The Kobzar and the Bard: Shevchenko and Burns as Great Freedom Singers

Until recently I was inclined to claim that, as soon as Ukraine
began to live a normal cultural and political life, Shevchenko would
cease to be an icon and a prophet and be “just” one of humanity’s
greatest poets. This may be so. Yet he will remain to some extent a
prophet because it is impossible not to take into account the historical
memory of Ukrainians and the extraordinary, deeply heartfelt, and
mysterious, seemingly God-given, power of his word.

In order to confirm that the hand of God was truly at work here, let us compare Taras Shevchenko and Robert Burns.

It is common practice to compare the Ukrainian Kobzar and the Scottish Bard because they both stand in the first line of contenders for the title of a truly people’s poet whom their compatriots still venerate like no one else. “There is perhaps no other poet in the world so widely known and sung — for centuries on end! — in his native land... His words are now part of sayings and proverbs, his songs have made a spectacular comeback,” R. Wright-Kovalova once said about Burns. The same is true of Shevchenko. “The phenomenon of a writer as a national cultural hero may be found in many nations, but perhaps no other writer so tenaciously ‘occupies this post’ and so unreservedly enjoys the love of his compatriots,” said George Grabowicz about Shevchenko. The same may be said about Burns.

Some superficial parallels seem simply unbelievable. For instance, both bards showed their contempt for monarchy in the poem A Dream, and both had a high-society patroness (Princess Varvara Repnina and Mrs. Dunlop). After the publication of a first small collection of poems (with a print run of a few hundred copies), both Burns and Shevchenko embarked on a fateful journey across the country in search of poetic inspiration. Both conducted their correspondence and diaries in a nonnative language of the empire in which they were living.

But there are other, more important, reasons behind the need for a comparison. First of all, the Ukrainian and the Scotsman wrote in the language of their people, although they were relentlessly advised to use the literary language of the empire and not waste their talent on a “dying dialect.” In this linguistic aspect, the need for comparison is so obvious that even the object of comparison resorts to drawing parallels! As Y. Levin wrote in the commentary to a collection of Burns’s poems (in Russian and English), “it is interesting to note that the great Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko felt an inner affinity with Burns. In 1847, defending his right to create poetry in the Ukrainian language, he cited the case of Burns, who wrote in his native dialect rather than in the standard language: ‘Still, Burns is a great national poet’.”

“...You should not use the provincial dialect so much. Why should you, resorting to the latter, limit the number of your devotees only to those who understand Scots, when you could include here everyone with exquisite taste who understands English? In my opinion, you ought to think up a plan of a more extensive oeuvre than the ones you have hitherto written. I want to say that you should think about a deserving topic and only take it up after you have studied the best English poets and acquired deeper historical knowledge. You will be able to read Greek and Roman tales in any redaction and soon acquaint yourself with the most illustrious facts that would delight a poetic soul. Also, you must and, of course, will be able to learn pagan mythology to which all poets always allude and which in and of itself is full of charming fiction...” Dr. John Moore, a keen, veteran critic, tried to edify Burns. Shevchenko was also edified — with the best of intentions: one of his female admirers even planned to send him for a three-year course in Italy. For “what Shevchenko learned at the Academy of Arts was superficial information about ancient mythology that a painter needs and some famous episodes from Roman history. He had no systematic knowledge, nor did he develop any integral outlooks” (Nikolai Ulyanov). Fortunately for the Ukrainians and Scots, their geniuses of a national renaissance adopted a lukewarm attitude to the advice of their imperial well-wishers.

It is also small wonder that the Ukrainian and the Scottish poets drew creative inspiration from the same source — the heroic past of their now subdued, humiliated, and insulted fatherlands. Here Stuarts once in glory reigned
And laws for Scotland’s weal ordained
But now unroof’d their palace stands
Their sceptre’s sway’d by other hands,

— Robert Burns wrote with a diamond-tipped pencil on glass, when he visited Stirling, the ancient residence of the Scottish kings. There was a time in our Ukraine
When cannon roared with glee,
A time when Zaporozhian men
Excelled in mastery!
They lived as masters — freedom’s joy
And glory were their gain:
All that has passed, and what is left
Is grave-mounds on the plain!

— Taras Shevchenko reminisces about Ukraine’s glorious past in far-away Petersburg.

For Burns, Scottish patriotism was both an ardent feeling and a heartfelt conviction that affected his entire system of values. When the poet heard on November 5, 1788, a solemn church sermon devoted to the anniversary of the glorious revolution of 1688, he felt a burning indignation at the derision and contempt that the preacher showed for the Stuarts in an attempt to fawn on the ruling dynasty. That same evening Burns wrote a letter to the editor of the Edinburgh Evening Courant: “...Let every man, who has a tear for the many miseries incident to humanity, feel for a family, illustrious as any in Europe, and unfortunate beyond historic precedent; and let every Briton, and particularly every Scotsman, who ever looked with reverential pity on the dotage of a parent, cast a veil over the fatal mistakes of the Kings of his forefathers.” It would be even better to express this idea without the poet’s euphemisms by paraphrasing Theodore Roosevelt’s famous dictum: ‘Stuart is, of course, a son of a bitch, but he is our, Scottish, son of a bitch!’ It was precisely the contempt of the English for the royal house of Stuart that made the rebellious Burns begin to burn with a feverish love for the latter. As Taras Shevchenko noted in a similar case,

What do we love Bohdan for? Because the Muscovites managed to cheat and forget the wisest hetman ever.

However, Shevchenko also gave a somewhat different assessment of Khmelnytsky: If, drunk Bohdan, you now could take a glance
At Pereyaslav and your ruined castle,
You would get good and drunk, completely liquored!
Fie on you ... over-praised old potentate
Among the Cossacks! Even in the filth
Of a Jew’s hut you’d drink to end up tipsy
Or dive into a slough of swinishness...

During a conversation in 1827 with J. P. Eckermann Goethe said, “Take Burns, for example. Is he not great because his ancestors’ old songs still lived on the lips of the people, because he heard them sung, so to speak, while he was still in the cradle, because he grew up among them and could appreciate the sublime perfection of those pieces, because he found in them the living foundation to rely upon and start from? Besides, is he not great because his own songs instantly found a ready ear among his compatriots and then came back to him from the lips of reapers, haystack makers, and his boon pub companions? Something could really happen here.”

Goethe was right in saying that Burns’s songs corresponded to folk songs: “Once the poet tried to compose tunes for his songs, but seeing that he was failing to do so, he turned to existing tunes and adjusted them to his own lyrics” (from the same commentary on Burns’s poetry). He often told his readers exactly which song or dance his poem was set to. In other words, the Scottish bard’s folk spirit is close to the formal, pseudo-folkloric style of the Russian poet Koltsov — something that critics failed to find in Shevchenko’ works (Ivan Franko claimed that Shevchenko never attempted “to imitate folk expressions or a folk tune”).

It is essential to remember that the language Burns wrote in was not that of an enslaved people. On the contrary, it was the Scots who militarily and politically enslaved the Angles in the eleventh century. Conquered by a barbarian force, the weak but more cultured Angles very soon took cruel vengeance, and fifty years after the victory of the Scots their king Malcolm III began to pursue a policy of spreading the English language and culture in Scotland. Thus the northern dialect of Middle English became the national language of the Scottish kingdom (the way Russian once “captured” the Duchy of Lithuania). Conversely, the relationship between the Little Russian language (the language of Shevchenko) and the imperial Great Russian language was totally at odds. This is why the language problem was in fact of sacred significance in Ukraine, and strenuous efforts were made to recognize the Little Russian dialect as a national literary language. By contrast, “Scottish Renaissance” figures, first and foremost Burns, instead of striving to create a national language as a factor of opposition to the empire, were in fact conserving dialects and vernaculars. The commentary points out that there is no radical difference between the Scottish language in which Burns wrote and the English language of that time — the poet himself and his contemporaries mention the Scots dialect, not the Scottish language. Goethe was right: something could really happen here (Burns’s success in Britain), while over there (in Ukraine) this could hardly occur if we try to find the reason behind the success of Shevchenko’s poetry in, so to speak, “natural” factors alone.

According to Davis Sibbald, Webmaster of www.robertburns.plus.com, the poems that Burns wrote before traveling around Scotland’s Highlands in 1786 were nothing but “a dream of Scotland.” However, harsh reality dispelled his dreams. After the Union of 1707, his country no longer knew for sure whether it was Scotland or Northern Britain. The very essence of Burns’s self- identity as a poet was called into question, his self-assurance showed cracks, and the blame for this lay with Scotland, which had tried to become England. Burns and Scotland seemed to be examining one another in search of the genuine and true. Burns was a real poet of a potentially real nation. Yet he saw that this potential had been betrayed, and this had the most crucial impact on his talent. The journey across the Highlands began like a triumphal march but ended in retreat. What he dreamed of remained simply a possibility — nothing more.

Taras Shevchenko, a student at St. Petersburg’s Academy of Arts, cherished no hopes about the future of Ukraine: No weeping’s heard; no cannon roar;
Only the wind so keen
Bends down the willows in the grove,
The grasses on the plain.
All has been silenced. So, he mute;
For so must God ordain! (Haidamaky, 1841)

Then he says in the Preface, “Thank God, it is all over now, especially if you remember that we are children of the same mother and we are all Slavs... Let the Slav land eternally expand undivided from sea to sea and be covered with golden rye and wheat.”

But when Shevchenko visited Ukraine in 1843, he returned to the empire’s capital not as a Slavic poet but as a Ukrainian national prophet, the absolute and sole embodiment of the folk spirit (according to Hegel). Ukraine may be sleeping, but God decreed that he, Shevchenko, will become Ukraine until the Universal Spirit calls the Ukrainian people to the forefront of history to draw the borders between the Slavic and Asian lands of the final empire.

Unlike the Scottish Bard, who in his works manifested the “Little British” national identity (“each Briton and especially each Scotsman”), which was totally acceptable to all strata of Scottish society, the Ukrainian Kobzar tried to create a distinctly Ukrainian, not Little Russian, identity (see Oksana Zabuzhko, Shevchenkiv mif Ukrayiny [Shevchenko’s Myth of Ukraine]; Andrew Wilson, The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation), and he wrote his poems despite everything: the imperial policy of assimilation, the preferences of the Russified Little Russian intelligentsia, or broad public sentiments.

Burns’s opposition boiled down to the idea that the Stuarts, a Scottish-born dynasty, had an advantage over the house of Hanover in claiming the right to occupy the British throne. Hence the national Scottish poet resolutely condemns radical nationalism: Ye Jacobites by name lend an ear, lend an ear
Ye Jacobites by name lend an ear
Ye Jacobites by name yer faults I will proclaim
Yer doctrines I maun blame, you will hear...
What is right, what is wrong, by the law, by the law
What is right and what is wrong by the law...?
What makes heroic strife, to whet the assassin’s knife
And haunt a parent’s life wi bloody war, bloody war?..
So let yer schemes alone in the State, in the State
Let yer schemes alone in the State
Let yer schemes alone, adore the Rising Sun
And leave a man undone to his fate, to his fate...!

Our Poet viewed “whetting the assassin’s knife and haunting a parent’s life wi bloody war” from an altogether different angle: Kiss me, my children, kiss me!
Your slayer is not I
But my grim oath!”
He swung his sword-
And thus the children die!

Challenging the opinion of “common humans” (a term coined by Maksim Sokolov) that “the haidamaky were not warriors but bandits, thieves, and a blot on our history,” the Poet said, My people’s bane, you lie!
No thief for sacred justice’ sake
The foes of freedom tackles;
Nor will he rise to free his folk,
Chained in your heavy shackles;
No thief his true-born son will slay
For liberty through pain;
He will not break his living heart
In service to Ukraine!

In none of his works does the national poet of Scotland have a vision of his country that differs from the contemporary one. The time in which the Scotland of Burns’s ballads and songs exists is clearly mythologized and divided into a sacred time that existed long ago and a profane time that has no links with either the past or the future, and is continuously circling around the present: SCOTS, what hae wi’ Wallace bled,
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,
Welcome to your gory bed,
Or to victorie!
Now’s the day, and now’s t he hour;
See the front o’ battle lour;
See approach proud Edward’s power —
Chains and slaverie!

Although the ideal Scottish world remained behind in the sacred past, the present “slaverie” totally suits Burns. He consolidates a national and political given, as he does a national linguistic one, by composing his songs and ballads chiefly in the Scottish dialect. In Burns’s view, what may threaten this not so ideal, but entirely acceptable, world are social and moral factors, not national ones: O Scotia! my dear, my native soil!
For whom my warmest wish to Heaven is sent!
Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil
Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content!
And O! may Heaven their simple lives prevent
From Luxury’s contagion, weak and vile!
Then, howe’er crowns and coronets be rent,
A virtuous populace may rise the while,
And stand a wall of fire around their much-lov’d Isle.

(To be continued)