________

HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES

Volume II Number 1 March 1978

In

Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Cambridge, Massachusetts

Copyright 1978, by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved ISSN 0363-5570 Published by the Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. Printed by theHarvard University Printing Office Typography by Brevis Press, Cheshire, Conn.

CONTENTS
ARTICLES Byzantium and the Eastern Slays after 1453
Il-IOR EVENKO

5 26

When did Dirhams First Reach the Ukraine?

THOMAS S. NOONAN Protestants in

the Ukraine during the Period Commonwealth

of

the Polish-Lithuanian 41

GEORGE H. WILLIAMS

The Commonwealth and the Cossacks in the First Quarter of the Seventeenth Century
WLADYSLAW A. SERCZYK evenko

73 94

and Blake

GEORGE S. N. LUCKYJ

DOCUMENTS Concerning the Union of Hadja 1658

OMELJAN PRITSAK

116

REVIEW ARTICLES A Decade of Tyyniana

GEORGE G. GRABOWICZ

119

REVIEWS Lukija Humecka et a!., eds., Slovnyk staroukrajinskoji st., volume 1 A-M Bohdan Struminskyj

movy XI V-X V

130

Jakym Zapasko, Mystecka spadJyna Ivana Fedorova Edward and James Walsh

Kasinec

132 133

S. K. Hutjanskyj, A. A. Kuhot, and M. P. Rud, eds., 50 Rokiv Ceniralnoji juvilejnoji konferenciji Edward Kasinec I. Metin Kunt, "17. YUzyilda Osmanli kuzey politikasi tizerine bir yorum [An interpretation of seventeenth-century Ottoman Northern policy]" Omeljan Pritsak P. H. Markov, M. 0. Maksymovyc: Vydatnyj istoryk XIX si. Frank E. Sysyn

134 135

CONTRIBUTORS
Ihor evenko is professor of Byzantine history and literature and associate direc tor of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. Thomas S. Noonan is associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota. George H. Williams is Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard University. Wiadyslaw A. Serczyk holds the chair in the history of Russia and the Soviet
Union and is prorector of Jagellonian University, Cracow. George S. N. Luckyj is professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the Uni versity of Toronto. Omeljan Pritsak is Mykhailo S. Hrushevskyi Professor of Ukrainian History and director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. George G. Grabowicz is assistant professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard University.

BYZANTIUM AND THE EASTERN SLAVS AFTER 1453*

IHOR EVCENKO

To Kenneth M. Setton

I
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Sometime between 1466 and 1472, a merchant from Tver by the name of Afanasij Nikitin traveled from his native city, which is northwest of Moscow, to a place in India southeast of Heyderabad. There, he must have come across a large statue of Buddha; in any case, in a big temple complex, he saw an idol which he called "But" and about which he had this to say: "Butb is carved out of stone, is very big, and raises his right

The first draft of this essay was read at a Dumbarton Oaks Symposium back in 1968. It has been written mostly from sources. Thus, to take an example from the very beginning, the opening paragraphs of the essay go back to Afanasij Nikitins Travel ogue and Epiphanius the Wises Letter to Cyril of Tver, rather than to the informative article by D. A. Belobrova, "Statuja vizantijskogo imperatora Justiniana v drevne russkix pismennyx istonikax i ikonografii," Vizant,jskij vremennik 17 1960: 114-23. Understandably, practically all the sources on which the present essay rests have appeared in print. Only in two instances did I rely on unpublished material. The manuscripts alluded to on pp. 14-15 and 17-18 below are Sinaiticus Graecus 1915, fols. 28v60 Paisios Ligarides Answers to the Tsars Sixty-One Questions and Jerusalem, Panagiou Taphou 160, especially fols. lv, I 53v_!54, 258v, 259v_260v Paisios Ligarides Prophecies. An essay is best read without encumbering footnotes, and I have followed this principle here. Still, I wish to mention two works, separated by a century, in order to

provide the reader with some perspective and with a minimum of bibliographical guidance. The early and still quite useful book is by F. A. Ternovskij, Izuenie vizantijskoj islorii i ee tendencioznoepriloJenie v drevnej Rusi, vol. 1 Kiev, 1875, vol.
2 Kiev, 1876; the recent monograph which, in space and time, goes over much of the

ground covered in the present essay, is by William K. Medlin and Christos 0. Patrinelis, Renaissance Influences and Religious Reforms in Russia [ Etudes de philologie et dhistoire, 18] Geneva, 1971. The superb monograph by B. L. Fonki,
Grecesko-russkie kulturnye svjazi v XV-XVII vv. Moscow, 1977, deals only with the fate of Greek manuscripts in Muscovy. It does, however, devote important pages to

two figures touched upon in the present essay, Arsenij Suxanov and Arsenius of Elasson.

IHOR EVCENKO

hand up and extends it as does Justinian, the emperor of Constantinople": aky Usta,m cari Carjagradsky. Nikitin was referring to Justinians famous equestrian statue. As far as we know, Nikitin had never been to Constantinople; anyhow, by this time, that statue had, in all likelihood, been torn down by Mehmet II. This statue is mentioned but thrice in Old Russian literature. On the other hand, we know that about 1400, the painter Theophanes the Greek had drawn a picture of St. Sophia, together with the Augusteion where Justinian stood, for the benefit of the Muscovites; that the Muscovites copied his pattern on many icons; and that their copies included a representation of Justinians equestrian statue. It is one such icon that Afanasij must have been recalling in his travelogue. For the art historian, then, Nikitins reference is a minor problem, with a ready solution. It is not so for the intellectual historian. For him, it is of importance to be able to tell those interested in Byzantiums survival in Eastern Europe that when a half-educated Russian merchant of post-Byzantine times had to provide a frame of reference for a new experience in a faraway land, the first thing he thought of was a statue of a Byzantine emperor, which he had never seen. This essay will not be about the causes of events, the meaning of Patriarch Nikons reform, or Muscovite library catalogues. It will be about states of mind and about people, some like Afanasij Nikitin, some more sophisticated than he, who had to accommodate their frames of reference to the fact that Byzantium was no more. II The stories of the Conquest of Constantinople in 1453 read in Eastern Europe fall into two kinds: the short chronicle entries and the longer reports. The short entries made in local chronicles seem to have been roughly contemporary with the event itself. Yet, oddly enough, none of them bewailed the fate of the Orthodox Greek Christians. In fact, most did not expressly mention the Greeks at all when speaking of the citys fall. One short chronicle entry was peculiar and a sign of things to come it contained a remark to the effect that, although he took the city, the sultan did not discontinue the "Russian" faith there this must have meant the Orthodox faith, since the two were apparently equated. On the other hand, all the longer reports sympathize with the Greeks, but, except for the Dirge of John Eugenikos translated into Slavonic by 1468, they are not contemporary with the event; at least, they appear in chrono
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BYZANTIUM AND THE EASTERN SLAVS AFTER 1453

logical compilations no earlier than the sixteenth century. Accordingly, the Chronograph of 1512, which closed with a dirge of Slavonic origin on the conquest of the city, showed empathy with the Greeks. However, the authors point of view was that of Orthodoxy in general, rather than Byzantium alone. The Greek Empire was mentioned along with the Serbian, Bosnian, and Albanian empires, and towards the dirges end, a passage destined for fame in the history of Muscovite political ideology proclaimed that while these empires had fallen, "Our Russian land is growing, getting ever younger, and more exalted; may Christ allow it to become rejuvenated and spread its boundaries until the end of time." The reason for this state of affairs is that the fall of Constantinople, which for us is such a landmark in history, was not the most decisive event in the shaping of Muscovite intellectual attitudes towards late Byzantium and the post-Byzantine world. That decisive event was the Council of Florence. To the Muscovites, what happened at Florencewas the betrayal of the Orthodox faith by the Greek emperor, the Greek patriarch, and the silver-loving Greeks. The Council of Florence, too, gave rise to a number of Muscovite works. In them, the Greek apostasy was contrasted, more and more stridently as time went on, with the unswerving Orthodoxy of the Muscovite prince. As long as the Council of Florence rankled, times were not propitious for spreading general treatises about the end of Byzantium, since such texts could not but arouse sympathy for the hapless, if shifty, Greeks. When the treatises were spread, they were made to serve the purposes of the Muscovites, not those of the Greeks. Muscovite bookmen knew two contradictory things to be true at once: they knew, and wrote, that the Greek Empire had failed in its faith at Florence before it failed politically on the walls of the imperial city. Yet, they also knew that their own Orthodox faith, and more, had come from the Greek Empire. Knowing two contradictory things at the same time makes one feel uncomfortable. With Muscovite bookmen, this led to ambiguous attitudes towards Byzantium, and, later, towards the Greeks. Occasional ambiguity towards Byzantium had been with the Eastern Slav elite ever since the Christianization of that region and the Primary Chronicle is a good witness to this; after the citys fall, however, this ambiguity was to become more frequent and ever more painful. The Greeks had proved, and were to prove again in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, unreliable in their faith. Their empire was prostrate, and defiled by the Turks. Yet the Muscovite bookmen of about 1500 and for a century afterwards could point to no new frame of

IHOR EVCENKO

historical reference and to no new system of cultural values other than that which their predecessors had taken over from Byzantium. The Russian writer Epiphanius the Wise dated the time at which a special alphabet was created for the newly-Christianized Permians as follows: "The alphabet for the Permians was created in the year 6883 120 years before the end of the world was expected at the that is 1375 end of the seventh millennium, while John was emperor of the Greeks, while Philotheos was patriarch, while Mamaj was ruler of the Horde, while Dmitrij Ivanovi was prince of Rus as we see, Dimitrij Donskoj while there was no metropolitan in Rus, and while comes in last place we were waiting for someone to come from Constantinople." Epiphanius was writing at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Yet Byzantium continued to provide chronological framework for much of Russian historical writing or compilations after the fall, as well. The which we already know is divided into chap Chronograph of 1512 ters. When this world chronicles narrative comes to the fourth century, each of the chapters opens with the entry "rule of emperor such and such" or "Greek Empire," in which Byzantine history is given and whereupon other events follow. What was true for the principle of general organization held true for the correlations between single events. When one of the chronicles came up to the year 1480, which included the famous confrontation on the Ugra River between Ivan III and the Tartar khan, it exhorted the Russians to act with vigor against the Hagarenes, so as to avoid the fate of other lands which had been conquered by the Turk, like Trebizond and Morea. either the tsars adviser Silvestr or his When, toward 1550, a writer metropolitan Makarij addressed Ivan the Terrible predicting the tsars conquest of the empire of Kazan, he quoted four events in world history: of the four, only one was Russian namely, this very confrontation between the haughty tsar of the Great Horde, Ahmet, and Ivan III. He put it side by side with one biblical and two Byzantine victories, won by the people of God against the infidel. The biblical one was the slaughter of the warriors in Sennacheribs army under the walls of Jerusalem at the hand of the angel of the Lord; the Byzantine ones were the two long Arab sieges of Constantinople: under Constantine Pogonatus 674-78 and under Leo III 717. By this device, the author was demonstrating to Ivan IV that the stand-off on the Ugra was a historical event of worldwide significance, and that the fall of Kazan would be another. Parallels between rulers were even easier to establish than those between events. Constantine, Theodosius, and Justinian the Great were
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BYZANTIUM AND THE EASTERN SLAYS AFTER 1453

the most popular models held out to the Ivans, Aleksejs, and Fedors. Bad rulers had their Byzantine counterparts, as well. Here Phocas easily won on points, followed by Constantine Copronymus. Not surprisingly, Ivan the Terrible was most often quoted in such company. Byzantine prelates, too, were introduced for purposes of comparison. When Ivan the Terrible condemned his former advisor, Silvestr, in absentia, this was likened to the condemnation of John Chrysostom. A century later, the patriarch Nikon consoled himself by reciting the examples of Byzantine prelates who had been banished and yet later returned to their thrones: John Chrysostom, again, and Athanasius the Great. Whether the task was to instruct a tsar in the art of governing, to put a heretic on the stake, to condone the more than four marriages of Ivan the Terrible, or to trap a patriarch who improvidently abdicated when he should not have, a Byzantine legal, historical, or hagiographical passage was put to good use, and to the practical exclusion of any other. A tsar would be fed a quotation from the sixth novel of Justinian about priest hood and empire, and the quotation would be reinforced by exempla of love between men of spirit and men of action, culled from the Old Testa ment and from Byzantine history: Constantine the Great loved Pope Silvester, Theodosius I, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Arcadius, John Chrysostom. A synod of Russian bishops would prove the illegal charac ter of the fourth marriage by referring to Leo VI, the emperor, and Nicholas, the patriarch. When it came to dealing with the heretic Judaizers around 1500, it was pointed out that Empress Theodora and her son Michael had condemned many heretics among them the patriarch Iannij, or John the Grammarian to life imprisonment. Since, however, the Judaizers had to be punished with death, St. Theodosia was enrolled into the holy ranks. Did she not kill the official attempting to destroy the icon of Christ at the Brazen Gate in Constantinople by pulling the ladder out from under him? Joseph of Volokolamsk was the man who quoted St. Theodosia, for he liked examples of resolute action in defense of a righteous cause. Whenever a historical miracle was needed, a Byzantine model was there, even if its meaning was to be put on its head. Nestor-Iskinder, the purported author of the longest Slavic report on the final conquest, described how, on the eve of the fall of the city, a light left the church of St. Sophia through the windows of the dome, turned into a ball of fire, and ascended to heaven a sure sign that there was no hope left for the empire, now forsaken by God. Avraamij Palicyn, the monk of Sergius Trinity Lavra, described the siege of his monastery by the godless Poles
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IHOR EVCENKO

towards the beginning of the seventeenth century. He observed much the same thing, but in his version the light descended from heaven, turned into a ball of fire and entered his church through a window above.

III All Muscovite political ideology developed after Byzantiums fall roughly, in the first half of the sixteenth century but Byzantium, dead and alive, remained the central point of reference for all of it. The Muscovite bookmen aimed at securing for Moscow a meaningful place in the sequence of world history and a central spot in the world of true faith. Since, in 1492 that is, the year 7000- the end of the world should have occurred but didnt, the metropolitan of Moscow, Zosima, published Paschal Tables for subsequent years. In the preface, he established a historical sequence from Constantine the Great through Vladimir of Kiev to Ivan III. He called Ivan the new Constantine which was routine and Moscow, the new Constantinople which was said for the first time in Russian recorded history. Philotheos of Pskovs familiar theory of Moscow as the Third Rome rested on the twin pillars of the failure of the Greek faith at the Council of Florenceand the failure of Greek arms in the Second Rome. The Story of the Princes of Vladimir, composed by Spiridon-Sava, a prelate who had been to Constantinople, had Prince Vladimir Monomax obtain both the regalia and the imperial title from the Byzantine emperor Constantine of the same family name. The regalia were said to have been transmitted to Kiev by a metropolitan, two bishops, and three Byzantine officials. Neither the metropolitan nor the bishops are known from any episcopal list; the title of Praefectus Augustalis of Egypt was mistaken for a proper name, but the point was made. The Story of the Princes of Vladimir also traced the lineage of the Kievan, and therefore Muscovite, princes back to Caesar Augustus of the old First Rome. Here we seem to lose the scent leading us to Constan tinople in fact, scholars have not yet established by what means Augustus appeared in the Kremlin. But even at this point, I submit, we might get to Byzantium, if via a Serbian detour. Serbian princely genealo gies linked the Serbian princes and the brother-in-law of Constantine the Great, Emperor Licinius, who was, of course, said to have been a Serbian himself. In turn, Constantine, or so the same chronicles say, was not only of Rascian, i.e., Serbian, blood, but also a relative of Caesar Augustus.
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11

We know that the Muscovite princes of the early sixteenth century were related by marriage to the semi-independent Serbian princes of the fifteenth. Princely genealogies may have wandered with brides from Serbia up north. We are also sure that the author of the Story of the Princes of Vladimir knew Serbian literature, since he inserted a long passage from a Serbian work into his text. Centers, political or ecclesiastical, which vied with Moscow or were bent on asserting their independence from it, relied on the same that is, Byzantine frame of reference. The eulogist of Prince Boris Aleksan drovi of Tver, a city which was Moscows rival for a time, treated his hero like a Byzantine emperor, comparing him to Augustus, Justinian, Leo the Wise, and Constantine. The story of the Novgorodian white cowl, a headgear which for some time distinguished the archbishop of Nov gorod from all other prelates of Russia, attributed the cowls origin to Pope Sylvester and quoted the Slavic version of the Donation of Constantine. The cowl covered the distance between St. Peters and Novgorod by stopping in Constantinople. And when it floated by sea from Rome to the imperial city, it duplicated a famous voyage which the icon of Maria Romana had made in the opposite direction at the begin ning of the Iconoclastic period. From Constantinople, the cowl was sent on to Novgorod, presumably by the patriarch Philotheos. Dependence on Byzantium did not necessarily mean a respect for the Byzantine Empire. In elaborating the ideology of their state, Muscovite bookmen also rested their case on the ever-unblemished Orthodoxy of their princes, and on the hereditary principle of these princes succession. Byzantium could not boast the former witness Constantine Coprony mus and in principle did not adhere to the latter. Muscovite autocratic power could be justified without the help of elaborate literary constructs, simply by referring to God, antiquity, and local tradition, and this method was openly applied, both by Ivan III and Ivan IV. By the seven teenth century the Muscovites could deride the Greeks and their past, since there had been Greek emperors who taught evil in the church, armed themselves against the holy icons, and became worse than pagans. How could it have been otherwise, if some of these emperors were like Leo the Armenian, who not only was of no imperial lineage, but did not even belong to the Greek nation? But the Muscovite defiance of the Greek had a reverse effect, of a kind which in individual behavior psychologists call "delayed obedience." A local Constantinopolitan synod was asked to confirm Ivan IVs imperial coronation of 1547. This happened in 1561. In 1590, another synod,
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IHOR SEVCENKO

which dubbed itself ecumenical, confirmed the creation of the Muscovite patriarchate. Thus, the Greeks approval was sought on each of the two occasions when Muscovites made steps towards ideal supremacy within the Orthodox world. Finally, in 1666, when Patriarch Nikon had to be crushed, those who sat in judgment over him, and stripped him of his insignia, were the patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria. In 1592, a unique device appeared in the letter which Moscows newly created patriarch, Job, addressed to Constantinople. The letter referred to Greek ecclesiastics coming from "the Greek Empire," to a council "of the whole Greek Empire" still to be held at Constantinople, and to conciliar deci sions made, and prayers said, both in "the Russian and in the Greek Empire." Once, Job even referred to "all the cities and places of the Greek Empire." For once, after 1453, a make-believe world was created in which Byzantium was alive again, not just within the body of the Eastern church, but side by side with the empire of Muscovy. The prize that of obtaining patriarchal rank was so considerable that it was worthwhile for the Muscovite chancery to indulge in the reverie for the benefit of the Greek prelates.
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IV The first recorded Greek refugee arrived in Moscow seeking alms and ransom for his family in 1464, and was warmly recommended to his fellow Christians by Metropolitan Theodosius. He was followed by a long procession of other refugees members of Sophia Palaeologinas en tourage, merchants, abbots and monks from Athos, Patmos, St. Sabas, Mt. Sinai, and even the Island of Milos, patriarchs, bishops, and finally, ecclesiastics doubling as intellectuals. It is the last group that interests us most. Orthodox Eastern Europe sought the guidance, or at least the services, of Greek teachers and scholars for 250 years after Byzantiums fall. These Greeks were a variegated group of people. From among them I shall single out a positive hero and a resourceful villain. As usual, the extremes, though less representative, will be allotted time at the expense of the man in the middle, although he probably reflected the majority of the Greek daskaloi, earning their honest bread in Eastern Europe, as did Arsenius, archbishop of Elasson, who left his teaching in Lviv Lemberg to go to Moscow with Patriarch Jeremiah II in 1588. Maksim the Greek, our positive hero, came to Moscow in 1518, and was a unique phenomenon in the history of Muscovite culture. This is not because he had spent time in Italy and brought with him stories of
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Savonarola, Lodovico Sforza il Moro, and the neo-pagan circles of the Renaissance. In the sixteenth century and later, other Greeks coming to Moscow had known the West as well as he. Maksim the Greek is so important because through him for the first and only time between Volodimer the Great in the tenth century and Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth, Eastern Europe was exposed to prolonged contact with a repre sentative of the refined layers of Byzantine culture. It is a pity that this should have happened only after Byzantiums fall. If the Muscovites could follow Maksims Slavic, which he never thoroughly mastered he mixed, more Serbico, his genitives and locatives they learned, or could have learned, something about Greek secular literature from him. In one of his treatises, he offered the plot of Aeschyluss Oresteia; he quoted the beginning of Hesiods Works and Days, and the seventy-fourth verse of the Fifteenth Book of the Odyssey: "Treat a man well, while he is with you, but let him go when he wishes," a plea pro domo, since Maksim had been accused of heresy and interned. He knew his mythology and told the Muscovites that Zeus gave birth to Pallas from his head. To my knowledge, Maksim was also the only author in Old Rusian literature before the seventeenth century ever to have used the words "Hellene" and "Hellenic" in a positive sense. Since he was a good Byzantine, however, Maksim sprinkled his prose with Byzantine proverbs, if barely recognizable in their Slavic garb. I also suspect that he did not adduce the line from the Odyssey directly, but remembered it from the early Byzantine rhetorician Aphthonios, who quoted it in his collection of set oratorical pieces. It is probably through Aphthonios that Maksim introduced his Russian readers to the genre of ethopoiia; moreover, he inserted in his writings an entry from the Lexicon of Suda, a saying by Pseudo-Menander from Stobaeus, and a story on the virtuous and chaste Belisarius. He could also transcend both Classicism and Byzantinism and show an open mind. To the Muscovites he spoke of the existence of a large land called Cuba politically one of his more prophetic statements. His own Greeks he told to free their souls from the illusory and vain hope that the imperial power in Constantinople would be reestablished as it had been before, or that the Greeks would arise from the slumber of carelessness and indifference in which they had sunk for many years. In terms of imponderables which bring ones downfall, Maksims trouble was his having been too much of a scholar. He talked too much, and he quoted his authorities as a scholar would, even though some, like Origen or Eusebius, were tainted with heresy. Being a true erudite, he dis
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dained discussing Basil the Great and John Chrysostom at length, because, he said, they were too well known a wrong approach with the Muscovites, who had always displayed a talent for dwelling on the ob vious at length. Maksim showed a scholars vanity and a foreigners impertinence when he made fun of the old, and therefore venerable, Slavic translators who had not been able to tell ekklisia, church, from the verb ekklise, to exclude. Finally, Maksim displayed the scholars hubris. Proud of his achievements as corrector of the Psalter, he com pared himself to the later translators of the Old Testament into Greek Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion. Had he known his milieu better, he would have realized that some fifty years before, an archbishop of Novgorod considered these very translators heretical perverters of the Holy Writ. Such a man was treading on thin ice. Maksim was banished, and never allowed to leave Muscovy and see his beloved Athonite monastery of Vatopedi. It gives one food for thought about the Muscovy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to realize that this highly cul tured Byzantine was long revered in Russia for his statements on the sign of the cross, whereas his classical references were never picked up. Of Arsenius, archbishop of Elasson, our middle-of-the-road traveler, I shall only say that he was a leading daskal in the school organized by the Epiphany Fraternity of Lviv in the 1 580s. He left his teachers position there to follow Patriarch Jeremiah II to Moscow in 1588, and he wrote a description of his trip in politic verse glued together by repetitions and assonance rhymes. He presented the establishment of the patriarchate in Moscow as a series of triumphs for the patriarch of Constantinople, and wrote from the perspective of a hanger-on with an empty stomach and grasping hands. The most detailed description in Arseniuss poem was of the vessels and table utensils displayed at the banquet held after the Russian metropolitan Job had been ordained patriarch. In Moscow, Arsenius did well; he resided in the Kremlin, distinguished himself as a copyist of manuscripts, and wrote on contemporary Muscovite history. Our resourceful villain will be the metropolitan of Gaza, Paisios Ligarides. From 1662 on, he was Tsar Aleksejs main foreign expert on the means for bringing about Patriarch Nikons downfall. Nearly every body grants him learning and intellectual agility Byzantine philologists remember him for bringing Photiuss Sermon on the Rusian attack of 860 to Moscow, and should commend him for his use of Photiuss Biblio theca. Everybody modern scholars and Paisioss contemporaries alike condemn the lack of scruples of this international adventurer. I shall not dwell on the well-known career of this notorious man. Instead,!
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shall introduce a new find and use it to suggest that in at least one aspect of the Nikon affair, the unprincipled Paisios showed some consistency namely, in fidelity to the Greek point of view. The find is a manuscript of Sinai, perhaps the autograph of Paisios, with answers to the sixty-one questions which Tsar Aleksej had secretly posed to him in the presence of the Boyars Council, in all likelihood sometime soon after 26 November 1662. In the last century, Vladimir Solovev observed that the Greeks who had come to Moscow to judge Nikon condemned him for his un-Byzantine ways that is, for resisting the tsar but disculpated him on counts where he behaved like a Byzan tine that is, for following Greek customs. The Sinai manuscript bears out Solovevs observation. To all the tsars questions obliquely attacking Nikon, Paisios answered to the formers satisfaction. All those touching on ritual and presenting a choice between the traditional Muscovite and the Greek interpretation, he answered in favor of the latter. Could the emperor convoke a local Synod? By all means. If a prelate talks offen sively against the emperor, what punishment is fitting for him? If out of stupidity, then compassion. If otherwise, his tongue should be cut out. If a bishop abdicates, does he retain power over his see? He does not. On the other hand, should the passage of the Credo run: "To whose Kingdom there is no end," rather than "shall be no end?" No. This is redolent of Origens heresy. Should Alleluia be sung two or three times? Three. How do you make the sign of the cross? With three fingers. And, finally, in what letters were the words that Constantine saw in heaven written Latin or Greek? In Greek letters, according to the view of Emperor Leo the Wise.
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V
Everybody agreed that Byzantium fell on account of its sins. What these sins were depended on the point of view and interests of the observer. To

the Muscovites, whether of the fifteenth century or of the seventeenth, the most grievous sins of Byzantium, and therefore of its heirs, the Greeks, were two: the most serious explicit sin was against the faith, and the most serious implicit sin was to have lost. Five years after the citys fall, the metropolitan Jonah held up the example of the empire to the Lithuanian bishops, to deter them from yielding to the Pope. When Constantinople remained faithful to Ortho doxy, it was invincible. The imperial city had not suffered from the Bulgarians nor from the Persians, who kept her seven years as in a net,

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because on that occasion which, we must assume, was the siege of 626 she had kept her piety. By the mid-seventeenth century, there were enough proofs that the Greeks had lost their piety, and that the Musco vites were the sole depositories of it. At the Moscow Council of 1666, the Old Believer Avvakum turned to the Greek patriarchs, and to many Greek prelates sitting in judgment on him, with as he put it their foxy Russian followers listening in, and said to them: "Your Orthodoxy has become variegated on account of the Turkish Mohammeds violence. There is nothing astonishing in this. Youve come to be weak. From now on come to us to be taught. By Gods grace there is autocracy here" that is, freedom from foreign domination. Avvakums words were repeated throughout Muscovy both by the Old Believers and by Orthodox con servatives, and the Greeks were vulnerable to the argument of lost authority and power. At first, the Muscovite case appeared to have one weakness. No matter how tarnished the Greek faith may have subsequently become, the fact remained that the Russes had gotten their Baptism from Greece. It was certainly a point on the Greek side during the disputation which they held with the conservative Russian monk and collector of Greek manuscripts, Arsenij Suxanov, in Moldavia in 1650. The Greeks kept asking Suxanov: "From where did you get your faith? You were baptized by us, the Greeks." Two escapes from this impasse were possible. First, one could say, "We got it from God, and not from the Greeks." Second, one could refer to a Slavic elaboration on an eighth-century Byzantine legend, and maintain that the Russes had accepted baptism originally from the apostle Andrew, not from the Greeks. Suxanov used both these escapes, but then went over to the offensive, asking the Greeks themselves from where they thought they had received their baptism. When they said they had received it from Christ and his Brother James, Suxanov an early revisionist of Byzantine history exploded this part of the myth of Hellenism. Christianity was no Greek monopoly; certainly not in Christs time in Palestine. Greeks, he knew, lived in Greece and Macedonia while Christ and St. James lived in Jerusalem. In Christs time, Jews and Arabs, not Greeks, lived there. The truth was that the Greeks received their baptism from St. Andrew, precisely as the Russes did; hence, they were in no respect better than the Russes. As for the Greeks claim to be "the source" for everyone, they should have considered a few facts: the first Gospel, by Matthew, was written in Jerusalem for the Jews, who had believed in him, and not for the Greeks. Ten years later, Mark wrote his
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Gospel in Rome for the Romans, and not for the Greeks. Hence, even the

BYZANTIUM AND THE EASTERN SLAVS AFTER 1453

17

Romans were ahead in receiving the glad tidings. The claim that the Greeks were the source for "all of us" was just overbearing talk; even if they had once been the source, it had dried up. The Turkish sultan lived among the Greeks, yet they were unable to give him water and lead him to the true faith. Gods word about the Greeks had come true. They had been first and now were last; the Russes had been last and were now first. The Greeks have been left behind zakosneli este. The conclusion from all this was that the norm of what was Orthodox and what was not lay with the Russians of Suxanovs time, and not with the Greeks. VI If the Muscovites could not easily abandon the Byzantine frame of reference, it stood to reason that the Greeks, when dealing with Muscovy, would adhere to it. In 1593 the patriarch of Alexandria, Meletios Pigas, belatedly confirmed the establishment of the Patriarchate of Moscow. In his letter to the tsar he justified his consent by quoting and paraphrasing, without giving his source, parts of the twenty-eighth canon of the Council of Chalcedon. In its time, that council had raised the rank of the see of Constantinople, because, like Moscow in the 1 580s, it was "a city adorned with a senate and an empire." All this amounted to flattering the barbarian. However, the Greeks also turned to Byzantium when they were countering Muscovite prejudices or just clinging to their own. When Byzantium gave out, they used their own heads, or cheated a bit. The Patriarchal Charter of 1561, confirming the imperial title to Ivan the Terrible, asserted that its issuance was necessary because Ivans coronation by the metropolitan of Moscow, Makarij, alone was not sufficient. This right was reserved exclusively for the patriarchs of Rome and Constantinople. At an earlier time, Maksim the Greek took issue with those prelates who did not accept ordination from the patriarch of Constantinople, because he lived in the dominion of the Turk. Pagan domination did not impugn ones faith. Before the year 300 the Church Universal was also subjugated, yet it had maintained its purity. Maksim did not begrudge Moscow Constantinoples old title of
"New Jerusalem," but he saw no reason to assert, as one of his Muscovite correspondents had done, that Old Jerusalem had lost its sanctity. Al though they lost the empire, the Greeks retained the Logos. They did lose

everything that was passing and worldly; Orthodoxy, however, uii yvolro, they not only did not lose, but taught to others. In this context,
the monks of Athos
-

for it was they who thought up these arguments for

18

IHOR EYCENKO
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the Slays shortly before 1650 quoted the Gospel: "the disciple is not above his master, nor the servant above his lord." When still living in Wallachia, Paisios Ligarides dedicated a big and still unpublished volume of the Prophecies Xpiauo2yiov to Tsar Aleksej Mixajlovi& This was in 1656, one year before Patriarch Nikon thought of inviting this gifted and potentially useful man to Moscow, and six years before Paisios actually went there and enrolled in the service not of Nikon, but of the tsar; Paisios believed in planning. He must also have believed that rulers to whom books are dedicated seldom read them, since his manuscript contains peculiar material on East European history. He had no difficulty countering the Muscovite boast of having been baptized by St. Andrew. Anyone could read in Constantine Porphyrogenitus that the first woman from Rus to receive baptism was Princess Olga, and in Theophanes Continuatus that the Russes were christianized under Basil I. In his further forays into the history of Old Rus, Ligarides came up with more astounding trophies. Rjurik, Sineus and Truvor, the traditional founders of the Rurikid dynasty, were Byzantines Pco1uaioi r yevoc. Consequently, Ligarides said, "the Muscovites had been handed down not only the faith, but also the empire, from us, the Byzantines Pcopaio:." On the other hand, Vladimir Monomax, the Muscovite ideologists link with Byzantium, was not connected with the empire after all. He was called Monomax simply "because he was monarch in all of Rossia." However, Ligarides did stress Moscows real link with a Byzan tine ruling house. He played the marriage of Ivan III with Sophia Palaeologina up for all its worth. Ivan IIIs many and unexpected vic tories, "so they say," were due to this most astute and loving mothers wisdom and advice. And Tsar Aleksej himself was reminded on the very first folio of the Prophecies that his lineage went back to Sophia. Towards the year 1700, and following fifteen years of tug-of-war, Greek was to yield to Latin as a basic tool of education in Moscow. About that time, the patriarch of Jerusalem, Dositheos, made a last stand for
-

Byzantine culture and delivered himself of a panoply of prejudices current since Photius. "To the person who told you that children should not be taught in Greek but in Latin," so he wrote to a Russian, "answer: First, the Old Test?.ment was translated by the Holy Ghost into Greek and not into another language." After making ten more equally cogent points, Dositheos concluded: "in matters politic, secular, rhetorical, logical,

poetical, philosophical, arithmetical, geometrical, and astronomical, the Hellenes are the teachers of the Latins." When arguments born of pride are spoken by the weak, they are seldom the better part of wisdom. In order to secure a passage from the frontier

BYZANTIUM AND THE EASTERN SLAYS AFTER 1453

19

town of Putyvl to Moscow with its promise of rubles and sable, in order to avoid possible imprisonment, or at least prolonged religious reorienta tion, in a monastery in the north, it was wiser to admit, even if you were a Greek, that the Greeks had not retained one-half of the faith wiser, too,
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to flatter Muscovite rulers, even before 1547, as worthy of being called emperors not only of Russia but of the whole earth, and to bestow imperial or biblical titles on them. Sometimes Byzantine epithets suffered depreciation, as when two Greek metropolitans and one patriarch called the Ukrainian hetman Xmelnyckyj a new Moses and a new Constantine, and when Paul of Aleppo compared him to Basil I. But behind currying favor with the Muscovite, there also lay a genuine hope - that of liberation from the Turkish yoke. Already Maksim the Greek exhorted Vasilij III to follow in the steps of Constantine and Theodosius and rule "over us," that is, the Greeks. Hopes of liberation continued throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As late as 1698 the patriarch of Jerusalem Dositheos passed on the rumor that Peter I had assured the king of England that in the year 1700 he would be celebrating liturgy in the church of St. Sophia. There was much wishful

thinking and much prophetic mumbo-jumbo in these calls for Muscovite help. Through his book on the Prophecies, Ligarides was something of a
specialist on the topic; he knew the prophecies of Andrew the Fool
-

such as the one that the "yellow,"i.e., blond, people, were destined to beat the prophecy of Gennadius Scholarius, and even the one the Turk contained in the Turco-Graecia of Martin Crusius. Other people circu
lated prophecies purportedly coming from the Turks themselves, pre dicting that a northern ruler would subjugate the Turkish land. Even the

anti-Greek Suxanov was swayed by the Greek passion to which, by the way, the West, too, had succumbed in the sixteenth century and trans
-

lated into Russian Gennadius Scholariuss decipherment of prophetic letters, said to have been inscribed on the sarcophagus of Constantine.

To give strength to the prophecies, Greek and other Balkan visitors

circulated stories about tens of thousands of Serbians, Bulgarians, Albanians, and Greeks ready to rise if the tsar would only cross the

Danube. The tsar, however, was very cautious. Towards the middle of the sixteenth century, Ivan Peresvetov reported the Greeks hopes that Ivan IV would liberate them from the Turk, but sixteenth-century Mus covy firmly refused to be dragged into an anti-Turkish action. The Povest o dvux posolstvax is, to my knowledge, the first semi-official Muscovite or so tract prophesying Constantinoples liberation by the tsar; it dates
-

its editor says

from the early seventeenth century.

Before the liberation of Orthodox Christians could be practically

20

IHOR EYCENKO

envisaged by Muscovy, the infidel had to be sized up; here, the Greeks

were useful indeed. Along with Christian relics, they brought information
on the Turk. Alms given by the Muscovite government to the Eastern

patriarchs were also payments for providing intelligence about Turkish affairs. Between 1630 and 1660, ten Greek metropolitans were in the
Russian service. Some Greek diplomats were double agents, and some

were denounced as Janissary spies. Others were impostors appearing with

forged recommendations from the Eastern patriarchs obtained in Mo! davia, for, according to one of the Russian informants, in the second half of the seventeenth century Moldavia was a great center for forging patri archal charters. On the whole, however, the Greeks served the Russian cause well, sometimes laying down their lives. In 1657 the Turks were said to have hung the patriarch of Constantinople, Parthenios III, for his relations

with the Russian government. Greek patriarchs and metropolitans were

instrumental and successful in mediating the submission of Hetman Xmelnyckyj to Moscow in 1654. One of them received 600 rubles for his services in this matter, but others, like Dositheos of Jerusalem, served not for money, but out of conviction. Since they hoped that the Russian tsar would liberate them, the Greeks could believe that he was the defender and protector of Orthodoxy throughout the world and should be obeyed by all Orthodox without exception. VII There was one area of Eastern Europe where Greek prelates could count on the respect of local bookmen and where nobody was checking on their credentials. This area was the Ukrainian and Belorussian lands under Polish-Lithuanian domination. In these lands the community of faith between Greeks and natives was reinforced by the similarity of fate. As the Turks lorded it over the Greeks, so the Catholic apostates, the Poles, persecuted the Eastern church. As spokesmen for hostile but independent powers, the Jesuit Peter Skarga in the sixteenth century and our acquaintance Suxanov scorned the Greeks in almost identical terms - Skarga saying that learning had died among the Greeks and had turned towards "us Catholics," Suxanov asserting that all that was best with the Greeks had gone over to "us Muscovites." But the subjugated Orthodox of Lviv, Kiev, and Vilnius needed the Greeks to help them establish schools in response to the Catholic challenge and even more, to help them reestablish the Orthodox

BYZANTIUM AND THE EASTERN SLAVS AFTER 1453

21

hierarchy in their lands. Schools under either princely or burgher patronage were created from the 1580s on, haIfa century before the first such attempts were undertaken in Moscow, and Greeks participated in their inception everywhere. Cyril Lukaris, later patriarch of Constan tinople, and Arsenius of Elasson, before his more profitable trek up north, were teachers in these schools. Latin joined Greek and soon over shadowed it. However, Latin was studied because one needed it to suc ceed in a Catholic state, while as one of the early seventeenth-century Kievan writers put it "it was not necessary to drive Kievans to learn Greek." Between 1616, when its first books appeared, and 1700, the Kievan press of the Caves monastery published mostly Slavonic translations of liturgical and Byzantine texts. Several of them were new or revised trans
-

lations from the Greek, and the Kievans, unlike the Muscovites, showed

no mistrust for Greek originals printed in the West. In 1624, they printed John Chrysostoms Sermons on the Acts. The translation was made by one Gavriil Dorofejevi, "the daskal of the most philosophic and artful Helleno-Greek tongue in Lviv, from the Helleno-Greek archetype printed in Eton v Etoni izobraenom." To my knowledge, this was the earliest mention of Eton in Eastern Europe. In their polemics with Catholics after the Union of 1596, the Orthodox of the Ukraine had to face the perennial argument about the fall of the Byzantine Empire. Meeting this argument with much empathy, the Orthodox described the spiritual purity of the Greeks, since they were unhampered by the cares of the worldly empire and free to seek the kingdom of God under the eye of the tolerant Turk a rosy picture indeed. True, the Greeks were not ruling any longer. This, however, was an advantage when it came to the salvation of their souls, for the Greeks now had to be humble and did not raise the sword of blood. Even the pagans, in the midst of whom they lived, wondered at their piety. One or two prophecies about the rebirth of Byzantium were quoted out of habit, but they had nothing of the vigor and impatience of those the Greeks addressed to the seventeenth-century Muscovite rulers. Such meekness disappeared, however, when the Orthodox of Poland and Lithuania had to counter the claim for the superiority of Latin learning. One of the polemicists went beyond Dositheos of Jerusalems old contention that Latin wisdom was Greek, and beyond the dusting off of Plato and the church fathers. Around the year 1400, he said, the sciences had been brought to the West by people like Chrysoloras, Theodore of Gaza, George of Trebizond, Manuel Moschopulos here
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22

IHOR SEYCENKO
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and Demetrios Chalkokondylas. the chronology was a bit wobbly Thus, "now," when the "Russes" were going to "German lands" for the sake of learning, they were taking back what was their own and had been lent to the Westerners by the Greeks for a short time. I know of no parallel to this argument in an early modern Slavic text. The Orthodox polemi cists of Poland-Lithuania were remarkably up-to-date on what went on in the Greek lands in their own time a result of close contacts with various Greek hierarchs. One of the treatises, written in 1621, quoted in the same breath John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the letter of Cyril Lukaris, dated 1614, to show that the true church of Christ was the church of persecution. To show that holiness had not left the Eastern church, the same treatise compiled a list of about 130 saints having shone in various Orthodox lands. The list opened with the saints of Greece, excluding Athos, which had a special rubric. The first name on the list was Seraphim, a martyr and a national hero of the Greeks beheaded by the Turks in 1612. He was said to have been abbot of St. Luke monastery in Hellas Hosios Lukas?, a piece of information of possible use to modern Greek historians. The cultural level of these anti-unionist polemics was higher than any thing the Muscovites could offer in the first half of the seventeenth century. The point is brought home if we juxtapose the bibliography of not many of which were appended just for show of 155 items Zacharias Kopystenskyjs Palinodia 1621 with the few books quoted during the disputation held in Moscow in 1627 with Lavrentij Zyzanij, the Ukrainian author of a catechism. Among other Greek texts, the Palinodia referred to Nicephorus Gregoras, Zonaras, and Chalkokondylas, while the Muscovites merely referred to Nicephorus, patriarch of Constan tinople, and to the book of Esop, "the Frankish wise man." However, these erudite polemics lacked the Muscovite bookmens clarity and seriousness of purpose. When the Muscovites quoted the Story of the Princes of Vladimir, they knew that their goal was to enhance the glory of Moscow. But when the Ukrainian Kopystenskyj quoted the same story in a preface to the Sermons of John Chrysostom, he did sojust to beef up the genealogy of the books patron, the prince Cetvertynskyj. Even in the Ukraine, deep respect for the Greeks and Greek lore was limited to the erudite Orthodox. A less learned West Ukrainian writer of
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about 1600, Ivan Vyenskyj, scorned Plato and Aristotle, associated

them with Origen, and found John Chrysostom, or better yet, the Horo logion and the Oktoechos, preferable. In matters of language, Vyenskyj thought that Slavic by which he meant both Church Slavonic and the
-

BYZANTIUM AND THE EASTERN SLAYS AFTER 1453

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23

semi-popular language in which he himself wrote was more honored before God than Greek and Latin. This adherence to native tradition at the expense of Byzantine models had its reward. Vyenskyj is the most vigorous and exciting writer of early seventeenth-century Ukrainian literature, as Protopop Avvakum who also rejected what he called the "Hellenic swiftness," was "not learned in dialectics," and wrote in prac tically vernacular Russian is the most vigorous and best writer of seventeenth-century Russian literature. One difference, however, helps to measure the distance which, in the seventeenth century, separated the two cultural communities from Greece. When in difficulty, Avvakum ex changed a book of Ephrem the Syrian for a horse and a Nomocanon for
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the services of a helmsman; he did not know Greek. Vyenskyj, who spent

much of his life as a solitary monk on Mt. Athos, knew it well. He could make Greek puns and raise his Slavonic tongue to the level of the calque of the Greek at will. Thus he could call the hated Michael VIII Palaeolo gus Mateolog and, in another passage, Suetoslov, which in both cases is "Mr. Vainword," expressed once by means of Greek and another time by means of Slavic components. VIII
If the Muscovites mistrusted the learned Greek visitors, it was because so many of them had indulged in suspicious activities in the West before

coming to their land. Maksim the Greek had worked in Venice with Aldus Manutius; Ligarides studied in the Athanasianum of Rome; Patriarch
Nikons helper, Arsenius the Greek, in Venice and Padua; and the

Brothers Leichudes, the ill-fated directors of the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy in Moscow, in the same two cities. The Greek books these men brought with them and from which the Muscovites were supposed to learn the correct faith had been printed in Venice, Paris, or, as we now know, Eton. In the Greeks own writings, quotations from John Chrysos tom stood side by side with those from St. Augustine a suspect author or, worse yet, from Martin Crusius, or Aleksander Gwagnin. However, at the very time when Muscovite conservatives decried Greek books printed in the West, the cultural impact of the West upon Moscow had been in swing for half a century. In 1617, the Chronograph of 1512a text quoted at the beginning of this essay underwent a face-lifting. In the new recension, many chapters still began with the old entry entitled "The Greek Empire," but the final dirge on the Conquest of Constan tinople was omitted, and a shorter version of Nestor-Iskinders story was
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24

IHOR EVCENKO

substituted. The body of the chronograph was substantially enlarged by translations from Polish chroniclers, and among other pieces of new information was a description "of the islands of wild men whom Germans called the New World or the Fourth Part of the Universe." Even Muscovite conservatives had to relent: they found themselves
invoking Latin sources in defense of super-Orthodox causes. In 1650 Arsenij Suxanov was telling the Greeks of Russias venerable traditions.

The city of Novgorod had been established just after the flood and was so powerful, he said, that the Latin chroniclers had written about it: "Who
can oppose God and the Great Novgorod?" The Latin chroniclers, I suspect, were in reality the Ukrainian polemicist Kopystenskyj. Kopy stenskyj in turn quoted a phrase "Quis potest contra Deum et magnum

Novogrodum "which he attributed to a certain "Krancius," who turns out to have been Albert Kranz, a German historian writing in Latin. In Moscow itself, Ligarides refuted the petition of the Old Believer Pop
Nikita in Latin, and the refutation was then translated into Russian. Inci dentally, the situation was no different in the Ukraine. There, anti-

Catholic polemicists prided themselves on their knowledge of Greek, put Greek sentences into their works, and quoted from Byzantine chroniclers. However, the long passages from Gregoras that one polemicist used to impress his readers were quoted not from the original, but from the Latin translation of 1562 by Hieronymus Wolf of Augsburg. In 1722, Feofan Prokopovy was obliged to help his protector Peter I, who had had his first son condemned to death and had just lost another. To do so, Prokopovy wrote a treatise proving that an emperor could
establish an heir other than his son, and quoted a number of examples

from Byzantine history; thus, he cited Leo I for having bypassed his sonin-law Zeno; however, his source was not a Byzantine chronicler, but Cassiodore. He also mentioned Phocas the Tyrant, but his reference was to the German Calvisius, whose Opus Chronologicum was published in 1605, rather than to a Greek source.
The story of those who relied on the Byzantine or Muscovite frame of

reference could be carried into Peter Is time and beyond it; however,
the recounting would be repetitious and outside the mainstream of

Russias cultural history. Peters name conjures up the image of Amster dam and St. Petersburg, not of Constantinople and Moscow. In Russian political schemes of the eighteenth century, Byzantium was no longer
used as a frame of reference, but purely as an item of propaganda; this was evident in Peters appeal to the Montenegrins and in Catherine IIs grand

project, dating from the 1780s, to establish a Greek empire with her

BYZANTIUM AND THE EASTERN SLAYS AFTER 1453

25

grandson, appropriately christened Constantine, ruling in Constan

tinople. The most interesting nugget this latter project offers to the intellectual historian is Joseph IIs quip that he would not suffer the Russians in Constantinople, since the vicinity of the turban would be less dangerous to Vienna than that of the Russian Japka, shades conscious perhaps of the saying unfairly attributed to Lukas Notaras on the eve of the fall of the city. Lukas Notaras brings us back to 1453, our point of departure. The years between the middle of the fifteenth and the end of the seventeenth century were the years of Eastern Europes de-Byzantinization, and the story they tell the intellectual historian about Muscovite Russia can be summed up thus: After Florence and Constantinoples fall, Russian bookmen attempted to build a cultural and ideological framework of their own by re-using the very elements which Byzantium had given them often indirectly in the preceding four centuries of their history. This building of new castles out of old blocks did not give the bookmen enough self-confidence in the face of Russias formerly glorious but by then debased Greek mentors. Hence the instances of defiance against the Greeks by the Muscovites throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the meantime, the neo-Byzantine castles continued to be built not only from old blocks and from their native imitations, but also from Western components. This was a contradictory situation, and it did not last. When a new system, based on Western blueprints, emerged about 1700, the Russian elite, without ever becoming oblivious to the Byzantine heritage, relegated it to the sidelines.
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Harvard University

WHEN DID DIRHAMS FIRST REACH THE UKRAINE?

THOMAS S. NOONAN

Historians and other specialists interested in the origins of the Kievan state have long known about the tens of thousands of dirhams which have been uncovered in Eastern Europe. While some of these coins may have originated as booty or tribute, the total number of dirhams is so large that the only satisfactory explanation for them seems to be the existence of an extensive trade between Eastern Europe and the Orient. In fact, various Arabic and Persian sources confirm the existence of such a large-scale trade in the early medieval period. When we start to examine this commerce in more detail, two questions which inevitably arise are when did it begin and which parts of Eastern Europe were involved. The numerous dirham finds constitute indis pensable evidence for the resolution of such problems. If we accept Ibn Khurddhbeh, mid-ninth century, as the earliest written source on the oriental trade of Eastern Europe, then the dirhams clearly constitute an earlier source. Unfortunately, there is no agreement on when these dirhams first began to reach Eastern Europe, i.e., on when we can date the start of Eastern Europes oriental trade based on numismatic evidence. As we shall see, the proposed dates vary from ca. 700A.D., or even earlier, to ca. 800A.D. At first glance, it may not appear significant whether this trade origi nated in 700, 750, or 800. But, for those interested in the developments
I

European Russia and adjoining regions rather than in its normal American meaning of all lands between Germany and the Urals or the area between Germany and the Soviet Union. I have followed the Soviet usage for the sake of convenience. The dirham was the standard silver coin of the Islamic world down to the Mongol era. The earliest Islamic dirhams, commonly called Arab-Sasanian coins, were imita tions of Sasanian drachms to which an inscription in the Kufic script had been added. The Sasanian drachm and Arab-Sasanian dirham weighed about 4 grams. Following the 698/99 monetary reform of the Umayyad caliph Abd-al-Malik, the official weight of the dirham became 2.97 grams, and all Pahlevi legends were eliminated. I should like to thank Michael Bates of the American Numismatic Society for his critical analysis of an earlier version of this paper.

The term "Eastern Europe" is often used by Soviet medievalists to refer to

WHEN DID DIRHAMS FIRST REACH THE UKRAINE?

27

leading up to the emergence of the Kievan state, the differences in time are crucial. Any theory which attempts to explain the origins of Kievan Rus must take into account the growth of the oriental trade and try to explain what role this trade had in the emergence of the Kievan state. Since the beginning of the dirham flow into Eastern Europe constitutes the first sign of the oriental trade, any effort to explain such a fundamental phenomenon as the formation of the Kievan state must necessarily con sider the problem of when dirhams first appeared in Eastern Europe. The relationship between the dirham finds, the oriental trade, and the origins of the Kievan state are perhaps most evident when we examine the middle Dnieper basin. It was precisely here, along the right bank of the middle Dnieper, that Kiev arose to become the capital of the emergent Kievan state. Quite often, the rise of Kiev has been linked to the Rus trade with Byzantium and the Black Sea. But it has recently been argued, with considerable justification, that there is little or no evidence that the Dnieper route was utilized in the Byzantine-Black Sea trade prior to the second half of the ninth century.2 In other words, Kiev and the middle Dnieper had already become a region of some importance even before the development of the Byzantine-Black Sea trade via the Dnieper. In an effort to explain the early growth of Kiev, some historians have looked to the oriental trade. It has been argued, for example, that Kiev and the middle Dnieper region first gained some prominence due to their role in the oriental trade with Eastern Europe. Given the paucity of Arabic and Persian sources which mention Kiev, the numismatic data again become crucial. The dirham finds probably provide the most important evidence for determining what relationship, if any, existed between the develop ment of the oriental trade with the Ukraine and the rise of Kiev and the middle Dnieper. It would, of course, be possible to enumerate other reasons why it is important to decide when dirhams first reached Eastern Europe in general and the Ukraine in particular. However, it should suffice to summarize by stating that the dirham finds are our best source for determining when the oriental trade of Eastern Europe began and for elucidating the place of Kiev and the middle Dnieper in the early stages of this commerce.
* * *

For many years, it was widely held that dirhams first reached Eastern
Imre Boba, Nomads, Northmen and Slays: Eastern Europe in the Ninth Century The Hague and Wiesbaden, 1967, pp. 18-38.
2

28

THOMAS S. NOONAN

Europe in the eighth or even the seventh century. A. I. Cherepnin, for example, expressed a common point of view when he stated that the dirham hoards found in European Russia were the result of Russian trade with Islam, and that these trade relations,judging from the hoards, began in the late seventh or the early eighth century.3 Cherepnin was, in fact, only repeating P. S. Savelevs conclusions, voiced almost a half-century earlier, that the trade ties of Russia with the Orient, based on the evidence of the earliest dirhams found in European Russia, dated to 699 or 74 The distinguished pre-revolutionary historian V. 0. Kliuchevskii echoed these views when he claimed that the numismatic data showed that the trade of the Dnieper with the Orient began around the mid-eighth cen tury.5 In a frequently cited article on Russias early oriental trade as reflected in coin finds, P. G. Liubomirov asserted that the regular ties of Russia with the Orient began during the eighth century, and he further concluded that eastern coins may have started to reach the middle Dnieper basin as early as the seventh century.6 Similar views can be found in more recent works.7 The argument that dirhams first reached Eastern Europe in the eighth century, or even earlier, is based on two primary assumptions. One assumption was that the start of the dirham flow into Eastern Europe could be determined from the date of the earliest dirham or, at least, postreform dirham. The second assumption holds that single finds, i.e., finds of one or a few dirhams, could be used to date the first appearance of dirhams in Eastern Europe. These assumptions led to the assertion that
dirhams initially reached Eastern Europe in the eighth century, because the earliest post-reform dirhams in the hoards from Eastern Europe were

issued in the eighth century and/or because single finds of Sasanian drachms as well as of Arab-Sasanian, Umayyad, and pre-800 Abbasid dirhams had been encountered throughout Eastern Europe. Oriental

Petersburg, 1847, p. xlv. V. 0. Kliuchevskii, Kurs russkoi istorii, pt. 1, lecture 8 in his Sochineniia, vol. 1 Moscow, 1956, p. 127. 6 P. G. Liubomirov, "Torgovye sviazi drevnei Rusi s Vostokom v VllI-Xl vv.

A. I. Cherepnin, Znachenie kladov s kuficheskipni monetami, naidennjkh v Tulskoi i Riazanskoi guberniiakh Riazan, 1892, pp. 6-7. P. S. Savelev, Mukhammedanskaia numismatika v otnoshenii k russkoi istorii St.

Preimushchestvenno P0 dannym o kladakh vostochnykh monet," Uchenie zapiski Gosudarstvennogo Saratovskogo universiteta, 1, no. 31923: 13, 19, 36. See V. L. lanin, Denezhno-vesovje sistem russkogo srednevekovia. Domon golskii period Moscow, 1956, p. 81; V. V. Kropotkin, "Karavannye puti v Vos tochnoi Evrope,"in Kavkazi Vostochnaia Evropa vdrevnostiMoscow, 1973, p. 227.

WHEN DID DIRHAMS FIRST REACH THE UKRAINE?

29

coins from the eighth century and earlier were considered proof that trade ties with the orient began in the eighth century, if not earlier. About forty years ago, however, the well-known Russian specialist in medieval oriental numismatics, Richard Vasmer Fasmer, directly chal lenged both assumptions. Vasmer noted that almost all dirham hoards found in Russia, and particularly the earliest, which he dated to ca. 800, contained coins from a much earlier period. Vasmer argued that the Sasanian, Arab-Sasanian, Umayyad, and early Abbasid coins found in these hoards were brought to Eastern Europe along with the later coins struck in the ninth and tenth centuries. Otherwise, Vasmer maintained, we would have hoards composed exclusively of the older coins. Vasmer then pointed out that hoards made up entirely of coins struck at a time much earlier than 800 were not yet known to him. Vasmer thus concluded that since coins of the seventh and eighth centuries reached Russia after about 800 in relatively large numbers, it could not be doubted that the individual finds of Sasanian drachms and pre-800 Islamic dirhams must be attributed to a period no earlier than 800. In brief, Vasmer dated the dirham finds in Eastern Europe from ca. 800, and he included in his earliest group of finds the individual Sasanian drachms and Islamic dirhams with earlier dates because these earlier coins had undoubtedly reached Russia only at the very end of the eighth century.8 These con siderations led Vasmer, a few years later, to lay down the maxim: "hoards buried in the eighth century are not yet known to us; there have only been found coins of the eighth century in hoards buried in the ninth century."9 Vasmers case against both traditional assumptions was most com pelling. An examination of East European dirham hoards from the first half of the ninth century clearly demonstrates that most of them con tained Sasanian, Arab-Sasanian, Umayyad, and pre-800 Abbasid coins, sometimes in significant quantities. At the same time, hoards of Sasanian drachms and Arab-Sasanian, Umayyad, and pre-800 Abbasid
dirhams have not yet been found anywhere in Eastern Europe or the

Baltic. Thus, Vasmers claim that drachms and pre-800 dirhams first entered Eastern Europe in hoards of the early ninth century appears convincing. Any remaining sceptics should remember that "it is quite
R. R. Fasmer, Zavalishinskii k/ad kuficheskikh monet VIJI-IX vv. [lzvestiia Gosudarstvennoi Akademii istorii materialnoi kultury, vol. 7, no. 2] Leningrad, 1931, p. 13. R. R. Fasmer, "Ob izdanii novoi topografii nakhodok kuficheskikh monet v Vostochnoi Evrope," Izvestiia Akademii nauk SSSR/ Otdelenie obshchestvennvkh nauk, 1933, no. 6-7, P. 476. IC lanin, Denezhno-vesovie sislemi, table 2.
8

30

THOMAS S. NOONAN

common, almost standard, for late 8th and 9th century hoards from the Middle East to contain some proportion of Sasanian and Arab-Sasanian dirhams, proving that these early coins continued to circulate there along side current issues." Thus, the pre-800 coins in the earliest hoards from Eastern Europe are nothing more than a reflection of the coin stock in the Islamic lands where these hoards were originally composed. Vasmer has thus demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that the appearance of dirhams in Eastern Europe must be dated by hoards and not by single finds, since it is most likely that the coins in pre-800 single finds only entered Eastern Europe in hoards of the ninth century. Furthermore, Vasmer implicitly reiterated the basic numismatic principle that coin hoards are to be dated by their most recent coin. The presence of eighthcentury dirhams in East European hoards of the ninth century does not show that dirhams circulated in Eastern Europe during the eighth cen tury. It only shows, to repeat Vasmer, that eighth-century coins were present in hoards buried in the ninth century. With Vasmer, the old tradi tion, according to which dirhams first appeared in Eastern Europe in the eighth century, or even earlier, was decisively refuted. In a more recent study of the early medieval Russian monetary system, V. L. lanin concluded that dirhams first began to reach Eastern Europe in the 770s-780s. In other words, lanin lowered Vasmers starting date by two or three decades, but he followed Vasmer in rejecting the claim that finds of one or a few coins from an earlier period determined when oriental coins as a whole initially appeared in Eastern Europe. Ianins argument was based on two factors. First, the earliest hoards from Russia Staraia Ladoga, Ca. 786 and the Baltic Fr, Gotland, ca. 783 date not from about 800, but from the 780s and 790s. Second, lanin composed a table of all the single finds of eighth-century dirhams from Eastern Europe. This table indicated, according to lanin, that the vast majority of single finds date to the last quarter of the eighth century. Such finds only appear with regularity after 774. The sporadic distribution of the remain ing finds over the preceding seventy-five year period did not demonstrate, in lanins view, the chance penetration of dirhams into Eastern Europe by the first half of the eighth century; what it showed was the chance burial of earlier coins at a much later time. The net result of lanins study was to further strengthen Vasmers basic approach to dating when oriental coins first reached Eastern Europe.2
II 12

Letter lanin,

of 27 May 1977, from Michael Bates to the author. Denezhno-vesovye sistemy, pp. 79-84.

WHEN DID DIRHAMS FIRST REACH THE UKRAINE?

31

While lanins work constituted a valuable contribution to the study of dirham circulation in Eastern Europe, we should note several ques tionable points in his argument regarding when dirhams first reached this region. The early hoards which he cites, for example, are not necessarily conclusive evidence that dirham hoards had appeared in Eastern Europe and the Baltic by the 780s. The hoard from FAr, Gotland contained only eight dirhams, while only seven identifiable coins remain from the hoard found in 1895 in the Parystovskyi khutor, Baturyn raion, Chernihiv oblast.3 Neither hoard is large enough to justify definitive conclusions on when dirhams first appeared in Eastern Europe and the Baltic. The 786 hoard from Old Staraia Ladoga is somewhat larger -28 whole dirhams and 3 fragments and thus must be considered more seriously.4 On the other hand, recent studies indicate that this was the only dirham hoard from all of Eastern Europe and the Baltic of sufficient size to be dated to a time before 800.15 As a result, we must ask whether the Old Ladoga hoard, which preceded all other significant early Eastern European dirham hoards by at least fifteen years, is, for some unknown reason, an anomaly. In any event, it does seem that dirham hoards began to appear in Eastern Europe with any regularity only after 800. lanins use of single finds to date the initial appearance of dirhams in Eastern Europe is also questionable. Vasmers main argument, which lanin accepts, is that the start of the dirham penetration into Eastern Europe must be dated by the earlist hoards from Eastern Europe rather than the earliest single finds. Yet, lanin attempts to buttress his case for the 770s to 780s by citing finds of single coins. In other words, lanin has developed a thesis based on both hoards and finds. Such a hybrid thesis, however, is inherently contradictory, because the essence of the contro versy revolves around the use of hoards or single finds, not both. lanin employed the very type of evidence which Vasmer had repudiated so strongly. As a matter of fact, the large number of post-770 single finds can easily be explained by the predominance of coins dating from the 770s or later in the earliest dirham hoards from Eastern Europe. An analysis of
-

lanin, Denezhno-vesovye sistemy, p. 82. MArten Stenberger, Die Schatzfunde Gotlands der Wikingerzeit, vol. 2: Fundbeschreibung und Taffein Lund, 1947, p. 69,
13

no. 175, lists the most recent coin from the FAr hoard as dating from 802.

kladov vostochnykh monet sasanidskikh i kufi p. 140, no. 24. IS Johan Callmer, "Oriental Coins and the Beginning of the Viking Period," Forn vnnen, 1976, p. 182; V. V. Kropotkin, "Novye materialy P0 istorii denezhnogo obrashcheniia v Vostochnoi Evrope v kontse VIII-pervoi polovine IXv.," in Slaviane i cheskikh

A. K. Markov, Topograflia St. Petersburg, 1910,

RusMoscow, 1968, pp. 72-79.

32

THOMAS S. NOONAN

the data compiled by lanin clearly shows this predominance.6 The appearance of these early ninth-century hoards composed primarily of dirhams struck after 769 is the most logical explanation for the greater number of relatively new single finds. Thus, the growth in the number of single finds dating from 774 does not show that dirhams had begun to reach Eastern Europe by the 770s. It merely reflects the composition of the hoards which supplied the coins for the first single finds. In short, lanin has not demonstrated conclusively that dirhams had begun to appear in Eastern Europe before 800.
* * *

Since the appearance of Vasmers pioneering studies, almost all numis matists and many other specialists have accepted his thesis that dirhams first reached Eastern Europe around the year 800. Recently, however, Vasmers entire approach has been challenged. Relying upon finds of one or two coins, M. F. Kotliar dated the start of dirham circulation in the Ukraine to the mid-eighth century.7 In effect, Kotliar repudiated both the methodology and conclusions of Vasmer. A critical analysis of Kotliars thesis is necessary for several reasons. First of all, we need to ask whether Kotliars thesis has replaced Vasmers interpretation and whether the entire Vasmer approach is now outdated. Secondly, it is important to know whether dirhams first reached the Ukraine ca. 750 or 800. Kliuchevskiis whole theory on the evolution of the middle Dnieper and the emergence of the Kievan state rests on the earlier date, whereas other theories about the development of this area also depend, to a large extent, on the time when dirhams first reached the Ukraine. Thus, Kotliars thesis represents a challenge to Vasmers widely accepted numismatic explanation of when dirhams reached all of Eastern Europe. It also has great importance for the dating of the start of the Ukraines ties with the Orient. If Kotliar is correct, we shall have to return to the older, pre-Vasmer tradition. Given the importance of his thesis, it is most unfortunate that Kotliar has not provided any explanation to support his use of single finds rather than hoards in determining when dirhams first reached Eastern Europe. As a result, it is not clear if he is motivated by some new insight or whether

16 17

Ianin, Denezhno-vesovye sistemy, table I. N. F. Kotlar [Kotliar], "Obrt arabskich dirhemw na terytorium Ukrainy," Wiadomo/ci Numizmatyczne 14 1970: 23, 30. Cf. his book Hroshovyi obih na terytorii Ukrainy dobyfeodalizmu Kiev, 1971, pp. 15-46.

WHEN DID DIRHAMS FIRST REACH THE UKRAINE?

33

he has simply reverted to the old, pre-Vasmer, custom of using single finds for purposes of dating. The absence of any explanation for his departure from standard numismatic practice means that we cannot examine the theoretical and methodological assumptions underlying his approach. Kotliar begins by summarizing the views of Vasmer and lanin that dirhams only reached Eastern Europe ca. 800 or in the 770s to 780s, at the
earliest. He then points to what he calls nine dated finds of eighth-century

dirhams in the Ukraine, six of which come from before 774. Having chastized lanin for not paying sufficient attention to these Ukrainian finds, Kotliar goes on to assert that Sasanian drachms from the Ukraine also need to be considered in any examination of when dirhams first reached the Ukraine. In this connection, Kotliar notes four Ukrainian hoards with Sasanian drachms which he feels have been overlooked. Finally, he cites other dirham finds from the Ukraine which date from the period before 833. Kotliar concludes his discussion of this topic by stating that because there are so many early coin finds, the penetration of dirhams into Eastern Europe should be dated to the mid-eighth rather than the late eighth century. 18
Let us review the six dirham finds from the Ukraine which supposedly

date from before 774. Kotliar fails to describe the provenance of any of
these finds. Thus, we cannot tell if the coins come from graves or habita tion sites or are chance finds. What we have is merely a list of six finds

containing coins struck before 774 with no indication of the circum stances of their discovery. While I have not been able to trace all of Kotliars references back to their original sources, those that I could check suggest the need for great caution. For example, the Abbasid dirham of
759/60 from Kiev comes from the homestead of a certain Marr and was

made into the shape of a medallion for hanging on the neck.9 There is no further data on how it was found.2 M. K. Karger suggests that this dirham, which was struck in Kufa, originated in a tenth-century burial uncovered in the homestead.2 The Abbasid dirham struck in Istakhr in 756/57, found in the city of Zmiiv during the 1860s,22 was actually uncovered while clearing the wall which surrounded the city.23 The 562 Sasanian drachm of Khusraw I and the 780 Ispahbad coin of Umar,
18 19 20 2! 22 23

Kotlar, "Obrt arabskich dirhemw," PP. 19-23, 30. Kotlar, "ObrOt arabskich dirhemw," p. 21, fn. 12, no. 3. Markov, Topograflia kladov yostochnykh monet, p. 13, no. 69. M. K. Karger, Drevnii Kiev, vol. 1 Moscow and Leningrad, 1958, p. 121. Kotlar, "Obrt arabskich dirhemw," P. 21, fn. 12, no. 7. Markov, Topograflia kladov vostochnykh monet, p. 52, no. 302.

34

THOMAS S. NOONAN

governor of Tabaristan,24 were found along the Babka River in the former province of Kharkiv. No other data on the discovery is provided. Further more, the source cited by Kotliar gives an erroneous date because it confused 129 H. 746/47 with the 129th year of the Tabaristan era, i.e., 780A.D.25 The Ispahbad dirham of the Tabaristan governor Umar found at Verkhnii Saltiv in the former Kharkiv province comes, in fact, from a cemetery along the Northern Donets River excavated in the early twentieth century.26 With the exception of a few tenth-century Samanid coins, Vasmer believed that the other dirhams found during these excava tions of the Verkhnii Saltiv cemetery were buried at about the same time as the Zavalishino hoard, i.e., about 810.27 I could not find any other source which listed the Abbasid dirham of 764 found in Kiev during 1876.28 I also wonder ifthe Abbasid dirham of 756/57 reportedly found in the raion of Zmiiv during the 1 860s is the same coin as the 756 / 57 dirham struck at Istakhr found in the city of Zmiiv in the 1860s.29 In any event, the six so-called dirham finds dating from before 774 turn out to be, in the main, an assortment of chance finds of early oriental coins discovered under unusual or unknown circumstances. These so-called finds are, in reality, the most dubious type of numismatic evidence for dating the initial influx of dirhams into the Ukraine. An argument built almost entirely upon loose and stray coins whose burial date cannot be deter mined is certainly far from convincing. The only find among the six which needs to be considered seriously is the Tabaristan dirham of the governor Umar found in a grave at Verkhnii Saltiv. Neither Kotliar nor Vasmer gives a date for the coin. However, it almost certainly was issued by the very same governor Umar whose coin, struck in 780, was found along the Babka River but was erroneously dated to 746/47. Therefore, we can automatically exclude the Tabaristan coin from Verkhnii Saltiv as evidence that dirhams first reached the Ukraine by the mid-eighth century. Furthermore, the cemetery in which this particular grave is located has been dated primarily by the approxi mately 30 coins found in various graves. Thus, reliable non-numismatic evidence for dating these graves does not appear to exist. In fact, the Verkhnii Saltiv graves may never be dated because the material is now
24 25 26 27 28 29

Kotlar, "Obrt arabskich dirhemw," p. 21, fn. 12, no. Fasmer, Zavalishinskii kiad, p. 14, no. 6, and fn. 1. Kotlar, "Obrt arabskich dirhemw," p. 21, fn. 12, no. Fasmer, Zayalishinskii k/ad, p. 14, no. 7. Kotlar, "Obrt arabskich dirhemw," p. 21, fn. 12, no. Kotlar, "Obrt arabskich dirhemw," p. 21, fn. 12, no.

12. 6. 2. 8.

WHEN DID DIRHAMS FIRST REACH THE UKRAINE?

35

old, part of it has been lost completely, and many of the finds are now separated from the original complexes.3 A recent effort to date the Saltovo-Maiaki culture, of which this cemetery is a part, concluded that the earliest graves were probably constructed no earlier than the late eighth century.3 While this is by no means an absolute date, it does reinforce our conclusion that the dirham find from Verkhnii Saltiv cited by Kotliar fails to support his thesis. Kotliars argument is extremely weak even if we accept his evidence as valid. Of the six "finds" cited, four were definitely struck only after 750, one was found with a Tabaristan coin of 780, and the sixth was a Tabaristan coin probably struck around 780. In other words, none of these finds dates to before 750 and, if we assume that these coins did not reach the Ukraine immediately after their issue, we might date their appearance there to around 775. But, this is precisely the time that lanin suggested. Consequently, Kotliars arguments do not prove what they set out to prove, even when we disregard their obvious numismatic defi ciencies. Now let us examine the four Ukrainian hoards with Sasanian drachms which Kotliar believes are pertinent to the question of when dirhams first reached the Ukraine. One of these "hoards" turns out to be the drachm of Khusraw I found along the Babka River.32 We have already seen that this find or "hoard" is worthless for purposes of dating. Another hoard con taining 21 Sasanian drachms was found at larylovychi in the former Chernihiv province. But the most recent dirham in this hoard dates to 820/21.33 Consequently, the Iarylovychi hoard tells us nothing about whether dirhams first reached the Ukraine in the eighth century. Kotliar also refers to the Sasanian drachms found with dirhams at Novi Mlyny near the Seim River.34 Vasmers account, which lists the find-site as Parystovskyi khutor, indicates that the peasant who uncovered the hoard found up to 800 coins and that his neighbors discovered additional dirhams. These coins subsequently disappeared, except for 15 dirhams purchased by a local inhabitant. The peasant who found the coins reported that one of them had a portrait with a severed border. This coin,

S. A. Pletneva, 01 kochevii k gorodam: Saltovo-maiatskaia kultura [Materialy i issledovaniia pa arkheologii SSSR, no. 142] Moscow, 1967, p. 135. 3! Pletneva, Ot kocheyii k gorodam, pp. 135-43.
30

Kotlar, "Obrt arabskich dirhemw," p. 22, fn. 16, no. 12. Kotlar, "Obrt arabskich dirhemw," p. 22, fn. 16, no. 21; Markov, Topograflia kladov vostochnykh monet, pp. 50-51, no. 290. Kotlar, "Obrt arabskich dirhemOw," p. 22, fn. 16, no. 71.
32

36

THOMAS S. NOONAN

according to V. A. Shuhaievskyi, was probably Sasanian or lspahbad. Vasmer was able to identify 7 of the over 800 coins from this hoard. The most recent of the less than 1 percent of coins from the find which survived has been dated to the 170s H., 786/87-795/96.35 The few coins which were preserved do not provide a solid foundation for dating the hoard as a whole. The information they do provide would date the hoard to the 780s or 790s, but no earlier. Most importantly, we must emphasize that the presence of a Sasanian drachm in this hoard is based on con jecture alone. Kotliars fourth hoard, found at Pischana in the former Kharkiv province at some unknown time, reportedly contained eastern coins of the sixth and seventh centuries as well as some Sasanian coins.36 I have not been able to trace this hoard in the numismatic literature, which suggests that most numismatists do not consider it a legitimate hoard. Furthermore, based on the citations provided by Kotliar, Vasmer may well have considered the Sasanian drachm from the Babka River as the drachm from Pischana, because the Babka River site is apparently only a few miles away.37 In short, we seem to be confronted with either a con fusion or a few loose coins which the majority of numismatists have, with good reason, not recognized as a hoard. We can conclude that the socalled hoards with Sasanian drachms tell us nothing about the time when dirhams first reached the Ukraine, and that Kotliars criticism of lanin for ignoring these hoards is without any foundation. Kotliars final evidence, the other early dirham finds from the Ukraine, does not strengthen his case. What he calls a hoard of eighth-century Abbasid dirhams from Verkhnii Saltiv is more accurately described as coins found in various graves during the excavation of the cemetery on that Site.38 The problems of dating these burials have already been dis cussed. We have also discussed the remnants from the hoard at Novi Mlyny and the difficulties in dating The four dirhams of 809/10 found in Kiev during underground construction work in the I 920s do not help us to resolve when dirhams first reached the Ukraine. 40 Finally, the most recent dirham in the hoard from Nyzhnia Syrovatka dates to 812 / 13 R. R. Fasmer, "Spisok monetnykh nakhodok. II," Soobshcheniia Gosudarsiven not Akademii istorii rnaterialnoi kultury 2 1929: 289-90, no. 24.
36 38 40

Kotlar, "Obrt arabskich dirhemw," p. 22, fn. 16, no. 1. Fasmer, Zavalishinskii k/ad, p. 14, no. 6. Kotlar, "Obrt arabskich dirhemw," p. 22, fn. 17, no. 5. Kotlar, "Obrt arabskich dirhemw," p. 22, fn. 17, no. 13.
Kotlar, "Obrt arabskich dirhemw," P. 22, fn. 17, no. 15.

WHEN DID DIRHAMS FIRST REACH THE UKRAINE?

37

and thus does not resolve the problem of whether dirhams had reached the Ukraine by 800. These four early dirham finds are of little value insofar as our main question is concerned. Let us sum up, then, our evaluation of the evidence Kotliar has pre sented to substantiate his claim that the penetration of dirhams into the Ukraine dates to the mid-eighth century. This evidence, much of which is very dubious and has not been thoroughly investigated, fails to show that dirhams reached the Ukraine prior to the late eighth or early ninth century. Kotliar has not cited one coin struck in the mid-eighth century or earlier which has been found in a burial or habitation site dated to ca. 750. All he has done is to enumerate loose, stray finds of early oriental coins and hoards with early coins which date to the end of the eighth and the early ninth century. Our analysis has attempted to show that the thesis presented by Kotliar has not been substantiated. The methodology he has employed suffers from several major deficiencies. It does not account for the fact that early oriental coins reached Eastern Europe in hoards dating from 800. It does not explain the absence of legitimate hoards composed entirely of coins struck before the late eighth century. Most important of all, it does not demonstrate that these early coins were buried in graves or habitation sites dating from the mid-eighth century or earlier. What Kotliar has shown is that early oriental coins are found in Eastern Europe. What he has not shown is the date at which they appeared here. These serious flaws in the methodology compel us to reject Kotliars claim that dirhams first reached Eastern Europe and the Ukraine in particular by the mid-eighth century. In short, the methods and the con clusions advanced by Vasmer over forty years ago are still valid. Recent studies on the dirham hoards from Eastern Europe, the eastern Baltic, and Scandinavia all confirm that the earliest dirham hoards from these regions date, at the very earliest, to the late eighth century.42

Kotlar, "Obrt arabskich dirhemw," p. 22, fn. 17, no. 19; Markov, Topogrqfiia kladov vostochnykh monet, p. 52, no. 301. 42 See Callmer, "Oriental Coins"; Kropotkin, "Novye materialy"; Beatrice Gran berg, Frteckning over KufIska M nifyndi Finland[Studia Orientalia Edidit Societas Orientalis Fennica, vol. 34] Helsinki, 1966;Teresaand Ryszard Kiersnowscy, Wczes no/rediowieczne skarbv srebrne z Pomorza: Materialv [Polskie badania archeolo giczne, vol. 4] Warsaw and Wroclaw, 1959; Stenberger, Die Schatzfunde Got lands der Wikingerzeit, vol.2: Fundbeschreibungund Taffe/n; Thomas S. Noonan, "Pre-970 Dirham Hoards from Estonia and Latvia, I: Catalog," Journal of Baltic Studies 8 1977: 238-59. In his study of TheAge of the VikingsLondon, 1962, Peter Sawyer noted pp. 104-105 that the earliest Scandinavian dirham hoards date from 780 and

38

THOMAS S. NOONAN

* * *

Having ascertained that Kotliars dating of the start of dirham circu lation in the Ukraine is not convincing, let us now attempt to determine this date using Vasmers approach. In this task, we shall only consider those Ukrainian dirham hoards which are large enough to warrant confi dence in the conclusions to be drawn from them. This means that very small hoards and those from which only a few coins remain will be excluded from consideration, since the small number of identifiable coins does not allow us to determine with any accuracy when they were buried or what their characteristics were. The addition or subtraction of a rela tively few coins to such mini-hoards could greatly alter their composition and approximate date of burial. Among the Ukrainian hoards omitted for these reasons are the finds from Parystovskyi khutor and Novo troitske horodyshche.43 With the elimination of these two mini-hoards, we are left with two genuine and fairly complete Ukrainian dirham hoards from the early ninth century. The first hoard was uncovered in 1848 in the village of Nyzhnia Syrovatka, Kharkiv province, and consisted of 206 dirhams. Unfortunately, we do not have a detailed breakdown of the individual coins. Markov reported that the hoard included Umayyad dirhams dating from 702/03 to 749/50 and Abbasid dirhams dating from 749/50 to 812/13.44 lanin, however, indicates that the hoard contained 114 Abbasid, 10 Umayyad, 1 Aghlabid, 1 Spanish Umayyad, 22 Idrisid and 22 Governors of Tudga dirhams, as well as a few Sasanian drachms and Arab-Sasanian dirhams from Tabaristan.45 The second hoard was found in 1875 in larylovychi, Chernihiv province, and consisted of 285 coins: 21 Sasanian drachms dating from 551 to 628, 4 Tabaristan dirhams dating from 773 to 784, 7 dirhams of the Arab governors of Persia Arab Sasanian dating from 640/41 to 687/88, 22 Umayyad dirhams dating from 698/99 to 746/47, 3 Spanish Umayyad dirhams dating from 770 to 800/01, 23 Idrisid dirhams dating from 776-786 to about 795, 1 Aghlabid

793, or from nearly the same time as Ianins earliest hoard from Russia 786. But Sawyer warns the reader not to put much emphasis on these first Scandinavian hoards
because they are so small. Kropotkin, "Novye materialy," p. 75, fn. 12.
"

lanins percentages.

Markov, Topograflia kladov vostochnykh monet, p. 52, no. 301. lanin, Denezhno-vesovye sistemy, table 2. The numbers are my translation of

WHEN DID DIRHAMS FIRST REACH THE UKRAINE?

39

dirham without date, and 204 Abbasid dirhams dating from 757/58 to 820/21.46 Both of these hoards are large enough to provide reliable data. The most recent dirhams in each hoard date from 8 12/13 and 820/21,
respectively. Since some time must be allowed for the movement of the

dirhams from within Islam to the Ukraine, it would appear that these hoards were probably buried sometime around 820 to 825. Therefore, dirhams seem to have reached the Ukraine around the year 820 a significant date because it is up to 20 years or more later than the initial dirham hoards from other parts of Eastern Europe and the Baltic. We should also note that the earliest dirham hoards from the Ukraine contain all the various types of pre-800 coins whose discovery in single finds has prompted numismatists from Savelev to Kotliar to date the start of dirham circulation to the eighth century. As Vasmer pointed out, Sasanian drachms as well as Arab-Sasanian, Umayyad, and early Abbasid dirhams are all found in these earliest hoards. Therefore, lacking any evidence that the single finds of such coins were buried before 800, we must attribute the single and stray finds of these pre-800 coins to the earliest dirham hoards, which appeared in the Ukraine ca. 820. It is also no doubt significant that both hoards come from the LeftBank Ukraine at some distance from Kiev. This might well suggest that Kiev and the surrounding middle Dnieper area had not yet become involved with the oriental trade at the time when dirhams first reached the Eastern Ukraine. Based on the location of these hoards, an attempt to determine the routes by which they reached the Ukraine could be made. However, given the find-spots, it is possible to construct abstract and perfectly logical geographical arguments which would clearly point to either the Volga Bulgar or the Khazar route. Unfortunately, the burial sites of these two hoards are not really sufficient evidence, in and of themselves, to indicate the route by which the hoards were brought to the Ukraine.
-

* * *

Our discussion has attempted to demonstrate that the traditional ap proach to the dirhams discovered in Eastern Europe, an approach which has recently been resuscitated by Kotliars study of the dirham finds from the Ukraine, is methodologically unsound and has produced misleading and inaccurate conclusions. As Vasmer convincingly showed some forty years ago, we cannot use either single finds or early coins from
46

Markov, Topogra.flia kladov vostochnykh monet, pp. 50-51, no. 290.

40

THOMAS S. NOONAN

later hoards to date the beginning of dirham circulation in Eastern Europe. Applying Vasmers principles to the Ukrainian data, we find that dirhams first reached the Ukraine around 820, not in the mid-eighth century as Kotliar and others have argued. This difference of some seventy years tends to abrogate Kliuchevskiis argument that Kiev and the middle Dnieper had emerged by the mid-ninth century as the nucleus of the Kievan state because of a century-old link with the oriental trade. Kievs participation in the oriental trade was much more recent, and the reasons for its rise must be sought elsewhere. University of Minnesota

PROTESTANTS IN THE UKRAINE

55

Artemius his Opravdanie [On the Justification of Sinful Man before God]

Nesvezh, 1562, which was dedicated to Court Marshal Eustathius

Volovich. In these and other works he found that Budny had already

moved from Calvinism to a Unitarianism with a social gospel less radical than that of the man who influenced him, Dr. Peter of Gonidz Gonesius, the Podlachian Binitarian not yet a Ditheist.2 In 1564 Budny also collaborated with Laurence Krzyszkowski d. ca. 1573 who was first a Czech Brother, then, successively, a Calvinist, a Lithu anian Brother 1565, and an Anabaptist leader on the translation of Justin Martyrs Dialogue with Trypho the Jew Nesvezh, 1564. It is of interest that the humanist Archimandrite Artemius, who had been ex pelled from Orthodox Muscovy for being a Judaizer in 1554, pilloried the Calvinist Budny, who by 1582 would be disowned as minister and brother by the general synod of the Commonwealths Unitarians held at Luslawice for being a Judaizer. The specific charges were his upholding of the validity of pedobaptism he changed on this issue and the legitimacy of defensive war, and his eschewing of the worship adoration of Christ
-

as idolatry, since he was now convinced that Christ was solely human in his perfection.

Pseudo-Kurbskii also wrote three letters to Prince Basil Constantine Ostrozkyi 1527-1608. His father, Constantine ca. 1460-1530, was from 1497 great hetman of Lithuania, from 1511 castellan of Vilnius where he erected a large palace, and had acclaim as a valiant fighter
against Muscovites and Turks. The son, Basil, commonly called by his

fathers imperial name, became the foremost leader of the Orthodox enlightenment; his principal seat, with school and press, was at Ostroh on the bryn River in Volhynia. He was from 1551 palatine of Volhynia and from 1560 until his death in 1608, palatine of Kiev. Prince Ostrozkyis religious beliefs were complex. He was a patriot prince of the Common wealth, as was his father; he was ecumenical, first, to the point of desiring the union of Orthodox and Catholics with certain clearly considered preconditions, and, second, to the point of extending a cordial hand, as we shall see, to Czech Brethren, Lutherans, and Calvinists, and even permitting a Unitarian church within view of his palace at Ostroh. In the first XII of the three letters Pseudo-Kurbskii reproached Ostrozkyi for having sponsored the translation of a devotional work by St. John Chrysostom from the Latin rather than the Greek, and into

20

Jzef Jasnowski, "Piotr z Gonidza," Przeglqd Historyczny 311935: 5-58.

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GEORGE H. WILLIAMS

Polish rather than into a modernized Slavonic. He chided him further by quoting the words of Pseudo-Dionysius in the Celestial Hierarchies as to the importance of keeping sacred matters "from the profane." In the second letter XXIII, Pseudo-Kurbskii reproached him again for having sent him On the Unity ofthe ChurchVilnius, 1577 by Peter Skarga, S.J., in which inter alia Skarga belittled the use of any language other than Greek or Latin for theological and liturgical purposes. Skargas Latin hauteur had so aroused Ostrozkyi that, despite his hope for ultimate church union, he had his obscure companion Motovylo reply to Skargas unacceptable proposals. He sent this, as a friend, to Pseudo-Kurbskii, who angrily retorted, in the third letter XXIV, that Ostrozkyi should not resort to employing an "Arian" in the defense of Orthodoxy. He called Motovylo "a heretic worse than Mohammed," and the Catholic bishops penetrating Byzantine-rite territory and ridiculing the Orthodox, "Antichrists." II. THE REFORMATION MOVEMENTS FROM THE WEST IN THE COMMONWEALTH: THE REFORMED AS "JUDAIZERS" Having dealt primarily with the few Judaizers from Russia in the Ukraine, notably in Volhynia, and having also mentioned, in passing only, the contacts between the unitarianizing Calvinist Simon Budny and Archimandrite Artemius, we turn to the main waves of the Reformation billowing in from the West. With respect to the spread of the Reformation in the Commonwealth, we should remark that Lutheranism often went by the name of "Augs burgism" in reference to the Confession of Augsburg presented to Charles V in 1530 while, in contrast, the Reformed faith commonly went by the name "Evangelicalism." This is only the beginning of the
-

distinctive nomenclature for confessions of faith that characterize general

and monographic presentations of religions in the Commonwealth. Although the term "Calvinism" came to prominence in due course, the Reformed faith and praxis in the Commonwealth drew as much upon the German-speaking Swiss, notably in Zurich and Basel, as upon the French-speaking Swiss in Geneva and Lausanne; therefore, in the Commonwealth it was also called the "Helvetic Church." Originally, the church developed primarily in Little Poland and the Grand Duchy north of the Prypiat River. Only later was it established in towns and on estates in the Ukrainian regions. This religious persuasion has never been called the Laskian Church
-

PROTESTANTS IN THE UKRAINE

57

from John Laski, who became its superintendent from 1556 until his death in 1560 but it might be well so named. For it was this nephew and
-

namesake of the primate Archbishop John VIII Laski, Gniezno, 1510-

31, who, as the sometime bishop of Hungarian Veszprem, the "Zwing han" Reformer of Oldenburg, the superintendent of the multilingual Strangers Church of London under Edward VI, and the pastor of Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, stamped his indelible character on the Polish Helvetic Church in but four years of intensive Reformed activity in his
native Commonwealth.

Because the Reformed Church in the Commonwealth developed dis tinctive features, identifiable with the Reformer John Laski, which sur vived in both branches of the tradition that split into the Major Calvinist and the Minor Unitarian Church in 1563, we must summarize the traits of the Laskian Church before turning to further particulars in the Ukraine.2 There are some six traits of John Laskis Church that go far to explain
why his version of the Reformed faith commended itself so swiftly and widely in the Commonwealth. Some of the traits also help explain how the schism leading to antitrinitarianism occurred in his church.

The first trait is Laskis vision of a pan-Protestant Commonwealth Church formed out of the Czech Brethren living mostly in Great Poland, the Lutherans within and beyond Ducal Prussia, and the Reformed in Little Poland and, to a small extent, even then in Ruthenia and the northern half of the Grand Duchy. Developing the idea while in London, he had the church orders printed and dedicated, in 1555, to King Sigismund II Augustus, to whom he wrote one of three major reforma tory letters in response to the kings call for a national council at the diet of Piotrkw in that year. Upon entering Poland via Frankfurt, he im
mediately sought out the king, as well as the Calvinist grand duke Nicholas VI Radvila the Black 1515-65, in Vilnius and the Lutheran duke Albert Hohenzollern 1490-1568 in Konigsberg - all with a view

toward organizing a non-episcopal, national church. To this end he was instrumental in dissolving the earlier agreement of Kominek between the Czech Brethren of Great Poland and the Reformed of Little Poland, which, he believed, was not broadly enough conceived.22 It should be The six traits are more fully presented and documented in my "Erasmianism in Poland," Polish Review 221977: 3-50. The points advanced here are not numbered or summarized precisely as "traits" there. 22 The most recent and comprehensive work on Laski as reformer in Poland is that of
2!

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GEORGE H. WILLIAMS

remarked that, unlike some of his followers and later Protestants of other sorts, Laski was expressly opposed to dealing constructively with the leadership, whether lay or clerical, of the Commonwealths millions of Orthodox subjects. Unlike the soon-to-emerge Unitarians, Laski had no sympathy with Orthodoxy and vigorously disputed its claim to be any more apostolic than Roman Catholicism or to be in any less need of reform. The second trait of the Laskian Reformed faith and praxis is that the latter that is, the sacraments or ordinances, polity, and discipline were very prominent in the mind of the reformer. For him, faith, when formulated as a confession of faith, or, in the language of the day, as a symbol or creed, could be divisive in distracting the simple and enraging the learned, thus resulting only in disunity. In fact, Laski could be equivo cal in matters of doctrine, partly because of his indisposition toward involvement in theological niceties, and partly because of his practical temperament after all, he had been educated by his primatial uncle to become his gifted namesakes successor, both as primate and as, on occasion, interrex, according to the constitution of the Commonwealth. Reformer Laski was preeminently political, in terms of both politics and polity. This temperamental trait leads directly to a third characteristic of the Laskian Church during Laskis lifetime: it did not adopt any confession of faith. Nay more, Laski programmatically eschewed all the great conciliar creeds of the patristic age and all the symbols of the Reformation Era. Finding sanction in Erasmus and Hilary of Poitiers "the Athanasius of the West", specifically in the dedicatory epistle of the great humanist to his editio princeps of Hilary, Laski insisted to the end of his career that only Scripture and the Apostles Creed were normative; the latter he, with Erasmus and Hilary, considered as not literally but substantively apos tolic, and as dating from about the time of the First Council of Nicaea, in 325. Thus, although he upheld Nicene-Constantinopolitan Triadology and Chalcedonian Christology, Laski was very reluctant to use anything but scriptural language to defend the notable and difficult doctrines long fought over by the learned fathers, who had, in the end, been obliged to resort to non-scriptural philosophical language to defend their post scriptural faith. Laski characteristically called God, presumably God the
-

Halina Kowalska, Dzialalno.i reformatorska Jana Laskiego w Poisce. 1556-1560 Wroclaw, etc., 1969.

PROTESTANTS IN THE UKRAINE

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59

Father, Deus Optimus Maxim us an appellation surely more Cice ronian than scriptural! A consequent fourth trait of Laski was his stress, for catechetical and several other purposes, upon the threefold office of Christ as Prophet, Priest, and King an idea that he most certainly derived from Erasmus, who had developed the triplex munus Christi in his Commentarium in Psalmum Secundum 1522 shortly before the young Laski had come to
-

live and study with him. Significantly, Laski used the threefold office in

connection with Psalm 2 and in his great reformatory letter to King Sigismund, which suggested that the king needed an experienced sacer dotal Propheta who had already served well in England in a multiethnic congeries of churches under Edward VI. Calvin, to be sure, eventually came to appropriate the terminology of the threefold office, but only in passing and first in his edition of The Institutes of 1543, but never in his commentaries, not even those on Psalm 2. The fifth trait, surely Erasmian rather than Calvinist, was Laskis reluctance to discuss predestination and free will, his clear tendency, unlike Calvins, to identify the predestined elect with membership in a Protestant Church, and his lack of concern, in scrutinizing the confes sions of faith of the Czech Brethren of Great Poland, toward their formu lation of this key Reformation doctrine, whereas he fussed considerably over their church order. Laski, as a kind of szlachcic-superintendent, had to go along nominally with the Swiss and the Saxon predestinarians; but he probably believed that a man was free not only as a freeman of the Commonwealth, but also as a true follower of Christs precepts. In many of his works published before his final return to Poland, Laski identified himself as Baro Polonus as well as, or rather than, Pastor in Anglia peregrinorum, etc. The sixth trait of the Laskian form of Helvetic evangelicalism included a great stress on deacons, including supra-congregational synodal deacons commonly of the noble class, a great deference to elders and patrons regarded as ministerial if not actually clerical, and a tendency to equalize the magnate and the elected pastor who served as co-moderators at the local and general synods of the Helvetic Church. The Laskian practice continued in both the Major and Minor churches after the
schism. Calvin, although he held a higher view of a Christian magistracy

than did Luther, would never allow it to interfere in the internal life and thought of the church. In the Reformed synods of Poland the pastors were subject to the collective moral and theological discipline and scrutiny in which the patrons, some of whom were princes in the Ukraine

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GEORGE H. WILLIAMS

and the Grand Duchy, and the "ministerial" elders, also generally noble
men, had a voice.23

Some of the foregoing traits make clear why Laskian Calvinism ap pealed to so many of the gentry and magnates of the Commonwealth, eventually also in regions beyond the internal boundary between the Latin-rite and Byzantine-rite. The nobility had long resented the epis copal tribunals exercising jurisdiction over the lay lords, and they wel comed a polity in which, as patrons, elders seniores, and synodal deacons, they were the equals or even more of the bishops now called simply pastors and themselves now subject to joint lay-clerical discipline
in synod.

Laski, for all his diligence, never succeeded in welding together a panProtestant Church of the Commonwealth. Shortly after his death, there opened up the already mentioned schism, 1563-65, over the issues of
baptism and Triadology, which generated still more ecclesiastical nomen clature. The conservative Laskians became known, as already noted, as

the Major Church, against the Minor Church of the Polish-LithuanianUkrainian Brethren.24 On the issue of Triadology, the Minor Church

At the time my article "Erasmianism in Poland" was completed, I did not have the careful, supportive analysis of Laskis polity in East Frisia, London, Frankfurt-on-the
23

Oder, and Poland as worked out by 0. Naunin, "Die Kirchenordnungen des Johannes
Laski," Deutsche Zeitschrift fr Kirchenrecht, 3rd series, 19 1909: 23-40, 195-236, 347-75. Naunin agrees that Laski brought the seniores and patrons to a very high level of authority in the Church, especially in synod, where pastors were disciplined on preaching and doctrine no less than on pastoral care and personal behavior. However, Naunin disagrees with Johannes Kruske, Johannes a Lasco und der Sakramentsstreit Breslau, 1899, that in giving such prominence to the elders and patrons Laski was influenced by the usage of Menno Simons, with whom he was once engaged in debate on another issue. Naunin holds, rather, that the lay control of the parish priest had been vigorously and widely preserved from early times in East Frisia, precisely where Laski first labored as a reformer, and that it was from the usage in this region that he appropriated his henceforth distinctive principle of polity. 24 Those whom I have distinguished, using hyphenated terms, as brethren of the three major parts of the Commonwealth, were in their own time always called Polish Brethren, even though many of their recruits were ethnic and foreign Germans, Italians, and even Frenchmen. "Polish Brethren" was applied even though the language of their discourses, publications, and synods was more commonly Latin than Polish, and even though for more than a decade near the end of their existence in the Commonwealth the center of gravity had shifted to Byzantine-rite territory. The standard work on them, in the Commonwealth and beyond, remains that of Earl Morse Wilbur, The History of Unitarianism: Socin,anism and its Antecedents Cam bridge, 1945. In my introduction to Stanislas Lubienieckis History of the Polish Reformation, to be published in the Harvard Theological Studies series, I update Wilbur and cover the development of all confessional groups in the Commonwealth from 1518 to 1601. My introduction to The Polish Brethren, 1601-1685, Harvard

PROTESTANTS IN THE UKRAINE

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went through a tritheist, a binitarian, and a ditheist phase before reach ing, in most regions, a fully unitarian position by the end of the sixteenth century. For the sake of clarity, it should be noted that though the Polish Brethren as unitarians might have been called by their Calvinist and Catholic foes "Judaizers" in the Protestant context, the term was in fact very rarely employed only by an occasional Catholic polemicist because the Polish Brethren, in general, programmatically placed the New Testa ment above the Old Testament and adored the ascended Christ first conceived of the Spirit of God the Father and born of the Virgin. In the process of reaching the fully unitarian position, the Minor Church divided itself temporarily into separate local synods under leaders who lent their names to distinctive lesser sects, only to merge again with the main body of the Minor Church of the Polish-Lithuanian-Ukrainian Brethren under the influence of Faustus Socinus, a permanent resident of Poland from 1579 until his death in 1604. Hence also the name Socinians for the Unitarian Brethren. It was on the other issue which had gained prominence in the Reformed Church and led to the definitive schism, namely, baptism, that Socinus did not agree with the Brethren. By the time of his arrival believers baptism by immersion was becoming the rule, and there were several instances of rebaptism or anabaptism at the conversion of several men who eventually became notable leaders of the movement, especially for mer Lutherans. Moreover, with believers baptism and a strict adherence to the precepts of Christ came a stress on pacifism or, minimally, a revulsion from any but purely defensive war. In following what they understood to be the implications of the precepts of Christ, some of the
Unitarian nobles in Little Poland, Ruthenia, and Volhynia freed their serfs so that they might be brethren with them in the present life. They also

occasionally exchanged the sword of the lord or magnate for a wooden staff like that of the Hutterite communitarian Anabaptists in Moravia. A party within the Minor Church tried to achieve a fraternal union with the Hutterites, and failing this, modeled the early Rakw 1569-72 as a Polish Bruderhof but with lords, pastors, and artisans as equal members. In Lithuania, which retained its distinctive administrative, military,

Theological Studies, vol. 30 Missoula, Montana, 1978, is largely limited to the

Unitarians in their constitutional and confessional setting. The term "Polish" was commonly appropriated by Ukrainians at the time. It is of interest that the almost wholly Polonized Czech Brethren in the Commonwealth retained their confessional and ethnic designation.

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judicial, and monetary arrangements even after the Union of Lubhin of 1569, the Unitarians, it is true, tended to remain pedobaptist, like their
much more numerous Calvinist confreres. At the same time, they became

more strictly unitarian than the Polish Brethren in that many ceased to adore Christ as the exalted King of the Cosmos, of the kingdoms of this world, and of the Church of the faithful followers of his precepts. On magistracy and war the Lithuanian Brethren remained or again became conservative, believing in the legitimacy of office-holding and opposing only aggressive wars. In this differentiation between the Polish Brethren
in the narrower sense and the Lithuanian Brethren in the narrower sense,

or Budnyites after Simon Budny, there was nevertheless a general

feeling that together they constituted a single Church of the Brethren.

Because the Brest Bible, sponsored by Nicholas the Black in 1563, had proved unsatisfactory, Budny was encouraged to undertake its revision; undertaking the task, he finally dispensed with the Vulgate and western vernacular translations and translated into Polish directly from the Hebrew Nesvezh, 1572 and the Greek Nesvezh, 1575. The former was much admired by rabbis who noted clearly Judaizing trends in Budnys creative lexicology. His translation and general non-adorant, nonpacifist stance earned him the charge of being a Judaizer from the Polish Brethren in Little Poland, Ruthenia, Volhynia, and Podolia, as well as the appellation "Jewish atheist" from the less radical Brethren. He, however, still regarded himself as a Christian and, like the adorants and pacifists among the Brethren, held to believers baptism and observed the Lords Supper. Budny defended his Christian unitarian faith, article by article, from within the Brotherhood in Oprzednieyszych wiary Christiaskiey artiku/ech Losk, 1576, approved by the Brethren in the Grand Duchy. After some compromising on both sides within the Polish-LithuanianUkrainian Minor Church, Budny was condemned as a Judaizer already noted in Part I: B for his "wicked opinions and acts" at a synod in Luslawice near Cracow in 1582, and again at a synod in Wgrw Uhriv in Podlachia in 1584. In all likelihood, it is against the background of Jewish proselytism and Budnys move from Calvinism to a Christian Uni tarianism markedly altered by Budnys high respect for the Old Testa ment similar to that of his ally among Transylvanian Unitarians, Jacob Palaeologus that some of the "Pseudo-Kurbskii" letters to Ukrainians see Part I: B were written. This is probable also because the Budnyite Unitarians came to mingle sometimes indistinguishably with the more pacifistic and adorant type of Unitarians associated by 1580 with Faustus Socinus.
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There are further distinctions to be made in the congeries of congrega tions calling themselves the Minor Church in Poland proper, in the Grand Duchy as of 1569, and in the Ukraine. Socinus, a somewhat camouflaged pacifist in dealings with the Lithuanian Brethren, was known to the

Polish Brethren, whose spokesman he had rapidly become, as an un compromisin opponent of baptism, which he viewed as a rite of the
Primitive Church long since superseded and useful only in marking an

occasional convert from Judaism or Islam. This Socinian view was incor porated in the Racovian Catechism in Polish of 1605, although the Brethren appear to have observed the provision in the breach. Thus the Minor Church included some Socinian mostly Polish anti-baptists,
-

some Polish, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian immersionists on the confession of faith, and some hold-out Lithuanian pedobaptists.25 There was one more doctrine of considerable internal importance to many, but not all, the members of the Minor Church throughout the Commonwealth. Already part of the theology of some of the Brethren, it seems to have received special impetus from Socinus. The doctrine held that the soul dies with the body and that only the righteous will be resur rected and reanimated at the Second Advent of Christ, when the punish ment of the wicked will consist of Christs humane decision not to awaken them from their eternal sleep, unless it be momentarily to behold what they could have enjoyed had they followed his precepts in life.26 This view may have an Italian Marrano, Valdesian from Juan de Valds or

perhaps even, indirectly, a Jewish source, for the ancient Jews and
medieval rabbis tended to believe in a limited resurrection of Jews and

righteous Gentiles.
Such a body of beliefs and practices, not wholly harmonized either by

region or generation from 1563 to the expulsion of the Brethren from the
Commonwealth in 1660, cannot be called "Arianism" in any sense in which that term was used in Christian antiquity. This remains true even though today the term is widely used, especially in Polish, Lithuanian,

and Ukrainian studies, to refer to the Brethren. This usage has become current largely because the designation "Arian" and the ascription of that

25 Although the Lithuanian Brethren were largely autonomous and differed in some ways from the main body in Crown Poland, they, too, called themselves Polish Brethren. Only the opponents in Crown Poland called their extremists Budnyites. The main group that broke away from the Minor Church were the Ditheists, also called Farnovians, after their leader Stanislas Farnowski. 26 I have dealt with Socinuss eschatology in Polish Brethren, doc. 3: D.

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GEORGE H. WILLIAMS

ancient heresy to the Brethren brought about their banishment from the

Commonwealth in 1660.
How did such a body of beliefs and practices emerge in the Reformed

congregations so quickly after the death of Laski?

The first answer must be that a tendency towards unitarianism in the strict theological sense is perhaps endemic in the Reformed position,

because salvation is preeminently located in the eternal decrees of God,

only one of which was the foreseen historic atoning event on Calvary. In nearby Transylvania the Reformed Church also split, at about the same time, into a trinitarian and a unitarian body. The Unitarians there, however, remained largely pedobaptist and came to refuse to adore Christ, thus being more like the Lithuanian Budnyites than the Polish-

Ukrainian Brethren.
The second and more commonly advanced answer, especially for the rise of Unitarianism in ethnic Poland, is the influence of the large number of Italians of a rationalist bent. Although drawn to Calvin rather than Luther and often sojourning in Geneva before moving on to the Commonwealth or to Transylvania, they subjected the received doctrine

of the Trinity to such intensive questioning in the philological and critical tradition of Lorenzo Valla that they wittingly or unwittingly unraveled
the traditional doctrines of the Trinity and Christology. In the Common wealth Laelius Socinus and, especially, Francesco Lismanino, Francesco Stancaro, and Dr. Giorgio Biandrata must be considered foremost

figures. 27
While accepting this explanation for the early emergence of Unitarian ism in the Commonwealth, I would wish to ascribe something of the devolution of the doctrine of the Trinity in Poland to Calvin and Laski themselves. After becoming Protestant, the Franciscan confessor of Bona Sforza, Lismanino, urged Calvin to take an active role in guiding the Reformation in an Helvetic direction throughout the Commonwealth, which he proceeded to do. But as soon as Laski arrived, the overcom mitted Calvin let his correspondence drop. An intra-Reformed controversy arose at Konigsberg in which Stancaro charged the Lutheran deviant Andrew Osiander with subordination for

All three and others, too, are perspicaciously dealt with by Lorenz Hem, Italien ische Protestanten und ihr Einfluss auf die Reformation in Polen. .. vor dem Sando mirer Konsensus Leiden, 1974. For their role in the devolution of the doctrine ofthe Trinity, see my "The Polish-Lithuanian Calvin," in Essays in Honor of Ford Lewis Battles, ed. by Brian Gerrish Pittsburgh, Pa., forthcoming.
27

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his interest in distinguishing the roles of Christ in the atonement and in justification. Concurrently, Stancaro held that he alone was faithful to the tradition common to Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox alike. As

a major Italian Hebraist who had also mastered the Midrash and
Cabbala, Stancaro argued -correctly, in terms of Anselm of Canterbury and Peter Lombard - that Christ could not be the mediator between God and man in his divine nature, for this would make Christs deity inferior to

the Fathers. Instead of supporting this traditional Catholic view of the

atonement, Calvin, with his penal theory, turned out to be confusing. Also, because of his virtual interruption of correspondence and super vision of the Reformed churches in the Commonwealth in deference to Laski, Calvin was not readily heeded by the churches when, stirred by the controversy of Stancaro, he resumed correspondence in 1560.28 More over, because of the subordinationism that Calvin had expressed in his Responsum 1557 to George Biandrata and the Reformed in the Commonwealth, in which he spoke of the Person of the Mediator in both natures as having the role of a medius gradus middle rank, he

unwittingly contributed to the process of the devolution of Christology and then Triadology. Two additional letters to the Reformed in the Commonwealth, in which Calvin tried to dissociate himself from
Stancaro, only worsened the situation.29 When these letters of Calvin are

considered with some of the above-mentioned distinctive traits of Laski, notably his view of God and primarily God the Father as Deus Optimus Maximus and his refusal to allow his synod to have recourse to any but
the Apostolic Creed, it is not surprising that the movement toward antitrinitarianism spread rapidly. Laski, follower of both Erasmus and Calvin, emerges, then, as the unwitting father of Unitarianism in the

Commonwealth.
Not long after his death one of Laskis major intra-Protestant ecu

menical concerns was consummated.3 Stimulated in part by the greater

See Nancy Conradt, "John Calvin, Theodore Beza and the Reformation in Poland" Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, l974,andaforthcomingarticle by Jill Raitt, "The Person of the Mediator: Calvins Christology and Bezas Fidelity." 29 "Responsum ad quaestiones Georgii Blandratae," Corpus Reformatorum here after CR, vol. 37. The two additional letters are "Responsum ad Fratres Polonos quomodo Mediator sit Christus ad refutandum Stancari errorem" 1560, CR 37: 333-42, and "Ministrorum Ecclesiae Genevensis responsio ad Nobiles Polones et Franciscum Stancarum Mantuanum de controversiis Mediatonis" 1561, CR 37:
28

345-58.

For intra-Protestant and Protestant-Orthodox relations in the Commonwealth with material on the Ukraine, see Kai Eduard Jordt Jrgensen, Okumenische Bestre
30

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GEORGE H. WILLIAMS

consolidation of the Commonwealth in the Union of Lublin 1569,

through the already mentioned Agreement of Vilnius and the Consensus of Sandomierz both of 1570, the Czech Brethren, the Lutherans outside
Ducal Prussia, and the Calvinists, with seven of the followers of Stancaro

submitting at Sandomierz, joined in a federal pan-Protestant union theoretically coterminous with the Grand Duchy and the rest of the
Commonwealth, respectively. The three bodies agreed to keep their respective confessions as mutually compatible. The Calvinists had but recently accepted the Second Swiss Confession 1566 translated into Polish by Paul Gilowski, which he modified only in the new section on the Lords Supper. The Unitarians were expressly excluded from the Agree ment and the Consensus. The delegates who drew up the Consensus and deliberated from 9 to 14 May 1570, opened their Consensus with ref erence to churches of one confession or another, present by delegation, from "Russia," meaning thereby the palatinate of Ruthenia.3 The

federating confessions agreed to hold Commonwealth-wide joint synods

every five years; actually, however, the Sandomierz Confederates man aged to convene only four times in the sixteenth century, at Cracow, Piotrkw, Wlodzislaw, and Toru.32 Their General Synod of 1586 in Wlodzislaw was the first to authorize the printing of the Consensus.

In the deliberations of Sandomierz the Lutherans, headed by their superintendent for Great Poland, Erasmus Gliczner, were the most rigid. The Czech Brethren, who were the least conspicuously represented, were perhaps the most creative: the colloquy took place, moreover, half-way between their home base in Bohemia-Moravia and their extensive settle ments in Great Poland. As fashioners of what they may have considered
bungen unter den polnischen Protestanten bis zum Jahre 1645 Copenhagen, 1942, and Ambroise Jobert, De Luther a Mohila. La Pologne dans la crise de Ia Chrtient, 1517-1648 Paris, 1974.
3!

An English version of the Consensus may be found in Edmund de Schweinitz, The History of the Church Known as the Unity of the Brethren Bethlehem, Pa., 1885, pp. 354-56. The standard monograph is by Oskar Halecki, Zgoda sandomierska 1570 r. Warsaw and Cracow, 1915. The most recent study is by J. Lehmann, Konfesja sandomierska na tIe innych konfesfi w Polsce XVI wieku Warsaw, 1937. An

important account of Sandomierz and of the Brethren in the Commonwealth is that of Jzef Lukaszewicz, 0 ko.iciolach Braci Czeskich w dawnej Polsce Pozna, 1835,
trans. G. W. T. Fischer, Von den Kirchen der Bhmischen Bruder im ehemaligen Grosspolen Graz, 1877. It leaves out, however, 155 pages of listings of bishops,

schools, churches, etc. 32 De Schweinitz, History of the Church Known as the Unity, p.4V7, gives only three, while Jobert, De Luther a Mohila, p. 140, says there were four, which he dates, without reference to place, to 1573, 1578, 1583 undoubtedly an error, correctly 1586, and 1595 Toru.

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the "first Reformation," the Czech Brethren were aware of their strategic position between the Lutherans and the Calvinists in matters of both belief and practice. Moreover, they were fully Polonized, with a school in Leszno and another major center in Ostrorg. At the time of the colloquy, there were one hundred Lutheran and sixty-five Czech Brethren congre gations in Great Poland.33 The fact that only the palatinate of Ruthenia is mentioned as being represented would confirm the general observation that Protestantism in the Byzantine-rite lands of the Crown began mostly after 1570. Of indirect interest to the narration of Reformation events relevant to the Ukraine is the fact that the chief magnate among the Czech Brethren was a theologian who figured prominently in a delegation to Ivan IV. With the Union of Lubhin, Muscovys threat to the Grandy Duchy which had been a major factor in the union and the Duchys territorial conces sions to the Crown became a threat to the more fully integrated Com monwealth. Accordingly, Sigismund II had already settled upon sending a large delegation to Moscow, to discuss an armistice, trade relations, and possibly religion. On both sides lay the consideration that if religious differences could be worked out, the tsar might in fact become a con tender for the elective kingship of the Commonwealth, since the present king was childless. Sigismunds delegation consisted of 718 persons and an additional 643 merchants. Among the delegates were Czech Brother Raphael Leszczyski, starosta of Radziejw, and Czech Brother John Rokyta, as theologian. The negotiators arrived in Moscow 3 March 1570, but, because of the absence of the tsar, who was in Novgorod, they did not deal with him directly until May. From the outset of the talks, the reli gious exchange was most difficult: on 10 May, Ivan called the religious delegation "vos porci," before which he would not cast Orthodox pearls. Later, however, he did ask for written statements respecting Protestant ism and gave the delegates presents.34 While Protestantism in the Ukraine was expanding through the ongoing settlements of Polish Brethren and the indigenous development of local organizations of Reformed and some few Unitarian congrega tions, a notable ecumenical episode was taking place. It is possible that
33 34

Jrgensen, Okumenische Bestrebungen, p. 276, fn. 1. Joseph Th. MUller, Geschichte der Bhmischen Brflder, 3 vols. Herrnhut, 192231, 3: 146-49. A major source is Jan Laskis De Russorum, Moscoviticarum et Tartarorum religione.. . Spires, 1582. Also see Valerie Tumins, Tsar Ivan/Vs Reply to Jan Rokyta The Hague, 1971, which is a facsimile edition of the Russian and Polish versions with English translations.

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the discreet Italian anabaptist unitarian philosopher of the medical faculty of Padua, Dr. Nicholas Buccella, may have been a small factor in the spread of immersionist Unitarianism among East Slays. In the war against Muscovy under Stephen Batory 1576-86, Russian prisoners, presumably men of some rank, were lodged in Cracow with Dr. Bucella, personal physician to the king. Some have thought his Russian charges were orphans. He converted the lodgers to his views, and in his Testa mentum made substantial provision for them as they dispersed east ward.35 The three confessions of Sandomierz made to counter the general harassment of Protestants and to head off the bruited and actually imminent union of Latin-rite and Byzantine-rite Christians, which Skarga had called for as early as 1577 and which was to culminate in the Union of Brest at a series of synods and colloquies there and in Cracow and Rome in 1595-96 definitely reaffirmed their pan-Protestant unity. Already in advance of the first synod of Brest, the three Protestant con fessions felt themselves to be strongly threatened by King Sigismund III Vasa 1587-1632 and his Jesuit advisors. Confident in the privileges granted all Protestants including the Unitarians inthepaxdissidentium of 1573 insisted on by all Protestant groups in return for supporting Henry of Valois, their representative lay and clerical leaders at the diet of Cracow in 1594 concurred in sending out an invitation for a general synod of the three confessions, to meet in Toru, in St. Marys Lutheran Church, 2 1-26 August 1595. Protestants from all parts of the Common wealth, and specifically large numbers of Calvinist nobles from the pala tinates of Ruthenia, Volhynia, Podolia, Bratslav, and Kiev, flocked to Toru. They reaffirmed the Consensus and authorized a deputation to parley with the king; despite the eminence of its members, the delegation was to effect nothing. Through this experience, however, the three con fessions recovered their sense of a common destiny in the face of increas ing hazards. Their feeling of desperation brought about the idea of approaching the non-Uniate Orthodox clergy with a view to extending the principle of federal Consensus to include holdouts among the Orthodox in the Com monwealth. In the meantime the initiative had already been. taken by a major Orthodox prince who had sent observers to Toru. Prince Basil Constantine Ostrozkyi of Ostroh in Volhynia, the palatine
-

See Aldo Stella,

DallAnabattismo al Socinianesimo Padua, 1967, p. 193.

PROTESTANTS IN THE UKRAINE

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of Kiev whom we met as the correspondent of Pseudo-Kurbskii, had originally favored the Roman-Orthodox Union, but only on the condi tion that all the Patriarchs, as well as the Pope, concur in an ecumenical council. Indeed, it had been he who, having the right of advowson to the Orthodox see of Volodymyr, first convinced its widowed castellan, a semi-Calvinist educated at Cracow, Hypatius Potii Pociej, to become a monk, hence eligible for episcopal promotion and to provide Orthodox leadership toward union. As the Uniate movement seemed to be getting out of control, however, Prince Ostrozkyi took the initiative even during the Protestant General Synod of Toru in 1595 and then, more urgently, in 1596. He defended Orthodoxy and proposed bringing together the Protestant three of Vilnius-Sandomierz,. now of Toru, with the Ortho dox in Vilnius in 1599.36 In his immediate defense of Orthodoxy Prince Ostrozkyi, who had already established an Orthodox academy at Ostroh sometime before 1581, now engaged a Protestant to write, under the pseudonym of "Christopher Philaleth," Apocrisis or Reply to the Book of the Synod of Brest, given in vehement haste... in the name ofthepeople ofthe ancient Greek Religion Vilnius: in Polish, 1597; in Ruthenian, 1598. The work has been ascribed both to the Unitarian Christopher Broski and to the Calvinist Martin Broniewski on whom see below.37 At the colloquy of Vilnius on the side of the Czech Brethren there were, among others, Lord Andrew Leszczyski, palatine of Brze-Kujawski, and Senior Bishop Simon Theophilus Tarnowski Turnowski of Ostrorg;38 on the side of the Lutherans, Erasmus Gliczner, superin tendent of the Lutherans of Great Poland, and the German and the Polish

An account of the colloquy in Yilnius is given by Jzef Lukaszewicz, Dzieje koiciotw wyznania helweckiego w Litwie. 2 vols. Pozna, 1841-43; probably trans lated by the author, Geschichte der reform irten Kirchen in Lithauen, 2 vols. Leipzig, 1848-50. The authors of this and other older accounts did not have direct knowledge of the signed and sealed document, which is presented in five plates by Domet Oljanyn, "Zur Frage der Generalkonfederation zwischen Protestanten und Ortho doxen in Wilna 1599," Kyrios 1 1936: 29-46. The text was in the Royal Secret Archives in Konigsberg. Tracing the history of the interpretation of the colloquy, Oljanyn holds that, despite the lack of any Orthodox signatures, the document still had validity, as subsequent joint actions clearly indicate. Jrgensen, Okumenische Bestrebungen, pp. 323ff., accepts these findings. 370n these two, see Kazimierz Chodynicki, PSB, 2: 426ff. Tazbir, "Na ziemiach ukraiskich," p. 111, ascribes the work without question to Broski and says it was published "on the Arian press in Cracow." 38 In Great Poland the Czech Brethren called their elected Bishop senior and the other ministers conseniores. MUller, Geschichte der Bhmischen Brder, 3: 408-410.
36

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GEORGE H. WILLIAMS

preacher in Vilnius; on the side of the Calvinists, Grand Hetman Christo pher I Nicholas Radvila Radziwill, castellan of Vilnius two of whose four wives belonged to the Ostrozkyi family, his son George, palatine of Brest, and Superintendent Daniel Mikolajewski; on the side of the Ortho dox, besides the prince, his son Alexander, palatine of Volhynia, Senator and Castellan Gregory George Sangushko of Bratslav, Metropolitan Luke of Bilhorod,4 Hegumen Isaac and Archdeacon Gideon, both of Dubno. The two staunchly Orthodox bishops in the Commonwealth, Gideon Balaban of Lviv and Michael Kopystenskyi of Peremyshl, although urgently invited by Prince Ostrozkyi, did not attend for unex plained reasons.4 A preliminary meeting of representatives of the three federated con fessions and the Orthodox took place before the arrival of Leszczyski and Radvila in the palace of Prince Ostrozkyi at Vilnius. The greeting of Archimandrite Isaac to Bishop Tarnowski, which he spoke with hand extended, augured ill: "I greet you, although the Scriptures forbid us to greet heretics." Tarnowski gently expressed surprise that he and his com panions could be so readily identified as heretics. Ostrozkyi opened the proceedings with the hope that an accord could be reached: "If God the Lord would permit union between our Greek and your Evangelical Church, I would be ready tomorrow to leave this world with joy." And when after a hopeful intervention by Lutheran Gliczner, Metropolitan Luke said that union on the basis of mutual concessions was in vain, Ostrozkyi rebuked him: "If our clergy decline union, let the devil take them." Tarnowski was the key figure in a temporary reconciliation. The Church in Bohemia, of which his in Great Poland was a branch, had earlier sought to establish contact with the Eastern Church. The retention of many medieval institutions and an orthodox ethos made the Polish Czech Brethren and their chief theologian in the colloquy of Vilnius the most important resource, on the Protestant side, in seeking a basis for a political confederation or a common front against Roman and Byzantinerite Catholicism on the ascendancy. Basing their pact on the PolishLithuanian constitutional principle of a parliamentary confederation, Wlodzimierz Dworzaczek, Genealogia Warsaw, 1959, table 163. Jobert, De Luther a Mohila, takes the name as referring to Belgrade, but the same Latin word also stood for Ukrainian Bilhorod. 41 A Calvinist source for the colloquy, utilized by writers already cited, is that of
O

Andrzej Wegierski, Libri quattuor Slavoniae Reformatae 2nd ed. Amsterdam, 1679; Janusz Tazbir, Warsaw, 1973, pp. 478-503. He does not refer to the failure of the two Orthodox bishops to appear.

facsimile ed. by

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grounded in this case expressly on the Confederation of Warsaw of 1573 with its pax dissidentium de religione, the assembled agreed, on 3 May 1599, that they should consider themselves "a body under the one single Head the Lord Jesus Christ" and that they should send representative observers to the synods of each group and mutually defend each others religious rights locally and generally within the provisions of the consti tution of the Commonwealth.42 It was established that 126 "general provisors" would be elected to convene, confer, and uphold the religio political agreement: three Orthodox Senators headed by Prince Os trozkyi, sixteen Orthodox Deputies, twenty non-Unitarian Protestant Senators, and eighty-seven Protestant Deputies. The Polish text of the agreement shows that although there were enough waxed spaces for the full number of participants to sign and imprint with their seals, only eighty-six fifty-four with seals all of them Protestant actually did so. It has sometimes been argued that the Orthodox had a Ruthenian version of the document, but this would appear to have been, in fact, another document of similar purport and period brought out by the Orthodox brotherhood of Vilnius.43 It would appear that Cyril Lucaris, at the time the representative of his uncle Patriarch Meletius Pigas of Alexandria, dissuaded the Orthodox from signing the document of con federation, although many of the Orthodox lords proceeded to act in accord with its intentions. They apparently agreed among themselves that nothing further could be done until Patriarchs Matthew II of Constan tinople and Meletius Pigas of Alexandria replied endorsing the agree ment. The colloquy adjourned 5 June 1599. Six leading Protestant clergymen sent a letter to the patriarch of Constantinople, appealing for his support of the Vilnius accord.44 It is possible that the joint letter to Constantinople was intercepted by Jesuits.
-

The full Polish text is translated into German by 0ljanyn, "Zur Frage der Generalkonfederation," pp. 31ff. Oljanyn, "Zur Frage der Generalkonfederation," pp. 37ff. Wgierski, Libri quattuor, pp. 491-94. It is important to clarify the patriarchal situation. The Orthodox of the Commonwealth were under the patriarch of Con stantinople and the metropolitan of Kiev; the latter city was an integral part of the Commonwealth and the seat of one of its palatinates. After the union, the Uniate metropolitans were Michael Rohozha, 1588/96-99, Hypatius Potii Pociej, 1600-13, Joseph IV Rutskyi, 1614-37, etc. In 1620 a complete new Orthodox hierarchy was instituted, with Job Boretskyi, 1620-33, Isaac Boryshkevych, 1633, Peter Mohyla, 1633-47, etc. In Constantinople Matthew II was patriarch for the first time in 1595. Two patriarchs ruled briefly, followed by Meletius Pigas of Alexandria as Locum tenens, 1597-98, and Matthew II a second time, 1598-1602. The instability of the throne in Istanbul made Patriarch Meletius Pigas of Alexandria the key figure.

42

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GEORGE H. WILLIAMS

The letter of Tarnowski alone to Meletius Pigas as locum tenens of Con stantinople 1597-98 while also patriarch of Alexandria, in which he referred to the earlier contacts of the Czech Brethren with Patriarch Nicodemus of Constantinople in 1440, is dated 4 June l599.5 Patriarch Meletius, who probably received several accounts of the colloquy from his own clergy, sent a response to his nephew Archimandrite Cyril Lucaris, who had been his representative at the Union Synod of Brest.46 Destined to become himself successively patriarch of Alexandria and fearful of then of Constantinople, Exarch Cyril Lucaris was unwilling to make known what was apparently the the king and the Catholics somewhat favorable response of his uncle, which he discussed only privately in Volhynia.47 Bishop Tarnowski did get a brief letter from Meletius, as did Lord Martin Broniewski, who, with another noble, had first spoken in the name of Prince Constantine at the outset of the gather ing in Vilnius. Both letters, dated December 1600, refer to the reply carried by Cyril Lucaris as exarch and as the Alexandrine patriarchs authorized spokesman.48
-

Harvard University To be Continued

Wgierski, Libri quattuor, pp. 495ff. Cyril Lucaris was briefly head of a brotherhood college in Vilnius and personally opposed the union. He became patriarch of Alexandria from 1602 to 1620, and of Constantinople, with interruptions, from 1620 to 1638. The main modern work on him is that of G. A. Hadjiantoniou, Protestant Patriarch: The Life of Cyril Lucaris London, 1961. I have dealt with his double-predestinarian Confessiofidei in Latin and Greek 1629, 1631 and with other aspects of this unusual figure, so prominent in Commonwealth interconfessional intrigue that he became a Calvinist in a major doctrine to oppose the Catholics, "New England Puritan Interest in the Christian East," Andover Newton Quarterly 15 1975: 267-77. Wgierski, Libri quattuor. p. 497. 48 Wgierski, Libri quattuor, pp. 497ff.
46

THE COMMONWEALTH AND THE COSSACKS IN THE FIRST QUARTER OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
WLADYSLAW A. SERCZYK

The Cossacks rapid creation of the foundations for a state and their subsequent, partially successful attempts to attain sovereignty constitute a unique historical phenomenon. This development deserves special attention because the Cossack society comprised elements that were immigratory, multinational, and disparate in tradition, language, and religion. For on the sparsely settled Dnieper territories, peoples mixed as in an alchemists cauldron: the local population with Poles, Russians, Tatars, Turks and refugees from all areas of the Russian Empire. It is perhaps due to their very diversity that none of these groups became dominant, and that they did not, at first, conflict. Each group considered itself to be in a similar situation vis--vis the laws of its native state, and each regarded the others as equals. None consciously attempted to impose its own point of view. The formation of the new social organism therefore followed a natural course, free from external legislation or constraints. In this regard the formation of the Cossack system was an excellent instance of the coming together of peasants from various lands. It proved, for instance, that even considerable differences in the degree of indemp tion do not always play as central a role in defining a particular group as does its place in the hierarchical structure of feudal society and the extent of its dependence on feudal landholders. Fleeing to the Dnieper terri tories was the peasant obliged to pay rent as well as the peasant forced to work on the noblemans manor, the Russian subject oppressed by the boyar as well as the Tatar ura totally dependent on his immediate superior. The refugees who crossed the rapids of the Dnieper were alike in that virtually all were young, usually under the age of thirty. For the most part, they did not leave behind wives or children, but parents who took pride in their valor and counted on their glorious return. The fleeing

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young men knew nothing about constructing stable governments: they had lived under traditional governments and ossified administrations that had taken form over centuries. Soon, however, they were obliged to work out viable political and social substitutes for the systems left behind. Some form of organization had to be devised not only because of the need to regulate and, subsequently, to codify the relations of the com munitys various groups, but also because of the need to defend newly acquired personal freedom. The refugees were threatened both by their magnates and gentry who mounted private crusades former landlords for their recapture and by neighboring states, i.e., the Commonwealth, Muscovy, the Crimean Tatar state, and the Ottoman Empire. Each state greedily eyed the Dnieper lands and planned their pacification through preemptive campaigns, well aware of the folly of allowing a powerful military organization to emerge on neighboring territory. These powerful and continual external pressures mobilized the refu gees to create a military organization which gradually became a political government. As their own historical at first, oral only tradition came into being and the population of the Zaporozhian territories grew along with the wealth of the enterprising individuals who held Cossack offices, property stratification first became evident. In the first decades of organ ized Cossack existence, the distinctions did not have the character of feudal stratification and did not exemplify the classical feudal relation ship. With time, however, local peasants and impoverished "Zaporozhian comrades" fell into a state of dependence on their erstwhile equal coinhabitants. The forming of such a set of relationships, even in germinal form, required a parallel strengthening of the then developing legal and governmental structure. This, then, was the third factor speeding the birth of an infant state in the Zaporozhe. The preceding analysis supports Hrulevskyjs statement that "the Eastern Ukraine came to be the center of opposition" to tendencies occurring in the Commonwealth. However, one must keep in mind that this opposition was only one of the forms taken by the anti-feudal struggle of the subject populace. Flight, the most common form of opposition to feudal exploitation, was elsewhere a process similar toperpetuum mobile. Peasants fled from one village to the next, from estate to estate, and from landholder to land holder, hoping to improve their lot. After a brief hiatus, during which
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M. Hrutevskyj, Istorija Ukrajiny-Rusy, vol. 7 Kiev and Lviv, 1909, p. 2.

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they may have evaded work and taxes, the refugeeslots became similar to or even worse than before. They could then look forward only to yet another escape and new disillusionments. Alternatively, the quest for a better existence ended with flight to the Zaporozhe. There the refugees found an order which resembled the model of gentry equality which they had believed to be unattainable. For in the Zaporozhe every Cossack was formally the equal of his comrades in rights and privileges. Once word of the Zaporozhian system spread among the populace of neighboring states, the number of newcomers greatly increased and the potential for internal struggles of a national, or, to a lesser degree, of a religious nature grew. During the early existence of the Zaporozhian Sich the Cossacks were rather indifferent to religious questions. As the organization of the Sich strengthened, it could, and did, impose its own models of behavior on its members. External threats, as noted above, favored and speeded processes of consolidation. During this period a peculiar kind of military democracy was formed which gradually became a typical feudal organism. To an increasing degree, its offices and positions were awarded not according to an indi viduals capacities and talents, but to his wealth and the size of his property. By the mid-sixteenth century, the Commonwealth was attempting to use the Cossacks for the realization of its own political goals. On the one hand, it treated them as simply a gathering of bandits, brawlers, and outlaws hence its constant attempts to restrict their movement by a series of royal prohibitions and threats. On the other, it attempted to pit them against the Commonwealths enemies to the east. On 20 November 1568, just six months prior to the Union of Lubhin, Zygmunt August published a proclamation directed to "the Cossacks, our subjects," who, he wrote, "departing from our Ukrainian ukrain nych forts and towns without our sovereign permission or knowledge or that of our Ukrainian starosty, now live in the Nyz, on the [lower] Dnieper, in the fields, and in other places." The king reported that the Cossacks, "living a licentious life yjqc swawolnie raid and rob the subjects of the Turkish sultan, the herdsmen and Tatars of the Perekop Khan, and their campsites and grazing grounds. Zygmunt August reminded the Cossacks that they are governed by the treaty signed with both Turkey and the Tatars, and that such behavior on their part could lead to its abrogation. "All of the Ukraine and the counties beyond it know well what damages and captivity" could result. The king forbade further attacks and threat,"

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ened severe punishment "against those breaking the general peace."2 Twelve years later Stefan Batory published a similar proclamation addressed to the officials and gentry in the Ukraine. He wrote: Knowing full well how important it is for us and the Commonwealth that the treaties that we have with the Turks, the Tartars, and the Wallachians be honorably adhered to, not only at the present time when we are occupied in
fighting the Muscovite [state], but for all time, we thus also did not neglect... to make certain that from our side no cause be given by licentious men for our neigh bors to break the treaties and the general peace.

The "licentious people ludzie swawolne" violating the treaties were to be seized, imprisoned, and held awaiting further orders.3 Ten years later, Zygmunt III announced the decision of the Common wealths Diet to establish a military unit of a thousand men Cossacks, to be sure under the command of the starosta of Sniatyn, Mikolaj z Buczacza Jazlowiecki. Their orders were "with all diligence and effort to keep peace with the neighboring states and to prevent any man from invading these neighboring states and inflicting damage." Zygmunt III also ordered the construction of a small wooden fort on the Dnieper to serve as a permanent station for the unit. The threats and repressive measures of the authorities were of small avail: in subsequent years complaints about "Cossack licentiousness" became ever more numerous. Concurrently, however, due to the Com monwealths increasing involvement in the east, attempts were made to use the Cossacks as auxiliary forces for patrolling the borderlands. This, surely, came as no small shock to the gentry of the eastern territories, which was accustomed to viewing the Zaporozhian Cossacks either as runaway serfs or as an organized band of thieves. The Muscovite state had a "line" of fortifications defending it against the Tatars. The Commonwealth, however, chose a different means fot defending its borders.5 In 1575, Cossacks inducted into Polish military service numbered 300; in 1578, they were joined by 500 new recruits, and
2

Arxiv Jugo-Zapadnoj Rossii hereafter AJZR, Pt. 3, vol. 1 Kiev, 1863, pp. 4-6, proclamation to the Cossacks, dated 20 November 1568, issued in Warsaw. AJZR, pt. 3, vol. 1, pp. 12-13, doe. 5Stefan Batorys proclamation to the officials and gentry of the Ukrainian palatinates, dated January 1580, in Warsaw. AJZR, pt. 3, vol. 1, pp. 28-30, doc. 11 Zygmunt IIIs proclamation regarding the creation of a unit to prevent the Cossacks from raiding neighboring states, dated 25 July 1590, in Cracow. This was already recognized by F. Rawita-Gawroski in his otherwise tendentious book, Kozaczyzna ukrainna w Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej do koca XVIII wieku: Zarys polityczno-historyczny Warsaw, Cracow, and Lublin, 1922, p. 42.

doe. 3 Zygmunt Augusts

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soon thereafter, by 600 more. Polish units fighting against Moscow included at least an additional 1,500 Cossack volunteers. In 1590, the Diet passed a law entitled "Porzdek z strony Niowcw i Ukrainy,"6 some provisions of which were announced in Zygmunt IIIs proclamation of November 1568. With the laws implementation, the number of Cos sacks included in the register i.e., in the employ of the state grew to 3,000, divided into 2,000 infantry and 1,000 cavalry. At the same time, the king was authorized to grant portions of the Ukrainian "desert lands" to the gentry. Consequently the Commonwealth became more involved in Ukrainian affairs than ever before. By creating a network of landed properties in effect, magnate estates and by cultivating lands that had been sparsely settled, the state was advancing two ends: on the one hand, it was strengthening the bond between the Ukrainian territories and the rest of the country; on the other, it was making the defense of Polands eastern boundaries a personal concern of the gentry holding property there. Al though both ends were partially realized, it also became apparent that involving the Cossacks in the plans of the Commonwealth was not a task that could be accomplished by the Diets resolution or by the kings proclamation. In 1592 the uprising of Kosynskyj Kosiski broke out. It began as a personal quarrel between Prince Konstantyn Ostrozkyj, the palatine of Kiev, Alexander Vyneveckyj Winiowiecki, subsequently starosta of Cerkasy, and Krytof Kosynskyj, a Volhynian nobleman. However, one can hardly call it, as did one Polish historian, a "private war."7 Very soon the conflict grew into a full-fledged uprising of the Cossacks against the Commonwealth. In 1593 the Diet passed the constitution "0 Nikowcach," which desig nated the Cossacks who were rebelling, plundering, and crossing the countrys boundaries without authority as enemies of the state and traitors to be killed outright.8 But this measure, too, proved ineffectual. In 1595 another uprising began, under the leadership of Semen Nalyvajko, Hryhoryj Loboda, and Matvij avula. It soon reached such proportions that the Commonwealths hetman, Stanislaw lkiewski, was put in command of forces sent to quell it.
-

6 8

Volumina Legum, 2nd ed., vol. 2 St. Petersburg, 1859, pp. 310-11. W. Tomkiewicz, Kozaczvzna ukrainna Lviv, 1939, p. 23. Volumina Legum, 2: 344.

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In 1596, when the synod of Brest led to a union of the Orthodox Church with the Church of Rome a union including all the lands of the Com monwealth a situation arose in which "one was dealing on the one hand with a hierarchy without faithful and on the other, with faithful without hierarchy."9 For whereas the middle and high Orthodox clergy in great majority chose the union, the faithful in great numbers remained with Orthodoxy. Once the division occurred, opponents of the union were obliged to oppose Poland as the bastion of the religion they were reject ing. Since the nearest bastion of Orthodoxy was Muscovy, it was there that the unions opponents looked for support. Consequently, the Com monwealth faced Muscovy not only as an external enemy, but as one that had the support of a considerable part of its own inhabitants. In these circumstances, the Cossacks came out openly for Orthodoxy.
-

* * *

The situation threatened to break out in violence at any moment. Its ele ments were not fully understood in Poland. The Cossacks, too, despite their two major uprisings, were not fully conscious of their own power. Polish policies for resolving the problem did not go beyond plans for using the Cossacks in the Commonwealths wars, and contemporary pub lications consistently called for the complete subjugation of the Ukrainian lands. In commenting on Turkish attempts to liquidate the Cossacks, Krzysztof Palczowski maintained that their success would not benefit Poland, and, in any case, was quite improbable." At this time the Commonwealth was one of the most powerful states in Europe. Triumphant from its victories in the Muscovite campaign, ex panded in territory through the Union of Lublin, the Commonwealth determined the politics of Central and Eastern Europe. The assumption of the Polish throne by the Vasas in 1587 effected a change in political goals. The struggle over the dominium mans Baltici conducted since the time of Zygmunt August was now transformed into the exclusively dynastic politics of the ruling family, which included claims to the Swedish and Muscovite thrones.
Z. Wjcik, Dzikie Pola w ogniu: 0 Kozaczyznie w dawnej Warsaw, 1960, pp. 83-84. 10 J Wereszczyski, Publika ... z strony fundowania szkoly rycerskiej synom koronnym na Ukrainie Cracow, 1594; P. Grabowski, Poiska nizna albo osada polska ... n.p., 1506; S. Starowolski, Pobudka abo rada na zniesienie Tatarw Perekopskich ... Cracow, 1618. I! K. Palczowski, 0 Kozakachjelli ich znie.i czy nie ... Cracow, 1618.

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The magnates growing role in the Commonwealth, as well as the con siderable and ongoing importance of the Polish grain export to the European markets, led to the continuation and strengthening of the policy of eastern expansion and pacification of the fertile Ukrainian lands. Here it must be noted that official colonization was augmented by the spontaneous mass movement of peasants to the less settled territories, which also held a smaller number of gentry. The movement was of such magnitude that even without the colonizing activity of the state and of individual magnates, the Ukrainian lands would have had a developed agricultural infrastructure within a short span of time.2 It was in the Commonwealths interest to resolve the Cossack question quickly and to make the Cossacks an instrument of its eastern policy. At the beginning of the seventeenth century there were only two ways in which Polish-Cossack relations could have been regulated. The first was a negotiated understanding based on principles of alliance and on a treaty against Moscow, the Tatars, and Turkey. This solution would have been very dangerous for the Cossacks, because the three powers could have united to crush any attempts on their part to attain permanent political autonomy especially since such intentions were already evident. It would also presage if not the decline of the Commonwealth on the inter national arena, then at least the appearance of a factor equivalent to Poland, namely, a Russian state. If such a solution were accepted, Poland, in responseto Cossack demands for autonomy, would have been obliged to abolish the limitation of Cossack registry, accept all into its employ, agree to the existence of independent institutions and Cossack offices, and eventually allow the ennoblement of Cossacks. The acts of the gentry and the authorities in the latter half of the sixteenth century on such matters show that this alternative was never even considered. The second solution would have been to crush all the Cossacks at tempts at emancipation, to establish a Polish administration in the terri tories they inhabited, and to place them under Polish jurisdiction. This would have required the complete takeover and effective control of the Cossack army and its utilization for Polish political plans in the east. Given the existence of a coherent and effectively functioning Sich, how ever, and the Cossacks awareness of their distinctive identity and goals, the full subordination of the Cossacks to the Polish state could not be realized.
2 Cf. A. I. Baranovi, Ukraina nakanune osvoboditelnoj vojny serediny XVII v. socialno-ekonomkeskie predposylki vojny Moscow, 1959, pp. 162ff.

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WLADYSLAW A. SERCZYK

Generally, Polish efforts to reach an "understanding" with the Cos sacks were characterized by the absence of any compromise other than partial and forced concessions. By contrast, it seems that at the beginning of the seventeenth century the Cossacks were ready to cooperate closely with the Commonwealth. In 1600, for instance, 2,000 to 3,000 Cossacks led by Samuel Kika, who used the title "hetman," took part in Jan Zamoyskis campaign against Wallachia. In 1601 the Diet of Crown Poland passed a law reinstating the civil rights of Cossacks who had taken part in the uprisings of Kosynskyj and Nalyvajko. The amnesty was to apply only, however, to Cossacks who would take part in the campaign against Sweden. It was promised that the Cossacks status would be legalized and that the inheritance law obtaining in the Commonwealth would be introduced in the Zaporozhe. Assur ances were made that while the Cossacks were fighting Sweden in Livonia their families and property would be fully protected.3 Kika also led the Cossacks in Livonia, but he died during the cam paign, possibly at the hands of his own men the reason may have been his conciliatory policy toward the Polish authorities, who were in no hurry to meet their contractual obligations. The Poles tactics of delay caused the Cossacks to leave Livonia. The result was new troubles for the Commonwealth as the returning units devastated the Belorussian lands along their way home. The Cossacks reappeared in the Ukraine in the spring of 1603. For their services in the Livonian war, given "for only grass and water," the Cos sacks demanded ennoblement.4 Also, they continued to stage raids into Turkish territories. Although occasionally, as "faithful servants" of the king and the Commonwealth "mindful of their knightly duty,"5 the Cossacks did pass on information about Tatar plans, the situation was not at all satisfactory to the Polish authorities. At this time the Commonwealth was becoming ever more seriously involved with Dimitri the Pretender and his claims to the Muscovite throne. In the circumstances, the Commonwealth needed the Cossacks in the war against Russia. It was precisely for this reason that no distraction of Cossack attention to the Turks and Tatars could be permitted. Law lessness could not be tolerated, yet extreme severity might backfire. The
Volumina Legum, 2:40 1. Hrulevskyj, Istorija Ukrajiny-Rusy, 7:319-20. AJZR, pt. 3, vol. 1, pp. 152-53, doe. 45 the proclamation of the Cossack hetman Izapovy, dated 20 January 1605, in Volodymyr.
13 14 5

THE COMMONWEALTH AND THE COSSACKS

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outcome was the Commonwealths return to a policy of half-measures. The Cossacks continued to pillage the borderlands without fear of punishment, and they began to undertake daring and victorious sea cam paigns, sacking Varna, Kihia, Akkerman, Perekop, Sinop, Trebizond, Kaffa, and the environs of Constantinople. It was in these raids that the leadership qualities of the Cossack hetman Petro Konaevy Sahajdanyj first became evident.6 The Turks, fortunately, were involved in a war with Persia and incapable of moving against Poland. The Tatars, how ever, invaded the Commonwealths borders, burned and pillaged settle ments, and took the inhabitants into captivity. In 1609, a decision was made to send the kings commissioners to the Ukraine, since, as was stated in the resolution "0 Kozakach Zaporos kich":
great anarchy and licentiousness do these Cossacks make.., they do not acknowl edge the authority of our starosty nor of their lords, but have their own hetmans

and other forms of their own justice, by which they oppress our towns and
burghers [and] subvert the offices of our officials and of the territorial govern ment.... Finally, with license and against our wishes and without our knowledge

or that of our military authorities, they collect in great numbers and make raids on
our provincial towns and on the castles of the enemy, thus breaking the general

peace and the treaties which we have with our neighbors. In 1604, a large number of Zaporozhians took part in the Moscow campaign of the First Pretender. They remained with him even after most Polish units, fearing the winter and dissatisfied with delayed payments, had returned home.8 Similarly, in 1609, when Zygmunt III and Stanislaw lkiewski set out from the Second Pretenders camp at Tuszyn, the Cossacks continued to join the kings units until they were counted in the scores of thousands.9 The Cossacks both aided the Poles and on their own took cities in Severia. Nonetheless, the Poles found it difficult to treat them as genuine allies, for the Cossacks were not motivated by loyalty to the Common wealth, nor, for that matter, by hostility toward the Russian state. They viewed the Muscovite campaigns as simply another opportunity for material gain, not as a manifestation of their political convictions or sympathies.
Istorija Ukrajinskoji RSR, vol. 1 Kiev, 1967, p. 183. Volumina Legum, 2:465. 8 It was said that they numbered about 8,000 men; see W. Dyamentowski, "Diariusz 1605-09," in Polska a Moskwa wpierwsze/polowie wieku XVII: Zbir materiatw do stosunkwpolsko-rosy/skich za Zygmunta III. ed. A. HirschbergLviv, 1901, p. 14. 9 Hrulevskyj, Istorija Ukra/iny-Rusy, 7:333-34.
6

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WLADYSLAW A. SERCZYK

On 3 February 1613, the king issued a proclamation expressing grati tude to the Cossacks for their participation in the Moscow campaign, particularly for their capture of Putyvl, which the king bestowed on Myxajlo Vyneveckyj.2 But only ten months later, in a proclamation of December 21, also directed to the Cossacks, the king, in a characteristic reversal of policy, stated:
We have received reliable reports that you are collecting into large formations in various places against our orders ... and disregarding the repercussions, and you

not only greatly oppress our outlying provinces, but are also preparing to invade
the Wallachian lands.... We urgently and gravely order you: immediately dis perse your formations and return to your usual places; refrain from doing any further damage to crown territories and dare not to enter the Wallachian lands or those of any other neighboring country.

In the event the order was disobeyed:

we order the army of the Commonwealth and our military officials to act against. you as against enemies of the fatherland and to crush you, and we will exact punishment for your license and disobedience from your belongings, your wives, and your children.2!

In 1614 the Turks threatened Poland with war because of the con tinuing Cossack menace. To be sure, formally the Turks only expressed the desire to organize a pacification campaign against the Zaporozhians, but since that would entail military action within the boundaries of the Commonwealth, there was no question how such a campaign would end. In response, the king requested sufficient troops to secure, with one strike, the southeastern border against a possible Turkish attack and to end, simultaneously, the Cossack swawola. Royal units under the com mand of lkiewski were dispatched to the Ukraine, and orders relayed
by messenger to the Cossacks admonished them not to hinder the units

quartering and collection of supplies. The royal troops, in turn, were ordered not to pick quarrels with the Cossacks, "from which disturbances and the spilling of blood could result."22 Meanwhile, however, Turkey became involved in yet another conflict with Persia, so that the Common wealth again avoided war with the Porte as the troops commanded by Ahmed Pasha turned back from Moldavia. Subsequent events followed the traditional pattern. The only unusual
20 2!

Hruievskyj, Istorija Ukrajiny-Rusy, 7:337.

AJZR, Pt. 3, vol. 1, pp. 191-92, doe. 55 Zygmunt IIIs proclamation to the

Cossacks, dated 21 December 1613, in Warsaw. 22 AJZR, Pt. 3, vol. 1, p. 197, doe. 57 Hetman tkiewskis proclamation to the regular army, dated 20 November 1614, in 2ovkva.

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occurrence was the Zaporozhians dispatch of a delegation to Warsaw, which arrived sometime at the beginning of 1615. The Cossacks exact postulates are unknown: they can only be surmised from the kings answers and from the decisions of a commission of the Commonwealth sent earlier to negotiate with the Cossacks. In both instances, Poland opted to continue its existing policy, which was predicated on three tenets: 1 the Cossacks are the kings subjects, 2 they are obliged to guard the countrys borders without provoking conflicts with its neigh bors, and 3 they must be fully subordinate to the laws of the Common wealth. In return for their loyalty and services, the Cossacks were to receive previously stipulated rewards, which were intended, however, for only a small number of them. 23 The Cossacks, on their part, surely sought to procure autonomy and, possibly, legal equality with the Polish gentry, as had been the case in 1603. While these negotiations were underway, it was learned that the Cossacks had destroyed the suburbs of Constan tinople and defeated a fleet of Turkish ships which sailed in their pursuit. In reprisal, the Tatars had laid waste the borderlands. In late 1616, Zygmunt III issued a proclamation to the Ukrainian gentry forbidding them to supply food, powder, or lead to the Zaporo zhians, and ordering them to stop the Zaporozhians from building boats or ships. Gentry who refused to carry out the royal decree were to be punished by confiscation of property and by death.24 Unsurprisingly, the decree seriously increased the tensions already existing between Poland and the Cossacks. At this point, several serious peasant uprisings broke out, and Cossacks joined the rebels in great numbers. Their hetman, Sahajdanyj, was at that time conducting a pro-Polish policy, motivated in part, it is now surmised, by fears for his own estates.25 Due to Sahajdanyjs attitude and to the diplomatic abilities of lkiewski, the Commonwealth was success ful in negotiating two important treaties.

AJZR, Pt. 3, vol. 1, p. 199, doc. 58 Zygmunt IIIs answer to the Cossacks request, dated April 1615, in Warsaw: that the entire Zaporozhian Host, having been orderly registered by our Commis sioners, remain peacefully in its usual places, that it obey our Hetman, maintain decorum and keep the law, not accept fugitives [into its ranks], not invade foreign countries, not encroach upon Crown territories or those of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania with license and in military formations, and not damage or harass any one.... 24 AJZR, Pt. 3, vol. 1, Pp. 201-202, doe. 59 Zygmunt IIIs proclamation to the Ukrainian gentry, dated 29 December 1616, in Warsaw. 25 Istorija Ukrajins koji RSR, 1: 184.
23

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WLADYSLAW A. SERCZYK

The first agreement, with Iskender Pasha, was signed 23 September 1617, in Bua, near Jaruha in Podolia. It forestalled ajoint Turkish-Tatar expedition against Poland. In the treatys first article, unambiguously entitled "Cossack banditry lotrostwo kozackie," the Commonwealth pledged to prevent further Cossack raids. In return, it received a similar pledge from the Turks regarding the Tatars, on the condition of an annual payment of tribute. 26 The second treaty was signed with the Cossacks on 28 October 1617, in 0lIanycja on the Ros. The agreement was preceded by difficult negotia tions, since !kiewski, who headed the Polish side of the negotiations, had already drafted a treaty which completely ignored the Cossacks demands. His draft established the number of registered Cossacks at 1,000 and banned the supply of food or arms to the Zaporozhians without prior approval by the palatine of Kiev and the starosta of erkasy. 2lkiewskis proposal was unrealistic, as the Polish negotiators them selves were aware. It is not surprising, then, that the final text of the Olanycja treaty expressed in parallel declarations, one Polish and the differed considerably from his draft. The exact number other Cossack of Zaporozhians was not determined, but it was required that: they must turn away all artisans, merchants, innkeepers, village artists butchers, and all, whatever their profession, and all other unattached people, as
...

well as all those who in the last [two] years joined their army, all these they must

turn away and keep them from calling themselves "Cossacks." Payment was to be made to 1,000 men only, in the amount already set, but this was not to restrict the size of the Zaporozhian army. In any case, the Cossacks reserved the right to appeal the matter to the Diet. The declara tion of the royal commissioners was also ambiguous about the Cossack "elders." The parallel Cossack declaration held that: the leader [to serve] in the name of His Majesty the King and of the present and the future Crown Hetman is to be one who is worthy and fitting, and selected from
among our forces by us, and no one else, and is to be certified by His Excellency

the Crown Hetman. On their part, the Cossacks pledged "not to encroach upon the estates," and "to remain in their usual places of habitation."27 Both sides signed the Ollanycja treaty under duress. The Common wealth, conducting a war with Russia, needed to protect its rear and to
26 27

Hrulevskyj, Istorija Ukrajiny-Rusy, 7:359. The text ofthe Polish declaration of the Ollanycja treaty is contained in AJZR, pt. 3, vol. 1, pp. 206-209, doe. 61; that of the Cossack declaration, in Hrulevskyj, Istorija Ukrajiny-Rusy, 7: 364-65.

THE COMMONWEALTH AND THE COSSACKS

85

gain allies. The Cossacks were faced with the danger of war on two fronts-with the Turks and with lkiewskis units-so Sahajdanyj was, as we have noted, of necessity more amenable to a negotiated agreement than ever before. The Diet, however, did not cooperate it refused to ratify the treaty. None of the delegates would hear of the increases in payment, which were, in effect, increases in the register. The Diets resolution concerning "The Nyz Cossacks 0 Kozakach Niowych" returned to the old formulas which had been tested before with negative results. Promises were made to send another delegation to the Ukraine, at some time in the future, to discuss the Cossack demands. In short, the Commonwealths attitude toward the Cossacks remained unchanged. When, in 1618, a call-up was posted to the units of the crown prince Wiadyslaw, then setting out against Moscow, Sahajdanyj appeared at his side with 20,000 men. The occasion was used to pillage the palatinate of Kiev to such a degree that the Cossacks were threatened with military action and formal war. On May 22, the hetman received orders to unite with the castellan of Cracow and to move against "those robbers te zdzience "28 Sahajdanyj fared as well in the Russian state. On their own the Cos sacks captured Jelec and Kaluga, and with the Poles they attempted, unsuccessfully, to take Moscow. Historians generally agree that the activity of the Cossacks in no small measure prompted the concessions of the Russians. These were formalized in a treaty very favorable to Poland signed at Deulin in December 1618.29 The Commonwealth now quickly turned to regulating its relations with the Cossacks. Speed was of the essence, since the outbreak of war with Turkey was imminent. In September 1619, negotiations were begun with the Cossacks near Rastavycja, in the region of Pavolo. They lasted several weeks, due to the uncompromising position taken by the Com monwealth, which, except for an insignificant increase in the number of registered Cossacks, equalling not even half the actual number of Zaporozhians, made no concessions. The formal terms of the Rastavycja treaty were similar to those concluded at Olanycja. They consisted of
-

28 29

May 1618, in Warsaw. e.g., Hrulevskyj, Istorija Ukrajiny-Rusy, 7:377; Tomkiewicz, Kozaczvzna ukrainna, p. 35; Wojcik, Dzikie Pola w ogniu, p. 108. This also can be deduced from, Historia ZSRR, vol. 1, ed. B. D. GrekowaWarsaw, 1954, p. 324, and Istorija SSSR s drevnejlix vremen do na/ix dnej, ed. M. N. Tixomirov Moscow, 1966, p. 297.

gentry,

AJZR, pt. 3, vol. 1, P. 258, doe. 70 Zygmunt IIIs proclamation to the Kievan

Cf.,

dated 22

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WLADYSLAW A. SERCZYK

separate declarations by the parties involved, worded identically. The Polish declaration was dated 8 October, and the Cossack, 17 October l6l9. The Poles and Cossacks had resolved to compromise, and a highly imperfect understanding was the result. The register was raised to 3,000, as was the quota of payments, while arrears were made good immediately. The Cossacks were paid 20,000 zloty for the Moscow campaign, and another 4,000 zloty were offered to the star Jyna for their fealty za okazanq pokor. The additional sum was perhaps the most convincing argument in the negotiations. For in return the Cossacks promised to remove from their ranks the "loose people" who had attached themselves during the preceding five years, and to burn all the boats and ships that had been used in raids against Turkish territories although for the latter concession they were to receive additional compensation. The Cossacks tried to find loopholes for bypassing the definite and clear provisions of the treaty in the future. They demanded that the treaty contain a clause permitting them to undertake campaigns against the Turks in the event the Commonwealth were to become delinquent in pay ments, but without success. By the terms of the treaty the Cossacks agreed that on crown lands they would be subject to the laws and authority of the starosty, on private estates to that of the feudal lords, and in time of warto military jurisdiction. The signing of the Rastavycja treaty not only evoked dissension among the Cossacks, but also led to discord among the star .fyna. The ataman Jacko Borodavka refused to obey Sahajdanyj and left for Varna. At the time, units of mercenaries called Lissowczyki were taking part in a diversionary, anti-Turkish action in Hungary and Slovakia. The sultan Osman II viewed the situation as sufficient casus belli, and declared war on Poland. Cognizant of the Commonwealths weakness and knowing that Borodavka had already attempted to come to an understanding with Russia, Sahajdanyj, too, commenced efforts in that direction. In 1620 his emissaries appeared in Moscow and asserted that the Cossacks were now, as before !, ready to fight against all the tsars enemies. The dele gation did not come empty-handed: it could boast of the Cossacks par ticipation in the reestablishment of the Orthodox hierarchy in the

The text of 2thkiewskiego,

30

the ed.

Polish and Cossack declarations is given according to Pisma S. A. Bielowski Lviv, 1861, pp. 330-34.

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Ukraine,3 as well as of their close cooperation with the patriarch of Jerusalem, Theofanes. For the first time Russia became a direct rival of the Commonwealth in matters pertaining to the Cossacks. While Petro Odynecwas negotiating in Moscow in Sahajdanyjs name, lkiewski, deprived almost totally of his undoubtedly burdensome but hitherto unfailing allies, the Cossacks, was being defeated by the Turks in the campaign of Teora Cecora. lkiewskis death there can be attributed indirectly to the delaying tactics of the Commonwealth in its relations with the Cossacks. The Diet called together at the end of 1620 found that its hand had been forced. Under the circumstances it was considered quite appropriate to discuss the proposal that 20,000 Cossacks be accepted into government service for the rather small sum of 100,000 zloty.32 Even the mediation of Theofanes came into play, obtained most probably by the promise of royal confirmation and approval of the Kievan Orthodox eparchy that the patriarch had restored. Theofanes duly sent a pastoral letter to the Cossacks urging them to serve under Polish command. In July 1621, four Cossack delegates arrived in Warsaw for negotia tions; among them were Sahajdathyj and the Orthodox bishop Ezekiel Kurcevy. The talks lasted two weeks without fulfilling the Cossacks hopes. They had demanded the kings recognition of the renewed Ortho dox hierarchy, in return for which they were willing to take part in the war against Turkey. Instead, Zygmunt III mollified Sahajdanyj byacknowl edging his title as hetman, but the king did not recognize the new Ortho dox bishops and only just refrained from implementing the edict pro claiming them enemies of his majesty and the state.33 The army of Osman II did not wait, however,for the results of the talks in Warsaw. In the middle of August, after crossing the Danube, it camped near Bilhorod. The Cossacks, too, were ready for battle. Ceasing to raid gentry estates, Borodavka crossed the Dniester and proceeded to plunder Moldavia. On 20 August 1621, the Polish units commanded by Hetman Karol Chodkiewicz also crossed the river, halting in the vicinity of Xotyn Chocim. The following day Sahajdanyj arrived at Xotyn from Warsaw. Two days later, Borodavkas delegate, later the Cossack

Vossoedinenie Ukrainy s Rossiej: Dokumenty i materialy. vol. 1 Moscow, 1954, p. 3, doe. 1 recording of the Posolskij Prikaz, 26 February 1620; Istorija Ukrajinskoji
3!

RSR, 1: 185.
32 33

Wjcik,

Hrulevskyj, Istorija Ukrajiny-Rusy, 7:443. Dzikie Pola w ogniu, p. 113.

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WLADYSLAW A. SERCZYK

hetman, Myxajlo Doroenko, arrived at the Polish camp, asking for further instructions. Chodkiewicz ordered the Cossacks immediately to unite with the Polish forces, and Sahajdanyj accompanied the returning Doroenko. The Cossacks were then camped in the area of Mohyliv Podilskyj. The casualties the Cossacks had suffered under Borodavkas inept leadership and their consequent hostility toward him made for an enthusiastic reception of his rival. At the convened council of the starJyna, Sahajdanyj boasted of the alleged successes of his talks with the king. The reaction was even greater enthusiasm, leading to the deposition of Borodavka and the acclamation of Sahajdanyj as hetman. With the Cossacks confirmation and the kings recognition of his title, Sahajdanyj could act boldly. Borodavka was put in chains and executed on 8 September 1621, near Xotyn. Sahajdanyj then led almost 40,000 Cossacks to Chodkiewiczs camp, where Polish troops numbered 35,000. Opposing them were 150,000 Turkish soldiers, thousands of Tatars, and masses of retainers who, for the most part, could also take up arms. The battle of Xotyn began in early September 1621. It lasted, with brief respites, for six weeks, and was won by the Polish-Cossack forces. The allies looked with satisfaction on their mutual accomplishment; they had battled heroically and successfully against an enemy with mani fold superiority. The fame of the victors did not wane over the years. In 1670, Waclaw Potocki finished his epic poem about the event, Wojna chocimska. Potocki had lived through Xmelnyckyjs uprising and was not favorably disposed toward the Cossacks. Nevertheless, bearing wit ness to actual events, he wrote of the futile attack of the Turks and the strategy of the Cossacks, purportedly suggested by Chodkiewicz: Long do the Cossacks lie in wait, like the hunter / For the fox, or the wolf when he sees a flock of sheep; / The one does not rush in, the other does not move / Before they are close, before they are sure of their quarry; / Thus the Cossacks keep to
their strategy, / Nor give any sign of themselves before the enemy is in range; / Then they fire point-blank from their cannon and side arms ... / The pagans are confounded and terribly amazed / That the Cossacks are firing

and are still alive.

Our troops and the Cossacks, each to their utmost, / Slash, stab, shoot the retreating foe.34

The battle of Xotyn exhausted the strength of both armies, and negotiations were begun soon afterwards. The Turks demanded tribute

W. Potocki, Wojna chocimska i wybor poezji Cracow, 1949, p. 28.

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and the surrender of the Cossacks, or, at the very least, their severe punishment for continuous violation of the borders and for raids into Turkish territories. Contemporary accounts all hold that the Polish negotiators acknowledged the Cossacks as their comrades in arms and decisively rejected these demands.35 Responsibility for all the "licentious ness" of the Cossacks was placed on their dead leader, Borodavka. A treaty of peace was signed on October 9. In practice it did not change the situation nor introduce any new elements that could make peace more lasting. The Commonwealth pledged to stop the Cossacks sea raids against Turkey, while the Turks promised to prevent the Tatars raids on the Polish borderlands. Not surprisingly, the Cossacks had no enthus iasm for the treaty; on the contrary, they expressed their disenchantment by quickly leaving the camp at Xotyn, without waiting for the usual triumphal ceremonies and congratulations. The next few weeks were to show that the Cossacks had acted appropriately. For just two weeks after the signing of the treaty the royal commissioners prepared a proclamation which forbade, "under pain of death," the flight of Cossacks to the Zaporozhe or any supply of arms to them.36 In 1622 Petro Konaevy Sahajdanyj died, and the state of Ukrainian affairs resumed its normal pattern. Shortly after the Xotyn battle, the Cossacks sent a petition to Zygmunt III in which they pledged to refrain from sea raids in return for fulfillment of the promises made to Sahaj danyj at the Warsaw talks that is, payment of 100,000 zloty yearly, payment for their part in the last war, equal rights for Orthodoxy, the construction of a hospital for invalids, permission to settle on gentry and royal estates without obligation of serf labor, the right to serve other governments, and, finally, the recall of crown troops from the palatinate of Kiev.37 These conditions especially the last two were totally unacceptable to the Commonwealth. Nevertheless, they might at least have been a starting point for discussion. The king, however, would consider only the possibility of remuneration for the Xotyn war; all other issues were deferred to the Diet and the local authorities for decision, which in prac
-

n "It is not fitting for us to go back on our word and punish those who - as the Turks themselves see - serve our country so well; now they are not miscreants but our com rades, employed and paid by the Commonwealth as we are." Hrutevskyj, Istorija Ukrajiny-Rusy. 7:477. "We gave them our word which if we were to break it, how would the Turks themselves believe us?" Tomkiewicz, Kozaczyzna ukrainna, p. 38. 36 Istorja Ukrajins koji RSR, 1: 186. Hrulevskyj, Islorija Ukrajiny-Rusy, 7:481-82.

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tice meant the refusal of the Cossack demands. Everything, thus, re mained as before. The actions of the Commonwealth and the Cossacks in the following years, too, proved predictable. They differed in no way from those which preceded the victory at Xotyn. Now, however, the Cossacks were cog nizant of their own strength. Not only did they ignore the Common wealths injunctions, but they openly threatened rebellion and the break ing off of all relations. At the convocation of the Diet in 1623, the castellan of Cracow, Prince Jerzy Zbaraski, requested a final solution to the Cossack problem not only because of the Turkish danger, but also because of the Polish serfs and warned that "a storm is threatening us on all sides."38 It was even agreed to send a new commission to the Ukraine, and to support it with strong military units that could go into action at the proper time. This decision, however, was not put into effect. The Cossacks, for their part, began to interfere in the internal conflicts of the Crimean khans. In 1624 they came out on the side of the brothers ahin and Mehmet Giray against Turkey, which wanted to replace the two with a more cooperative leader. The Zaporozhians fought for Sahin and Mehmet Giray on both land and sea, and in January 1625, they concluded an offensive and defensive alliance with ahin Giray. As it became evident that the Cossacks involvement in Tatar affairs could lead to a common Cossack-Tatar attack against the Commonwealth with, even worse, the possible participation of Moscow it was agreed that decisive action had to be taken. Cossack matters ceased to be exclusively the internal affairs of Poland, and became a battleground between the Polish state and the quasi-state of the Cossacks. Taking charge of the situation, the Polish field hetman Stanislaw Koniecpolski proceeded deftly. He did not act militarily until he had made sure of the neutrality of the Tatars in the event of war between Poland and the Cossacks. Only after getting assurances in this regard did he move toward the Ukraine. With him went royal proclamations to the local gentry calling for additional private recruits. These mustered and took up arms quickly. The royal forces, numbering about 8,000 men, set out in mid-Septem ber, 1625. The Cossack hetman, Marko Zmajlo, did not expect so ener getic a maneuver from the Commonwealth, nor did he know of the
-

38

Zbaraski, 1621-1631,

Scriptores Rerum Polonicarum, pp. 77-78.

vol.

5,

ed.

A.

Sokolowski the

letters of J.

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Polish-Tatar neutrality agreement. So majlo calmly continued to pre pare for another raid against Turkey. Within a month, however, es pecially after the first encounters near Kaniv, he realized what was threatening. On October 25, in the area of Kryliv, the first meeting between the commissioners sent by majlo and Koniecpolski took place. The commissioners demands contained a new element the provision that the leaders of the anti-Turkish excesses, namely, the envoys to Moscow who had corresponded with the Russian tsar, be surrendered to the Poles.39 Now it was not the threat of a war with Turkey provoked by the Cossacks which plagued the Polish authorities, but the possibility that the Russians would join the Cossacks. As the experience with reawaken ing Orthodoxy had showed, this was by no means a baseless fear. Most of the commissioners demands were rejected by the council of the Cossack staryna. On October 25, Koniecpolski attacked the enemy and won the first battle. When the Cossacks attempts to strike back ended in disaster, Zmajlo retreated to Lake Kurukove, where he again mustered a defense. Initially, Koniecpolski failed to overwhelm these forces. Having a decided advantage but considerable losses, he once again began negotia tions. In four days, these culminated with the signing of the Kurukove Treaty, on 6 November 1625. Its provisions were as follows: I Amnesty was granted to participants in raids against Turkish terri tories, estates of the Ukrainian gentry, and crown estates, "provided that henceforth obedience and respect be vouchsafed to the starosty and officialdom"; 2 Regulations were made for the election of the "elder" starJyj, who, after the deposition of majlo, became Myxajlo Doroenko by the Cossacks from among themselves, subject, however, to confirmation by the field hetman, representing the king; 3 It was required that the Cossacks establish, by 18 December 1625, a register of not more than 6,000 names, but that "those who were removed were not to suffer damages, and the podstarosty were not to punish them for having been in the Zaporozhian army"; 4 The sum of 60,000 zloty was to be paid annually in Kiev; 5 Separate remuneration was established for the starJyna: 600 zloty for the "elder"; 150 zloty to each of two osavuly; 100 zloty each to the oboznyj, the secretary pysar, the six colonels and the judge; and 50 zloty each to the six "regimental" osavuly and the sixty captains sotnyky;
-

Hruevskyj, Istorija Ukrajiny-Rusy, 7:547.

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WLADYSLAW A. SERCZYK

6 Places where the Cossack army could settle were designated: beyond the Dnieper rapids, the number of settlers could be 1,000 men, or "as many as the hetman, being advised by the elder as to time and circum stance, may deem necessary"; the rest were to remain on crown estates and on private estates only as allowed by article 10 following; 7 The Cossacks were placed under the jurisdiction of the stanJyna "according to codified common law"; 8 Independent campaigns against Turkey were prohibited; 9 The immediate burning of boats and ships that could be used in sea raids was ordered, and the building of such vessels in the future was prohibited; 10 The return, within twelve weeks, of lands belonging to private and church estates on which taxes could not be paid or labor given including those lands which were "illicitly usurped" was ordered; "the gentry and the starosty, however, were to allow them [the Cossacks] peacefully to collect the fruit and seed thereof"; 11 Finally, it was declared that "no alliances with any neighboring state be made nor any delegations from other states be received, nor any com munication through envoys, nor any service for foreign states be under taken." If any of the treatys conditions were breached, "the Commonwealth will proceed as if against enemies. "40 The provisions of the Kurukove treaty were much broader than those of previous Polish-Cossack agreements, but its tone and character did not differ, except in some details. None of the royal commissioners con sidered what was to be done with the 40,000 Cossacks who found them selves outside the register, and they still believed that threatening severe punishment was sufficient force for the treaty to have effect. Soon, how ever, that belief proved to be sorely mistaken.
* * *

Contemporary historians commonly hold that in 1648 "as a result of over half a century of an unsound Polish policy in the Ukraine, a great uprising ensued."4 This view should not be accepted without qualification. Polish policy was "unsound" because it was premised on the total subordination
Text of the treaty according to AJZR. pt. 3, vol. 1, pp. 284-92, doe. 78 conditions of the treaty between the Cossacks and Hetman Koniecpolski, dated 6 November 1625, in Medvei Lozy. 4! Z. Wjcik, "Midzynarodowe potozenie Rzeczypospolitej," in Polska XVII wieku: Pastwo, spoteczestwo, kultura. ed. J. Tazbir Warsaw, 1969, P. 28.
40

THE COMMONWEALTH AND THE COSSACKS

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of the Cossacks to the Commonwealth. The premise stemmed from the gentrys conviction that the czen,i kozacka "Cossack mob" could not be ennobled and equalized under law with the "noble born." Can one, however, blame the gentry for holding a gentrys views? I propose that the attitude of Poland toward the Cossacks contained other features which require analysis. These were, above all, lthe lack of a long-range and clear conception of a political resolution to the Cossack problem, and 2 the opportunistic transformation of the problem ac cording to the changing position of the Polish state on the international stage, specifically in Eastern and Central Europe. In effect, throughout the first quarter of the seventeenth century, Polish-Cossack relations were solely functions of the Commonwealths foreign policy toward Turkey, Sweden, and Russia, and of its domestic policy toward Orthodoxy. The issue never stood on its own as an independent problem. Polish authori ties seemed oblivious to changes and growth in the Cossack phenomenon, and continued to treat it as a subordinate institution. Without question, however, the decisive factor in the shaping of the Commonwealths policy was the economic and social interests of the Polish magnates and gentry. Jagellonian University, Cracow

SEVCENKO AND BLAKE

GEORGE S. N. LUCKYJ

The framework of archetypal symbolism provided by Blake may be of some value in trying to unify in our minds the symbolism of another poet. Northrop Frye

A broad comparative study of evenko and an English Romantic poet has not yet been made. Some scholars have tried to compare gevenko, in very general terms, with Robert Burns.2 This effort was, no doubt,

The only attempt to place Sevenko within the framework of European Romanti cism was made by P. Fylypovy "evenko i romantyzm," Zapysky Istory&io fllolohknoho viddilu Vseukrajins koji akademiji nauk, 1924, no. 4, pp. 3-18, where some discussion is devoted to evenko and Byron. From 1930 on, Soviet criticism tended to disregard or downplay evenkos Romanticism and to proclaim him, instead, a great Realist. This approach was acknowledged in an article on evenko and Ukrainian Romanticism by M. X. Kocjubynska "Poetyka evenka i ukrajinskyj romantyzm," in Zbirnyk prac .S?ostoji Naukovoji Iev&nkivskoji konferencji [Kiev, 1958]. She wrote "In contemporary Ukrainian literary scholarship the question of evenkos romanticism is almost never raised separately specialno" p. 49. In evenko j ukrajinskyj romantyzm 30-50 rr. XIX st. Kiev, 1963, P. H. Pryxodko dismisses West European Romanticism in six pages 3-9, with only very occasional further references to Byron and Burns. Pryxodkos main thesis, which is not without
some validity, is that "the specificity of the historical development of the Slavic countries made the epoch of Romanticism in literature coincide with the epoch of the national rebirth of the subjugated peoples and the development of national and cultural movements and the struggle against foreign occupants" p. 80. This, in turn, leads Pryxodko to divide all Romantics into reactionaries and progressives, according to the role they played in this struggle. The book offers much material on the ideo logical differences among Ukrainian Romantics, but very little on the literary genesis of their works. A long footnote on evenko and Byron appears in J. Bojkos "evenko als Romantiker," in Taras evienko: Sein Leben und Sein Werk Wies baden, 1965, PP. 109-112. Some very penetrating observations on evenko and English Romanticism appeared recently in an article by Lisa E. Schneider, "An Exami nation of Shevchenkos Romanticism," Journal of Ukrainian Graduate Studies 3, no.

1 Spring 1978: 5-28. Cf. A. Muzyka, "Taras evenko i Robert Burns," LMenye zapiski vyslef .fkoly g. Odessy, 1922, no. 2; P. Fylypovy& "evenko v borotbi z ukrajinskoju dvorjansko pomisyckoju literaturoju," Zyttja i revoljucija, 1934, no. 4; A. Z. Levenson, "Burns i evenko," NauiYnye zapiski xarkovskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagoginogo insti tuta inostrannyxjazykov, 1939, no. 1. The British scholar W. Morfill first compared
2

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95

prompted by evenkos own remark about Burns in the unpublished preface to the second edition of the Kobzar [The minstrel, 1847]. Deplor ing the fact that Ukrainian writers such as Skovoroda and Gogol did not write in Ukrainian, evenko compared Walter Scott, whom he other wise admired, unfavorably with Robert Burns. Scott, argued evenko, "came from Edinburgh and not from Scotland [proper]" and forsook his native language evenko was unsure why while, on the other hand, Burns was "a national narodnyj poet and a great one."3 evenkos argument is valid to a point. Burns is unquestionably the national poet of Scotland, but he did not write in Gaelic. His language was "a mixture of general English and Scots spoken in no particular area,"4 and one wonders whether evenko would have approved of it. Nonetheless, there is certainly some validity in attempting to compare the poetry of Burns with that of evenko; for instance, both wrote a great deal of lyrical poetry and were capable of sharp satire. The subject awaits thorough analysis. Here, however, another aspect of ev&nkos Romanticism one which brings him closer to the shores of Britain will be explored. evenko and the English poet William Blake seem to have little in common, that is, if one compares them in terms of biography or cultural background. If one compares them in terms of their poetry, however, a striking similarity appears. Both Blake and evenko are mythopoeic poets. On its deepest level, their work represents a vision of life composed of archetypes. This is true of many other poets, but it is our contention here that a special affinity exists between the components of this vision in evenkos and Blakes poetry. By studying Blakes archetypal patterns one can gain new insight into evenkos poetry. Moreover, the visionary and anthropocentric qualities of their writings distinguish these two poets from many other Romantic poets. The first major study of Blake as an "illustration of the poetic process" was published by Northrop Frye in l947. Frye scrutinized Blakes cos mology in great detail on the assumption that "an archetypal vision, which all great art without exception shows forth to us, really does exist."6 The components of this mythology are clothed in highly subjec
-

evenko to Burns in 1883 in the Westminster Review. J. B. Rudnyckyjs Burns i Sevenko Winnipeg, 1959 is more a commemorative than a scholarly study. Taras evenko, Povne zibrannja tvoriv v Jesty tomax Kiev, 1964, 6: 314. Robert T. Fitzhugh, Robert Burns Boston, 1970, P. 49. From the new preface to Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake Princeton,

N.J., 1969.
6

Frye, Fearful Symmetry, p. 418

96

GEORGE S. N. LUCKYJ

tive terms and must, therefore, be decoded by the reader. Once the decod ing is done, however, the entire vision is comprehensible in a universal context. There is no need to dwell on Blakes iconography here, for the reader can find a thorough discussion of it in Fryes book as well as in studies by Peter Fisher,7 John Beer,8 Harold Bloom9 and others. On the other hand, very little has been written about the archetypes in evenkos poetry. This area of enquiry has been virtually proscribed in the Soviet Union, primarily due to official disapproval of the theories of Carl Jung that are the foundation for such an approach. Emigr Ukrainian scholars with the exception of Cyevskyj have followed the well-worn track of an "ideological" interpretation of Sevenko. A probe in a new direction is therefore long overdue. Using the comparative approach, the present study attempts such a probe. In setting out, we must accept the premise that all art and literature convey, in the words of Leslie Fiedler, "immemorial patterns of response to the human situation in its most permanent aspects: death, love, the biological family, the relationship with the Unknown, etc., whether those patterns be considered to reside in the Jungian Collective Unconscious or the Platonic world of Ideas." In other words, art is rooted in archetypes. For the definition of an archetype, with all its qualifications, we turn to Jung, who must be credited with discovering the deepest layer of the human psyche the collective unconscious. "The contents of the collec tive unconscious," he wrote, "are known as archetypes."2 These "pri mordial images" underlie their manifestations in the human conscious ness manifestations which vary a great deal from one culture to another. Jung himself and some of his followers did a great deal of com parative study in mythology and religion. His discoveries and theories have strongly influenced literary and art criticism everywhere except in the Soviet Union, where his work, like that of Freud, has been proscribed.
-

8 0

P. Fisher, The Valley of Vision Toronto, 1961. J. Beer, Blakes Visionary Universe Manchester, 1969.

H. Bloom, The Visionary Company Ithaca, 1971. M. Shlemkevych, "The Substratum of Sevenkos View of Life," in Taras ,Sev&nko, 1814-1861: A Symposium, ed. V. Mijakovskyj and G. Y. Shevelov The Hague, 1962; A. V. Kultschytskyj, "evenko-Kult in tiefenpsychologischer Sicht," in Taras evenko Munich, 1964, especially pp. 50-70; G.S.N. Luckyj, "The Archetype of the Bastard in Sev&nkos Poetry," Slavic and East European Journal 14, no. 3 Fall 1970. Leslie A. Fiedler, "Archetype and Signature,"Art and Psychoanalysis, ed. William

Phillips Cleveland, 1963, p. 462.

2

9, pt. 1 New York, 1959, p. 4.

C. G. Jung, "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious," in Collected Works, vol.

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A great deal has been written on motifs, themes, and even symbols in evenkos poetry, but the explanations offered have nearly always been couched in socio-political terms. An archetypal approach maintains, in the words of George Whalley, that "[myth] embodies in an articulated structure of symbol and narrative a version of reality. It is a condensed account of mans being and attempts to represent reality with structural fidelity, to indicate at a single stroke the salient and fundamental relations which for a man constitute reality. Myth is not an obscure, oblique or elaborate way of expressing reality. It is the only way."3 Motifs and symbols represent, therefore, the deeper layers of the psyche, which spring from the personal and collective unconscious. To find the under lying pattern is the task of the researcher. Jungs views have struck a responsive chord in the twentieth century precisely because one of his central ideas was "that modern man has become alienated from this mythopoeic substratum of his being, and that therefore his life lacked meaning and significance for him." The Romantics were the first poets to produce art strongly marked by aliena tion. Their influence has survived to the present day in various "neo romantic" trends. The Romantics not only revealed the hidden depths of the human psyche in their art, but attached importance to the poetic expression of these depths. "Symbolism, animism and mythopeia," writes M. H. Abrams, "in richly diverse forms, explicit or submerged, were so pervasive in this age as to constitute the most pertinent single attribute for defining romantic poetry."S
* * *

The central archetype in Sevenkos romantic poetry is the archetype of woman. It is, at the same time, the essence of what Jung would call the authors "anima" that is, mans image of woman. In itself, this is yet another archetype the primordial image of the opposite sex. The mere count of evenkos poems with a woman in a key role confirms the centrality of this archetype: of evenkos twenty-eight long poems, four teen, or one-half, revolve around a woman "Pryynna," "Kateryna," "Topolja," "Marjana-ernycja," "Utoplena," "Slepaja," "Soya," "Naj myka," "Lileja," "Osyka" later "Vidma", "Maryna," "Neofity," "Marija". His shorter poems are replete with images of women, and his
-

Poetic Process London, 1953, p. 178. Anthony Storr, Jung London, 1973, p. 42. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp Oxford, 1971, P. 296. For the "expres sive" theory of Romanticism see ibid., pp. 70-100.

!3

George Whalley,

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N.

LUCKYJ

lyrics are often written from the feminine point of view e.g., "Oj odnaja, odna.. .". To use Erich Neumanns term, the "Great Mother" dominates evenkos imagination to a greater degree than that of any of his Slavic contemporaries. There are many reasons for this dominance, not the least of which is evenkos memory of his childhood sweetheart, Oksana Kovalenko, whose seduction and abandonment by a Russian soldier left a deep trauma in his life. His poems, especially the ballads and lyrical poems, were based on folk-motifs, many of which center around womans fate. Some scholars even look back to the matriarchal society of pre historic Ukraine as the source of the Feminine Archetype.6 Yet, merely pointing out such obvious origins does not answer the basic question about this archetype in evenkos poetry: its nature and place in his poetic vision of life. In early 1849, two years after being exiled to the desolate Kos-Aral, evenko wrote a poem which begins with the lines "U naim raji na zemli. Its first stanza sets forth a stance to which the poet remained faithful throughout his life:
. . ."

Y HamiM pal ua 3eMSH Hiqoro paiqoro HeMac, $IK Tag MaTH MOJ1OB 3 eBoiM HTgTOqKOM MaJIHM. ByBac, iHOi, HBJ1IOCB, ,EIIBy,cch HBOM, i neqajm OxaaTHm ymy; cTaHe Ka.r,b MeRi II, i 3aKyp}ocsi, I nepe Heio noMoJuocsl, MOB nepe o6pa3oM cBBTHM

16

See Shlemkevych, "Substratum of gevenkos View of Life," Pp. 43-45. On matriarchy in prehistoric Ukraine see V. Serbakivskyj, Formacija ukrQjinskoji naciji: Narys praistoriji Ukrajiny, 2nd ed. New York, 1958, PP. 37, 42; Narysy starodavnoji istoriji Ukrajinskoji RSR Kiev, 1957, P. 38. For M. Hrulevskyjs sceptical view of matriarchy in the Ukraine, see his Istorija Ukrajiny-Rusy, 2nd ed., vol. 1 New York, 1954, P. 343. More recent researches in the Trypillian culture 3500-1700 B.C. support the view that matriarchy existed in the social structure cf. J. Pasternak in Ukraine. A Concise Encyclopaedia, 2 vols. [Toronto, 1963], 1:532. The migr Ukrainian writer Dokija Humenna, author of a novel about the Trypillian matriarchy Velyke cabe [New York, 1952], has remarked pointedly that "one heritage of the matriarchy is alive even now - this is the cult of the mother. It runs through all the stages of our [Ukrainian] history and is still alive today." Dokija Humenna, "Cyja za matrijarxat?," Svoboda, 4 March 1976. For a general discussion of matriarchy and literature see also E. 0. James, The Cult of Mother Goddess London, 1959.

EVCENKO AND BLAKE Tiei

lUo
aTepi casiTol,
B MJ4 Ham ora

99

npHaecJla.

un

our earthly paradise There is nothing more beautiful Than a young mother With her small child. It happens that sometimes I look, Marveling, and sorrow seizes my soul; I begin to pity her and grow sad And I pray to her, As if to a holy icon Of the holy mother Who brought God into our world. . . /

The young mother of this poem incarnates supreme Beauty and Good ness, and makes the world an earthly paradise. But she is also the object of the poets sorrow and pity, for he identifies her with the Virgin Mary, who is the triumphant mother of God but also the epitome of human suffering: "Joy and Woe are woven fine! A Clothing for the Soul divine" Blake. The next twenty-one lines of the poem extoll the joys of motherhood. Subsequently, however, we learn that the child was a bastard whose mother was driven from her home, rejected by her community and even her own child, and thus punished for her deep motherly love. Finally, she is left to die "denebud pid tynom [anywhere under a fence]," forgotten and cursed, yet a loving mother still. Here, in essence, is evenkos major theme of the "seduced woman" pokrytka uncommon in Ukrainian folk songs which has been discussed by many Most of Sevenkos women are pokrytkas seduced women bearing an illegitimate child. From the early poem "Kateryna" 1840 to the late "Marija" 1859 his best poetry is devoted to
-

The first scholar to draw special attention to the theme of the pokrvtka in poetry was Ivan Franko. In his lecture on ev6enkos "Najmyka" in 1895 he interpreted the poem as the poets protest against the destruction of the "sanctity of family." But although Franko saw strong social criticism in the poem he also realized that "the accurately observed and successfully depicted fact of living reality he [ev&nko] thus tried to transform into a type, to crystallize into a symbolic image of the idea itself." 1. Franko, Tvory [Kiev, 1955], 17: 115. Frankos study was followed by that of M. Sumcovs "0 motivax poezii T. G. evenka," Kievskaja slarina 60
evenkos

17

1898, no. 2 and many others. Only very occasionally was it admitted that, as Zerov

put it so well, "this image [of the woman] is seen apart from the Ukrainian condition and village environment and is placed on the universal level" M. Zerov, Lekciji z istorji ukrajinskoji literatury [Toronto, 1977], P. 179. The term pokrytka "the covered one" derives from the custom of covering the head of an unwed mother with a kerchief so as to change her status from that of maiden to married woman.

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this archetype.8 The many studies on the subject usually interpret it in terms of social class the seduction of a serf-girl by an officer or a land owner9 or, occasionally, as allegory the "seduction" of the Ukraine by Russia. It is clear that Sevenko deliberately chose the Ukrainian peasant woman as the symbol of an oppressed nation, an oppressed class and an oppressed sex. However, these interpretations alone are insufficient in depth for an understanding of the themes relation to Sevenkos work. The poetry of Sevenko gives the seduced girl, so common in the pre Romantic literature of European sentimentalism, a unique dimension. She is often a manifestation of the Great Mother,2 a "symbol of the deepest realm of the unconscious, where the opposites, male and female, are not yet separate."2 Thus, the girl speaking in the lyric "Oj odna ja, odna. has not yet experienced sexual love and is unhappy. Yet, she is aware of the potential for disgrace and tragedy as well as goodness and fulfillment in the experience. The bi-polarity of this archetype later the good-bad mother integrates "into a meaningful whole all the possibilities of that which has been and of that which is still to come."22 The co existence of good and evil, of which evenko was so keenly aware, is manifested here in the poetic rendering of an old folk motif.
. ."

Ofi OH a, oHa, 51K 6HJIHH0MKa B no.ju, Ta e aa MeHi Bor

AHi WCT$I, Hi OJ1i. TisnKo aa MeHi Bor
Kpacy
-

Kapil oqi,

Ta fl Ti BHns8aKaJla B caMoTHHi uBoqifi.

Excellent Russian translations of these poems by Aleksander Tvardovsky and Boris Pasternak appear in T. G. Sevenko, Kobzar Leningrad, 1939. 19 Cf. one of the latest Soviet studies by J. M. Holombjovskyj "Evolucija obrazu materi v poemax T. H. evenka," in Ukrajinske literaturoznavstvo Lviv, 1973, no. 19. The author repeats the familiar Soviet interpretation, adding only that in the development of this theme evenko moves from early Romanticism to Realism in his final poems, "Neofity" and "Marija" p. 108. There, according to Holombjovskyj, mothers are propagators of revolutionary ideas, whose ultimate aim was, of course, social revolution against tsarism. 20 Cf. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of an Archetype Princeton, 1974. 2! Jolande Jacobi, Complex, Archetype, Symbol in the Psychology of C. G. Jung New York, 1959, p. 146. 22 Jacobi, Complex, Archetype, Symbol, p. 65.

ii

EVCENKO AND BLAKE

AHi 6paTHKa a,

101

Hi CecTpHMKH He 3HaJIa, Me MKHMH 3poc.na, I 3pocJla He Koxa.rlacb!

-

K pyKHHa MOa,

je Boo, o6piI .rnoe? IX a caMa. A PYKHHH ii He 6yte!

/1 am alone, quite alone Like a blade of grass in the field, Yet God has not given me Either happiness or fortune. All that God has given me Is my beauty, my hazel eyes, But they wept without cease In the solitude of girlhood. I know neither brother
Nor sister, I grew up among strangers Without love.

Where is my mate, Where are you, good people? There are none; I am alone And mate there will be none! /

The girls longing for love remains unfulfilled. Yet her complaint that God has not given her "fortune," or "fate" doija, is somewhat ironic when we consider other poems where a womans fortune has inevitably turned out to be tragic. It is as if in appealing for fortune she asks for misfortune, because, in evenkos outlook, do/ia fate, fortune and nedolja misfortune are closely linked,23 corresponding to other arche typal images, such as volja freedom and nevolf a bondage in Ukrainian all four nouns are feminine in gender. The sexual urge in women is often described by evenko as a noble and God-given impulse. The clearest expression of this occurs in a poem written shortly before his death, which begins "Velykomuenyce kumo... [My good long-suffering woman]," and ends with the exhortation:
23 The archetypes doija - nedolja occur frequently in Ukrainian folk songs about women; e.g., Narodni pisni v zapysax Myxajla Pavlyka Kiev, 1974, P. 87. For a penetrating discussion of dolja in Ukrainian and other Slavic folklore, see Oleksander Potebnjas 0 nekotoryx simvolax v slavjanskoj narodnoj poezii, 2nd ed. Xarkiv, 1914, Pp. 189-243. Potebnjas other massive study of Ukrainian folklore, Objasnenija ma/orusskix i srodnyx narodnyx pesen, 2 vols. Warsaw, 1883/87 offers invaluable insights into the archetypal patterns of Ukrainian folk songs.

102

GEORGE S. N. LUCKYJ Haqxaii Ha F uaoy cnaay Ta IHHM cepueM, HeJlyKaBo, Xo pa3, cepero, co6sIyH!
/Dont give a damn for your maidenhead and sincerely, without evil, err, my dear woman, if only once./

The sensual quality, so clear in evenkos paintings of the nude, is best seen in "Divyiji noi" [Maidens nights], where the first stanza extolls the desire for physical love:
Po3nneJlaca ryeTa icoca

Aic o noaca,
Po3KpH.rmca nepdn-ropn, Xaooiii cepe Mopa; 3aciajno Kapi oqi, 3opi cepe Hoqi, Bij,i pyKH npocs,rinca TaK Got ii o6aooiincsi KpyroM cTaHy. I B noymy XoJlo,uHy Bnlurnca. Ta i 3K.TisiKJ1ot, Ta ii 3 nnaqeM po3Hanooca. /The thick braids unwound

To the waist,
The mound-like breasts Are like waves in the sea, The hazel eyes are shining Like stars in the night, White hands stretch out They would twine themselves Around [someones] waist. They claw the cold pillow And stiffen and grow cold, Spread out, amid tears. /

Even greater than the agony of unfulfilled desire is the suffering that follows the consummation of physical love, usually resulting in the birth of an illegitimate child. The tragic destiny of women, especially beautiful women, is a frequent theme in folk songs; in evenkos poems, however, it acquires a central place in his worldview. The physical act of love fore shadows spiritual chaos. In the poem "I stanom hnukym i krasoju. . [With a slim waist and beauty..., 1850] he sums up this philosophy very well: I
cTaHoM FHKHM i icpacoio HpeHenopoHo-Monooio

EVCENKO AND BLAKE

Crapii oqi aecesno. jHBJnoca iHOi, wBrnoch, I yHO, MOB nepe casiToso, Hepe To60}O noMOJi}Ocb. I KJ1b Meoti, CTapOMy, cTaHe TB0CI 6ooi Kpadoo. 3 H5O iHeWcB ecn? XTO Kojio Te6e B cBiTi cTaHe CBBTHM XHHTJIM TBO1M? I XTO 3acrynnm? XTO yicpuc O 3ia .J1}O4dhKOrO B qac JII4XHI4? XTO cepue qoocTee 1-larpie OrHeM jiio6oai, XTO TaKHI1? Too coopoTa, HeMa Hiicoro, Onpie npaBeHoro Bora.

103

/ With

a slim waist and beauty That is pure and young I gladden my old eyes, I gaze and I gaze As in wonder, as in front of an icon I would pray to you; And I, an old man, take pity on Your divine beauty. Where will you put it? Who in this world will become Your holy protector? Who will defend you? Who will protect you from Human evil at a bad time? Who will fill the pure heart With a fire of love, who will it be? You are an orphan and you have no one Apart from the just God . . . . /

Most of the women in evenkos poems are not raped as in the poem "Knjana" [The princess], but seduced. From the admission of Kateryna 1838 that, despite her parents warning, she loved the Russian officer with all her heart: He c.ayxaJla KarepooHa Hi Gamica Hi HeHbKH,
Horno6niia MocKaibotica, SIc 3HaJlo cepeHbKo.

/ Catherine

heeded Neither father nor mother, She loved the moskal With all her heart./

to the worshipful reverence of Marija 1859 for her seducer:

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LUCKYJ

I cjioaeca iloro caarooi

Ha cepue naaMu Mapil, I cepue M3HO I necjioca /And his holy words fell Into Marijas heart, And the heart froze and burned.!

it is clear that evenkos women are willing victims and that seduction is their inescapable fate. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature the word "seduction" implied a deceitful seducer, usually a man: a woman could be a temptress, but not a seducer. Yet, historically, the womanseductress could have pre-dated the man-seducer, especially in a matri archal society of the type common in pre-historic Ukraine, in which the woman chose her man or men and had no opprobrium attached to the choice. This pre-historic, pre-Christian level of the man-woman relation ship is faintly discernible in Ukrainian folklore.24 While men went to fight in the outer world, women kept watch over the inner world of the family. Mans world is full of danger, but womans world, too, is constantly threatened by disruption, pain, and tragedy. Moreover, womans role in the cycle of life is more vital than mans, for she is responsible for the bearing and rearing of children. The circumstances of conception were of great importance to evenko: he regarded the high rate of illegitimate births in his time as a cause of human misery. In dealing with this, he unveiled various manifestations of an old archetype the bastard. To evenko, the birth of a child was the critical outcome of seduction. It is his representation of birth as an irrepressible, libidinal life force not to be thwarted that gives his poems meaning. The new life asserts itself despite the conditions from which it springs. Although it usually brings further pain and suffering, it sometimes offers hope and salvation, as in the poems "Najmyka" and "Marija." In the latter, Jesus, the illegitimate child, is the founder of a new religion based on compassion and love. Blake, too, often viewed birth as the source of revitalization:
-

"When Enitharmon groaning Produced a man Child to the

light"

The Book of Urizen, VI

Unwed mothers in evenkos poems suffer humiliation, social ostra Cf. P. Cubynskyj, ed., Trudy tnograflesko-statistUeskoj kspedicii v zapadno russky kraj. vols. 3-4 St. Petersburg, 1872; Materijaly do ukrajinsko-ruskoji etnolohiji Lviv, 1899-1916. A great deal of Ukrainian pre-Christian mythology was collected and analyzed by J. G. Frazer in his The Golden Bough London, 1890.
24

EVCENKO AND BLAKE

105

cism, prolonged misery, and, often, self-inflicted and tragic death. Their children, with the few exceptions mentioned, are also punished for their illegitimacy. The flaw in the life cycle is irreparable, and the damage is lasting. Because Sevenkos seducers are all either landlords or Russian soldiers does not mean that he views the abuse of women as arising only from serfdom and the imperial army. However cruel these social types are, they represent more than their class; they are like Blakes deathdealing "satanic powers." In the poem "Maryna," which depicts the bestial treatment of a peasant girl by her landlord, who finally perishes in the fire she sets to his house, the evils of the social order are most clear. Yet even there the poets aim is deeper, for as he himself says, Mifi BoKe
MI4J3H}1,

jIapyfi c.rIoBaM caaTylo cotsiy MiocbKee cepue npo6ooaam, Mi-ocbKii dJlbO3H npoimBam,

Wo6 MuJbOcTh ymy ocinHJia, Wo6 cnasia Toixasi neam Ha oqi ix, o6 cTa.no cajia Moix iBqaTox, uo6 naaJumcb
HyTaMot o6pHMR XOHTb, CBaToro Focnoa ino6oom

I 6paTa MooMoBam.
.

/ My

dear God, Give [my] words a holy power To pierce the human heart To shed human tears So that kindness may envelop the soul, So that quiet sorrow may fall on their eyes, So that my girls shall be pitied, So that they may learn to walk fair paths, To love our holy God And to be kind to one another . . . /

Another extension of womans fate is the obvious analogy which evenko draws between it and the Ukraine a country "seduced" by her Russian masters. The Ukraine is, as he often writes, full of bastards and renegades bajstrjuky, pereverini who are ready "to take off their mothers patched-up shirt" z materipo/alanu soroku znirnaty, "Rozryta mohyla" [The ransacked grave, 1843]. On the one hand, the loss of natural motherhood touches on cataclysmic human problems, while, on the other hand, it obviously reflects national ones. To point out the presence of the national issue in evenkos poetry is to add nothing new, but to establish its dependence on the human issue is to question earlier
-

106

GEORGE S.

N.

LUCKYJ

interpretations. These often maintain that the national and social oppres sion of the Ukraine is the poets predominant theme, and that his main postulate is a free and independent Ukraine.25 In our analysis, the call for the freedom and independence of his country, unquestionable as it is, must be subordinated to Sevenkos view of the human situation. True, the Ukraine is like a seduced woman e.g., the poem "Son" [The dream, 1844] who is exploited by bastards and renegades, and again a "willing seduction" is implied. But this tragedy, like the fate of Kateryna, is seen not in purely political, but in human terms. Politics forms part of the archetypal vision. The existence of a similar correlation in the work of the English Romantic poets has been effectively established.26 As we shall soon see, it is especially apparent in the work of William Blake. Apart from the woman archetype, many other "primordial images" are present in evenkos poetry. Among them are, as has been noted, fate or fortune do/ia and its counterpart, misfortune nedoija, see the poem "Dolja," 1858; glory slava, see the poem "Slava," 1858, freedom vol/a and bondage nevolfa; and truth pravda and falsehood nepravda. These images are not so much concepts27 or ideas as they are archetypes, for they emerge in images, dreams, and symbols. They generally occur in pairs, though not necessarily within the same poem, and represent the positive and negative opposites of the human psyche. The tension existing between them is the substance of life itself. Both evenko and Blake were constantly aware of this tension and responded to it similarly. The "wise old man" or "teacher" is another common archetype used by evenko. This figure usually appeared as a minstrel or kobzar, and provided evenko with the title of his first collection of poems. As in many other cultures,28 the minstrel occupies a prominent place in Ukrainian oral tradition beginning with the medieval legendary rhap sodes Bojan and Mytusa. He is not only a singer-poet, but also the wise old man who guards the traditional wisdom of the people. He appears as the hero of evenkos early poem "Perebendja" 1839. This poem does much more than recreate the blind old minstrel as a Romantic figure. evenko takes great care to characterize him three Cf. S. Smal-Stockyj, T. S?evenko. Interpretaciji, 2nd ed. New York, 1965. Carl Woodring, Politics in English Romantic Poetry Cambridge, 1970. 27 D. Cylevskyj, A History of Ukrainian Literature Littleton, Cob., 1975, pp. 521-24. 28 Albert B. Lord, The Singer ofTales Cambridge, 1960; Robert Graves, The White Goddess London, 1948.
25 26

SEVCENKO AND BLAKE

107

times as "old and whimsical" staryj Ia xymernyj, and to probe behind his whimsicality. The wandering minstrels true nature is revealed in lines

55-79:
Crapoti 3axoaaBc ceny Ha MOFHSIi, nto6 HixTo He 6aqHB, WoG Birep no nojiio cjioaa po3MaxaB, IUo6 iiioe He y.rIH, Go TO 6oce c.rlOBo, To cepue no B0J!i 3 BoroM po3MoBJIa, To cepqe ,qe6eqe FOdnOH1OIO c.riaay, A tyca cpaii cBiTa Ha XM1 ryia.

OpnoM CH3OKHJ1HM snrae, mlpaC, Ac He60 6.IIaKHTHe U1HOKHM54 6e; CII0MHHe Ha coooqi, ioro anotae,
je BOH0 Hoye, 51K BOHO BcTae; Hociyxae Mopa, no Booto roaopum, Cnotra opy ropy: "4oro Tot HiMa?" I 3HOB i-ia He6o, 6o ota 3eMJu rope, Bo Ha iii, motpociii, xyoxa HeMa ToMy, XTO Bce 3Hae, ToMy, XTO ace ye: I1Io Mope roBopHTB, e coqe Hoqyc. oro ota diM cBiTi HiXTO He npotiiMa. OHH BIH MiK HHMH, 51K cootie BHcoKe. oro sHaloTh nioe, 6o HocooTh 3eMJba; A 51K6H flOMyJbH, i1O BiH, OHHOKHII, Cr,isa Ha MOTHJIi, 3 MODeM pO3MOBJI51, Ha 6ocee dsIOBo BOHH 6 HacMia.ruocb, ypHHM Gn Ha3BaJbH, o ce6e 6 nporHanoo. "Hexail noHa MopeM, - cxa3aJbn 6, - rynsi!"

/ The

old man hid On the mound in the steppes, so that none would see him, So that the wind would scatter his words across the field, So that people would not hear them, because these are Gods words; This is how his heart talks freely with God, His heart sings Gods glory, And his thoughts fly on a cloud to the edge of the world. Like a gray eagle he soars, Touching the blue sky with his wide wings; He would rest on the sun and ask it Where it rests at night, how it rises; He would listen to what the sea says, And ask the black mountain: "Why are you silent?" Then once more up into the sky, since on earth there is woe, On its wide expanse there is no corner, For one who knows and hears everything: What the sea is saying, where the sun spends the night.

108

GEORGE S. N. LUCKYJ
No one receives him on earth, He is alone among men, like a high sun. People know him, since he walks on earth, But when they would hear, what does he, the solitary one Sing on the mound as he talks to the sea, They would laugh at his Gods words, Would call him a fool and drive him away, "Let him," they would say, "roam around the sea." /

It is obvious from this stanza that what is important about the minstrel is not his communication with his listeners, but his discourse with the supra-human elements of sun, sea, and God. The minstrels awareness of these higher powers cannot, in fact, be communicated to men on earth, yet it is invaluable because it symbolizes the trans-personal, larger reality of the human psyche, what Jung called the Self as opposed to the human Ego.29 One need not be a Jungian to agree that "the Self is the ordering and unifying center of the total psyche conscious and unconscious just as the ego is the center of the conscious personality:"30 nearly all religions and pseudo-religions accept this tenet as truth. Jungs innovation was to clarify the process by which, in childhood, the ego is gradually separated from the Self through "inflation" and "alienation" and, in old age, may be reunited with the Self through "individuation". What is at stake in our discussion is to recognize this religious conviction about human life as the basis of evenkos poetic creativity. Any other discussion of evenkos religion or irreligion in terms of belief in God, Christian ethics, anti-religious outbursts, etc. is futile, for any set of his pro nouncements may be manipulated to prove that he was a devout Christian or an atheist. It is only on the level of "depth psychology" that ev&nkos religion can be truly understood for what it was an abiding and constant awareness of the division between the all-embracing objec tive reality of life and the human, temporal subjective consciousness. It is also true that, like most Romantics, he believed the former to be essen tially good and beautiful and the latter to be evil and corrupt. In their dreary existence on earth, men had presentiments of eternal beauty and "intimations of immortality." evenko believed that, as one critic puts it, "the goal [of human life] is to redeem by conscious realization, the hidden Self, hidden in unconscious identification with the ego."3
-

29 30

Cf.

Edward F. Edinger, Ego and Archetype Baltimore, 1973. Edinger, Ego and Archetype, p. 3. Edinger, Ego and Archetype, p. 103.

EVCENKO AND BLAKE

109

The disintegration of religious beliefs in the modern world makes the reconciliation of the Ego with the Self a task for psychotherapists. How ever, in evenkos time, religious structures were still by and large intact. Therefore his appeal is not to the individual reader, but to the nation, which, as the perpetuator of a set of definite historical and social prac tices, can assist in the return to wholeness and sanity. evenkos nationalism, therefore, lies not in adherence to a particular political program, but in reliance on a national culture and history to help redeem fallen and suffering human beings. The gallery of evenkos archetypes would be incomplete without the archetype of the Warrior or Cossack, who is the counterpart, if not the companion, of the suffering woman. evenkos poems contain many facets of this archetype: historical and legendary Cossacks or insurgent leaders Taras Trjasylo, Ivan Pidkova, Hamalija, Honta, Zaliznjak, Palij, vaka, Bohdan Xmelnyckyj; the Cossack captured by the Turks the poem "Nevolnyk" [The captive, 1845-59]; and the rank-and-file Cossack, the hero of several shorter poems. evenkos view of the Cossacks underwent a profound change. At first he admired their bravery and heroism, but later he became sceptical of their achievements. The glorious deeds of the Cossacks had left the Ukraine in ruins and led to its enslavement by Russia Sevenko was particularly critical of Bohdan Xmelnyckyj, the chief architect of Russian-Ukrainian union in 1654. The Cossacks valiant exploits failed to guarantee the Ukraines freedom. The poet, therefore, described their inflated egos as "stupid heads durni holovy" which, although they rolled for "truth and Christs faith za pravdu, za viru Xrystovu" were no better than their enemies "Son". Although evenkos reverence for the past glory of the Hetman Ukraine remained, he grew increasingly disenchanted with its legacy and degener ation. This disenchantment culminated in his poem "Sotnyk" [Captain, 1849], in which the titular Cossack officer is described as a selfish, lecherous, and dishonest man. The suffering and alienated male ego is rarely represented by a Cossack an instance occurs in "Nevolnyk," begun in 1845 as "Slipyj" [The blind one] and completed in 1859. For this purpose evenko chose figures such as John Huss "Jeretyk" [The heretic, outside Ukrainian history 1845] and the Roman Alcydes "Neofity" [The neophytes, 1857]. They are human embodiments of the archetype pravda truth in the broadest, not narrowly nationalistic, sense. Both are religious martyrs, upholding eternal truth at a time when "kruhom nepravda i nevolja [everywhere
-

110

GEORGE S. N. LUCKYJ

there is falsehood and bondage]" "Jeretyk" and "ce bezzakonije tvorylos [this lawlessness took place] ""Neofity". In both poems truth is vindicated despite, or perhaps because of, the heroesdeaths. In "Neofity" it is Alcydes suffering mother who, after her sons death, becomes the bearer of Truth "ty slovo pravdy ponesla". Thus men struggle, fight and die in glory, but women are left to suffer and to prevent the victory of the forces of evil.
* * *

The never-ending conflict between good and evil, God and Satan, free dom and oppression that evenko writes about is also the central theme of Blakes poetry. And although the details of the vision of these two poets differ, as does their poetic expression, striking similarities exist between them. Both are visionary or "oracular" poets,32 both create mythologems from partly national Blake England, evenko the Ukraine and partly biblical material, both rebel against the existing social order and enunciate moral principles to a far greater extent than do their contem poraries, and both are vatic poets. There are similarities between their lyrical poems and their favorite devices Blakes "proverbs," evenkos "formulae". Finally, both poets were tried for sedition, and both were artistic as well as literary men, although Blakes engravings are rather different in concept from evenkos etchings and illustrations to his poems. In a recent Jungian interpretation of Blake,33 June Singer summed up the poets vision as "the basic duality of man as expressed in terms of material and spiritual or body and soul the clash of the forces of freely flowing libidinal energy with the inhibiting forms of reason; the confrontation of conscious personal attitudes with the accepted values of contemporary society; and the relationship of the personal uncon scious . and a collective unconscious which is shared by all man kind."34 These terms, general as they are, are also applicable to evenko. True, Blakes emphasis differs from evenkos. H was constantly
. . . . . . . .

32

H. Abrams, "English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age," in Romanticism

Reconsidered, ed. N. Frye New York, 1963. Blake, alone among the English Romantic poets, fills the role of wieszcz "seer, prophet" which is characteristic of
Mickiewicz and evenko. "Their [Blakes, Goethes and Emersons] effort was to restore the poet to his traditional function of seer and mystagogue of the regenerative vision." Joseph Campbell, "Bios and Mythos: Prolegomena to a Science of Mythology," in Myth and Literature, ed. John B. Vickery Lincoln, Neb., 1966, p. 22. June K. Singer, The Unholy Bible New York, 1970. Singer, Unholy Bible, p. 12.

EVCENKO AND BLAKE

Ill

writing about the "contraries" of body and soul, man and woman. In the Marriage of Heaven and Hell such oppositions reach truly cosmic pro portions, of not only spiritual cleavage, but union and reconciliation. Through realizing his own isolation and alienation, man can attain personal and national freedom Song of Liberty. To be sure, Blake describes this process in totally different images and symbols than does evenko; his constant dwelling on sexual liberation, energy, the cosmic nightmare, and the city of God have no counterparts in the work of the Ukrainian poet. Nonetheless these images, too, convey what Frye calls "the beauty of intense concentration,"35 or the creative passion and intel lectual vehemence which we find in evenko. Hand in hand with this quality goes both poetsdeep Christian conviction, which is often directed quite ruthlessly against the Church and religious dogma. "Blakes prophecies," observes Frye, "are in the tradition of Christian epic, and the meaning or total image of the Christian epic is the apocalypse, the vision of reality separated into its eternal constituents of heaven and hell."36 In this sense evenkos "Neofity" is a Blakean poem. In poetic structure, however, evenkos "Velykyj lox" [The great vault] is much closer to Blakes prophecies than any other of the Ukrainians poems. Blakes counterpart to evenkos seduced woman is Lyca, the heroine of two of his Songs of Innocence and of Experience. "The Little Girl Lost" and "The Little Girl Found." But how different is Blakes treatment of seduction! Womans sexual fulfillment leads not to heartbreak, as in evenko, but, on the contrary, to wisdom and maturity. In her percep tive study of this Romantic archetype in Blake,37 Irene Chayes pointed out that at its root lies the myth of the rape of Persephone, and that Lycas "surrender in sleep in the midst of the fallen, desert world is . . a neces sary, ritual step toward the predicted awakening, by which earth will be able to break the heavy chain that holds her in bondage."38 Lycas trans formation, "at variance with the values reflected in the Greek myth,"39 is also very different from that of evenkos heroines. In Blake the struggle between male and female and their union in sexual intercourse is a triumph of lifes energy and imagination over social conventions, beyond
.

Fearful Symmetry, p. 359. Northrop Frye, "Poetry and Design in William Blake," in Blake, ed. N. Frye Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966, pp. 125-26. 3 Irene H. Chayes, "Little Girls Lost: Problems of a Romantic Archetype," in Blake, ed. N. Frye. 38 Chayes, "Little Girls Lost," p. 69. Chayes, "Little Girls Lost," P. 73.
36

Frye,

112

GEORGE S. N. LUCKYJ

good and evil. Blakes feminine ideal, Oothoon Vision of the Daughters ofA/bion, "has learned that this life is a transfiguration of the sexual life of the natural world"4 and is a glorification of physical love. Yet, for Blake woman is not only the symbol of "gratified desire": often his female figures are "pathetic victims"; sometimes they are malevolent and down cast.4 While it is impossible to compare the female figures in evenkos narrative poems with the symbolic "feminine emanations" of Blake both poets animas are everpresent in their works, there are some similarities images of doom, pain, nature and childbirth between Sevenkos pokrytkas and Blakes Vala and Enitharmon in The Four Zoas. While for Blake the woman archetype is not the mother, as it is for Sevenko, both poets treat sex as an elemental reality, although for evenko it is tragic but for Blake, joyous. Neither gives sex the common Romantic conven tion of eroticism or playful adventure, as did Pushkin in Graf Nit/in or Byron in The Bride of Abydos. Eros remains a deity while woman expresses a sense of life to both evenko and Blake. evenkos archetypes Do/ja-Nedo/ja, Volja-Nevoija and Pravda Nepravda have their counterparts in Blake, who invented his own mythical figures to personify what he believed to be the main forces of the psyche. Innocence and Experience, Imagination, Reason, Energy, Love and Hate, Freedom and Slavery, Fall and Eden these archetypal con cepts recur, often in dialectical, opposing pairs. They are the parts of the poets vision that, in one respect, have much in common with evenko. The opposites are dialectically linked; they point in the direction of a new synthesis the regeneration of man.42 The intense struggle between "contraries" runs through most of Blakes and evenkos poems. Their retreat into idylls is very temporary, whereas their poetic imagination is radical and revolutionary. Blakes world is in constant upheaval and his commitment to destroying the existing social order through the powers of his imagination is clear, as is evenkos. However, both poets were more than social critics or even social rebels: they envisioned an ideal order the re-unification re-ligion of man based on their personal religions
-

40

Frye, Fearful Symmetry, p. 240. Mary E. White, "Womans Triumph: A Study of the Changing Symbolic Values of the Female in the Works of William Blake" Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1972. 42 Cf. Joseph P. Natoli, "A Study of Blakes Contraries with Reference to Jungs Theory of Individuation" Ph.D. diss., State University of New York, Albany, 1973.

EVENKO AND BLAKE

113

with God, or the Ego with the Self. In this they act as Romantic revolu tionaries of their respective countries, united by a common Zeitgeist. But to them revolution was not so much a violent re-ordering of society as the regeneration of men.
* * *

Although his imagery is highly universal, Blake wrote about real, contemporary life in England, including the industrial revolution and political and social conditions.43 Whereas Sevenko constantly lashed out against serfdom in his work, Blake lambasted the exploitation of the working class "They mock at the Labourers limbs; they mock at his starved children". What unites Blake and evenko is their hatred of oppression, specifically imperialism. Sevenkos vehement attacks against it in the poems "Son," "Kavkaz," "Velykyj lox" and others come from the viewpoint of the oppressed nation, whereas Blakes come from the side of the oppressor Albion. Blakes anti-imperialism, which has become the subject of an important study,44 made him a staunch sup porter of the French and American revolutions. His poem "America," which depicted British tyranny as a dragon which must be slain, hailed the American Revolution not only as the liberation of America, but as a victory in the struggle against slavery everywhere. In touching upon Blakes admiration for the American Revolution, it is appropriate to mention evenkos similar sentiment, so rare in the Eastern Europe of his day, as expressed in "Jurodyvyj" [Gods fool, 1857]:
-

Ko,not Mot iKeMoca Bauionorroooa 3 HOBHM i llBHotM 3aKoHoM? A UKMOCb TKH KOJlHcb.
-

/When shall we get a Washington With a new and just law? And yet we shall get him one day./

Blakes frequent exhortations to England "England, awake!," Jerusa lem have their counterparts in evenko P/a Ukrajno!, "Son"; Vstane Ukrajina, "Stojit v sell Subotovi". Blakes declaration of independence rings similarly to Sevenkos: Blake: "Let the slave, grinding at the mill, run out into
the field,

Cf.

44

J. Bronowski, William Blake and the Age of Revolution New York, 1965. David Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire Princeton, 1954.

114

GEORGE S. N. LUCKYJ Let him look up into the heavens and laugh in the bright air; the inchained soul, shut up in darkness and in Let
sighing,

Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years, Rise and look out; his chains are loose, his dungeon
doors are open."

"America"
evenko: I po3Bie TbM HeBoili, CBiT npaB4ot 3adBiTotm, I flOMOJIHTbd$1 ota BOJIi Heaojmnaqi piTH. /It will disperse the dark slavery, The truth will shine forth, And in freedom will pray The children of slaves. . . . /

"Stojit v seli Subotovi" [There stands in the village of Subotiv] Like Blake, evenko perceived liberation in human, not social or political, terms:
Bcraooe npaaa! Bcraooe Bojiol! /Truth will rise! Freedom will rise

!/ "Kavkaz"

or:

I ota

oHoBsIelnui 3MJli

Bpara He 6ye, cyriocrara, A 6ye coon i 6ye MaTH I 6yyii, rnoe Ha 3eMJn.
/And on the new land There will be no enemy, no adversary,

But there will be son and mother And there will be people on this earth.

"Arximed i Halilej" "The end which he [Blake] sought," writes Bronowski, "was more than a social righting; it was the right. He believed that this end is found in no society, but must be found by man himself."45 To say that both Blake and evenko were revolutionary poets is true, but cursory. Their rhetoric against the established order is similar in vehemence and apocalyptic outlook, and it is evident why much of their

Bronowski, William Blake, p. 131.

EVCENKO AND BLAKE

115

best poetry was published only long after their deaths. Blake waited much longer than Sevenko for recognition, mostly because Blakes mythology was not easily understood. evenkos appeal to his countrymen was much more direct, though it was blocked for decades by tsarist censor ship. Blake, unlike evenko, had a clearly worked out theory of art; however, he was unable to communicate his vision, since, as Frye wrote, "how are we to evaluate an utterance which is now lucid and now a mere clashing of symbols, now disciplined and lovely verse and now a prosy gabble?"46 Though so different in form, the poems of evenko and Blake show a similar tension between the "contraries" conceived in terms of the archetypes of Good and Evil, rather than Beauty and Ugliness or Reason and Emotion. The conflict in their works is essentially moral, not spiritual or intellectual. In the histories of their respective literatures, Blake and Sevenko were volcanic eruptions that shattered all previous concepts of art. The dis coveries they made are still valid today. Their anthropocentric visions of on life were based on the archetypal perception of the human psyche mans capacity to overcome alienation and inflation and to find the lost Eden in himself. Therefore the myths they created are lasting ones. For "great literature is impossible without a previous imaginative consent to a ruling mythology that makes intelligible and unitive the whole of that experience."47 And what mythologies can be more convincing than those bodying forth inevitable human regeneration?
-

University of Toronto

46

ed. A. S.

N. Frye, "Blakes Treatment of the Archetype," in English Institute Essays - 1950, Downer New York, 1951, p. 195. M. Schorer, William Blake: The Politics of Vision New York, 1946, p. 29.

DOCUMENTS

CONCERNING THE UNION OF HADJAC 1658

OMELJAN PRITSAK

The Union of Hadja of 1658, which aimed to restructure the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth as a triple state comprising Poland, Lithu ania, and RusUkraine, has fared badly in Ukrainian historiography. In assessing the event, scholars have used the nationalistic criteria intro duced by Romanticism especially "ethnos" and language to object that the Grand Duchy of Rus established by Hadja did not include all the Ukrainian ethnic territories of the Commonwealth. Also, Ukrainian his torians of various political outlooks, from the socialist Myxajlo Hruev skyj to the monarchist Vjaeslav Lypynskyj, have doubted whether the intentions of the Poles were honorable. In a previous issue of this journal Professor Andrzej Kamiski showed that in order to evaluate the spirit of Hadja properly, one must consider the political ideology of the Commonwealths nobility during the seven teenth century. No Polish king could, or would, separate a part of the Commonwealth and turn it over to a newly emerging state at will. The local nobles szlachta alone could decide whether to remain under the Polish Crown or to establish a separate political entity. In 1658 the Kiev, Braclav, and szlachta of the three Ukrainian palatinates Cernihiv opted, despite their ethnic and religious differences, to create a separate Grand Duchy of Rus. It was entirely up to the szlachta of the palatinate of Rus Lviv to decide whether to follow suit. The only rele vant guarantee made at Hadja was the freedom of the Orthodox faith in all parts of Poland, including the Grand Duchy of Rus.
-

* * *

few years after

the Hadja union was concluded, a cadastral census

"The Cossack Experiment in Szlachta Democracy in the Polish-Lithuanian Com monwealth: The Hadiach Iladziacz Union," Harvard Ukrainian Studies 1, no. 2 1977: 178-97.

THE UNION OF HADJAt

117

lustracja was conducted in Poland for tax purposes. The Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences recently published, in three parts, the Lustracja of the Rus palatinate.2 The third part contains some hitherto unknown data confirming Professor Kamiskis thesis that the Poles took Hadja seriously. In particular, these data show that the Polish administration respected and implemented the paragraphs of the Hadja Treaty that granted tax exemptions to Orthodox priests. The relevant passages from the Lustrac/a of 1661-1665 are the fol
lowing:

1. [Haly Land, Kalu]:

POP! MIASTA JKM KALUSZA I STAROSTWA KALUSKIEGO Stanwszy przed nami popi kaluscy i starostwa kaluskiego prosili, abymy ich

przy punktach [in Hadja] Kozakom Zaporoskim na przszlym Sejmie nadanych,

ktremi od robot ich uwalniaj i insze prerogatywy nadaj quasi ad similitudinem den ritus Romani, zachowali. W czym i potrzeby jest JKM i calej Rzeczypos politej consensus, t spraw i pretensyje ich do Sejmu, da Bog, blisko przyszlego zachowujc i tam ich z supplik odsylajc, zwyczaje et iura utriusque partis w cale zostawujemy antiqua.3

2. [Haly Land, Rohatyn]: Pop wolen iuxta [Hadja] constitutionem.4 3. [Haly Land, Rohatyn county]:
Uskarali sic przy tym popi starostwa rohatyskiego, e od nich dziesicin

pszczeln, czynsze i kaplony wybieraj. Tedy, co sic tycze dziesiciny pszczelnej,

jeeli na gruncie cerkiewnym ma ktOry pop pszczoly, od nich nie ma bye brana do zamku dziesicina. Ale jeeli na gruncie zamkowym ma pszczoty, dziesicin powinien do zamku takowy pop daC. A wzgldem czyszw i kaplonw,
poniewa wiea konstytucyja [of HadjaC] uwolnila popOw od wszytkich podat kw i z kaplanami religijej rzymskiej katolickiej porwnala, wolni byC od takowych i od inszych wszytkich maji jako i my onych wolnemi czyniemy.

4. [HalyC Land, Firlejov]:

Pop wolen od podatkw iuxta [Hadja-] constitutionem.6

5. [HalyC Land, Terebovija]: Prowent z miasta trembowelskiego do zamku naIez.cy. Popw ritus Graeci trzech, wolni od podatkw per [Hadja-] constitutionem.7
. . .

" 6

Emilia Arlamowska, Kazimierz Arlamowski, and Wanda Kaput, Lustracja woje wdstwa ruskiego 1661-1665, part 3: ZiemiehalickaichetmskaWroclaw,etc., 1976. Lustracja, p. 48.

Lustracja, p. 112. Lustracja, p. 120. Lustracja, p. 129.

Lustracja,
p.

145.

118

OMELJAN PRITSAK

6. [HalyC Land, Terebovlja]:

Trembowli Stanwszy przed nami pop Gielofneg Rubala, pnodukowal nam przywilej
Popostwa miasta Najjaniejszego KJM Jana Kazimierza, de data we Lwowie dnia 4 m. grudnia r.

1662 milociwie otnzymany, ktonym tak pomienionego Gielofnega Rubal, jako i

syna jego, Antoniego Rubal, i Fedora, zicia jego, od wszelakich podatkOw

uwalnia podlug [Hadja] konstytucyjej, przy ktOnej wolnoci i przywileju

pomienionego popa z synem i z zicciem jego w cale zachowujemy.

Do teje wolnoci Leontego, namiestnika tnbowelskiego, i Bazylego przypusz

czamy i aby przy takowych swobodach, jakie Gielofreg z synem i z zicciem maj,

zostawali, mied chcemy.5 These data support the revindication of the Union of HadjaC as one of the most glorious political acts in the history of Europe. Harvard University

Lustracja, p. 147.

REVIEW ARTICLES A DECADE OF TYCYNIANA

GEORGE G. GRABOWICZ

The Tyyniana published since the poets death in 1967 is remarkable for both its quantity and diversity. Surely in that time no Ukrainian writer has been the focus of as much attention as Pavlo TyCyna. Writing about Tyyna, on editing and commenting his works, has become a suigeneris growth industry in Soviet Ukrainian letters. The poet who wrote "Za vsix skau . now has the favor returned by a large segment, if not the whole, of the literary community. The attention is certainly not misplaced: the consensus that TyCyna is the greatest Ukrainian poet of this century is felt on both sides of the ideological divide. Not unexpectedly, this broad interest is actualized in various focuses and approaches, and in works dif fering greatly in quality. The production of works by and on TyCyna can be divided into four fairly discrete categories: new editions of TyCynas already published poetry; editions of Tyynas unpublished or "forgotten" works, princi pally his poetry, but also articles and speeches; 2 memoirs, interviews,
. ."

ARFAMY, ARFAMY. . . . By Pavlo Tyyna. Kiev: "Dnipro," 1968. 95 Pp. VYBRANI TVORY. By Pavlo Tyyna. Edited by S. S. Zinuk. Kiev: "Dnipro," 1971. Vol. 1: 393 pp. Vol. 2: 363 pp. TVORY V DVOX TOMAX. By Pavlo Tyyna. Edited by 0. I. Kudin. Kiev: "Dnipro," 1976. Vol. 1: 415 PP. Vol. 2: 423 PP. JUNOSTI NEPEREMONYJ DUX. By Pavlo Tyyna. Edited by Lidija Petrivna Tyyna. Kiev: "Molod," 1974. 263 pp. 2yvy, 2Yvy, KRASUJSJA. By Pavlo Tyyna. Edited by Hryhorij Donec. Kiev: "Dnipro," 1975. 190 PP. 2 P0D0ROZ DO IXTIMANA. By Pavlo Tyyna. Edited by V. 0. Pidpalyj. Kiev: "Radjanskyj pysmennyk," 1969. 125 PP. V SERCI U MOJIM. . . . By Pavlo Tyt9yna. Edited by S. S. Zinuk. Kiev: "Dnipro," 1970. 302 pp. SKOvORODA. SYMFONIJA. By Pavlo Tyyna. Edited by L.M. Novy&nko et al. Kiev: "Radjanskyj pysmennyk," 1971. 401 PP. KVITNY MOvO NASA RIDNA. By Pavlo Tyyna. Edited by H. M. Kolesnyk. Akademija Nauk URSR, Instytut movoznavstva im. 0. 0. Potebni. Kiev: "Naukova dumka," 1971. 205 PP.

120

GEORGE G. GRABOWICZ

recollections, etc.;3 and criticism.4 The first category is comprised exclusively of popular editions offering selections of Tyynas poetry. In normal circumstances they would not merit close scrutiny. The reviewer would comment on an editorial choice, on the physical format, or on the illustrations, and reserve discussion of more substantive issues for a scholarly or academic edition. However, circumstances in the Soviet Ukraine are not entirely "normal." Given official control and vigilance, every publication and every edition reflects an official interpretation. More specifically, there is no scholarly, academic, or complete edition of Tyynas work: since the early 1930s all editions of his poetry have been selections, including the multivolume editions of 1946, 1957, and 1961. In each, censorship was the sole prin ciple of selection. Offending poems, such as "Vijna" in Sonjafnikljarnety or "Mesija" in Pluh, were simply deleted. In fact, it was a sign of progress when the deletion began to be admitted by the qualification "Iz knyhy" preceding the title of the given collection; in the 1946 edition, there was no such concession to historical fact. Under such circumstances, the publication of an academic, presumably uncensored, edition of TyCynas work which, according to L. NovyCenko, was already planned in 1970 seems quite impossible.5 The censoring of Frankos poetry in the recent fifty-volume [!] edition of his works tends to reinforce this conclusion.6 The popular new editions, then, perform a valuable service:
-

Z MYNULOHO - v MAJBUTNJE. By Pavlo Tyyna. Edited by Stanislav Telnjuk. Kiev: "Dnipro," 1973. 343 pp. NARODNI PISNI V ZAPYSAX PAvLA TYCYNY. Edited by B. I. SurJa. Kiev: "Muzyna Ukrajina," 1976. 174 PP. 3 SPIvEcNovono sv!Tu: SPOHADY PRO PAvLA TYCYNU. Edited by H. P. Donec Kiev: "Dnipro," 1971. 510 pp. PRO PAVLA TYCYNU. Edited by H. P. Donec Kiev: "Radjanskyj pysmennyk," 1976. 291 PP. PAvLO TYCYNA: ZYTTJA l TvORCIST U DOKUMENTAX, FOTOHRAFIJAX, !LJUSTRA CIJAX. Edited by V. I. Hrunicev and S. M. axovskyj. Kiev: "Radjanska Ikola,"

1974. 262 pp.

CERVONYX SONC PROTUBERANCI. By Stanislav Telnjuk. Kiev: "Radjanskyj pysmennyk," 1968. 187 Pp. PAvLO TYCINA: OCERK POETICESKOGO TVORCESTVA. By Stanislav Telnjuk. PAvLO TYCYNA - LITERATUROZNAVEC I KRYTYK. By Z. M. Hruzman. Kiev: "Dnipro," 1975. 194 pp. F!LosOFsKl MOTYVY U TVORCOSTI PAVLA TYCYNY. By B. L Korsunska. Kiev: "Naukova dumka," 1977. 224 pp.

Moscow: "Xudoestvennaja literatura," 1974. 273 pp.

Vserci u mojim, p.35.

Cf., for example, Ivan Franko, Zibrannja tvoriv upatdesjaty tomax, vol.

1 Kiev,

1976; the cycle "Ukrajina" in Z verlyn i nyzyn.

A DECADE OF TYYNIANA

121

each, in its own way, is a small step toward revealing the poet behind the official rhetorician. The first posthumous edition of Tyynas poetry, the slim volume entitled Arfamy, arfamy 1968, may be seen, in retrospect, as a har binger of positive developments. By dispensing with the customary fore word or introduction, which more often than not is an exercise in bombast, it signals a new approach and allows the poetry to speak for itself. More importantly, the edition is genuinely selective, approaching its subject not through the customary chronological order, but through thematic and modal divisions i.e., the "purely" lyrical poems, the revolu tionary and tribunicial ones, the hymns to the new order, etc.. The selec tion throughout reflects a concern with aesthetic quality, and the early poetry and the lyrical principle predominate; the very title may be seen as symbolically resurrecting this side of TyCyna. The other two small volumes, Junosti neperemonyj dux 1974 and Zyvy, yvy, krasujsja 1975 have no striking faults or merits, and are similar in format to the last selection of TyCynas poetry published during his lifetime, Ljudyni himn 1966.7 Their principal value is to make a fairly good selection of TyCynas poetry available to a large readership.8 Junosti neperemonyj dux performs an additional service by including four longer works. Un fortunately, it also contains a more than usually clichd foreword. It is the larger, two-volume editions of 1971 and 1976, however, that achieve a modest rollback of the censorship in force since the early l930s. Between them, the two editions reinstate the poems "Skorbna maty I-IV," "I,e ptaky," "Tuman/Enharmonijne," and "Zolotyj homin" from Sonjalni kljarnety9 still missing is the excellent poem "Vijna", republish the cycle "Madonno moja" from P/uh still missing are such poems as "Na mohyli evenka, III," "26.11/11.111 [Na den evenka]" part II, "Palit universaly," "Hnatovi Myxajlyenku" and "Mesija", complete the cycle "V kosminomu orkestri" from Viler z Ukrajiny, add two poems to the two usually allowed from Cernihiv thus making exactly half of the cycle available," and, perhaps most significantly, include four
...

Pavlo Tyyna, Ljudyni himn. . . Kiev, 1966. Their combined edition is six times that of the previous edition, Ljudyni himn.... "Tuman" and "Zolotyj homin" were included in the 1946 edition. The latter is given there in a somewhat bowdlerized version. 10 In a recent edition the seventh part was omitted - perhaps because it mentions Christ and Myxajlyenko. II Cf. G. Grabowicz, "Tyynas Cernihiv," Harvard Ukrainian Studies 1, no. I
8

March 1977: 79-113.

122

GEORGE G. GRABOWICZ

poems, with antistrophes again exactly one-half of the collection from the heretofore proscribed Zamistsonetiv i oktav. At this rate assum ing no relapses a more or less complete canon of Tyynas poetry can be expected to be published in the Soviet Ukraine by the centenary of his birth, in 1991. The more recent and larger of these editions also has bibliographical and explanatory notes appended to each volume, and it is here that we learn that this publication is conceived as the fullest edition yet published of Tyynas poetry.2 It seems reasonable to presume that it is also the compromise solution to the as-yet-unpublishable academic edition. In their bibliographical capacity the notes are undoubtedly useful, and the explanations, too, are occasionally helpful we learn, for example, that the neologism "social-cergibeli" from Cernihiv is based on the name of the chief of police in the Brtining government in Germany.3 For the most part, however, the explanations are crude, and when dealing with the newly rehabilitated "controversial" works, vulgar and distorting in the extreme. For example, the poem "Ispyt" from Zamist sonetiv i oktav,
-

Tijmxn UO noqasin MH 3eMJHo .J1IO6HTb, B3SLJ1H acyna B pyKH, ItoJIoffli 3aKaMaJbH. pan 6ora, ameToo HaiHbTe, wo-He6yb 1M dICaKiTh: BOHH naom, Mn dTb y Hac KyJmTypa! 5Ixicb qH6aTi qyIcoseMw noxypioann Kpi3h riencHe. A HaBKoJIo 3J1HHi SIX rynHa, six rooM! A HaBKo.no 3eMnsI, cToJloqeHa, pyia. TyT xonB Cxoaopoa.
-

is given this elucidation: "This poem is a grotesque directed against the false bourgeois civilization and the rotten culture of the West and its missionaries; at the same time, the unique native culture samobutnja viUyznjana kultura and its new shoots are passionately asserted."4 Judging by this, one would be inclined to think that an undogmatic and sophisticated reading of Tyynas poetry, where "humanism" or "ab stract humanism" and "symbolist poetics" are not terms of oppro brium,5 is still far in the future. As we shall see, this is not altogether the case.

12

Tvory v dvox tomax, 1:387. Tvory v dvox tomax, 1:396. Cf. also "Tyynas Cernihiv, "p. 109.
Tvory v dvox tomax,

l:390.Cf. also the

Tvory v dvox tomax, 1:390.

notes to "Zolotyj homin," P. 389, etc.

A DECADE OF TYYNIANA

123

Compared with the modest gains of the above, two publications ap pearing in close succession, in 1970 and 1971, constitute a dramatic break through. They are, respectively, the collection of TyCynas unpublished and "forgotten" poetry, V serci u mojim, and the monumentally con ceived but fragmentary Skovoroda. Symfona, on which TyCyna worked between 1920 and 1940. Vserci u mojim, with its selection of new poems from virtually every period of TyCynas creativity, with a number of out standing works, and, above all, with its revelation in the late TyCyna of a private lyrical voice largely unaffected by the public stance of official spokesman, made, as is now apparent, an indelible mark on the Ukrainian literary scene. The collection not only resurrected some of Tyynas poems which are now included, for example, in the editions mentioned above, but it also genuinely deepened the understanding of his poetry. A closer analysis of this collection has already been attempted.6 One can only note here that it casts extremely valuable light on the basic structures of Tyynas poetry, the interplay of the personal and the impersonal, the lyrical and the tribunicial. This book also adds to our perception of the thematic range of his work, especially the intimate love poetry and the confessional and meditative poems. Moreover, it obliges the critic to reexamine the poets creative evolution, and to discard any facile, ideo logical scheme of periodization. Whereas V serci u mojim illustrates the range of Tyynas poetry, Skovoroda. Symfona intimates its depth. Despite its unfinished state, numerous redactions, and the manifest changes in its "ideological" and "philosophical" premises, the essence of the poem is unfragmented. In fact, it reflects an abiding, intense concern of TyCynas poetry. For Skovoroda is not so much an epic canvas about the eighteenth-century poet-philosopher and his participation in and transformation by social upheavals i.e., the hajdamak uprising and the KolUivlyna, as Soviet scholarship and TyCyna himself professed it to be, as it is an extended meditation on what is surely the central issue in Tyynas ethos the poet and his relation to society, to the people. Tyynas identification with Skovoroda already signaled in his early poetry, i.e., in Zamistsonetiv i oktav is total. The deliberations on social theory and materialism, the movement from a sense of social injustice to a realization of the inevita bility of class conflict, the agonizing over the inadequacy of ones earlier creativity because of its "abstract humanism",I7 all these manifestly
-

6 Cf. G. Grabowica, "The Poetry of Reconstitution: Pavlo Tyynas V serci u mo/tm," Recenzija 2, no. 2 Spring 1972: 3-29. 7 Cf. the section entitled "Perle vydinnja Skovorody."

124
reflect

GEORGE G. GRABOWICZ
-

TyCyna and the massive pressures of his world not those of the Baroque poet. But askew as it is, the historiography does not affect the aesthetic core of Skovoroda. The long poem-symphony both as poetic auto biography, self-analysis and programme, and as a vision of the Ukrainian past particularly telling in its comic and satiric scenes has become a centerpiece of Tyynas oeuvre. And the greatest commendation that can be made for this edition is that it does justice to the work. It is pain stakingly and lovingly reconstructed, and it is provided with a sensitive and thoughtful introduction, by Stanislav Telnjuk, and notes that are remarkably informative and free from cant. In the entire spectrum of TyCyniana under discussion, Skovoroda. Symfonija is the unqualified highpoint. Publication of other portions of Tyynas voluminous works has produced editions that seem paler by comparison, as well as some that are quite revealing. Podoro do Ixtimana, first published in 1969 in the journal Vityzna and then in a separate edition, is a long narrative-lyrical poem, dated 1950-1967, that is based on TyCynas visits to Bulgaria. While not devoid of good moments, the poem is far from TyCyna at his best. Its curious afterword, by Zaxar HonCaruk, is in effect a collage of citations from Tyyna held together by breathless poetic prose rumi nating on the musical principle in Tyynas poetry; its style is reminiscent of another poet-commentator on Tyyna, the migr Vasyl Barka.8 Rather more interesting than Podoro do Ixtimana is the small volume entitled Kvitny movo naJa ridna, an intriguing potpourri of several of TyCynas articles about language, letters and fragments of letters dealing with poetry and language, poems and fragments of poems, a selection of his aphorisms and "winged" expressions, and, finally, as perhaps the most valuable contribution, a dictionary of Tyynas neologisms complete with references to the poetic source. The palpably synthetic format, the re peated paeans to the Ukrainian language and to poetic inventiveness, and, especially, TyCynas criticism although mild, to be sure of the bastardization i.e., Russification of the Ukrainian language in the Soviet press in two articles, written in 1938 and 1940, when viewed in terms of the maximal sensitivity of the language issue in the Soviet Ukraine today, cannot but lead to speculation about the motives behind this work. The introduction was written by the ultimate official Soviet
-

1961.

Cf. Vasyl Barka, Xliborobskyj Orfej, abo kl/arnetyzm Munich and New York,

A DECADE OF TYCYNIANA
-

125

authority on the Ukrainian language, the academician I. K. Bilodid but it is eminently circumspect and cautious. Whatever the motives and larger function of the book, it is unquestionably valuable for having assembled certain poetic-linguistic material and for giving us occasional glimpses into TyCynas poetic laboratory. One of its most interesting pieces is a fragment of a letter to Zerov in which TyCyna differs with him on the question of styles in his own poetry. As fragmentary and indirect as the debate is, it shows the incisiveness of Zerovs criticism, and, in contrast, the ineptness of much of present-day Soviet criticism on TyCyna. A subsequent edition of TyCynas articles, speeches and sketches, Z mynuloho v majbutnje, published in 1973, makes a very different impact. It is a large collection of about seventy occasional pieces, averag ing about three to four pages. Most are published for the first time and virtually all date from TyCynas later years the majority from the l950s and l960s, the earliest from the mid and late 1930s, when he had become an official spokesman, polemicist, and elder for the Soviet Ukraine and for Soviet Ukrainian literature. The collection was apparently originally conceived by Tyyna himself, but its actual realization, the selection and the editing was done by S. Telnjuk, with characteristic great care and empathy. In his introduction Telnjuk notes that Each of these articles and notes, every sketch, memoir, or interview published in
-

this book is, above all, a human document. In speaking, for example, about Komensky or Pet&i, Gorky or Aseev, loanisian or Kolas, Pavlo Tyyna not only gives us something new for understanding the greatness of these writers which we can, to be sure, also find in other sources, but enlightens every fact, even the well-

known, with the unique soft warmth of his great heart, opening to us ever new dimensions of his soul.9 This, unfortunately, is only occasionally true. Indeed, when speaking of his past, or of his friends and colleagues - Vasyl Ellan Blakytnyj, Les Kurbas, Maksym Rylskyj, etc. - TyCyna can both evocatively portray

the man and reveal his own benign and gentle character. But these pieces are in the minority; the greater number are written in TyCynas public, official voice, and here the same emotional and pathetic principle turns them into empty rhetoric and clich: As he castigates "Western imperial ists" and "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists," or praises Dmytro PavlyCko for his chef doeuvre "Pljuju na papu," TyCyna is, sadly, no different from any run-of-the-mill Soviet propagandist; as he gives socialist realist

Z mynuloho

v majbutnje,

p.

4.

126

GEORGE G. GRABOWICZ

advice to young poets and approvingly cites fragments from hack versi fiers cf. "Do molodi mij holos" he is the typical Soviet gerontocrat and reactionary. But what is most embarrassing is the interpretation by Soviet critics of such rhetorical, pathos-laden pieces as literary criticism, indeed literary scholarship. Leaving aside the usual and expected barrage about the essential revolutionariness, the identification with the "people," in a word, the bolshevism avant la lettre of Sevenko, Franko, or Lesja Ukrajinka,2 one can turn to TyCynas comments on other well-known writers to illustrate the problem. A talk on Mickiewicz, for instance, begins with this sentence: "Today we solemnly celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of the great Polish revolutionary poet, thinker, and founder of modern Polish literature, Adam Mickiewicz."2 The opening statement of the very next article, on Gogol, is: "The worth of every writer is measured by many qualities of his creative spirit. But the first of these qualities is his patriotism, his love for his fatherland." It continues:
In his concept of patriotism Gogol included everything: his love for his suffering, enserfed people; his fierce hate for tsarist autocracy, his hate for the foreign ideology that was hostile to the Russian people [and yet] was imposed on Russia

by foreign newcomers who surrounded the tsars throne; his perpetual desire for cooperation between nations; and, above all, his belief that his nation will in the
future finally become the first among the first in the entire world.22

All this may be interesting as an example of TyCynas literary associations or his phantasy viewing Mickiewicz through the prism of a evenko or a Kotljarevskyj? making Gogol into Tyynas image and likeness? or simply his repetition of established Soviet verities, but it has nothing to do
with literary criticism or scholarship. To imply otherwise is to mock these

disciplines

and to mock Tyyna. There should be no misunderstanding

here: these writings by Tyyna as also his odes to Stalin, or the elegy for

the Kruty dead should be recorded and published, for they are part of his canon and part of history. Their genre, however, their essential rhetorical, exhortatory mode, should be clearly recognized, for it is plain that TyCyna is no more a scholar or reasoning literary critic in these pieces than he is an objective historian in Skovoroda. Perhaps saddest of all is the fact, as the letter to Zerov mentioned above makes clear, that this was not always TyCynas mode of literary analysis. The difference between the
20

E.g., "Lesja Ukrajinka, with all her tireless activity, honestly performed the tasks

required of her by the progressive revolutionary forces of that epoch." Z mynuloho v majbutnje, p. 80. 2! Z mynuloho - v majbutnje, p. 120. 22 Z mynuloho - v majbutnje, pp. l23-4.

A DECADE OF TYCYNIANA

127

lucidity and lightness in that fragment of correspondence and the heavy handed, unsubtle pronouncements of this book is painfully obvious. At the core of the third category of TyCyniana are two collections of memoirs edited by H. P. Donec: Spivec novoho svitu: Spohady pro Pay/a Tyynu 1971 and Pro Pay/a Tyynu 1976. The first, larger volume contains over one hundred, mostly short three-to-four page notes, recollections, or sketches devoted to TyCyna. Most are published for the first time, although a larger number is taken from the collection Pav/ovi Tyynipublished during the poets lifetime, in 1961. The second, smaller volume contains over forty articles of slightly greater length, just under half of which are published for the first time. In both collections the range is predictably great. There are short poems by Sosjura, Malyko, DraC, letters or notes to TyCyna e.g., by Baan, longer memoirs e.g., by SmolyC, articles with an analytical bent Rylskyj, NovyCenko, short rhetorical pieces, etc. Their date of writing also varies greatly, from perhaps the earliest comment, by Vasyl Ellan Blakytnyj, written before 1925, to the vast majority written toward the end of Tyynas life and dedicated to him posthumously. The vast majority are laudatory and panegyrical; a few, as noted, are more analytical. Some are informative and interesting, some are dull and predictable. Among all of them, one stands out sharply "Zhadujuy TyCynu," by the poet Leonid Pervo majskyj. Consciously avoiding elevated rhetoric or pathos or praise, Pervomajskyj recounts, with great objectivity and a kind of sombre introspection, some of his meetings with TyCyna, and in the process reveals much about each writer and about the complex, difficult times they lived through. A very different history is presented in the album Pavlo Tyyna:Zyttja i tvorist u dokumentax, fotohrafijax, i/justracjax 1974. Published by "Radjanska kola," its aim is frankly propagandistic. There are numer ous photographs and excerpts from his poems and excerpts from comments on his work, but, in sum, TyCyna the poet is decidedly secondary to TyCyna the Minister of Education, the Party Member, and the Hero of Socialist Labor. Were it not for one critic, the category of critical studies on TyCyna would appear rather bleak. The publications discussed here are fre
-

quently accompanied

by introductory essays, but they break no new

ground and do not even attempt a critical, analytical stance. Leonid NovyCenkos introduction to Vserci it mojim is one exception, for it seeks to sketch out at least some of the major thematic and evolutionary lines in TyCynas poetry. However, two other articles by NovyCenko on Tyyna

128

GEORGE G. GRABOWICZ

written in this period are quite disappointing.23 Put in the best light, they deal with the politics and orthodoxy of Tyyna, rather than with his poetry. In fact, it is doubly disappointing to observe that an article written by NovyCenko more than thirty years ago, on "Poxoron druha,"24 is con siderably more analytical and outspoken, and much more attuned to the poetic phenomenon itself, than are his present essays. Two recent, specialized studies, Z. M. Hruzmans Pav/o Tyyna /iteraturoznayec i krytyk 1975 and B. L. Korsunskas Filosofski motyvy it tvorosti Pay/a Tyyny 1977, mark the low point of TyCyna studies. As literary scholarship or criticism, they hardly merit discussion.
-

The first work, an instance of "popular scholarship" at its worst, is simply

a rehashing of the clichs Tyyna promulgated as part of his official

duties. It is no more than an exercise in dogma and banality. On any given page one can find such critical judgments as:
Noting that V. I. Lenin was severe and honest in his views, principled and uncom promising in his estimation of such or another work, Tyyna exhorted [us] to learn from Lenin and to hold high and always live up to the calling of a Soviet writer. 25

Similarly, Korsunska, in her study, neatly defines philosophy as the battle against religious convictions ultimately for Marxism, and with that proceeds to an altogether predictable exegesis of TyCyna, especially his Skovoroda. Hers, too, is essentially a ritual, not an analytical quest. Semen axovskyjs Pav/o Tyyna: Zyujepyspoeta ihromadjanyna,26 although published in 1968, was written well before Tyynas death, and
in approach as well as chronology clearly antedates the publications dis cussed here. It, too, is a popularizing work "Knyha rozraxovana na najyre kolo CytaCiv. . ." which combines a reading of TyCynas poetry

with a biographical treatment. As a literary study it is perhaps a cut above the efforts of Hruzman and Korsunska, but only marginally so. The real counterpoint is provided by the critic and poet Stanislav Telnjuk, already encountered as co-editor of the excellent Skovoroda and editor of the problematical Z mynuloho v majbutnje. With the appearance of his other two works, Cervonyx soncprotuberanci 1968 and the Russian-language Pavlo Tyina: Oerk poetieskogo tvorestva 1974, Telnjuk must be seen as the most serious and dedicated Tyyna scholar in the Soviet Union today. The first of his studies, as Telnjuk
-

23 24 25 26

Cf. Leonid Novyenko, Zytija jak dzjannja Kiev, 1974. "Pravda naloho asu," in Zytt Ia jak dijannja, PP. 164-79. Pavlo Tytyna - literaturoznavec i krytyk, p. 37. Semen Saxovskyj, Pavlo Tyyna: 2yttjepys poeta i hromadjanyna Kiev, 1968.

A DECADE OF TYCYNIANA

129

notes, is conducted on the borderline between literary criticism and per sonal memoir. More than half of the work, however, is devoted to a close

reading of Tyynas poetry, primarily his early work. Despite its engage,
manifestly sympathetic stance or perhaps because of it, Telnjuks criti cism emerges as remarkably sophisticated and subtle. It is also out spoken - for when necessary Telnjuk is willing to question the over simplification of even a NovyCenko. His second study, Pavlo Tyina, which is a mature elaboration of the first, stands as probably the best Soviet treatment of TyCyna since the 1930s. The book is certainly not without flaws, principally a reliance on reductive ideological readings although these are often mandatory, a frequently unquestioning accept ance of TyCynas own "ideological" or "philosophical" premises e.g., the discussion of Skovoroda, and empathy that at times tends to overwhelm critical distance. These are well compensated, however, by the authors merits - acuity of judgment, sensitivity to poetry, and a readiness to oppose and directly polemicize with narrowmindedness and vulgariza tions as clearly manifested in his enlightened discussion of Zamist sonetiv I oktav and Cernihiv. For the present, these are considerable achievements. One can only hope that it will be the efforts of Telnjuk, and not the more recent productions mentioned above, that set the tone for future TyCyna study in the Soviet Ukraine. Harvard University

REVIEWS

SLOVNYK STAROUKRAJINSKOJ! MOVY XIV-XV ST. Volume 1 A-M. Edited by Luka Humecka et al. Akademija nauk Ukrajinskoji URSR. Kiev: "Naukova dumka," 1977. 630 pp.

The Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR

originally planned to publish Materialsfor a historical dictionary of the Ukrain ian language l4th-I5th c. under the editorial supervision of Lukija Humecka by
1965. Only after long delay, however, has the plan materialized with the appear ance of volume 1 of the "Old Ukrainian" actually, early Middle Ukrainian dic tionary edited by Humecka and others. The volume contains 5,701 entries of both common and proper names. As a thesaurus, the dictionary is meant to include "all words of all the sources of the said period [l4th-l5th c.] that have been made the dictionarys base."2 A random check shows that this is not always the case e.g., the adjective vol"byrovskomou from Olexno 2usyCs charter [Ostroh, 1458] is not included.3 Statistics on the frequency of words are provided, and the sources of loanwords are given. Material is excerpted from 939 texts, which range from lengthy tracts such as Casimir IIIs statute to short inscriptions and marginal notes in books. A chapter in the entry columns accorded to the digraph ,cz directly follows the section on this is intended to help one see the place of the g sound in Ukrainian. In reading the list of secondary sources, one cannot fail to note the omission of the two charter collections by Pelak and Rusanivskyj also published by
"Naukova dumka" under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrain

ian SSR.4 Apparently, the compilers of the new dictionary turned to the sources
used by Pelak and Rusanivskyj directly in order to avoid their mistakes al

though not always successfully, as noted below.

I Osnovniproblemy rozvytku movoznavstva v Ukrajinsk:j RSR na 1959-1965 rr. Kiev, 1959, p. 54. 2 Quoted from the "pryncypy pobudovy" of Slovnyk staroukrajinskoji movy, p. 10. See Ukrajinskihramoty XVst., ed. by V. M. Rusanivskyj Kiev, 1965, pp. 39-40 facsimile and text. Hramoty XIVst., ed. by M. M. Pelak Kiev, 1974; Ukra/inskihramoty XVst.,

PP. 39-40.

Reviews

131

The compilers quite rightly omitted charters ascribed to Prince Lev Danylovy which Peak reprinted because they cannot be considered authentic.5 They did use one for Tutenij and Mojk, but only as an example of the language of 1443-1446 the date of the forgerys legalization and not of that before 1302. The
dictionarys earliest source is a charter ascribed to Prince Liubartas, located in Luck and dated 1322. But this, too, is a forgery.6 Doubtlessly the text existed in 1498, when it was confirmed by Grand Prince Alexander of Lithuania; but then it should be taken to represent the language of 1498, not of 1322. The dictionary also includes two forged charters for Jews ascribed to Prince Vytautas, allegedly issued

in Luck and dated 1388 and 1389, but actually written in or just before 1507 and
l547.

The dictionarys user can get a completely false idea of the age of some Ukrainian words if he accepts the dates based on the forged charters. For ex ample, he will find attestation for the word grunt from as early as 1322 and 1389, but both dates are from the forgeries. The dictionarys first fully acceptable date for the appearance of grunt is 1430 or 1431 i.e., Prince vitrigailas charter for Karpo Mykulynskyj, apparently issued in 1430, confirmed in 1431. The user of the dictionary must also be advised not to rely on the dictionary for accurate phonetics of Middle Ukrainian, due to: 1 the overuse of the letter e, which wrongly suggests a soft pronunciation of consonants before e;8 2 an incor rect reading of some words e.g., cmHo3fcmmuMumistakenlys.v. eoii6aipeequ, but cmnodcamuMu correctly s.v. 3aeumb .
Despite its inadequacies, the dictionary can be used as an index for further studies. Because most of its sources are published 807 of 939,!0 the researcher

can, when in doubt, check most of the dictionarys information. Unfortunately, his doubt will all too frequently prove justified.

Bohdan Struminskyj Harvard University

See my review of V. M. Rusanivskyj, ed., UkrajinskihramotyXVst. . .,and M. M. Pelak, ed., Hramoty XIVst in Recenzija 5, no. 1 Fall-Winter 1975: 10-26. 6 Struminskyj in Recenz,ja, pp. 10ff. Struminskyj in Recenzija, p. 13. 8 Struminskyj in Recenzja, PP. 3-4. The Ukrainian hardening of consonants before e can be dated long before 1458 on the basis of facts cited by M. F. Nakonenyj, "Do
vyvennja procesu stanovlennja

rozvytku fonetynoji systemy ukrajinskoji movy,"

Pytannja istorynoho rozvytku ukrajins koji movy Xarkiv, 1962, Pp. 135-36. My random check of various kinds of e in one phrase of Myxajlo Ivanovys charter of 1386 Lviv, in a facsimile of the original published by Pelak P. 68 against the present Slovnyk s.v. djerfati, yielded the following comparisons: ie - ie, aJfee ace, ue - nc, eo - edo, uwmemb - uMmemb, epaicamu - epieamu, ceio - ceio. The original conveys the difference between the two kinds of e correctly, in the same way as modern Ukrainian orthography does, whereas the Slovnyk makes the language of the
charter seem more similar to Russian or Belorussian. See Ukrajinski hramoty XVst., pp. 39-40. 10 Slovnyk, p. 10.

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MYSTECKA SPADSCYNA IVANA FEDOROVA. By Jakym Zapasko. [Lviv:] "Vyla Ikola" [1974]. 219 pp. 25,000 copies.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a significant amount of material on the history of Ukrainian book graphics was published in such journals as Iskusstvo v JuJnoj Rossii Kiev: 1909-14 and by the Polish scholars J. Kolacz kowski Lviv: 1874 and E. Rastawiecki Pozna: 1886. During the interwar period, the Ukrainian Research Institute of Bibliology UNIK in the Soviet

Ukraine and the scholars V. Siynskyj in the Western Ukraine Galicia con tinued the tradition. Among Soviet Russian scholars, A. A. Sidorov and A. S.
Zernova contributed pioneering studies of the ornamentation and types of early East Slavic Cyrillic books. Recent Soviet Ukrainian scholarship in the area has usually appeared in such serials as Ukra/inske mpstectvoznavstvo and Narodna

tvorist ta etnohrafija, and in general histories of art, graphics, and the printed
book.
The most important contributions have come from the pen of the art historian

Ja. P. Zapasko b. 1923; for his basic bibliography, see Recenzi/a 5, no. I [FallWinter 1974]: 65-66. Zapaskos most recent work is an excellent study - par
ticularly with respect to typefaces and ornaments
-

of the most important early

Ukrainian and Russian printer, Ivan FedorovyC. Only thirteen books are known
to have come off Fedorovys press, but together they contain a great variety of decorative material and initials, all reproduced here in the original size along with

examples of Fedorovys six Greek and Cyrillic typefaces. As might be expected,

the ornaments show the strong influence of the Byzantine manuscript tradition,

but some of the title borders appear to have been copied after West European, particularly German, models. The work is divided into three broad sections. The first consists of an intro ductory text; the second, of indices to the specific kinds of types and ornamenta
tion in Fedorovys books and to the portions of the various works reproduced;

and the third, of an album of reproductions. Zapasko opens the first section with a historiographical review of studies of
FedorovyCs career. He follows with brief surveys of each of Fedorovys thirteen publications, including physical description, graphic elements, printing process, and the locations where copies are presently located. Zapasko then turns to the three basic typefaces the "Moscow," "Ostroh," and "Greek" and more than 500 ornaments used by Fedorovy. The ornaments include 185 lines of ligatures, 16

figure ornamentations frontispieces, heraldic devices, printers marks, title bor ders, page engravings, 254 ornamental ornaments 80 blocks of headpieces in five stylistic groups, 20 tail pieces, 154 initials in four stylistic groups, and miscel laneous items such as running titles, frames, and cast metal motifs. The two concluding sections deal with the five identifiable graphists of Fedorovys publications, namely, FedorovyC himself, Petr Timofejevi Misti
slavec, Hryn Ivanovy, Lavrentij Pylypovy, and "WS" Wendel Scharfenberg?.

Reviews Zapasko concludes that

133

seventy-nine of Fedorovys original blocks were used on or more titles published posthumously at the beginning of the nine eighty-two century. teenth As a work devoted to a single printer, Zapaskos book compares well with

studies on FedorovyCs European contemporaries. Non-Slavic-reading users are

not well served by the stilted and unidiomatic English summaries and captions,

but the French and German summaries make things a bit clearer. The work
represents an important contribution not only to FedorovyCiana, but to the methodology of descriptive bibliography.

Edward Kasinec
James E. Walsh

Harvard University

50 RoKIv

CENTRALNOJI NAUKOVOJI BIBLIOTEKY AN URSR: MATERIALY JUVILEJNOJJ KONFERENCIJI. Edited by S. K. Hut/an skvj, A. A. Kuhot, and M. P. Rud Kiev: "Naukova dumka," 1974.

93 pp. 500 copies.

This collection contains eight papers delivered at a symposium held 29 September 1969, to commemorate the 50th year of the Central Research Library of the

Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. The papers were written by the librarys staff and
deal with their respective areas of responsibility. Thus, S. K. Hutjanskyj, director, reviews the librarys efforts to fulfill Lenins mandates; S. V. Sorokovska, head bibliographer, deals with its collections of rare Leniniana; P. A. Sotnyenko, collection development officer, gives a broad overview of the various types of col lections held by the library; L. A. Zjuba, public services librarian, gives a history

of the librarys attempt to adjust its administrative structure to serving its diverse
clientele; and F. Z. Symenko, head of the Rare Books Division, contributes a

useful review of the bibliographical work of the librarys associates. In dealing with collection building of Soviet literature, M. Ja. Kahanova notes the various methods of acquiring current Soviet publications, through paid and free "obliga tory on deposit" acquisition, purchase, donation, and exchange. The chief of the Foreign Publications Division, K. D. Bakulin, a frequent contributor to inter national library publications, indicates that the greater portion of the accessions of foreign publications to the Academy of Sciences library network comes

through international exchange. In the lengthy final essay, 0. P. Darahan dis cusses the catalogs, card files, reference department, and reference archives of the
Central Research Library.

Despite the fact that some statistics cited during the symposium were outdated
even at the time of publication in 1974, this volume can be of great interest to

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Reviews

students of Soviet Ukrainian librarianship and Ukrainian culture. One intriguing

statement, for example, is that the Nazis looted the academys collection of 705,000 items p. 13. Of special interest is Kahanovas account of the intricacies
of the deposit system in the Soviet Union and its impact on Soviet Ukrainian
libraries. Valuable to Western specialists is the identification of the chief adminis trative officers of the library, only some of whom were known previously. When

used in conjunction with K. 0. Kovalenko, et al., Centralna naukova biblioteka Akademiji nauk URSR: BibliohrafinyjpokaJyk 1919-1969 rokiv Kiev, 1970, the collection provides a much-needed survey of the achievements of this major

Soviet Ukrainian research facility.

Edward Kasinec

Harvard University

"17. YOZYILDA OSMANLI KUZEY POLITIKASI UZERINE BIR YORUM

[AN INTERPRETATIONOF SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY OYrOMAN NORTH ERN POLICY] ." By 1. Metin Kunt. In Boazici Universitesi Dergisi.

Beeri Bilimler-Humanities, vols. 4-5 Istanbul, 1976-77, pp. Ill- 16.

It is not the norm for this journal to review articles. However, there is special
reason to do so in the present case. The study of Ottoman Northern policy is among the most neglected areas in Turkish historiography. Therefore, the debut in this field of Dr. Kunt, assistant professor of history at Boazii University in

Istanbul formerly Robert College, who studied in both Turkey and the United
States, deserves special attention. The article under review here contains a new interpretation of Ottoman foreign
policy during the period 1660-1670, presented in the form of a hypothesis and the authors desiderata i.e., further research in Ottoman archives concerning his subject. In general, its highly plausible thesis is that after the successful conclusion

of the Persian wars 1639 and the Conquest of Crete 1669, the Ottoman govern
ment for the first time concentrated on its Northern policy, with the intent of establishing its center of authority in the north. With this aim in mind, the govern ment created two new provinces of the conquered territories, each flanking the
new center: one in western Transylvania Yanova/Ineu, and the other in the

Western Ukraine Podillja, with Kamjanec as its administrative center. The

planned next step, which never materialized, due to the catastrophe in Vienna of

1683, was to gradually transform the hitherto vassal states of Transylvania, Wal lachia, and Moldavia into Ottoman provinces. Once Yanova and Podillja were
occupied, the Ottomans immediately arranged to take a cadastral survey with a census of the population, in keeping with their method of conquest, as has been so well described by Halil Inalcik Studia Islamica 2 [1954].

Reviews

135

Dr. Kunt is presently cooperating with Professor Alan W. Fisher of Michigan State University in analyzing the Podillja cadastral survey defier. I sincerely wish them success in this endeavor, and hope that in the future Dr. Kunt will often be associated with studies of Ottoman-Ukrainian relations.

Omeljan Pritsak

Harvard University

M. 0.

MAKSYMOVYC: VYDATNYJ ISTORYK XIX ST. By

P. H. Markov.

Kiev: Vydavnyctvo Kyjivskoho universytetu, 1973. 233 pp.

Contemporary Soviet study of Ukrainian historiography suffers from a paucity of "progressive" Ukrainian historians. With Mykola Kostomarov, Pantelejmon Kulil, Volodymyr Antonovy, and Myxajlo Hruevskyj consigned to the ranks
of "bourgeois nationalists," Soviet students of Ukrainian historiography must search arduously for "progressives." In the late I950s, M. I. Marenko and D.

Ostrjanyn rehabilitated Myxajlo Maksymovy 1804-1873 from his condemna

tion in Stalinist times as a "bourgeois nationalist." Undoubtedly Maksymovys
status as the first rector of Kiev University, a prominent natural scientist, and a

pioneer in Ukrainian ethnographic studies increased his acceptability. Apart from

a few sins in the direction of idealist philosophy and some unfortunate statements

tracing the Ukrainian language back to the Kievan period, Maksymovy espoused
views acceptable in current Soviet historical dogmas. He was a fervent anti

Normanist, an admirer of Bohdan Xmelnyckyj, an apologist for the hajdamaky,

and a political loyalist to Russia. Fortunately, he was also a scholar of great breadth who furthered the serious study of the Ukrainian past and published a considerable amount of source material.

Almost twenty years ago Marenko adequately - albeit within the constraints of Soviet orthodoxy - evaluated Maksymovys work. It is indicative of the
trend of historical studies in the Ukraine that Markovs book adds little new material and is, in fact, a vulgarization of Marenkos work.

The book contains a sketch on Maksymovys life and career Pp. 13-59, and
the chapters "The role of M. 0. Maksymovy in the development of the histori

ography of the Ukraine and RuSsia" pp. 59-120, "Kievan Rus in the works of
M. 0. Maksymovy6" pp. 12 1-58, and "Peasant-Cossack uprisings, the Libera tion War in the Ukraine 1648-1654 and the Hajdamak movement in the evalua

M. I. Marenko, Ukrajins ka istoriohrafija: Z. davnix lasiv do seredyny XIX St. [Kiev] 1959, pp. 194-247, and D. Ostrjanyn, Svitohljad M. 0. Maksymovya Kiev, 1960.

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Reviews

tion of M. 0. Maksymovy" pp. 159-227. At first glance the numerous archival citations are impressive. A closer examination, however, reveals that little infor mation emerges from the complex citations, while Markovs sloppiness in dealing with printed material casts doubt on any conclusions he draws from the archival materials. For example, Maksymovys article "0 priinax vzaimnogo ofesto enija poljakov i malorossijan, byvago v XVII veke" is cited twice as "v XVIII veke" pp. 174, 192. It would appear that Markov has not even read Maksy movys works. He tells us about Maksymovys indignation over the Polish historian "A. Michalowskis Pam"/atna knyha" and Maksymovys complaints that Michalowskis calumnous ideas were being repeated in "fatherland" i.e., Russian imperial historiography p. 191. In fact, there is no such historical monograph by anyone named "A. Michalowski": Markov is referring to Maksymovys review of a volume of documents edited and published by Antoni Zygmunt Helcel.2 The documents were selected from seventeenth-century books presumed to have been compiled by Jakub Michalowski. The confusion and ignorance Markov shows on this point is indicative of his shallow discussion of
the issues that Maksymovy faced. Markovs book is not an analysis, but rather a checklist with praise for Maksymovy when his views coincide with those of

contemporary Soviet historiography and with explanations when he occasionally

commits "errors."

Markovs doctrinnaire treatment might be excused if he had provided us with new information. No such data, however, other than the archival fond numbers, is given. Markov does not even include a bibliography of Maksymovys historical works or discuss unpublished manuscript sources. So, while we can take some satisfaction that Maksymovy makes the grade as a "progressive" in Markovs estimation, we must lament the progressive decline of Soviet Ukrainian historical studies that Markovs work reflects.
Frank E. Sysyn Harvard University

M, A. Maksimovi, "Bibliografija. Jakuba Michalowskiego Xiega Pamitnicza. KrakOw, 1864. Dva pisma k grafu V. I. Broel-Pljateru," in Sobranie solineni/, 3 vols. Kiev, 1876, 1: 510-12. The title page of this publication reads Jakuba
2

Michalowskiego Lubeiskiego a pdiniej kasztelana bieckiego. Ksiga pamitnicza z dawnego rkopisma bdqcego wlasnocia Ludwika Hr. Morsztyna wydana staraniem i nakiadem C. K. Towarzystwa Naukowego Krakowskiego Cracow, 1864.