The father of the Zaporozhian Cossacks

rary of the events that he was recounting. When he related the story of some ancient sable or musket, describing the life of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, their campaigns, and Sich customs, it seemed as though this man was wearing a modern three-piece suit by accident, rather than a Cossack tunic and red Cossack pantaloons, as wide as the Black Sea, or at least the clothing of a Cossack scribe with an inkpot and a goose feather in his hand or tucked behind his ear, like the one immortalized in Ilya Repin’s painting. He had about him something of the Zaporozhian sorcerer — a kharakternyk — the subject of so many stories that have been preserved to this day.” This description of Dmytro Yavornytsky was written by the poet Maksym Rylsky.

November 7 marks the 150th birth anniversary of this Ukrainian historian, archeologist, folklorist, and writer, who published more than 100 works. The most famous of them is his trilogy, The History of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, published between 1892 and 1907. When I was in university in the early 1990s I remember studying the Cossack period of Ukrainian history from this precious book, which had just been republished after many decades.

Yavornytsky was also a famous collector of Ukrainian artifacts. In search of these treasures he traveled on foot to the Dnipro rapids and all the steppes, islands, and tracts that were once inhabited by the Cossacks. He stored his rich collection at the Museum of Artifacts in Katerynoslav (now Dnipropetrovsk), which he himself directed. During the various revolutions and wars numerous unique items were lost. He exchanged some of them for grain to save his fellow countrymen during the famine of 1933. The surviving items are stored at the Dnipropetrovsk Museum of History, which merits a separate story, especially with regard to its valuable collection of exhibits and the local authorities’ attitude toward them. At the invitation of National Mining University we traveled to Dnipropetrovsk to present the latest books from The Day’s Library Series: Day and Eternity of James Mace and Klara Gudzyk’s Apocrypha. We could not visit the museum, however, because of a routine emergency: several collections had been damaged by flooding. We could not see the exhibit organized to mark Yavornytsky’s anniversary either, owing to our ignorance of the museum guards’ code of conduct.

Instead, we visited Yavornytsky’s memorial house museum, fulfilling our longtime dream.

The walls of the foyer are painted with scenes from Cossack life — all of them the work of the artist Mykola Strunnikov. Taras Bulba is the most recognizable character. “Ever since Yavornytsky’s father read Gogol’s Taras Bulba to his son, the Cossacks dominated the boy’s life and dreams. He wrote about this in his memoirs,” says the museum’s curator, Anhelina Perkova. The other paintings in the anteroom, including the artists’ self-portrait, are no less original. Perkova says that during the German occupation people covered the wall paintings with a coat of paint to save them from destruction. When the museum opened in 1988, various people returned Yavornytsky’s personal belongings, which they had kept safe all those years. The housemaid of the Yavornytsky family, Kateryna Lytvynenko, returned his china cupboard, porcelain, table, embroidered shirt, and embroidered towel, which “the father of the Zaporozhian Cossacks” — as prominent Ukrainian and Russian scholars and cultural figures often called him — was given in the Poltava region in gratitude for a series of fascinating lectures on the Cossacks. On the walls of the writer’s study hang reproductions of the two versions of Ilya Repin’s famous painting “Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan.” A longtime friend of Repin’s, Dmytro Yavornytsky sat for him when he was painting the scribe. “Dmytro Ivanovych [Yavornytsky] often looked for models that looked like Zaporozhian Cossacks for Ilya Yefimovich [Repin],” says the museum’s curator. “He would even lend them garments and Cossack weapons from his collection. Under the influence of his stories, Repin created an entire cycle of works: “Black Sea Freemen,” “Cossacks Crossing the Sea in Pursuit of Their Quarry,” and “Haidamaks.” “Hopak” was his last work that he was painting when he died.”

“Dmytro Ivanovych [Yavornytsky] maintained creative cooperation and friendship with many luminaries of Ukrainian scholarship and culture: Marko Kropyvnytsky, Mariya Zankovetska, Mykola Sadovsky, Mykhailo Starytsky, Panas Myrny, and Lesia Ukrainka. He met with her in Egypt. Few people know this fact,” says the curator of the Yavornytsky museum. In 1910 the historian embarked on a tour of Turkey, Palestine, and Egypt, where Lesia Ukrainka was undergoing treatment. He stopped at the Villa Heluana to visit her and stayed for a week. She mentioned this in a letter to her sister Olha and mother Olena Pchilka. “I had a guest: Dmytro Ivanovych Yavornytsky — a daring old fellow. He was on the pyramids and in the pyramids, and he traveled high and low,” Perkova said, quoting from Lesia Ukrainka’s letter. Together they visited the Museum of Cairo.

It turns out that the museum employees traveled to almost every place where Dmytro Yavornytsky had lived, in particular Moscow and St. Petersburg, Yavornytsky left a large archive in Kyiv; meanwhile, the documents that he left behind in Warsaw and Central Asia are still inaccessible.

The archives reveal that in 1887 Yavornytsky embarked on a long journey to the Solovky Islands to learn about the fate of Petro Kalnyshevsky, the last head otaman of the Zaporozhian Sich. There he studied documents stored in Solovky Monastery and found evidence that Kalnyshevsky spent 25 years in prison there. “So this is where the ‘glorious’ otaman of the ‘glorious” Cossacks found eternal peace. It is hard to imagine anything more bitter and grievous than the irony of fate that befell the ‘glorious and free’ otaman of the ‘glorious and free’ Cossacks. Indeed, to be born and grow up in the lap of vating nature; spend his youth and adult years among the Zaporozhian freemen; see and love the free and boundless steppes with all of his warrior’s soul; command and control thousands of free and freedom- loving people; associate with powerful men and royalty; and own great wealth, and then in the end to exchange all this for a gloomy, dark, and damp prison cell, in a faraway, desolate land in the back of beyond, in the middle of a cold sea, where he spent 25 years in dark imprisonment. It is hard to imagine a more bitter and cruel twist of fate for a man,” Yavornytsky wrote in his study, “The Last Kish Otaman Petro Ivanovych Kalnyshevsky,” one of the chapters of his book Po sledam zaporozhtsev [In the Footsteps of the Zaporozhian Cossacks] (1887). This study was never republished as a separate work.

These facts are little known. But anyone who visits the house museum is guaranteed to make discoveries. For example, we learned that three volumes of the historian’s epistolary collection have already been published. A fourth volume is expected to be published in time for the anniversary. We also saw the book Naukovo-publitsystychni i polemichni pysannia Kostomarova [The Scholarly-Journalistic and Polemical Writings of Kostomarov], published in 1928 under the editorship of Mykhailo Hrushevsky. It has not been republished since then.

Finally, one must visit the museum at least once to get an idea of the lifestyle of Ukrainian aristocrats: their favorite pastimes, books, and friends. Most importantly, it shows how they remained true to their principles in the most unfavorable periods. Understanding one’s lineage undoubtedly has an impact on one’s self-assessment.

N.B. The Dmytro Yavornytsky Memorial House Museum needs funds primarily to publish a booklet, repair the building, and restore museum items. Information on how to send donations:

Acct. no. 35429004000447 with UDKU in Dnipropetrovsk oblast ZKPO of the museum: 02215992 MFO: 805012 The Dmytro Yavornytsky Dnipropetrovsk Museum of History, a regional communal cultural institution Specify: For the Dmytro Yavornytsky Memorial House Museum