Humań (English)

Roman Koropeckyj, UCLA, Los Angeles

 

These days, when visitors come to this otherwise non-descript central Ukrainian city of tsarist buildings, Soviet blocks, and post-Soviet Modern, they do so usually for either of two very different reasons: to marvel at Zofiówka, Stanisław Szczęsny Potocki’s horticultural extravaganza, still beautifully preserved after two centuries on the city’s eastern outskirts; or to make an annual Rosh Ha-Shanah pilgrimage to the grave of Nahman of Bracław, the revered Hasidic admor who settled in Humań (Умань) shortly before his death in 1810, so that, as he reportedly remarked, he could be buried among „the souls of martyrs (slaughtered by Gonta).” [Shohetman 2014]. Few, however, come to Humań to recall the slaughter that is indelibly associated with its name, the so-called Koliszczyzna, when in the late spring of 1768 a combined force of Cossacks, Ukrainian peasants, and brigands led by Maksym Żeleźniak (Залізняк) and Ivan Gonta massacred several thousand of its Polish and Jewish inhabitants. In any case, only the eighteenth-century Basilian monastery still survives as a reminder of the event, and its building, „w środku miasta zbudowany, o trzech […] liniach i o dwóch piętrach, leżąc między wschodem i południem” [Wołyniak 1899a: 943] is in sore need of repair.

There is a sort of psychoanalytic logic to this, for it is precisely the dilapidated monastery, together with the school it once housed, that persists as the symptomatic link between the baroque horrors evoked by Rabbi Nahman and the neoclassicist serenity of Zofiówka’s trees and fountains. Indeed, according to a local legend recorded by Aleksander Groza in his 1860 poem Śmieciński: „Była głęboka, pełna najdoskonalszej wody studnia na Bazyliańskim dziedzińcu, ale gdy jedna kropla krwi niewinnej do niej wpadła, woda znikła, a rizuny pustą krynicę zarzucili ciałami studentów. Później woda ta okazała się w jarze w którym założono Zofiówkę” [Groza 1860: 192]. More saliently, however, it was thanks in part to the remarkable cohort of students who attended the Basilian school some fifty years after the massacre—among them, Józef Bohdan Zaleski, Seweryn Goszczyński, Michał Grabowski („Za-Go-Gra”), Jan Krechowiecki, and Groza himself—that Humań surfaced on the map of the romantic imagination as the symbolic center of Poland’s mythical Ukraine, at once locus amoenus and locus horribilis.

Both the monastery and its school owed their existence to Franciszek Salezy Potocki, the „kinglet of Rusʹ,” who invited the Basilians to settle in Humań in 1766 during one of the town’s periodic renascences. Situated in what was then the Bracław Palatinate of the Old Commonwealth, astride routes from Ottoman Moldavia and Yedisan to the south and, to the north and east, the lands of Rusʹ and Cossack Zaporizhzhia, the town had seen its share of violence ever since emerging at the beginning of the seventeenth century as a commercial hub of this fertile but volatile territory. Raids by marauding Tatars traveling along the so-called czarny szlak were a common occurrence. In 1648, the town, with its „immense castle of wood […] trenches […] and […] square towers” [Paul of Aleppo 1836: 185] was occupied by the forces of Hetman Bohdan Chmielnicki, who installed a Cossack regiment there as an administrative unit of his nascent state. During the civil war that followed his death in 1657, it changed hands between rival hetmans and their respective Polish, Russian, and Ottoman allies. In 1674, as a consequence of one such change, it was razed by the latter and nearly all of its inhabitants put to the sword (leaving a suburb called Turki as a reminder). The Koliszczyzna was itself but the last, if most egregious, of several hajdamak attacks on the town in the first half of the eighteenth century. Within a few years of its no less egregiously brutal suppression, however, Humań was thriving once again, thanks in large part to the attention lavished on it by its new owner, Franciszek’s son Stanisław. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the town, with its reformed school as well as magnificent new park, had become „jakoby ogniskiem życia społecznego w Ukrainie” [Heleniusz 1873: 568]. It remained in the hands of the Potocki family until 1832, when on orders of Nicholas I, it was confiscated from Stanisław’s son Aleksander for his participation in the November Uprising. Shortly thereafter, the town was transformed into „a military settlement of the Kiev and Podole gubernias,” and Zofiówka renamed (if only unofficially) Tsaritsyn Sad [Kryvosheia 1999: 21]. The Basilian school had been closed earlier, in 1831, „on account of the cholera ostensibly raging in various [surrounding] districts,” but it never reopened [Wołyniak 1899b: 1147].

Although much had changed in Humań since the Koliszczyzna—gone were the drawbridges, the fortified gates, the administrator’s citadel, and the wooden palisade surrounding the town—traces of the horrific events were still very much in evidence in the second decade of the nineteenth century, from the „dość znaczna fosa” just outside the Basilian monastery’s walls, „którędy Gonta i Żeleźniak podstępem weszli do miasta” [Wołyniak 1899b: 1146-1147], to the restored Roman Catholic Church of St. Anthony, which had been „obdarty brzydko” by the hajdamaks, „podłoga z niego wyrzucona, ławki porąbane; środek rozkopany został jamą, w której szukano zakopanych pieniędzy” [Mładanowicz 1854: 97]. But it was within the thick walls of the monastery that reminders of the Koliszczyzna were most palpable. „Wzdłuż kurytarza,” recalls one former student (Edmund Liwski), there hung „ogromne obrazy św. Bazylego, Mikołaja, Onufrego i Jozefata, poprzestrzelane i pokłute podczas rzezi Humańskiej”[Wołyniak 1899b: 1146]. Most prominently, though, affixed near the entrance to the library, was the portrait of Father Herakliusz Kostecki, the school’s first rector, a depiction of whose sorry end at the hands of the hajdamaks served the students of the Basilian school as a daily memento of both their inheritance and the wages of martyrdom:

Stoi on na dwóch skrwawioncyh włoczniach, w lewej ręce krucyfiks, w prawej Przenajświętszy Sakrament z piersią dwiema ranami pokrytą. Scena odbywa się za obrębem klasztoru w perspektywie źle zachowanej. Hajdamacy mordują klęczących zakonników i studentów. Ciała ich wrzucają do znajdującej się obok studni. Postawa męczennika wzniosła, szlachetna, oblicze wypogodzone, piękne ślady umartwionego życia noszące, z bródką krótko zaokrągloną, tą cechą misjonarskiego w zakonie powołania, podpis pod obrazem łaciński, jako w obronie wiary św. katolickiej “crudiliter occisus” [Krechowiecki 1871: 151].

Over that notorious well, however, which until 1779 had been marked by a grave-mound, there now stood a new town hall.

Yet if one is to take Groza at his poetic word, it was water from this well that „młodzież jasnym napawała stokiem” [Groza 1860: 192]; not in the town itself, but rather an hour’s walk to the east, in Zofiówka, where the park’s „przejrzyste fale / Żywym potokiem zaszumiały w skale” [Groza 1860: 192]. It was there that groups of students from the Basilian school, sometimes numbering in the dozens, would repair on Saturdays (ostensibly to avoid the crowds – [Groza 1857: 127]) and wander amid nature,

„Co tak rozkwita urocznie, dziewiczo,

Między surową krain tych dziczą,

Jak niebiański rumieniec, kwiat świętej wieczności […]” [Goszczyński 1911: 15]

Located just south of the infamous „Greek forest” where Żelźniak’s hajdamaks made their camp during their siege of Humań, the park had been established in 1796 by Stanisław Potocki, „Humania pan,” as a gift for his third wife. But, as his panegyrist is quick to note, in a land where not too long ago „z szlachtą wielokrotnie łamały się chłopi,” where

„to sieczowe nachody, to tauryckiej ordy

zdradne zawsze nad karkiem strzały, spisy, kordy;

dzicz wnętrzna, częsty rozruch i sąsiad niemiły

majętniejszych opodal mieszkać niewoliły“

—this gift was ultimately made possible by Catherine II, Potocki’s erstwhile patron, who „zniosła Zaporoża i Krymu rozboje” and tamed this „barbaric” land for its Polish owner’s benefit [Trembecki 2000: 21-22].

In Śmieciński, Groza recounts how in Zofiówka

„I przywabione młode pokolenie,

Na jasne zdroje i na chłodne cienie,

Krzepiło serce i ducha i wolę,

I na szerokie wyszło świata pole,

Z pieśnią—jakowej nie słyszano jeszcze,

A jaką pieją ukraińscy wieszcze”. [Groza 1860: 192-193]

And indeed, Groza’s entire cohort appears to have been fascinated by the park, where they would often stroll arm in arm, „sprzeczając się,” as Groza writes in his 1857 memoir Mozaika kontraktowa, „skąd widok był piękniejszy” [Groza 1857: 127]. In the notes to his own (albeit unpublished) memoir, Goszczyński recalls sharing quarters at one point with Zaleski in a homestead located right on the edge of Zofiówka, which they would sometimes visit „przed czwartą rano” [Goszczyński 1924: 17]. Yet if Goszczyński’s early poem „Noc w Zofiówce” (1824) gives a good indication of the power of the park’s nature to at once stimulate and articulate a romantic imagination, it may well be argued, as Józef Tretiak does in the first volume of his critical biography of Zaleski [Tretiak 1911: 47], that in the case of Goszczyński’s friend Zofiówka’s „wody, skały, wzgórza, bujna zieloność i bielające na jej tle posągi” conditioned the temperament of his entire poetic œuvre. In fact, it is Zofiówka that ultimately figures Zaleski’s memories of Humań itself and, by extension, of the entire Ukraine. Reflecting nostalgically in his old age on his days there as a youth, he writes in a poem entitled „Nieszpor”:

„Śnię, Ukraino, wiecznie śnię o tobie!

Gdzieś w Zofijówce twojej i w Humaniu

Goduję wesół, jak na dnia zaraniu.

[…]

I widzę ciebie, jak na dnia zaraniu,

Tam w Zofijówce twojej i w Humaniu,

Rozkoszny sadzie mój, o rajska strono,

Po dziś dzień gonisz mnie ciągle jak zmora […]”. [Zaleski 1899: 18]

Synonymous as it is here with the stunningly beautiful but nonetheless man-made, controlled environment of Zofiówka, Zaleski’s Humań in effect constitutes Ukraine as the subject of consciousness, out of which, to quote Trembecki, „Wygnała barbarzyństwo rzeczy postać inna / i obfita ziemica jest, czym być powinna” [Trembecki 2000: 22].

But the repressed has a nasty way of to returning. And when it does, as in the works not only of Goszczyński, Grabowski, and Groza (the so-called Ukrainian School), but of an entire generation of romantics who traced their origins to Ukraine, it does so precisely in the shape of „surowej krain tych dziczy.”

If the portrait of Father Kostecki was not reminder enough to the students of the Basilian school of the elemental forces lurking beneath the deceptive surface of this land „miła oku” [Trembecki 2000: 21], there was always the monastery’s chronicle, which contained graphic (hence appropriately edifying) accounts of their predecessors’ fate, including a narrative poem entitled Rzeź Humańska by one M. Darowski, a student at the school who managed to „sit out the entire slaughter in the cupola of the parish church” and subsequently recorded his terrifying experience for a class assignment [Goszczyński 1925: 162; Goszczyński 1924: 84; cf. Khraban’ 1970: 139].

No less compelling, though, particularly to sensibilities for whom the voice of the people was incontrovertible, were the oral narratives of those, „którzy byli oczywistymi świadkami tych strasznych wypadków, a mało się znajdzie ktoby o nich nie słyszał dokładnych powieści” [Grabowski 1839: 130]. In his brief overview of the Basilian Order in Ukraine (1871), Krechowiecki recalls one such survivor, „żyjący jeszcze za czasów moich podeszły w wieku obywatel, [który] sam mi opowiadał, iż był wtedy studentem w tej szkole, i że już po zamordowaniu ks. Kosteckiego, kiedy całą gromadkę studentów spędzono dla przyjęcia Chrzt[u] prawosławnego do studni obok klasztorku będącej, w którą uporczywszych wtrącono, wśród zamieszania udało mu się umknąć i szczęśliwie dobiedz do futoru zamiejskiego” [Krechowiecki 1871: 150]. Similar annotations crediting local legends and the tales of eyewitnesses figure prominently in Goszczyński’s foreword to Zamek Kaniowski (1832) as well as in the poem itself, Michał Czajkowski’s 1838 political novel Wernyhora, and Groza’s Śmieciński, where they serve not simply as a guarantee of the fictions’ authenticity—”jako najwierniejszy obraz tej krwawej dramy” [Goszczyński 1925: 61] — but as a sign of their authors’ own participation in unearthing the archeological fragments of the event and preserving them for posterity. Indeed, the first-person narrator of Grabowski’s documentary novel Koliszczyzna i stepy (1838) laments the fact that he heard tales of the slaughter „z ust stronnika Polaków.” „Sądzę,” he continues, „że opowiadanie o tej samej rzeczy, szczerego hajdamaki, byłoby daleko wyższej barwy” [Grabowski 1838: 97].^[1]

An analogous function, of at once attesting, authenticating, and preserving, was assigned to accounts of the slaughter set down by eyewitnesses (many years after the fact, to be sure), who apparently were quite eager to show their manuscripts to anyone interested. And if in this respect, Goszczyński expressed fears in 1832 that narratives such as that of his acquaintance Weronika z Mładanowiczów Krebsowa, the daughter of Humań’s administrator killed by the hajdamaks, might perish with time [Goszczyński 1925: 161], he need not have worried. For not only was Krebsowa’s manuscript published in 1840, but it was, in fact, one of a number of memoirs devoted fully or in part to the Koliszczyzna that began surfacing in print in the 1830s and 1840s. That Edward Raczyński’s edition of Jan Lippoman’s Bunt hajdamaków went through two printings (1842, 1854) would indicate that there was a ready audience for this „teatr niesłychanych mordów” [Goszczyński 1925: 159]^[2].

After all, what these eyewitness accounts all had in common was a store of requisites that thoroughly resonated with the aesthetic sensibilities of a generation brought up on Shakespeare, Scott, and the Gothic novel: a fortified town set in a lawless, semi-exotic frontier; cruel villains with semi-exotic names (Szwaczka, Szyło, Neżyvyj, Żurba); a scheming (Orthodox) monk; mysterious nocturnal ceremonies (the consecration of knives); a treasonous Cossack retainer who murders his own children (Gonta); an innocent young maiden who thanks „only to her dark eyebrows” [Goszczyński 1925: 161] survives to tell the tale (Krebsowa); and, of course, the carnage itself:

“Kłóto, rznięto, zabijano po ulicach i domach, bez żadnego ni na osoby, ni na płacz i prośby względu, rzucano w górę na powietrze, lub na dachy przeszyte niemowlęta, a kiedy spadłszy żyły, tęż samą im mękę zadając, powtórnie gubiono. Płacz, wrzask, prośby napełniały powietrze; okropny jęk wydawały matki, którym pruto wnętrzności, aby z nich wydobyty płód okrucieńskim zatracono sposobem.” [Tuczapski 1854: 130]

In the words of Count Henry Krasinski, who introduced the English-speaking world to Humań in his „historical drama” Gonta (1848)^[3] as well as in a book of „biographical notices” entitled The Cossacks of the Ukraine (1848), there was in all this „a curious mix of eastern, southern, and northern imagery; […] an angel with the demon, […] a noisy joy with black sorrow and despair. There [was] (as it were) in it an Arab in the desert, a Cossack and his steed, a White Eagle and an Ossian’s child” [Krasinski 1848b: xiv] — and, one might add, a good dose of pornographic violence.

What this meant, in practice, was the regular blurring of the line between fiction and document, wherein authors of the former shaped their narratives, to quote Czajkowski, „na tle historycznym i bez żadnego krzywienia wypadków” [Czajkowki 1868: 258], while authors of the latter bore witness to the authenticity of what in many instances proved quite literally to be stranger than fiction, from the number of victims (in the tens of thousands) to the story of Gonta’s murder of his two young sons. But if the very nature of the events, even as reconstructed by such relatively unbiased modern historians as Władysław Serczyk or H. Iu. Khraban,^[4] was so extreme that almost anything could be left to the individual imagination, the physical topography of the slaughter remained indelibly fixed: the drawbridges, the palisade, and the towers from which Humań’s inhabitants tried to defend themselves with cannons and small arms on the first day of the siege; the gate through which Gonta and Żeleźniak were allowed to enter the town by its panicked administrator Mładanowicz in a naïve attempt at self-preservation; the citadel, the town hall, the Roman Catholic church, the Basilian chapel, and the shul where many of the townsfolk were killed as they futilely sought shelter from the rampaging hajdamaks; the Orthodox church of St. Michael where those Catholics and Jews desperate to survive allowed themselves to be baptized into the Eastern Rite; and finally, the (dry) well down which decomposing corpses were thrown on the day after the massacre.

But then too, as at once the culmination and most notorious episode of the Koliszczyzna, the slaughter in Humań constitutes one of those remarkably overdetermined moments in Polish history that the romantic imagination quickly seized on to mine for latent meanings and correspondences. Occurring as it did on the eve of the First Partition and intersecting with the Confederacy of Bar, the violent confrontation between Ruthenian subaltern and Polish hegemon, Orthodox and Catholic (vel Uniate), barbaric East and civilized West, with nefarious Russia ostensibly pulling all of the strings, could consequently be read as a hypertrophied expression of the laminated social, religious, ethnic as well as political tensions that defined Poland’s relationship with Ukraine and its inhabitants. Humań thus comes to serve as a powerful metonymic symbol multisemous enough to articulate everything from Byronic rebellion in Zamek Kaniowski and Lucjan Siemieński’s „Wieś Serby” to the Scottian patriarchalism of Koliszczyzna i stepy and Zenon Fisz’s „Nestor Pisanka”; from Wernyhora’s naively paternalistic vision of Polish-Ukrainian solidarity to the radical program of the Jersey section of Lud Polski, whose decision „przybrać nazwisko Humania” was intended as a „pokorna ekspijacja za winy ojców […] za prześladowanie ludu Ukrainy” [Temkinowa (ed.) 1957: 103]. More saliently, though, and in Słowacki’s Sen srebrny Salomei paradigmatically, it figures what some have argued is the very essence of the Ukrainian myth in Polish romanticism: amid obscene plenty an orgy of obscene violence marking the death-throes of the Old Commonwealth and the concomitant emergence of two modern national entities.^[5]

The image of Humań limned by the Polish romantics did not, however, go uncontested. In 1841, the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko published his poem Haidamaky, the culminating section of which depicts the slaughter in Humań and Gonta’s apocryphal murder of his two sons, both, ostensibly, students of the Basilian school. Shevchenko himself was born in Right-Bank Ukraine, about a hundred kilometers northeast of Humań, and in the foreword to his poem he claims to be describing „what happened in Ukraine in 1768 as [he] had heard it from old folks.” „I have not,” he continues, „read anything in print and criticism because, it seems, there is nothing” [Shevchenko 1963: 142]. This is not entirely true. In fact, in Haidamaky Shevchenko draws liberally from Czajkowski’s Wernyhora, particularly for information contained in his own explanatory notes. These serve the same function in Haidamaky as they do in Polish works about the slaughter, but they also constitute something of a polemic with them. And in this respect, perhaps the most eloquent in its minimalism—and in its irony—is the gloss Shevchenko inserts to the section entitled „Gonta in Umanʹ”: ” Umanʹ—a district town of the Kiev guberniia.” Nothing more, nothing less, just another town in Ukraine.

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