San Remo, February 18 (March, 3), 1903
Dear Mykhailo,
I’ve been struggling with a title for my work (titles always intimidate me!), which is why I haven’t written to you yet. I’m considering Our Freedom Under the White Tsar or Our Life Under the Moscow Orthodox Tsars—whichever you think is better. Just publish it anyway.
I don’t know Samiilenko either. The handwriting looks vaguely familiar from the “sloganists” circle, but I can’t be sure. I suspect the “writer” is I.[van] M.[atviyovych] (referring to Ivan Matviyovych Steshenko, a Ukrainian public and political figure, an active member of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, and a friend of Lesia Ukrainka, editor’s note), while the professor is certainly no literary scholar. I find Volia’s plans rather utopian—God help us just to manage our own “factions” here, let alone reconcile other people’s disputes. Meanwhile, Russian factions and parties are fighting among themselves with full force. It seems to me that Ukrainians are not meant to be peacemakers—history has not prepared us for that role. Iskra and other factions may either scoff at such ambitions or simply ignore them. When a Pole once tried to convince me of a grand plan to reconcile Ukrainian factions and unite them with the Polish faction in Kyiv, I found it difficult to take him seriously. I told him that if Ukrainians wanted to reconcile, they would do so themselves—without outsiders’ mediation.
It’s time we accept that these so-called “brotherly peoples” are merely neighbors, bound together by the same oppressive yoke, but without truly shared interests. It is better to act side by side, each for our own benefit, rather than meddling in each other’s “internal politics.” Why should we care if Iskra quarrels with Revolutionary Russia? It’s not our business to reconcile them, especially when they haven’t asked us to act as arbiters. And why, of all people, should we Ukrainians be the ones playing peacemaker, rather than the Poles, Jews, or others? What matters to us is how these factions treat us and our cause. That alone should determine with whom we fight and with whom we reconcile. Even that is only practically relevant if we establish our own presence through real work and influence—otherwise, it’s like a woman being outraged at a bargain, while the bargain is unaware of her existence.
The idea of a bilingual publication seems impractical to me. Russian literature is already published in far greater volume than Ukrainian literature, and so much Ukrainian money has been spent on it that it’s high time we “get ours back.” In my view, Revolutionary Russia should fund translations of its own publications into Ukrainian—rather than impoverished young Ukrainian organizations spending their meager resources on publishing Russian works. Who would these publications even serve? If they are meant for Great Russia [Velykorossia, tr.note], we are too poor to offer such gifts to our “elder brothers”—we have already given them more than we’ve taken, even sacrificing “blood taxes” for the terrorist movement. And if these Russian publications are intended for Ukraine, then we should not be aiding the cause of “obrusenie” [russification, tr.note], even if it is of the revolutionary variety. A Ukrainian who wishes to address a Russian or “all-Russian” audience can do so by submitting a “letter to the editor” or “foreign correspondence” to an existing Russian revolutionary publication. Creating separate publications for this purpose would be both costly and unnecessary. I would strongly oppose such a waste of hard-earned Ukrainian funds. If we were to be truly consistent, we would need not just a bilingual publication but one in ten languages—to reconcile Lithuanian, Jewish, Armenian, and other factions. That would be impossible. It’s bad enough that censorship forces Ukrainian liberals into bilingualism, but at least revolutionaries don’t have to worry about censorship. On this note, I should mention that Vpered, a hectographically printed organ once published in Ukrainian territory, explicitly refused (I know this for a fact) to print any Ukrainian-language materials. No Russian (non-Ukrainophile) publication has ever printed Ukrainian-language works either. This is all quite natural, if you think about it—but why should we be the ones paying the price for their lack of hospitality? If that’s the case, let everyone stay in their own tent. Ukrainians have long initiated efforts toward federal relations—since the days of Drahomanov, even Shevchenko—and have repeatedly extended a hand, only for our “big brothers” to ignore it. If they now wish to engage with us, they can come looking for us this time. We have no reason to chase after them—doing so only humiliates us, making it seem as if we are desperate for fraternity while they don’t even acknowledge our existence. Enough of that!
When our “brothers” finally take an interest in us, believe me, they will remember where to find us. I never sought out association with Russian emigrants, but they found me—very politely asking me to translate their publications and be of service because they needed me. I agreed to translate some, but only as an equal to an equal, without joining any faction or mediating disputes—simply as an independent translator. That, I believe, is the only natural position to take in such relations. If I had tried to play the peacemaker, I would have been ridiculed—and rightly so.
[…]
In a letter to her friend and ideological associate, Mykhailo Kryvyniuk—a member of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party and a forced emigrant from the Russian Empire who had settled in Lviv—writer Lesia Ukrainka shares her impressions of the publishing debates unfolding within Russian liberal circles at the time. These discussions centered on non-Russian languages and the language policies of Russian “oppositionists” in the early twentieth century.