Humor in the History of Ukrainian Culture

In the long struggle for their national identity, the Ukrainian people has shown not only heroism and the will to win but also a critical outlook on life. This was a unique means of spiritual self-assertion and protection. The ethnic flavor of humor varies during the course of history, for it is determined by eternal changes in the people’s sociopolitical and economic life. However, the culture of laughter is still to become the object of in-depth study in historical context. Meanwhile, humor is a good mirror of human nature. This was described very well by the great ancient Greek philosopher and historian Plutarch. He wrote in his biography of Alexander the Great that “very often... a word or a joke exposes human nature better than battles do...”

The first recorded example of the culture of laughter in Ukrainian history was a well-known Kyivan Rus’ tale The Prayers of Daniel the Hermit. This unique twelfth-century source allows us to study the origins of Ukrainian humor and its place in medieval spiritual culture. Russian researcher S. P. Sheviriov noticed this more than 150 years ago. “ The Tale of Daniel the Hermit,” he writes, “contains the first instance, an immature sprout, if you like, of Little Russian humor. The present-day poet (Nikolai Gogol — Author) has elevated this gift of our South Russians to a higher degree of artistry. This is a charming blend of laughter and smiling sadness which find reconciliation in a highly clever thought vested in the shape of the simplest folklore — a Russian saying or Solomon’s parable.”

Later, in the Lithuanian-Polish period of Ukrainian history, folk satire focused on the nobility which had repudiated its ethnicity in pursuit of wealth. At the turn of the seventeenth century, this stratum of society became a target for satirical arrows of Ivan Vyshensky. In his Little Book, he derided those who “love money and sugar” but do not care about their spiritual life. According to Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Vyshensky “wanted to counterbalance all the doubts, questions, and contradictions of those tempestuous times with Byzantine asceticism and old Rus’ ‘simplicity’.”

The love of money and hypocrisy also came under the satirical pen of Ivan Pasteliy, Hryhory Skovoroda’s predecessor. Like Vyshensky, he leveled criticism not only at Ukraine’s wealthy but also at the clergy who broke Christian canons. In the poem Song of Pasteliy, he pours ridicule on this kind of pastors, “You assign rigorous fasts to people, but you do not rule your own belly.” Then he concludes, “...You would sell out even Christ for wealth.”

The cultural public is more familiar with the humor and satire of Hryhory Skovoroda. He was not just a philosopher and a poet, a fable writer and teacher, but, as researcher K. B. Sigov rightly emphasizes, a “‘Divine fool’ ...who dared serve the merry-making cause by faith and truth.” Skovoroda’s poem Every Town Has its Own Morals and Laws is a classic piece of the humorist genre. Here, the arrow of satire hits social climbers who fawn on nobles in search of lucrative offices, merchants who overcharge and shortchange customers, lawyers who bend the law as they please, et al. The cycle of his fables A Doe and a Boar, The Head and the Torso, A Honeybee and a Bumblebee, A Country Woman and a Potter is one the pinnacles of Ukrainian folk humor. Many of Skovoroda’s fables and ironic aphorisms are based on folk proverbs and sayings, especially on the following: “He would not be rich were he not a swine,” “A landlord fears the truth like a dog does soap,” “Living in captivity is the worst lot,” “Like the bird, like the song,” “A brave man is the one who swims upstream, not downstream.”

It is common knowledge that Ukrainian Cossack humor was well known far outside Ukraine. Suffice it to recall “Zaporozhzhians Writing a Letter in Reply.” That was the answer to Turkish Sultan Mohammed IV’s letter of ultimatum he sent to the Cossacks after they had made a foray into the Crimean Khanate in 1675. The sultan tried to stun the Zaporozhzhians with his numerous titles, but, instead, he received a sarcastic comment on the latter. Although the words “You will never dare keep Christian sons in subjugation” are the essence of the letter, the overall humorous tone has provoked raucous laughter in not only Ukrainians for centuries on end. It is not accidental that Ilya Repin drew inspiration from this historical plot to paint a picture that was highly acclaimed throughout the world.

A new stage in the development of the culture of laughter was opened by Ivan Kotliarevsky. His Aeneid is unique in that it makes wide use of the eighteenth-century burlesque tradition. Relying on the experience of his predominantly anonymous predecessors, Kotliarevsky outsmarts them all in the satirical exposure of contradictions in the Russian Empire’s feudal serfdom system. It is for this reason that, as researchers note, Kotliarevsky had to pay a high price for his “daily visits to the censorship committee” in Saint Petersburg. When a tsarist general suggested that Kotliarevsky switch to the Russian language and write the way Derzhavin and Karamzin did, he said in reply, “Not me, Your Excellence. Can I possibly reach the divine mastery of the poets you mentioned? But the main point is that I am a Little Russian and thus deem it my duty to write in the language of my mother and my compatriots.” Still in the writer’s lifetime, The Aeneid was widely discussed by men of letters and cultural figures of Bohemia, Poland, the US, Britain, Germany, France, and Italy, such as Safaryk, Hanka, Bandke, Talvis, Kohl, Chojecki, Morfill, Gubernatis.

What needs a most thorough analysis is the culture connected with the names of Taras Shevchenko and Nikolai Gogol (Mykola Hohol). According to prominent Ukrainian philosopher Myroslav Popovych, Gogol represented “a philosophical and esthetic system which combined carnival laughter with the word of a pastor.” In addition, Popovych rightly notes that the artistic power of Gogol (both as a rational preacher and a carnival merrymaker) is rooted in the “folk culture of marketplace laughter.” As to Shevchenko, when he wrote to Gogol “You are laughing, but I am crying, my good friend,” he underrated the laughter-related aspects of his own creative power. His laughter blends still deeper with preaching and political criticism. Suffice it to analyze the comedy, Dream. It is no accident that he took the following words of the Bible as the epigraph to this poem, “Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him...” (John 14:17). Admitting at the beginning of the poem that “each has a destiny of his own,” the poet describes the sociopolitical contrasts of his epoch in a sparklingly humorous vein. Casting a retrospective look at his fatherland’s recent past and assessing the Russian political elite, he drops humor and writes bitterly, “I feel so bad, as if I were reading the history of Ukraine.”

Gogol’s and Shevchenko’s traditions of laughter were further developed in the second half of the nineteenth century by Marko Vovchok, Panas Myrny, and Ivan Franko. The Ukrainian humor of that period is a special page in the history of our culture. It is to Shevchenko that Marko Vovchok dedicated A Girl Student , one of her best satirical works. This work aimed to expose the social ills of that time. As to Myrny, he spearheaded his humor against the state-sponsored lawlessness, social contrasts in the Russian Empire, and cruelty of the tsar. His novels Do the Oxen Low when the Manger is Full? The Harlot, and others ridicule the domination of social untruth, hypocrisy of the Ukrainian social elite, and the philistine character of mankind. Franko also developed the best traditions of Ukrainian humor. What can serve as convincing proof of this is the accusing spirit of his novella The Pillars of Society, which shows the disintegration and degradation of the Polish nobility, as well as the short story Swinish Constitution, etc. It should be stressed that Marko Vovchok, Panas Myrny, and Ivan Franko made ample use of the best pieces of humorous folklore, fairy tales, and sayings. Moreover, Franko also studied the dialogs of burlesque shows.

During the Revolution of 1905, Ukrainian satire was mainly concentrated in the print media, such as the newspaper Hromadska dumka (later Rada) an magazines Shershen, Ridny Krai, and Nova hromada — especially after the tsar proclaimed a manifesto on October 17, 1905, which allowed some democratic freedoms, including that of printing. An important part in the development of Ukrainian humor was played by Shershen (Hornet, in fact the only satirical magazine of those times. Edited by V. Lozynsky, it came out between January and August 1906. The Shershen editorial board conducted correspondence with and heeded the advice of Ivan Franko. The magazine wittily derided the false tsarist freedoms and various nonviable “theories” of solving the land problem.

Soviet humor is an issue for special discussion. Although there also were outstanding and talented authors, such as Ostap Vyshnia, Fedir Makivchuk, Stepan Oliynyk, et al, the works of this genre are overburdened with ideological cliches: it is, first of all, so-called class enemies who came under the fire of satirists.

Now that Ukraine is an independent state, humorists are facing not so easy a challenge: to take up new, contemporary, themes without taking the sting out of the pen. Whether they are ready to meet this challenge will be clear in the immediate future.