the same period on the soundtrack to her partner Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9, Oldham sang on the first track, ‘Gratitude’: a setting to music of a letter from a Japanese fisherman to American General Douglas MacArthur.

———

‘Gratitude’, from Drawing Restraint 9

———

________

Björk’s interview with Interview Magazine, 2004: http://www.bjork.fr/Interview-Magazine-2004

Cummings, E.E. Complete Poems, 1904-1962 (Liveright, 1994)

Hurwitz, H. M. ‘Yeats and Tagore’ Comparative Literature, Vol. 16, No. 1, Winter (1964) pp. 55-64

Tagore, R. Gitanjali (1912) (A full flash version of which may be accessed here)

Tagore, R. Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore eds. Dutta, K. & Robinson, A. (Cambridge University Press, 1997)

Pierrot Through the Arts: Deburau, Laforgue, Schoenberg and On

Pierrot, the sad clown, with white face and loose white blouse, expressing slowly and subtly and in the absence of and beyond words, emerged in the nineteenth century from his roots in stock comedies and pantomimes to become the embodiment of a certain artistic type, a specific strain of artistic emotion: sensitive, melancholy and solitary, and at once playful and daring in subverting language and suggesting the fraught but still facile and fluctuating nature of gender.

The character of Pierrot can be traced back to Molière’s Don Juan, or The Feast with the Statue, first performed in February 1660 at the Palais-Royal theatre in Paris, and with Molière playing the role of Sganarelle. Pierrot is the name of a peasant character who appears in the second act of the play, the fiancé of Charlotte. The Palais-Royal theatre had been established by Cardinal Richelieu, in the east wing of the Palais-Royal, in 1637; and by 1662, Molière’s acting troupe was sharing the venue with a troupe of Italian Commedia dell’Arte performers, including Domenicio Biancolelli, famous for his performances in the role of Harlequin. The Italian Commedia dell’Arte flourished throughout the seventeenth century in France, and in fact the character of Molière’s Sganarelle already drew from the Italian comedians. With Molière and Biancolelli’s troupes in such proximity, this interplay and cross-pollination continued, the Commedia dell’Arte incorporating Pierrot into its repertoire and well establishing the figure by the time of the Italians’ expulsion from France, by Royal decree, in 1697.

So Pierrot persisted on in Italy, and then again in France after Italian troupes were permitted to return during the second decade of the following century. Through the 1700s, though the character began to appear in performances in European centres outside of Italy and France, the Pierrot on display often featured in lesser and disparate roles: the basis of the character, his unrequited love for Columbine, who prefers Harlequin, was sometimes lost, and he was frequently portrayed in a purely comic, or even bumbling and foolish manner. It was in the 1800s that Pierrot gained stature, and began his reach into the other arts, developing in literature and painting as an emblem and as a muse.

Jean-Gaspard Deburau, a mime from Kolín, in what is now the Czech Republic but was then Bohemia, was most responsible for this recreation of Pierrot. Born in 1796, he began appearing in Paris at the Théâtre des Funambules some time around 1819, under the stage-name ‘Baptiste’. The Funambules had opened in 1816, on the Boulevard du Temple, otherwise known as the Boulevard du Crime owing to the volume of crime dramas shown nightly in the Boulevard’s numerous theatres – all but one of which, including the Funambles, were demolished during Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris in the 1860s. The Funambules originally hosted only acrobats and mimes; and Deburau, taking the role of Pierrot as a young man, would continue at the part until his death in 1846. He extended and deepened Pierrot, his restrained and nuanced acting style replacing the tendency towards bold and gesticulating comedy; gaining recognition and increasing fame towards the end of the 1820s, Deburau’s Pierrot would even be compared to the works of Shakespeare when, in 1842, the versatile and distinctly modern man-of-letters Théophile Gautier wrote a fictionalised review entitled, ‘Shakespeare at the Funambules’.

Other mimes would continue to have success playing Pierrot after Deburau’s death. These included his son, Jean Charles, and most notably Paul Legrand. Still, it was Deburau who enshrined Pierrot within French culture, and established the sense of Pierrot as a sensitive and anguished artist. This conception of Pierrot was celebrated, explored and entrenched in 1945 with Marcel Carné’s film, Les Enfants du Paradis, often considered one of the greatest films of all time; which suffered its own anguishes as it was made in occupied France, with damaged sets, short of supplies, with a cast and crew short of food and comprising several Jews who had to work secretely or risk production shutting down; and consisting of a fictionalised story drawing upon real figures from early nineteenth century France. Deburau is portrayed in the film as ‘Baptiste’, a lovelorn mime who achieves success in the Funambules, in a magnificent performance by Jean-Louis Barrault.

Gautier’s piece on Deburau’s Pierrot was but one of the first entwinements of Pierrot with literature. Writers including Flaubert (who, early in his career, wrote an unperformed pantomime entitled Pierrot au sérail), Verlaine and Huysmens incorporated Pierrot into their works. Most extensively, he was the central figure in the poetry of Jules Laforgue. Laforgue – a French Symbolist poet who died in 1887 aged just twenty-seven years old – wrote three of the ‘complaints’ in his first selection of poems, Les Complaintes (1885), in Pierrot’s voice; then devoted his second collection, L’Imitation de Notre Dame de la Lune (1886), entirely to Pierrot and his moonlit world, influenced by Albert Giraud’s poetry cycle published a couple of years previously.

In his book, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, first published in 1899, which served to introduce French Symbolism to an English readership, Arthur Symons devoted a chapter to Laforgue. Symons describes Laforgue’s verse and prose as,

‘alike a kind of travesty, making subtle use of colloquialism, slang, neologism, technical terms, for their allusive, their factitious, their reflected meanings, with which one can play, very seriously. The verse is alert, troubled, swaying, deliberately uncertain, hating rhetoric so piously that it prefers, and finds its piquancy in, the ridiculously obvious…It is an art of the nerves, this art of Laforgue, and it is what all art would tend towards if we followed our nerves on all their journeys.’

and defines Laforgue’s laughter in the following terms:

‘His laughter, which Maeterlinck has defined so admirably as ‘the laughter of the soul’, is the laughter of Pierrot, more than half a sob, and shaken out of him with a deplorable gesture of the thin arms, thrown wide. He is a metaphysical Pierrot, Pierrot Lunaire, and it is of abstract notions, the whole science of the unconscious, that he makes his showman’s patter.’

Laforgue was a great influence upon a young T. S. Eliot. Later in his life, Eliot would write that, ‘Of Jules Laforgue I can say that he was the first to teach me how to speak, to teach me the poetic possibilities of my own idiom of speech’, and, ‘I have written…nothing about Jules Laforgue, to whom I owe more than to any one poet in any language’. In this way the figure of Pierrot maintained a relevance beyond French Romanticism and Symbolism, on into the literature of the Anglophone Modernists. He also appeared in canvases by painters who led their art-form into modernity: in Seurat’s Pierrot with a White Pipe (1883); in Cézanne’s Pierrot and Harlequin (1888); whilst Picasso’s Pierrot and Columbine (1900) was the first of several pieces in which he depicts Pierrot.

Pierrot became a canonised figure within twentieth century classical music with Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21, a setting of twenty-one poems from a German translation of Albert Giraud’s cycle. Schoenberg’s work was premiered in Berlin, on 16 October, 1912, with Albertine Zehme the solo vocalist. Theodor Adorno, theorist, philosopher and musicologist, wrote some of his earliest pieces on Schoenberg; including a 1922 review of a performance of Pierrot Lunaire in Frankfurt, in which Adorno puts it that Schoenberg’s piece characterises ‘the homelessness of our souls’. Musically and aesthetically, Pierrot has exerted his influence too on popular music: Björk, a fervent admirer of Schoenberg, sang Pierrot Lunaire in a one-off performance at the Verbier Festival in 1996; whilst David Bowie, after studying theatre and mime, played a role in the 1967 theatrical production Pierrot in Turquoise, and appeared as Pierrot in the video to his 1980 song, ‘Ashes to Ashes’.

____________

Jean-Louis Barrault in Les Enfants du Paradis

____________

Jules Laforgue – ‘Autre Complaint de Lord Pierrot’ (‘Another Complaint of Lord Pierrot’). In French; then translated into English courtesy of Paul Staniforth and brindin.com

——–

Celle qui doit me mettre au courant de la Femme!

Nous lui dirons d’abord, de mon air le moins froid:

“La somme des angles d’un triangle, chère âme,

Est égale à deux droits.”

–
Et si ce cri lui part: “Dieu de Dieu! que je t’aime!”

– “Dieu reconnaîtra les siens.” Ou piquée au vif:

– “Mes claviers ont du coeur, tu seras mon seul thème.”

Moi: “Tout est relatif.”

–

De tous ses yeux, alors! se sentant trop banale:

“Ah! tu ne m’aimes pas; tant d’autres sont jaloux!”

Et moi, d’un oeil qui vers l’inconscient s’emballe:

“Merci, pas mal; et vous?”

–

– “Jouons au plus fidèle!” – “à quoi bon, ô Nature!

Autant à qui perd gagne!” Alors, autre couplet:

– “Ah! tu te lasseras le premier, j’en suis sûre…”

– “Après vous, s’il vous plaît.”

–

Enfin, si, par un soir, elle meurt dans mes livres,

Douce; feignant de n’en pas croire encor mes yeux,

J’aurai un: “Ah! ça, mais, nous avions De Quoi vivre!

C’était donc sérieux?”

——–

The one who’ll give an update on her sex!

We’ll tell her first in our least frigid air

“The sum of a triangle’s angles makes

exactly two right angles, dear.”

–

And should she peal “O God! how I love you!”,

‘God’ll know his own’ – or, cut to the quick: 

“My heart knows love’s keys; I’ll play but of you!”, 

then I: ‘All’s relativistic.’

–

Then, with all eyes, feeling too commonplace 

“You don’t love me whom men crave with each muscle?” 

And I, with an eye on Unconsciousness, 

‘Oh, not so bad, ta, and yousel’?’

–

“Let’s vie in fidelity!” – ‘Might as well play

(Nature!) loser wins.’ And after those, these: 

“Oh, you’ll tire of me first, you’ll go away…” 

‘Oh no: ladies first, if you please.’

–

Last, if one night she die in my ‘Divan’, 

soft … with fake disbelief in my closet 

I’ll go ‘Well, now, we’d something to live on –

it was serious then, was it?’

____________

Pierrot with a White Pipe, by Seurat

____________

Pierrot and Harlequin, by Cézanne

____________

Pierrot and Columbine, by Picasso

____________

Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21

____________

David Bowie as Pierrot

____________

Raine, C. T. S. Eliot (Oxford University Press, 2006)

Symons, A. The Symbolist Movement In Literature (Dutton & Company, 1919)

Wiggerhaus, R. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (MIT Press, 1995)

Alexander Blok – ‘Night, street, street-light, drugstore,…’ (1912)

Alexander Blok (Александр Блок) (1880-1921) was the foremost of the Russian Symbolists, who changed the face of Russian letters from the late 1890s through until the Russian Revolution, leading Russian literature into a ‘Silver Age’ after the great works of the previous century.

Chekhov died in 1904, and Tolstoy, over thirty years his senior, not until 1910. Tolstoy published his final novel, Resurrection, in 1899; worked on Hadji Murat – which wasn’t published until after his death – until about 1904; and wrote and published one of his great short stories, ‘Alyosha the Pot’, in 1905. Chekhov’s stature as a playwright owes to his later years: The Seagull premiered in 1896, Uncle Vanya in 1899, Three Sisters in 1901, and The Cherry Orchard in 1904. Some of his best short stories were written during the same period, including ‘The Bishop’ as late as 1902, but especially ‘Lady With the Toy Dog’ (1899) (otherwise known as ‘Lady With the Little Dog’, or ‘Small Dog’, or ‘Pet Dog’, or simply ‘Dog’) and ‘In the Ravine’ (1900). Indeed, Chekhov’s career as a serious writer was only established in the latter half of the 1890s, when the Symbolist movement in Russia was itself emerging under Merezhkovsky, Balmont and Bryusov.

Still, the work of Chekhov and the later works of Tolstoy sit happily alongside the writings of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky and Turgenev, as well as Tolstoy’s earlier pieces. All of these writers extended, in various manners and through various disciplines, into the twentieth century and beyond; but they seem, certainly in retrospect, together as one tradition, which is that of the 1800s. This perhaps owes something to their lack of immediate and gifted successors in the novel and the short story. The Symbolists had the effect of reestablishing poetry as the primary form in Russian literature. Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva and Vladimir Mayakovsky would follow them in differing ways. The Symbolists held their forebears in the highest regard. Andrei Bely wrote penetrating essays on Russian prosody, and on Gogol in particular, rescuing his work from the socially conscious realm delimited by Vissarion Belinsky. Yet in their metaphysics, and in their formal innovations, they took Russian literature into a distinctly new and decidedly modern era.

Blok wrote from a young age and was publishing his poetry to acclaim by 1903. He soon found himself at the head of the second wave of Russian Symbolism. This Symbolist movement in Russia was something quite distinct from the Symbolist movement in France. Edmund Wilson, in Axel’s Castle, characterises the movement in France as the ‘second swing of the pendulum away from a mechanistic view of nature and from a social conception of man’ – which is to say that it took its lead from Romanticism, and its related but sometimes unclear (especially outside of Germany) sense of philosophical Idealism, and sought the individual against the Naturalism associated with Émile Zola. While the social realist model of literature had continued to thrive in Russia after Belinsky, and whilst there were contemporary realist writers to respond and react against, in Russia there were other important influences: in the writings of prominent religious thinkers and mystics; and also in a nascent attention being paid towards folk art. Consequently Symbolism in Russia was itself more mystical, and more explicitly and thoroughly philosophical. This was so at least in the early years of its writers, who moved on significantly throughout their careers in both form and thought.

D.S. Mirsky calls the lyrics Blok wrote between 1908 and 1916, which together comprise the third volume of his collected poems in Russian, ‘certainly the greatest body of poetry written by a Russian poet since the middle of last century’, the time of Pushkin, Tyutchev and Lermontov. Mirsky also calls much of this poetry untranslatable, as it ‘depends to such an extent on the ‘imponderables’ of diction, sound and association’. Yet some of the musical, stridently rhythmic qualities of Blok’s verse do, I believe, show through in translations of his work.

One of my favourite poems by Blok is also one of his most well-known and reproduced. It bears no title, but is dated 10 October, 1912. Below I will give the poem in Russian; in my own admittedly rough transliteration, which I think still gives a strong sense of the flow of sounds; and then in three different translations into English.

________________

Russian Text

________________

Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека,

Бессмысленный и тусклый свет.

Живи ещё хоть четверть века –

Всё будет так. Исхода нет.

–

Умрёшь — начнёшь опять сначала,

И повторится всё, как встарь:

Ночь, ледяная рябь канала,

Аптека, улица, фонарь.

–

10 октября 1912

________________

English Transliteration

________________

Notch, oolitsah, fonar, aptyekah,

Byessmuyslennuyi ee tooskluyi svet.

Zheevee yeshe hhot chetvyerrt vyeka –

Vsyeh boodyeht tak. Eeshhuhda nyet.

–

Oomryesh – natchnesh opyaht snatchahlah,

Ee puhvtoreetsyah vsyeh, kak vstahr:

Notch, lyedyahnayah rryahb kanahla,

Aptyekah, oolitsah, fonar.

–

10 Oktyabryah 1912

___

Transliterated by me, Christopher Laws

________________

English Translation 1

________________

The night. The street. Street-lamp. Drugstore.

A meaningless dull light about.

You may live twenty-five years more;

All will still be there. No way out.

–

You die. You start again and all

Will be repeated as before:

The cold rippling of a canal.

The night. The street. Street-lamp. Drugstore.

–

10 October 1912

___

Translated by Vladimir Markov and Merrill Sparks

________________

English Translation 2

________________

Night, street and streetlight, drugstore,

The purposeless, half-dim, drab light.

For all the use live on a quarter century – 

Nothing will change.  There’s no way out.

–

You’ll die – and start all over, live twice,

Everything repeats itself, just as it was:

Night, the canal’s rippled icy surface,

The drugstore, the street, and streetlight.

–

10 October 1912

___

Translated by Alex Cigale at albany.edu

________________

English Translation 3

________________

A night, a street, a lamp, a drugstore

A meaningless and dismal light

A quarter century outpours –

It’s all the same. No chance to flight.

–

You’d die and rise anew, begotten.

All would repeat as ever might:

The street, the icy rippled water,

The store, the lamp, the lonely night.

–

October 10th, 1912

___

Translated by Dina Belyayeva at silveragepoetry.com

________________

Markov, V. and Sparks, M. Modern Russian Poetry (MacGibbon & Kee, 1966)

Mirsky, D.S. A History of Russian Literature (London; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968)

Wilson, E. Axel’s Castle (Glasgow; Fontana, 1976)

‘Silentium!’, by Fyodor Tyutchev

Silentium!

Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal

the way you dream, the things you feel.

Deep in your spirits let them rise

akin to starts in crystal skies

that set before the night is blurred:

delight in them and speak no word.

–

How can a heart expression find?

How should another know your mind?

Will he discern what quickens you?

A thought once uttered is untrue.

Dimmed is the fountainhead when stirred:

drink at the source and speak no word.

–

Live in your inner self alone

within your soul a world has grown,

the magic of veiled thoughts that might

be blinded by the outer light,

drowned in the noise of day, unheard…

take in their song and speak no word.

Fyodor Tyutchev (1830), translated by Vladimir Nabokov

Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev (1803-1873), a poet from the Golden Age of Russian literature, was persuaded to first begin publishing his poetry in 1836. In that year, under only the initials F.T., his poems began appearing in Pushkin’s recently founded journal, Sovremennik (‘The Contemporary’). D.S. Mirsky describes that there were ‘from 1836 to 1838 about forty lyrics, all of which (quite literally) are known by heart today by everyone who cares for Russian poetry’.

Mirsky was writing in the middle of the 1920s, in his landmark work A History of Russian Literature; Tyutchev’s poems received little attention upon their first publication, and – though he continued to publish poetry sporadically throughout his life, whether romantic poetry, nature poetry, or his later political verse, writing always in Russian despite using predominantly French in his personal relations and in his public life – he only became fully recognised and recovered by the Symbolists, around the turn of the twentieth century.

In his work, Mirsky considers Tyutchev second in Russian poetry only to Pushkin. He goes on to note that ‘from personal experience…when English poetry readers do discover him they almost invariably prefer him to all other Russian poets. This is only natural, for of all Russian poets Tyutchev abounds in those qualities which the English poetry reader has learned to value in nineteenth-century poetry’. The philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev even argued that Russian literature of the early twentieth century followed Tyutchev’s spirit of ‘torment and anxiety’ more than the spirit of any other Russian writer.

I considered naming this website ‘Silentium’; however, the domain has already been taken by a firm specialising in noise-reduction. Still, I wanted to open with Tyutchev’s poem because it is one of my favourites, and makes for a pleasing and perverse introduction to the enterprise of having a website and writing pieces for it. Tyutchev’s repeated invocation to ‘speak no word’ is one by which he himself did not abide; but his poem nevertheless retains its truth, depicting the insular and self-contained nature of the artist, and suggesting the ambivalence of any art which dwells within personal emotions, reflections and preferences, yet must be expressed in public in order to survive.

I think Tyutchev’s poem can be read in the context of the internet, blogging, and so on. Its demand that we conceal our feelings, suppress our thoughts, remain silent whilst allowing our inner lives to soar, is precisely opposed to the inclination to publish online in a ceaseless stream what we are feeling, what we are doing, our immediate responses to things, even our most strongly held likes and dislikes. I think that it is important to state and maintain this opposition even whilst beginning and developing a website, writing articles for it, and engaging in other quicker forms of media. It is a message to keep some things especially close; that sometimes it is important, and sometimes it can be richer, not to express yourself.

——————

Gibian, G. (ed.) The Portable Nineteenth-Century Russian Reader (Penguin, 1993)

Mirsky, D.S. A History of Russian Literature (London; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968)