HE BLACK SEA AND THE SEA OF AZOV IN UKRAINIAN COSSACK EPOS

Abstract

This article describes the attempts of Ukrainian historians of the 1920s–1930s, in particular, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, to actualize the significance of sea as a geographical and natural sub-foundation of the territorial history of Ukraine. These efforts were necessary to revise and dismantle the imperial construct of “Novorossiya” (literally “New Russia”). Hrushevsky was interested, first of all, in the Cossack era (late 16th–18th centuries) and the era of repopulation of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov coastal areas after liquidation of the Zaporozhian Sich. Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s ideas drove the research work by Kateryna Hrushevska, who published in 1927–1931 a two-volume corps Ukrainian Folk Dumas in search of field materials that could prove the organic relation of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov with historical life of Ukrainians. Kateryna Hrushevska pointed out the publication of a duma about the seafaring adventure of Oleksiy Popovych in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads by Francis James Child (1882–1898) – it was presented as a parallel to the Scottish ballad Brown Robyn’s Confession. The text of a Ukrainian folk duma was thus included to a broad circle of folklore songs popular among seafaring peoples (meaning Swedish, Norwegian and Danish folk ballads). Kateryna Hrushevska focused on the study of ritual practices related to a departure to the sea, particularly those recorded by the ethnographer Vasyl Kravchenko in 1926 in Berdiansk. It provided a basis for the study of folklore works and customs of seafarers as a separate social group. Hrushevska also reviewed the field records made by the renowned Ukrainian artist and ethnographer Porfyrii Martynovych. His archives contained, in particular, the texts of folklore prose concerning the Sea of Azov, recorded during 1897–1902 in the Cossack village of Veremiivka in the Zolotonosha Povit (district) (in the 1950s, the village was flooded due to construction of Kremenchuk Hydroelectric Power Station). These texts under the general title What Zaporozhians Were are the fables in which Zaporozhians are associated with the image of Jesus Christ (this approximation took place on the basis of realization of the soteriological function of Cossacks in the history of Ukraine). Folk narrators considered Cossacks not only knights but also the “righteous of God”, and therefore, they were attributed the ability to “sit on water like on the ground” (evangelistic stories depict Jesus Christ who can “walk on water”). In the course of sacralization of the image of a Zaporozhian produced by collective work, his verbal portrait attained the features of a saint and a bogatyr, the birth of which has mythological explanation (this is a very old man in a white shirt). Memorialization of Cossacks is related to the experience of their Triumph and their Tragedy (meaning the destruction of the Sich), which on the whole has created the image of a Zaporozhian as a hero and defender impersonating the idea of chosenness. The hydronyms of Ukrainian heroic epos, particularly the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, became an important marker of the Cossack space with its triumphs and defeats.