Modest classic

History is not always fair in its assessments: it is apt to throw people who have sincerely, honestly, and inspiringly served their people throughout their lives into the River of Oblivion. This only adds to the obligation that historians, philologists, journalists, and all liberal arts people have to resurrect the good memory of these champions of worthy causes and give them a new-spiritual-life.

The person I will talk about here seems to be well-known to those who know and appreciate Ukrainian history and culture, rather than to only a narrow circle of specialists. In Ukrainian and Russian literatures, Yevhen Hrebinka (1812-1848) stands as a talented, original lyrical poet and the author of brilliant fables that have been deservedly included among our best belles-lettres works.

He is also a renowned prose writer; he wrote over 40 novels, novelettes, sketches, and stories in a variety of genres, including the historical genre. More specifically, he described the dramatic pages of Ukraine’s history in the novel Chaikovskii and in the novelette Nezhinskii polkovnik Zolotarenko (The Nizhyn Colonel Zolotarenko). The sociopsychological genre includes accounts of the customs prevalent among Russian officials, landlords’ autocratic rule, the death of “small people” in the hostile, antihuman environment, and the artistic analysis and interpretation of the emergence of Russian bourgeoisie.

Let us be frank: if the average reader remembers anything about Hrebinka (primarily from the compulsory school program), it is his Vedmezhyi sud (Bear’s trial), Rybalka (Fisherman), Pshenytsia (Wheat), Hrishnyk (Sinner), and other famous fables. So it turns out that a brilliant master of the pen, who died at 36 and devoted half of his life to writing, has been at the periphery of public attention for decades.

True, in Soviet times Hrebinka’s works were published in a fairly large number of copies, but at the same time, their interpretation was simplified. In order to have a comprehensive view of Hrebinka’s merits before Ukraine, it would be, perhaps, sufficient to mention only one fact: it was thanks to, above all, his initiative and efforts that the first edition of Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar (1840) was published. This was a book that created an entire epoch in Ukraine’s spiritual life.

Among other things, Hrebinka’s life and spiritual-intellectual world permit us to clarify a very interesting and not yet comprehensively studied problem: the contradictions and collisions in the consciousness of an educated, patriotically minded Ukrainian intellectual in the first half of the 19th century. However, for justice’s sake it needs to be mentioned that this patriotism was not of political nature — by necessity, it had a territorial-ethnographic character.

So, Yevhen Hrebinka was born on Feb. 2 (Jan. 21), 1812 at Ubizhyshche khutir near Pyriatyn in Poltava gubernia in the family of a petty landowner, a retired officer. His father had fought against Turks in the time of Catherine II. “With a saber in his hand, he plunged into the Turkish columns, leading brave hussars,” wrote Hrebinka in the largely autobiographical novel Zapysky studenta (Student’s Notes). His father later “fought as a Cossack” in the 1812 war.

Hrebinka’s mother was a descendant of a glorious Zaporozhian Chaikovskii dynasty. The stories that were passed from one generation to another in this dynasty went into the foundation of Hrebinka’s well-known historical novel Chaikovskii (1843). Truly, Hrebinka’s Ukrainian roots and the Ukrainian worldview in his works are easily discovered-it was natural for him.

Hrebinka graduated from the Nizhyn Gymnasia of Higher Sciences where Mykola Hohol (Nikolai Gogol), Nestor Kukolnyk, and Viktor Zabila (181-1831) also studied. Then he served in the 8th Little Russian Cossack Regiment for several years, retired in 1834, and moved to Saint Petersburg, where lived until the end of his life, making sporadic trips to Ukraine.

In the capital of the Russian empire Hrebinka worked as an official in the commission for religious schools, later taught the Russian language and mineralogy in military educational institutions and in the Institute of the Mining Engineers Corps. He had a fairly modest rank in the Russian table of ranks — a collegiate councilor and a 3rd-category teacher. Two months before his death, in September 1848, when he was terminally ill, his papers were submitted for the “highest reward” in recognition of 10 years of his immaculate service-however, he did not live to get it.

Despite this Hrebinka was very active in Saint Petersburg’s literary and artistic life in the 1830s and the 1840s. He set up a salon, which was well-known at the time and was attended by prominent activists of Ukrainian and Russian culture. He was personally acquainted with Aleksandr Pushkin, Ivan Krylov, Vladimir Dal, Ivan Panaev, and Fedor Tolstoi, who largely facilitated Shevchenko’s release from his Caspian exile. He corresponded and was friends with Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko, Petro Hulak-Artemovsky, Levko Borovykovsky, and other Ukrainian writers.

Hrebika published nearly all of his prose works (and a good portion of poems) in Russian. It would seem that he had dissolved in the ocean of Russian literature. Soviet critics gladly pointed out that “the fact that Hrebinka and, in general, Ukrainian writers of the time used the Russian language was evidence of their conscious effort to join the all-Russian literary process, which was a truly noble and historically significant cause.”

For some reason, these same critics ignored, for example, the following excerpt from Hrebinka’s 1840 letter to one of his friends. “Now I can again barely stand on my feet and today I will immediately leave for Little Russia in order not to die among katsaps (a derogatory name used by Ukrainians in reference to Russians).” This letter was absolutely private and intimate, thus it reflects true, rather than politically correct and affected, feelings.

Here is another confession, made somewhat earlier and also in a letter — to his relatives in Ubizhyshche: “I am always sick and bored — I am sorry for Little Russia!”

Looking back, we can now speak about the struggle between the Little Russian and the conscious Ukrainian in Hrebinka’s heart, but at the time it was not easy for the writer. Here is a telling example: he signed his first Russian-language works as Ye.Grebenkin, but then quickly reverted to his original Ukrainian last name. Who, then, prevailed in this struggle?

At this juncture we come to an extremely interesting and little-known topic: Hrebinka and Shevchenko or, more precisely, Hrebinka’s role and place in the circle of Shevchenko’s friends. There are valid reasons to believe that his role was special.

Let us turn to proved facts. Together with Ivan Soshenko, Ivan Hryhorovych-Barsky, and Apollon Mokrytsky, Hrebinka belonged to those Ukrainians without whose specific, selfless help Shevchenko would have never been released from serfdom. These people took the first step and involved influential Russian “partners”: Vasilii Zhukovsky, Karl Briullov, and Aleksei Venetsianov.

People who knew Shevchenko in his youth remembered that it was Hrebinka who made persistent efforts to introduce the gifted young man, who had been a serf, to the society of educated people in Saint Petersburg. He tried to create the most favorable conditions for Shevchenko’s talent to develop. In a Jan. 13, 1839 letter to Kvitka-Osnovianenko Hrebinka wrote: “I have the most wonderful assistant here-Shevchenko. He is an incredible man!” Around the same time Hrebinka advised Soshenko to give more books to Shevchenko.

Hrebinka prepared and published the remarkable Lastivka Almanac (1841), which was a landmark event in the development of our literature — it brought together under one cover the works of Shevchenko. Kvitka-Osnovianenko, Panteleimon Kulish, Ivan Kotliarevsky, Hrebinka himself, Borovykovsky, Zabila, and others. If Hrebinka had done nothing else for the Ukrainian literature, he would still deserve to be gratefully remembered by the subsequent generations of Ukrainians. Nevertheless, the greatest victory of Hrebinka-Ukrainian over Hrebinka-Little Russian was, no doubt, his involvement in the publication of Shevchenko’s Kobzar.

There is an account of how Shevchenko’s poems came to be published. It is either a legend or a fairly true story that was told by the Ukrainian landowner Petro Martos, who financed the project. He said he was posing for his portrait, which he had commissioned Shevchenko to execute, when he spotted a stack of papers a corner of the room where the young poet lived. He took a closer look, saw that those were poems and asked who the author was. To his surprise, it was his portraitist! He asked permission to take them home and read, which he did despite Shevchenko’s denials “Oh no, it’s not worth it!” The next day Martos showed the poems to Hrebinka who liked them very much and made some corrections. Martos sponsored the publication, Hrebinka overcame censorship, and thanks to their joint efforts Kobzar saw the light of day.

There are reasons to believe that Hrebinka’s involvement was far greater if only because he seemed to have already been familiar with Shevchenko’s works, and there was purely creative, rather than organizational, interaction between them.

Hrebinka was the person who accompanied Shevchenko in 1843 on his first journey across Ukraine after a 14-year separation, and this fact speaks volumes. Finally, while preparing the last edition of his novel Chaikovskii that appeared in his lifetime (in 1848), Hrebinka left intact all the epigraphs that had been placed before the chapters of the novel. These epigraphs were excerpts from poems by Shevchenko, who at the time was convicted and repressed by Nicholas I’s regime.

A modest, soft, and considerate person as he was, Hrebinka was still able to defend his principles. One of the main principles for him was free development of Ukrainian literature and culture on the highly moral, humanist foundation.