We present an article written 114 years ago by Volodymyr Jabotinsky, one of the creators of Zionism.
Foreword by Mirko Petriv, also the author of the translation from the original (the text preserves his style and terminology).
Volodymyr (Zeev) Jabotinsky
Born in Odessa (1880). Journalist, publicist, poet. Wrote in Muscovite and Hebrew. Leader of right-wing Zionism, co-creator of the Jewish Legion, the organizations “Beitar” and “Irgun”. Died in 1940 in New York, reburied in Jerusalem. He was friends with Symon Petliura and supported the UNR.
During the meeting of the World Jewish Congress in 1923, he and his ideological associates were ousted from leading positions in this organization. They were defeated by the socialist wing of this movement, led by Chaim Weizmann (who later became the first president of Israel). For Ukrainians, the difference in views between these two wings became apparent during the case of Schwarzbart, the murderer of Symon Petliura. The World Jewish Congress, led by Weizmann, took a pro-Bolshevik position, while Jabotinsky defended Petliura’s good name.
In 1911, Jabotinsky wrote (of course, in his native Muscovite language) a very interesting article on the anniversary of the birth of the great prophet. We present this Ukrainian-language translation of the original. The author’s understanding and attitude towards Shevchenko, Ukrainian nationalism, and his vision and prediction of future events are interesting.
The following is a translation by Mirko Petriv from the Muscovite original. His emphasis and explanations are in parentheses in this article).
It’s amazing how inconsistent people are. When we say A, we mostly don’t even think about what we should say B in this case. We approach a social fact as if it were isolated, torn from life, and as if it had no consequences.
Now we honor the memory of Shevchenko, or at least respond to the honor. But at the same time, we draw no conclusions. Not only do we not listen to those who read, but sometimes even in print it is imperceptible that any of us have thought carefully about what the recognition of this anniversary obliges us to do.
After all, there can only be one of two things: either Shevchenko is a cultural misunderstanding, a philological curiosity, and a rarity, and then there is no point in organizing anniversaries for him; or Shevchenko is a natural and characteristic phenomenon that develops in life, a sign of something to come, and then each of us needs, having said A, to also say B, that is, having recognized this anniversary, to determine our attitude to that huge phenomenon, the inevitability of which this anniversary prophesies to us. And it seems that few people think about this. Perhaps this can be explained by the fact that internally many, many of us really do secretly consider Shevchenko a philological curiosity. There is no truth in this, children, many people think like this. To them it seems like a whim, a caprice: a person knew Moscow perfectly, could write the same poems in the “common language”, but then got stuck and wrote in Khokhlat. Others go even further, asking: is there any serious difference between the two languages? Just stubbornness, a petty clinging to individual letters. What a strange thing to write without fail like this:
“My thoughts, my thoughts,
Woe to me with you!!
Why did they stand on paper
In sad rows?”
– When it was possible to write with the same success like this:
Ah you my thoughts, thoughts,
Ah, trouble to me with you!
What are you standing on paper
In sad rows?
A gentleman recently took a volume of Olesya’s poems in my hands and began to prove clearly that these poems can be read immediately in Russian and almost everything will come out in perfect order: the meter will not change and almost all the rhymes will be preserved. Maybe he was right: I did not listen to him to the end and while he was reciting in the Moscow manner: “Oh, why did you entrust a small child to the steppes?” – I thought about something else. I remembered that Shevchenko wrote something like this in Russian as well.
The writers from the newspaper “Kievlyanyn” recognize this as a great merit and shame the current Mazepinites: as if you see, he is not like you, he “did not shy away from the all-Russian language”! Even if so, but by some miracle the “all-Russian” language shunned the Ukrainian poet, and nothing worthwhile in that language stuck to him.
And Shevchenko is not an isolated phenomenon. In the (18)40s, the great poet Belli lived in Rome: there seems to be a mention of him somewhere in Gogol. He wrote mainly in the Roman dialect. The Roman dialect, compared to other local dialects of Italy, almost completely coincides with the Italian language: if it did not bore the reader, I could exhaust all the differences in exactly fifteen lines.
But Belli wrote wonderful things in the dialect, and in Italian – absolutely useless things. His sonnets “romanesko” are amazing, his Italian elegies are watery, rhetorical and – forgotten.
He also, apparently, got very stubborn: so stubborn that God himself abandoned him as soon as he crossed some barely noticeable border in his creative impulse – and Bella, on this side of the border a great poet by the grace of God, and on the other side he suddenly turned into a miserable scribbler …
The native language! All our Moscow naivety, inexperience, social ignorance, all our Pegasusism, all the crude empirical practicality that we profess are needed in relation to many sacred questions of the spirit, to make such big eyes and wonder why a normal person, with full reason and a healthy memory, would certainly insist and insist on saying “world” and not “world”.
Stupidity, whim! How many years have the Magyars been fighting for the Hungarian command in the Hungarian army, and all this command language consists of exactly 70 words. After 70 words, ministries fall, the most important reforms are postponed, the political map of Europe cracks along the seam of the Lej River.
In the Hungarian parliament, among more than four hundred Magyars, forty deputies from Croatia sit and sacredly preserve their right to speak from the rostrum in Croatian, that is, a language that no one but them understands and whose use in parliament is therefore, it would seem, not only useless, but even harmful to the Croatian cause itself.
These same Croats revolted when the Hungarian authorities tried to put Hungarian signs in some government institutions in Zagreb, alongside Croatian signs: there were street demonstrations, clashes with the troops, blood was shed…
Stupidity, whim! – We speak, we, the inhabitants of a remote country, we, from the height of our political intelligence and experience. And wouldn’t it be much more correct to look at the matter from the other side and understand that there is no way to argue with facts?
After all, here we are faced with a whole series of striking facts, whether mass or even more characteristic, individual. Here are almost entire nations going mad over seventy words or ten signs in a foreign language: here are great poets, instantly losing the gift of God as soon as they try to make a small, tiny, innocent forgery in themselves: to say “свет” instead of “свет” or “buona sera” instead of “bона sera”.
These are all facts, unshakable phenomena of life, which will not change whether we condemn or approve of them. We should not condemn or disapprove of them, and we should not give twos or fives to the world order and its manifestations, but we should humbly learn from them with our minds: to accept life as it is in its essence, and on this basis build our worldview.
Despite the fact that we celebrate Shevchenko’s anniversary with respectful bow, it does not even occur to us that this is a fact of exceptional symptomatic importance, on the basis of which, if we were smart, experienced and foresightful, we should change some essential elements of our worldview.
What is Shevchenko? One of two things.
Either we should look at him as a curious play of nature, something like an armless artist or an acrobat with one leg, something like a rare antediluvian exhibit in an archaeological museum. Or we should look at him as a bright sign of the national and cultural vitality of Ukrainians, and then we should open our eyes wider and take a good look at the conclusions that follow from this.
We ourselves here in the South (in Ukraine) so diligently and so naively planted the Moscow seed in the cities, our press was so busy here about the Moscow theater and the distribution of the Moscow book, that in the end we did not notice at all the real, tangible, arithmetic reality, as it “looks” outside the boundaries of our chicken worldview.
Behind these cities, a continuous, almost thirty-million-strong Ukrainian sea sways. Look not only into its center, into some Myrhorod or Vasylkiv district: look into its outskirts, into the Kharkiv or Voronezh provinces, at the very border beyond which the “Great Russian” language begins, – and you will be surprised to what extent this continuous Ukrainian sea has remained untouched and unpolluted.
There are villages on this border where “Khokhlys” live on this side of the river, and “Katsaps” on the other side. They have lived side by side since time immemorial and do not mix. Each side speaks in its own way, dresses in its own way, preserves its own special customs: they marry only with their own; they shun each other, do not understand and do not seek mutual understanding.
P. B. Struve, the author of the theory of “national repulsion,” would go there before talking about a single transcendent “all-Russian” essence. Such a pronounced “repulsion” does not exist, they say, even on the Polish-Lithuanian or Polish-Belarusian ethnographic border. The Ukrainian poet knew his people when he taught foolish girls: Make love, black-browed ones, But not with Muscovites, Because Muscovites are a strange people …
I do not share the theory of P. V. Struve and I do not think that such “repulsion” belongs to the necessary and normal manifestation of nationality – in any case, I believe that the legalization (in the scientific sense) of these “repulsions” would be permissible only with great and strict reservations.
I do not consider the antagonism between Muscovite and Ukrainian, which is present in the common nicknames “Khokhol” and especially “Katsap”, to be either normal or eternal; I am sure, on the contrary, that with the improvement of external conditions, not only Ukrainians, but also all the nationalities of Russia (the empire) will get along well with Muscovites on the basis of equality and mutual recognition; I even believe that the Moscow democratic intelligentsia will play a great and benevolent role in this – and recently, in a lecture in Kiev, I emphasized this belief so sharply that I even met resistance from some Ukrainian listeners.
But it cannot be denied that “repulsion” from a stranger is one of the signs of the presence of a national instinct, especially where national individuality, due to external oppression, cannot express itself in anything else, in anything positive. In such cases, the “repulsion” observed on ethnographic borders remains involuntarily the best proof that the oppressed nation spontaneously resists the transformation of its nature, that the true paths of its normal development stretch in another direction.
Such is the spontaneous mood of any large and homogeneous mass; such is the spontaneous mood of the thirty-million Ukrainian common people, no matter how much various experts on national werewolves may deny it. Experts of this kind are as competent in assessing the national feelings of the people from whom they have fallen behind as a deserter can be in assessing the patriotism and fighting spirit of the army from which he has fled.
The Ukrainian people have preserved intact what is the main, invincible pillar of the national soul: the village. A people whose roots are firmly and densely planted in a vast expanse of their native land have nothing to fear for their ancestral soul, no matter what is being done in the cities to the poor sprouts of their culture, their language, and their poets.
The peasant will endure everything, will survive everything, will outwit everyone, and slowly, step by step, but steadily and invincibly, from all sides will squeeze into the city, and what is now considered a peasant dialect will be the language of newspapers, theaters, signboards, and even more in two generations.
This is what the Shevchenko anniversary means for everyone who knows how to think consistently and look into the future. Unfortunately, we are not rich in these talents. The Ukrainian movement, which is growing right under our noses, is considered by us to be something like a sport: we ignore it, ignored it before this anniversary and will probably ignore it after the anniversary.
This is either the blindness of complacency, or the backwardness of human thought that guides our actions, and as a result we make a gross, unforgivable political mistake: instead of the movement, huge in its possible consequences, developing with the support of influential circles of the elite of society and getting used to seeing in them its support, its natural allies, we force it to break through on its own strength, we slow down its progress by omission and inattention, we irritate and push it into opposition (to the empire) – to a liberal and radical society.
This will not stop the growth of the movement, but it will cripple this growth and direct it in the least desirable direction – that is what is not difficult, and that is what (Muscovites) should beware of.
The most serious consequences for future relations in this vast south of Russia (empire) may arise here if we do not come to our senses in time, understand and take into account the spread of that mass phenomenon that the Shevchenko anniversary reminds us of, and do not align all our positions, all our tactics in both local and state affairs with it.
I will express one consideration that has long been formed in my mind and is supported by the study of Western European experience, but in response to which the reader will probably shrug his shoulders.
Our south (Ukraine) has become a favorite arena of the Black Hundreds, and it operates here, especially in cities and towns, with solid success. And until now we have not realized whether it is possible to fight against this phenomenon, and if so, how, with what weapons.
Meanwhile, this question deserves our attention, because in the current mood, neither city self-government nor even the right to send deputies to the State Duma is useful to our region. The deputies of the south are the main support of reaction, and this was the case even before the change in the electoral law, before the Third Duma.
How can we fight against this mood of the bourgeois masses of the south? Pure, abstract liberalism of any brand does not suit them: the bourgeoisie does not follow the liberals unless they think of giving them something else in addition.
The bourgeoisie is not organically capable of responding to socialist propaganda: the economic ideals of this environment are always inevitably reactionary and revolve at best around the medieval ideals of the guild system, at worst – we see this in Vienna, in Warsaw, at the last craft congress – around the economic and legal displacement of foreigners.
The only ideal slogan that, under the given conditions, is capable of raising the urban bourgeois masses, purifying and ennobling their worldview is the national slogan.
If they are now following the right, it is not because the right promises some wealth, but only because the right has managed to strike a nationalist chord in them. But not the chord of creative, positive nationalism, but the chord of “repulsion” from the foreigner.
And no bright flags in the world will turn our southern bourgeoisie away from the slogans of hatred, except for one flag: its own national protest. I am not competent to judge how ready some Slobidka-Romanivka is to accept Ukrainian national consciousness: I only state one thing: either the Ukrainian movement or no one will succeed in gaining allies from there.
I repeat: all this is so far from the current state of affairs that the reader, I know, will be moved shrugs his shoulders and says: fictions, fantasies. I think that those who see only what sticks out in the foreground and do not look into statistics, history, or the experience of the wise West are inventing and fantasizing. We will live to see. And maybe, if our tactics do not change in time, we will feel it … When we have to, out of official duty, honor Shevchenko’s anniversary, we shyly tell each other that the deceased, you see, was a “folk” poet, he sang about the sorrows of simple poor people, and in this, you see, all his value.
No, not in this. Shevchenko’s “folk” is a tenth thing, and if he had written all this in Russian, he would not have had in anyone’s eyes the enormous importance that is now attributed to him from all sides.
Shevchenko is a national poet, and this is his strength. He is a national poet in the subjective sense, that is, a nationalist poet, even with all the shortcomings of a nationalist, with outbursts of wild hostility towards the Pole, towards the Jew, towards other neighbors…
But even more important is that he is a national poet in his objective sense. He gave both his people and the whole world bright, unshakable proof that the Ukrainian soul is capable of the highest flights of original cultural creativity. That is why some love him so much, and why others fear him so much, and this love and this fear would be no less if Shevchenko had been in his time not a populist, but an aristocrat in the style of Goethe or Pushkin.
You can throw out all the democratic notes from his works (and censorship did so for a long time) – and Shevchenko will remain what his nature created him to be: a blinding precedent that does not allow Ukrainians to deviate from the path of national renaissance. The reactionaries understood this meaning well when they raised such a scream about separatism, treason and proximity to the mob on the eve of the anniversary.
Far from the mob and other horrors, but what is true is true: it is impossible to honor Shevchenko simply as a talented Russian writer of some level, but to honor him means to recognize everything that is associated with this name.
To honor Shevchenko means to understand and recognize that there is not and cannot be a single culture in a country where a hundred or more peoples live: to understand, recognize, step aside and give a rightful place to a powerful brother, the second in power in this empire.
