Life-long choice

Taras Shevchenko was 32 years old when he graduated from the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts in 1845. This was a respectable age for embarking on a serious occupation that would give meaning to the rest of his life. Already a reputed artist and poet, he was faced with a choice. He could rent an apartment in the northern capital and continue painting, as local publishers had become interested in him after he executed the illustrations to Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko and Mykola Hohol’s stories.

Having illustrated the Russian historian Nikolai Polevoi’s books The History of Suvorov and Russian Military Leaders, which were engraved in England, Shevchenko enjoyed the reputation of a mature and noted artist. However, he found the idea of spending the rest of his life in the somber and stifling stone city of Peter I intolerable, after growing up in the verdant environs of Ukraine. He also must not have forgotten the bitter taste left by unfavorable literary reviews, particularly those of Vissarion Belinsky, of his poem “Haidamaks,” in which the critic called into question the very existence of Ukrainian, the language of the poet’s people.

Another option was to return to his native land. If he did, he had to make arrangements for a job in Ukraine. In Russia, since the times of Peter I, all individuals who fell under the tax-exempt category had to serve in accordance with the Table of Ranks. The certificate of manumission issued by his landlord Paul Engelhardt in 1838 reads that Shevchenko could choose “the kind of life he desires.” The receipt of a certificate, on March 22, 1845, granting him the status of a non- class artist specializing in historical and creative painting, transferred him to this social category. The Academy of Arts enjoyed a privilege allowing its graduates to take up a service as they chose.

Therefore, in order to return to Ukraine Shevchenko had to select the kind of service that would earn him a living, since he owned no land. Naturally, he wanted an occupation that would coincide with his professional interests. Friends in Kyiv urged him to join them. The city was home to the offices of the Kyiv military, Podilian, and Volynian general governments comprising the administrative center of the Right-Bank Ukraine. The opening of a university had transformed Kyiv into a major scholarly center where a broad range of research was being conducted; rumors about this surpassed all expectations. Here one could find a job with prospects of traveling abroad in order to hone one’s artistic skills. What was Kyiv University like at the time? Unlike other universities founded in Russia by the Statute of 1804, the one in Kyiv was established at a considerably later date. It was created by a special ukase of Nicholas I on Nov. 8, 1833, primarily to provide students from aristocratic families in Kyiv, Podillia, and Volyn gubernias with a post-secondary education that was Russian in content and character. Whereas the earliest universities sought to emulate models of European corporate autonomy, with elected academic posts and freedom of instruction and research, the one in Kyiv followed a different model.

Kyiv University was completely dependent on the state, and its task was to heighten the local elite’s loyalty to the Russian monarch, and to assert the imperial presence in a territory that until recently had belonged to the Polish state. As a result of the participation of Ukrainian and Polish noblemen in the Polish uprising of November 1830, the tsarist authorities shaped Kyiv University according to the German academic model whose bureaucratic institutions kept control over learning and teaching in the interests of the empire.

The opening of the university was preceded by the closure of 245 schools rooted in the Polish educational tradition, particularly the lycee in the Volynian city of Kremenets. These educational establishments had played a decisive role in the revival of Polish identity in Right-Bank Ukraine. After a brief debate on his future place of residence, Orsha or Kyiv, Shevchenko chose Kyiv, as the central government gave the city a new, sacral meaning as the former seat of Orthodoxy. Since Christianity had spread from Kyiv, the city’s transformation into an educational center with an imperial ideology was expected to assert Russia’s right to the “Kyivan heritage” and to propagate the idea of the triumph of historical justice. Therefore, Kyiv University, unlike its other counterparts in Russia, obtained the title “Saint Volodymyr Imperial University of Kyiv.” The canonized prince, who went down in history as the unifier of the lands of Kyivan Rus’ and their baptizer, symbolized the assertion of Russian education in a Polonized territory.

The university functioned in keeping with an ad hoc statute that was adopted in 1833 and which, unlike the statute of 1804, eradicated the university’s self-government. Kyiv was the methodological-educational center of the newly established Kyiv district (1832) which until 1835 consisted of Chernihiv, Kyiv, Podillia, Volyn gubernias; Poltava was added as of 1839. The district was not headed by the rector of the university, like before, but by a government official, a trustee, who was appointed by the tsar in coordination with the minister of public education.

The university rector was subordinated to the minister of public education and the trustee of the educational district. The university’s internal administration was governed by a council made up of ordinary and extraordinary professors, headed by the rector. The university court and autonomous juridical rights of the members of the university corporation were abolished. The rector was elected by the university council for a term of two years and approved by the tsar. Professors and adjunct professors, like faculty deans, were elected by the council and subject to the minister’s approval. The government expected that academic managerial experience that had been acquired in Right-Bank Ukraine would foster the higher educational reform anticipated in 1835.

The material base and intellectual potential of the Volyn lycee and Vilnius University were enlisted for the newly established university, along with money collected by the Polish aristocracy in Kyiv gubernias in 1805, state funds that were issued for a projected Institute of Law in Kyiv and a lycee in Orsha, as well as donations by the merchant P. G. Demidov. Various scholarly collections and libraries of the Volyn lycee and Vilnius’s medical-surgical and Roman Catholic theological academies and university were transferred to Kyiv. The government impressed on the public, alarmed by the suppression of the uprising, the idea that the university was to be regarded as a gift of the Russian government in general and Nicholas I in particular. According to an official act, the Volyn (Kremenets) lycee was not closed but reorganized as a university.

When the university was inaugurated, it had only one faculty, philosophy, with departments of history and philology, and physics and mathematics. The law school opened in 1835, followed by the medical school in 1841. The university instituted a four-year curriculum, and the goal of the university’s founding determined a characteristic feature: the humanities disciplines were politicized and acquired political weight, while scholarly research tasks were pushed to the background. The emphasis was on training future bureaucrats.

The launch of the university’s scholarly research activities was fostered by several scholarly societies founded in Kyiv, through which the government aimed to assert the state’s policy of strengthening the imperial presence in Ukraine and substantiating the legal grounds of its inclusion in the empire by relying on historical sources, the search for which acquired priority status. On the basis of these sources Kyiv and the “Southwest krai” were to be recorded on the historical canvas stretching from Kyivan Rus’ to the Romanov Empire.

The course was set for training personnel for the government bureaucracy and teachers for Left-Bank Ukraine, because the empire did not trust the loyalty of locals of Polish descent and Polonized bureaucrats. Only graduates of classical high schools and Orthodox seminaries were eligible to enroll, while students who had completed private schools or had been home-schooled were not. In addition to tuition-paying students, 50 students could study at the state’s expense. After graduation they had to work for six years in government-assigned jobs.

Thus, law students became clerks at local institutions dealing with Polish lands. To this end the university council made several changes to the teaching of Roman law. The number of hours devoted to the teaching of this subject was reduced, while the number of hours devoted to teaching local laws was increased, as these laws would be crucial to future lawyers working in local courts. A chair of civil and boundary laws was thus founded in 1842.

The first round of students, admitted in 1834-1845, did not justify the government’s expectations, because most of the students were from Left-Bank Ukraine, not Right- Bank, as originally planned. Their stance also did not tally with the professors’ expectations, and the students’ moods were at odds with the public’s. At first, the most loyal professors from the Volyn lycee dominated the teaching staff. Only three chairs were staffed with Ukrainians and Russians because of a lack of suitable personnel: M. O. Maksymovych (Russian literature), V. F. Tsykh (general and Russian history; statistics), and O. M. Novytsky (philosophy). After Szymon Konarski’s Society of the Polish People was exposed and a number of students arrested, the Polish professors were dismissed from Kyiv University and transferred to other educational establishments in 1838-1839. Starting in March 1839, the university was closed for nearly a year.