By Ihor CHERNYCHKO
January 27 was the 160th anniversary of the birth of Pavlo Chubynsky,
author of the lyrics of the unforgettable Ukrainian national anthem "Ukraine
Has Not Yet Perished"
When he was only 23 he wrote his best-known poem, "Ukraine Has Not Yet
Perished," to become the national anthem of the short-lived Ukrainian People's
Republic and later, after being banned for decades, of our own. It was
mistakenly attributed to Taras Shevchenko and included in a collection
of his verse, in the narodnik (populist) period when The Kobzar
was genuinely revered. What better recognition could the author have dreamed
of as a cultural inheritor of the national prophet?
Pavlo Chubynsky's greatest accomplishment is a joint fundamental work,
the seven-volume and nine-book Works of the Ethnographic-Statistical
Expedition to the Western Ruthenian Territories, which is still regarded
a handbook for ethnologists. In fact, it laid the foundations of Ukrainian
ethnology. Academician Oleksandr Veselovsky thought it one of the top three
folk-ethnographic studies of all times and peoples.
Yet the kudos (the gold medals of the Russian Geographical Society and
International Congress of Paris, even the most prestigious award of the
Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg) did no save Pavlo Chubynsky, then
Secretary of the South-Western Branch of Russian Geographical Society,
from the Russian tsar's ill-famed anti-Ukrainian Ems Ukase of 1876 banning
Ukrainian language publishing and the same was true of other prominent
figures of the period (whom I personally favor, with their dictionary-making,
folkfests, and Christmas trick-or-treat rites).
Mikhail Yuzefovich, Privy Counselor and secret informer of the Russian
secret police, branded Chubynsky and Mykhailo Drahomanov, future ОmigrО,
in his "patriotic" memorandum "Apropos the So-Called Ukrainophile Movement"
as "the most inveterate enemies" of imperial integrity, calling the former
a "charlatan and zealous agitator." Remarkably, fifteen years earlier,
when first purged by the Russian authorities and exiled to the North, Pavlo
Chubynsky "agitated" and "Ukrainized" the special messenger accompanying
him to his place of exile. Well, there is the new broom rule. Now the scholar
was sent into "honorable exile" as a government official with a new assignment.
These two models of sending north all those "Mazepa exponents" would be
extensively applied by top-level bureaucrats of the next century.
His modernist followers, among them Lesia Ukrainka and Les Kurbas, discarded
the "pure Ukrainian Cossack" ideals of the narodniks at the turn of the
century, seeking instead a "return to Europe and our own identity," bringing
back the nation's "brain, the intelligentsia." (One could draw parallels
with today's "culture wars" as represented by Anthony Smith, postmodern
formulas like Umberto Eco's "ironic return to oneself," or neomodernistic
doctrines like the "return of demiurges.")
While opposing "conservation" of the old national-cultural identity,
the new creative generations proposed Europeanization and cosmopolitanism.
In other words, they were for modernizing Ukrainian culture, introducing
creative innovations based on "other" methods of creative thinking and
speaking.
As for Chubynsky with his enthusiasm, he wanted to preserve the lower
massif of the nation's cultural wealth; he wanted to introduce what Simone
Weil would identify as a denationalized city, acting as a liaison between
the past, present, and future of his nation, becoming a symbolic figure
in the history of Ukrainian society. Alas, all that wealth of thousands
of Ukrainian folk songs, tales, wedding rites, proverbs, tales, legends,
and puzzles Pavlo Chubynsky committed to paper would be never reappear
in print after 1878 (not counting two booklets as a pale sequestered shadow
of the prominent scholar's multivolume creative legacy).
All this notwithstanding, Chubynsky's folklorist-ethnologist followers,
currently working for peanuts at an Academy of Sciences institute (still
to be paid wages dating from three years), continue to sing "Ukraine Has
Not Yet Perished", keeping in the same romantic vein, although the anthem's
starting line is regarded with a tangible degree of pragmatic irony by
all those postmodern professionals hung over from countless presentations
and attendant verbiage.







