In a project of Suspilne Culture – “No brotherhood – there wasn't one, isn't and will never be” people from across Ukraine's creative and cultural industries explain in their columns, how Russia has been trying to destroy Ukrainian identity for years (or even centuries).
All materials published in both Ukrainian and English. Russia's informational aggression has been a part of the daily discourse in Ukraine for a long time, especially after Maidan in 2014. Now we need to make this context available abroad to show that we've been fighting this war for way more than just a month.
In his op-ed, the Ukrainian writer and essayist Stepan Protsiuk takes a look back to see how some Ukrainian writers predicted the impact of Russian imperialism on Ukrainian identity while their Russian counterparts were pushing propaganda narratives even by means of their own works.
Ukrainian version is available here.
Translated from Ukrainian by Lisa Bolotova.
Back in the year 1878, Ivan Nechuy-Levytsky, a former teacher of Russian philology, wrote an article titled The Modern Literary Destination, Or the Otiosity of the Great Russian Literature for Ukraine and Slavdom. Despite the author’s persistent championing of using a separate Dnieper Ukraine dialect, the one his mother spoke, as the basis for Standard Ukrainian, the main idea of the article shows right in its title.
Allegorically speaking, the writer Nechuy-Levytsky, who lived a very modest life, dared write that voluble article as a challenge to the Russian playwright Olexandr Ostrovskyi, whose brother was the highest-ranked state official. Indeed, not only to Ostrovskyi but to the entire Russian literature. My friends, let me offer you some quotes from that article, back then published in Ukraine unespied...
- The Great Russian journalism derided our language and literature.
- What with the lack of a general idea and of the view of the Moscow aristocracy from above in Tolstoy’s works, the reader is confused about whether to love and respect his characters or hate them.
- What good can Ostrovsky’s comedies teach our theatre-going bourgeoisie indeed? Perhaps that a man should make merry in his house while his wife and children throw themselves at his feet? It is but a negative impact that Ostrovsky can have on Ukraine.
- Is this school of the Great Russian writers any good for Ukraine? We dare say it has no civilisation-moulding value for Ukraine.
- There is a great distance between the Great Russian and Ukrainian peoples’ mindsets, traditions, and economic relations… The Ukrainian people stand as high above the Great Russian people as the sky is over the earth.
- A bad future looms for Ukraine in Russia, a future dark as the night.
The gloomy premonition of Nechui-Levytskyi, that eternal adolescent married to Ukrainian literature, will be picked up by the national communist and writer Mykola Khvylovyi. “There's the rub: Russian literature has been hanging over us for centuries like a master,” Khvylovy would write.
Oh, and in case there is still a trace of doubt regarding the “friendliness” imposed on Ukraine and its culture, here are but two short quotes from the literary critic
Vissarion Belinskyi that are eloquent of the imperial disdain, even the cultural superiority complex towards Ukraine. Mind you, that was as early as 1847! “Oh, those Little Ukrainian plebs! Lampoons as they are, they just keep liberalizing for the sake of halushky and varenyky with pork salo!”
On Shevchenko: “Common sense must see Shevchenko as a foolish, foul-mouthed ass.” (Belinskyi’s letter to P. Annenkov, December 1847)
Russia’s attitude towards Ukraine has always been startlingly stable, clearly seen by either Ukrainian communist Khvylovyi or nationalist Dontsov, despite the chasm between their ideological beliefs. In the series of pamphlets published by the newspaper Kultura i Pobut (Culture and Everyday Life) between February 28 and March 28, 1926, titled Apolohety Pysaryzmu (Apologists of Scribbling), Khvylovyi not only tries to defeat his opponent, the leader of Pluh (“PloughA group of rural writers in Ukraine, known as the Society of Proletarian-Kolkhoz Writers since 1931 and dismantled following the April 23, 1932 decree of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks) – Editor`s Note”) Serhii Pylypenko. He also recognizes the excessiveness and irrelevance of Russian culture and literature for Ukraine. The nervous charismatic dreamer that he was, Khvylovy believed: “We will travel to Europe to study but will foster a secret idea: in a few years, to glow with an extraordinary light.”
One of Khvylovyi’s pamphlets, Moskovski Zadrypanky (Moscow's Dusty Backwaters), came to be read by Joseph Stalin. Completely exasperated, in his April 26, 1926 letter he addressed Kaganovych and other members of the Politburo in a letter, ordering the Ukrainian communists to “convert the rising Ukrainian culture and public life into a Soviet culture and public life.” This phrase sealed the fate of Khvylovyi, who refused to wait for his execution. But it also became a time bomb, exploding into repressions of Ukrainian intelligentsia and common people too.
The Soviet (Tsarist, White-movement, you name it) Russia saw the enemies, and equally dangerous at that, in all of them: Dmytro Dontsov, Mykola Khvylovyi, and Serhii Pylypenko (who was executed by shooting back in 1934, by the way). I hope most Ukrainian citizens will have realized it by now.
It is still too early for us to fully comprehend the scale of the national trauma caused by Russia’s invasion with all its missile strikes, murders of civilians, rapes, and looting — all the attributes of the “mysterious” Russian soul.
But it has always been like this. Just think of the late Zhirinovskyi, who spent decades disgorging the most odious ravings. Think of the atrocities committed by the Russian army in Baturyn in 1708 or Muraviov in Kyiv in 1918—the list goes on and on. Incidentally, it did not matter if they were White, Tsarist, or Red. As the White Army General Anton Denikin observed, Russia without Ukraine is unimaginable.
Not to mention the evil of the thirties or the atrocities in Soviet concentration camps, which were, by the way, documented in detail by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who still maintained chauvinistic views on “the Ukrainian question.”
I think that one of the main causes of such atrocities is, to put it crudely, in their incessant, at least since the times of Ivan the Terrible, cultivation of hatred towards life inside Russia itself, the pre-eminence of the necrophilic over biophilic, of the forces of death over the forces of being…
Even that lyric that Putin quoted, “you may like it, you may not,” is one of the Russian chastushkas and rhymes, rooted in the world of death and necrophilic lust:
My beauty’s in the coffin, so I’ve crept up to f-ck her
You may like it, you may not — tough it out, my beauty.
Gradually and steadfastly, since the early 2000s, Russia has been submerging into a parallel propagandist reality that outshined George Orwell’s 1984. But the roots of these circumstances have, of course, always been there. Since the times of tsars, Russians have regarded the Ukrainian language as some sort of a mental twist that has no right to exist and acknowledged Ukrainian culture only in its separate ethnographic variants, such as the dances hopak or plazunets.
Even the fanatical bolshevik poet (who later came to be frustrated with the Soviet bolshevism up to the point of deep depression) Vladimir Maiakovskyi, long before his suicide, states in his poem “Debt to Ukraine”:
What do we know of the face of Ukraine?
A Russian doesn’t know much
And has little respect for his neighbour.
What everyone knows is Ukrainian borscht
What everyone knows is Ukrainian salo
Banal in its primitivity, a chauvinistic imperialistic syndrome has been instilled in Russians for centuries no matter their social status. The feeling of sadistic moral superiority, the bloated swells of the one-of-a-kind greatness of the Russian people and their “special mission,” multiplied by the frenzied anti-Ukrainian propaganda of the last decade at the very least, have fathered something special indeed, albeit a special kind of the Russian moral disfigurement short of a mania.
When a significant part of the nation believes in the daily hysterical, hypnotic lies, with no access to dissenting opinions, their media and television, unsurprisingly, start experimenting on the collective consciousness, which eventually results in the tragedy of the Russian people, who spent hundreds of years building up the need for tsar worship, total tameness, and loyal cults, multiplied by the fundamental fear.
Now, when the war between Russia and Ukraine rages on, it is high time that we freed ourselves from the influence of the Russian mentality. We cannot follow any other path.
The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Suspilne Culture.
Further reading
- What is de-Russification and why it is happening in Ukraine
- How Russian culture urges murder – explained by Yurii Bereza
- The Mysterious Soul, or How Dostoievskyi formed Russian society
- Music is outside of politics? Tell that to the dead in Bucha
- Against Interpretation: why Russian film critics don't hit home with us
- A brief history of Russian propaganda