THE MEMORY OF THE UKRAINIAN COSSACK IN THE LITERARY APPROACH OF UKRAINIAN AND POLISH ROMANTICS
Authors:   Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine, Bracka Mariya 
Published: February 2024

The article fits into the trend of contemporary humanities research called «memory studies». It was pointed out that the study of forms of artistic memory in literature provides answers to fundamental questions regarding individual and collective (national, ethnic, cultural) identity. The text attempts to describe the strategy of preserving the memory of the common hero of the Polish and Ukrainian nations – the Cossack – a key figure in the works of Polish and Ukrainian Romantics. To achieve this goal, the concept of mnemotopoi was used, because there is no doubt that the Cossack – realizing the ancient and later topoi of a young man, a knight – becomes a figure constantly recurring in the memory of subsequent generations. Topoi somehow encodes common places in collective memory, in cultural memory, creating mnemotopoi. The image of the Cossack in the works of Polish and Ukrainian romantics was created at the intersection of the traditional vision presented in Ukrainian oral folk art and sentimental tradition, on the one hand, and new romantic tendencies, on the other. The «building of memory» about the Ukrainian Cossack in Ukrainian culture is built primarily by folk songs – dumas, historical songs, love songs. Folk songs served as the basis for the works of many romantics: Józef Bohdan Zaleski, Tymek Padura, Aleksander Groza, Levko Borovykovski, Amvrosiy Metlynski and others. Such features of the Cossack community as: love of freedom, readiness to gamble and sacrifice for the faith, comrades and native land, appearing in early romantic poetry, are taken over from Ukrainian folk songs. In general, the mnemotopoi of the Ukrainian Cossack in Polish and Ukrainian romantic poetry builds the basic models of Cossack behavior, including striving for group integration, mutual help, fierceness in the fight against the enemy, as well as such characteristics as bravery, cunning, and physical strength. This is the figure of the Ukrainian Cossack that Levko Borovykovski, a pioneer of Ukrainian romanticism, tries to remember. At the same time, romantic motifs intensify in his poems: idealization and ideologization of the historical past, concentration of those principles of folk creativity that corresponded to romantic poetics and the romantic concept of personality: immersion in one’s own inner world, avoidance of the external world, spontaneity of actions, tragic perception of the world, premonition of death, rejection of earthly goods, denial of the prose of life. In the poetry of the Ukrainian Romanticist Amvrosiy Metlynski, the Cossack changes his role and becomes, above all, a defender of the people. He is remembered as a hero of times gone by, someone who no longer exists in the times of the Romantics and sleeps in his grave. The life of the nation contemporary to the poet is a time of sadness and mourning, degradation of the nation’s spirit, decline and oblivion, while the Cossack times are a period of greatness, dignity, bravery and freedom. The lasting memory of Cossack is shaped by the poetry of Taras Shevchenko. In the mnemotopoi created by an outstanding romantic, he is a representative of the Ukrainian nation, accumulating its best features, being its defender, a brave knight and a hero. Kozak’s romantic mnemotopoi has the same variant in Shevchenko’s poetry as Haidamak’s. And if in Polish romantic poetry we see these two characters strongly differentiated, for Shevchenko Haidamaka is as much a defender of the freedom of the oppressed people as the Cossack. In Polish literature, Józef Bohdan Zaleski began to shape the early version of the romantic mnemotopoi of the Cossack. Inscribed in sentimental poetics as faithful friends and allies of Poles, they will remain in memory as knights fighting for a common homeland and the Christian faith. No matter how important the specific features of the Cossacks may seem, what stands out in the foreground in Tymek Padura’s work is the brotherhood or even unity of this people with the Poles. The Padura Cossack is primarily an inhabitant of the areas located on the outskirts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Padura found deep historical justification for the unity of Cossacks and Poles – he argued that both nations originated from one stem. Kozak’s mnemotopoi in Polish romantic literature is multi-layered. He also reveals his other side – the enemy Cossack, the murderer, the «rizun». Goszczyński’s «Zamek Kaniowski» also commemorates the type of Cossack – a romantic hero – a lonely and haughty Cossack Nebaba, with a torn consciousness, tainted by the stigma of crime, but this piece probably contributed most to perpetuating in memory the image of Haidamaka – cruel, fierce in the desire for revenge, spontaneous and cunning. The most important figures of Słowacki’s Cossacks break the coherence of the memory of a strong, brave, cunning, and fierce Cossack in the fight against the enemy. In Słowacki’s works, for example in «Żmia», he is a hero with two faces, axiologically very ambiguous. In «Sen srebrny Salomei» Słowacki contributed to remembering Ukraine as brutal, barbaric and apocalyptic. Axiologically, the image of Semenka, which builds the mnemotopoi of the Ukrainian Cossack, is described by the poet as insidious, treacherous, terrible and bestial. The memory of the Cossack – a hero common to the Polish and Ukrainian nations – is different among Polish and Ukrainian romantics: although they share the features of a typical romantic, Byronic hero, for Ukrainian romantics he is primarily a fighter for his own freedom and the freedom of the Ukrainian people, a defender of the people’s rights, an avenger. human wrongs. For Polish romantics, on the one hand, he is a friend and ally, living in symbiotic unity with Poles, and on the other hand, he is a cruel, murderer, dividing the world into «own» and «alien» and destroying everything that is foreign, while defending the values of «own» world. At the same time, they are often located on the border of worlds, using extraterrestrial, demonic forces, represented in the form of the Cossack-kharacternik.