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Thomas M. Prymak University of Toronto Published on Slideshare Web. (November, 2016) 1 | Page The Château of Verkhivnia, Province of Kiev, Engraving by Napoleon Orda, sometime after 1860. HONORÉ DE BALZAC’S UKRAINIAN DREAMLAND Thomas M. Prymak University of Toronto onoré de Balzac (1799-1850) is well-known among students of literature as a French writer who produced an enormous number of novels and short stories depicting the French society of his days, which he collectively called La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy). Recognised as a founder of the “realist” tradition in European literature, he is generally considered to be one of the greatest novelists of all time. What is less well-known about him, however, at least among the general public, is that for many years he dreamed of moving eastward to the Slavonic world and eventually spent almost two full years of his life on an estate in Ukraine about a hundred kilometers or so from Kiev, on the western or Right Bank of the Dnieper River near the town of Berdychiv. The story of how this happened is a dramatic one and constitutes the real “novel of his life,” as more than one of his biographers have put it. Balzac himself was actually of very modest origins. His grandfather had been a peasant from the south, his father a minor bureaucrat in revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and he himself added the “de” to his surname to make it sound more aristocratic. A spendthrift and poor businessman all his life - his unsuccessful ventures included mass market publishing, Sardinian silver mines, and Ukrainian lumber - he ran up enormous debts and had to work day and night, literally in a monk’s robe, with pen in hand, and endless cups of coffee before him, to pay off these debts and keep afloat, though he never quite succeeded in this. But he was an acute observer of the emerging bourgeois world around him and described its inhabitants in great detail in his extremely penetrating stories and novels. In these, he described the internal side of things, but also well understood their causes, social and otherwise. He himself appeared to be driven by some unseen and unrelenting hand, much more than by simple ambition for love, money, or glory, and this seemingly caused him to attempt an ambitious and comprehensive description of the manners and morals of the entire society in which he lived. This was even reflected in many H

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Page 1: HONORE DE BALZAC

Thomas M. Prymak University of Toronto

Published on Slideshare Web. (November, 2016) 1 | P a g e

The Château of Verkhivnia, Province of Kiev,

Engraving by Napoleon Orda, sometime after 1860.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC’S UKRAINIAN DREAMLAND

Thomas M. Prymak University of Toronto

onoré de Balzac (1799-1850) is well-known among students of literature as a French

writer who produced an enormous number of novels and short stories depicting the

French society of his days, which he collectively called La Comédie humaine (The

Human Comedy). Recognised as a founder of the “realist” tradition in European literature, he is

generally considered to be one of the greatest novelists of all time. What is less well-known

about him, however, at least among the general public, is that for many years he dreamed of

moving eastward to the Slavonic world and eventually spent almost two full years of his life on

an estate in Ukraine about a hundred kilometers or so from Kiev, on the western or Right Bank

of the Dnieper River near the town of Berdychiv. The story of how this happened is a dramatic

one and constitutes the real “novel of his life,” as more than one of his biographers have put it.

Balzac himself was actually of very modest origins. His grandfather had been a peasant

from the south, his father a minor bureaucrat in revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and he

himself added the “de” to his surname to make it sound more aristocratic. A spendthrift and poor

businessman all his life - his unsuccessful ventures included mass market publishing, Sardinian

silver mines, and Ukrainian lumber - he ran up enormous debts and had to work day and night,

literally in a monk’s robe, with pen in hand, and endless cups of coffee before him, to pay off

these debts and keep afloat, though he never quite succeeded in this. But he was an acute

observer of the emerging bourgeois world around him and described its inhabitants in great detail

in his extremely penetrating stories and novels. In these, he described the internal side of things,

but also well understood their causes, social and otherwise. He himself appeared to be driven by

some unseen and unrelenting hand, much more than by simple ambition for love, money, or

glory, and this seemingly caused him to attempt an ambitious and comprehensive description of

the manners and morals of the entire society in which he lived. This was even reflected in many

H

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Thomas M. Prymak University of Toronto

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of the numerous characters he created, who were often consumed by passions and manias of one

sort or another, be it greed for money, desire for honour, or even love.

Balzac titled this great project of his The Human Comedy in imitation of Dante whose

Divine Comedy is often considered to have been the epitome of European literature in the

medieval world. Like Dante, he divided his life-work into three parts: studies of manners,

philosophical studies, and analytic studies, of which only the first part neared completion before

he died. Balzac pioneered the use of the all-knowing neutral narrator to tell his stories and

created over 2000 different characters in them. He described many of these characters in great

depth bringing them up recurrently in various novels. This too was a completely new technique

and has been imitated by many other novelists since his time. Also, Balzac spent much energy

very realistically describing the settings of his stories including even houses, rooms, and

clothing. The popular American writer, Elbert Hubbard once said that it was Balzac above all

who discovered that not merely the heroic and the romantic, but every human life is interesting,

that life itself is a struggle, most battles are bloodless, and romance a dream, though all are very

real. Moreover, Hubbard continues, in telling his many tales, he broke all the established rules of

writing: he preferred prose to poetry, walked over French grammar, invented phrases, coined

words, and used the language of the common folk to “defile the well of classic French.” The

public loved it, but the critics did not, and it took him many years before he was eventually

accepted as one of France’s greatest writers.

Politically, Balzac was what was called at the time a Legitimist, that is, he supported the

restoration of the old absolutist Bourbon dynasty of France. He saw such a restoration as the only

cure for the pettiness, untrammeled ambition, and “curse of money,” which he believed

corrupted his own time and marred the rather uninspiring reign of the constitutional monarch

Louis Philippe. And so, his criticism of French bourgeois society was comprehensive and strong,

doubtless pushed to extremes by his own pecuniary difficulties. The irony, of course, was that

this ultra-reactionary rightist, who came to be a vociferous supporter of absolute monarchy, was

also idolized by the political left. Not only did his friend, Victor Hugo, consider him a genius,

but he also considered him a revolutionary, and both Marx and Engels read his novels with great

pleasure. I give a famous quote from Engels (who considered himself an economist of sorts) in

translation from the long article on Balzac by A. I. Puzikov in the most authoritative of Soviet

literary encyclopedias:

Balzac gives us a most remarkable realist history of French society, describing it in the

form of a chronicle, almost year by year from 1816 to 1848. He shows how bourgeois

society, growing ever stronger, put ever more pressure on the society of the nobles, which

after 1815 restructured itself, and in so far as it was possible, showed itself as a model of

old French ideals. He reveals how the last remains of this model society steadily perished

under pressure from the vulgar money-grubber.... Around this central picture, Balzac

wound the whole history of French society in which I even recognise more in its

economic detail...than in the books of all the specialists of that time taken together,

including historians, economists, and statisticians.

This resounding recognition of Balzac’s greatness by one of the founders of international

socialism would return after 1917 to haunt the heirs of Karl Marx in the Soviet Union, and its

citizens would be subjected to the most acrobatic of Marxist “dialectics” to explain how such a

perceptive observer of society could hold such blindly “reactionary” political views.

But we are getting a bit ahead of ourselves. By character, Balzac was anything but the

refined and elegant aristocrat. His carriage was awkward, his manner course. He was short with

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square shoulders and a deep chest. But he held his head high and had the poise of a man born to

command. No scholar’s stoop or abiding melancholy of the usual man of genius for him, says

Hubbard. His smile was broad and infectious and, as Hubbard again put it, he was always ready

to romp and play. “He has never grown up; he is just a child,” his mother said in sad complaint

when he was already older than forty. Other women would say the same.

Perhaps it was this youthful enthusiasm that so endeared him to women, for they were

among his most avid readers and passionate admirers. Indeed, many of his stories and characters

spoke directly to girls and women and their complex and often frustrating situation. He seemed

to have an understanding of mature women that had been entirely missing from other male

writers of his time. Although never close to his mother, many other women from his sister, who

always was a close friend, to his older companion, Mme de Berny, “La Dilecta,” as he called her,

had taught him much about how women felt and thought and they urged him to set it all down in

writing, which he soon did.

The result was a steady stream of letters to the author of these innovative novels from

female readers all over Europe. In 1832, he especially noticed one such letter, stamped at Odessa

in the Russian Empire. It was carefully written on quality paper and was clearly composed by

some very cultivated person. The letter praised his previous writings, but expressed

disappointment with his latest book, which supposedly was much less sympathetic to women.

The message was unsigned.

This mysterious letter immediately caught Balzac’s attention and he spoke of it to several

friends. Then a second letter came, then a third, though none of these have survived. Finally,

another letter, dated November 7, 1832, arrived, and we can quote it because it was preserved.

Here it is in the English translation of Vincent Cronin:

Monsieur,

It would hardly be surprising should I, a foreigner, use expressions that seem to you

rather un-French, but write to you I must, to tell you with all possible enthusiasm how

deeply your books have affected me.

Your soul, Monsieur, is centuries-old; your philosophy seems to be based on age-long

study, and yet I am told that you are still young. I should like to know you, yet I do not

think I need to: a soul-instinct gives me a presentiment of you; I imagine you in my own

way, and if I happen to see you I should say, ‘There he is!’

As I read your books my heart bounded; you raise woman to her rightful dignity and

show her love as a heavenly virtue, a divine emanation; I admire the attractive sensibility

of soul which allowed you to discover these things....I should like to write to you

sometimes, to send you my thoughts and reflections....I have strength, energy, and

courage only for what seems to me to join with my dominant feeling: Love! ... I knew

how to love and still do.....

Again, the letter was anonymous, signed only L’Étrangère (the feminine form of “the

foreigner”).

But it advised Balzac to put a note to its writer in the royalist French newspaper La

Quotidienne (The Daily), which was the only such French paper then allowed into the Russian

Empire, others being considered too subversive of the autocratic order. He was to sign it simply:

A. l’E - h.b. Balzac replied immediately and soon received further letters. Eventually, closer

communication was established through a trusted courier, though Balzac’s correspondent still

remained anonymous. “I should be lost if anyone knew that I write to you and receive letters

from you,” she confided to him, vowing eternal anonymity.

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Left: Imaginative reconstruction of Honoré de Balzac as a young man (1901), by J. Allen St. John (1875-1957), based on a drawing by Louis

Boulanger.

Right: Ewelina Hańska, née Rzewuska, by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (1835).

The vow was soon broken. Before too long, Balzac received another letter from

L’Étrangère saying that she and her husband - for indeed she was a married woman with a young

daughter - would soon be visiting western Europe and she might meet Balzac in Neuchâtel in

Switzerland, though they both had to be very careful because of the circumstances. In

September, 1833, the two finally met, and Balzac discovered who his unnamed admirer really

was. She turned out to be a beautiful woman, slightly over thirty, from eastern Europe, married,

of course, but still young and vivacious, intelligent, very well read in European literature,

thoughtful, sensitive, elegant, and aristocratic of manner. Her name was Ewelina Hańska, née

Rzewuska, and she came from one of the most prestigious families of the old Polish-Lithuanian

Commonwealth, related to Polish royalty, with large estates in Ukraine, by then, part of the

Russian Empire.

What a contrast to Balzac, the awkward and ambitious writer who only pretended to be

an aristocrat! He was short, overweight, and not very good looking at all. But he still had

something magnetic about him. “A happy wild-boar,” was how one friend described him, and his

ever good humour and infectious enthusiasm for life soon swept the young lady from Ukraine

completely away. They vowed eternal love and met again the next December in Geneva where

they became lovers.

But Ewelina’s husband, Wacław Hański, was a problem. True, he was about twenty years

older than his wife and in bad health, but he was not expected to die immediately. So Balzac

was introduced to him and was soon playing the role of a family friend. In fact, the two men got

along quite well, agreeing on politics and having a mutual interest in the economics of

agriculture, for Hański, it turned out, was one of the richest men in Ukraine and owned a vast

estate in the Province of Kiev with thousands of hectares of good agricultural land and many

thousands of serfs to work them. He and Ewelina, Eve to Balzac, lived in a great château called

Verkhivnia built in the neoclassic style with an enormous colonnaded portico, dozens of elegant

rooms, a large library of thousands of volumes, furniture from around the world, rich Persian

carpets, and hundreds of household serfs to look after them. The house even had its own hospital

with a resident doctor. Eve and her daughter, Anna, were heirs to all this.

Balzac was more than impressed. He was, in fact, quite swept away by his good fortune.

Love! Beauty! Aristocracy! Enormous wealth! And Hański actually invited him to visit the

family in Ukraine, sending him a large engraved print of his great home! Eve, however, held

back. The situation was complicated and dangerous, and she knew it. After her return to

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Verkhivnia she continued to correspond with Balzac and some of her letters were quite

passionate. The separated lovers had to wait.

Meanwhile, Hański lived on. At one point, he intercepted some of Balzac’s letters to his

wife and was outraged. But the resourceful French writer, who was in the habit of writing to Eve

almost every day, dreamed up an excuse and the cuckolded husband, ever trusting, actually

believed it, or, at least, pretended to. This went on for several years, Balzac thinking more and

more of his beautiful love in far-off Ukraine. This did not prevent him from having affairs with

other women from time to time during the many years that he and Eve were separated, and,

indeed, word did get back to her that this was happening, but again, he was able to talk his way

out of the difficulty and her suspicions were quieted. He never was to completely give up on his

dreamy vision of a Ukraine that he saw as a kind of quiet oasis in the desert of life’s troubles and

now dearly wished to visit.

But what exactly was the reality of the Ukraine of those days, and who exactly were

Ewelina Rzewuska and Wacław Hański? The answers to both questions are complicated. Firstly,

of course, the Ukraine of those days was not the Ukraine of today. In the 1830s and 1840s, the

name “Ukraine” was not used for the western parts of today’s Ukraine, then under the Austrians,

or even for other western provinces like Podolia and Volhynia. But it was used for the Kiev

region and lands further east extending well into what are today parts of southern Russia,

specifically the provinces of Kursk and Voronezh (Ukrainians and Russians then called the more

eastern parts of these spacious territories “Sloboda Ukraine”). At that time, it was all part of the

great Russian Empire, ruled by the stern figure of Tsar Nicholas I with his infamous Third

Department of political police. On the eastern or Left Bank of the Dnieper River, which ran

through the middle of the country, the nobility was mostly descended from the old Cossack

officer class and part of the peasantry was still free, being designated as “state peasants.” But on

the western or Right Bank of the river, where the Hańskis lived, the nobility was almost all

Polish and the peasantry Ukrainian serfs. There were far fewer state peasants there than on the

Left Bank and life seemed to have been harder for the common people. Moreover, in the towns,

there was a very large Jewish population and very few Ukrainian residents. Thus in this part of

Ukraine, Russia ruled, Poles held the land, and Ukrainians worked it.

Coming from one of the most distinguished families of old Poland, to which this part of

Ukraine had been formally subject, one would think that Ewelina and her siblings would be

Polish patriots of a sort. After all, in 1830, the Poles had risen against the Tsar in an attempt to

resurrect their state and regain their freedom, and there were a great many Polish refugees from

this unsuccessful rising then living in France. But this was not the case at all.

According to Polish historical tradition, the Rzewuski family was counted as among the

greatest traitors to Poland. In fact, the three greatest landholding families of Ukraine under the

old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Potockis, the Branickis, and the Rzewuskis, were the

main pillars of the so-called Confederation of Targowica (a town in central Ukraine) which

opposed the reforming king, Stanisław August Poniatowski (1732-1798) and the progressive

May 3, 1791, Constitution, which attempted to introduce order into the Commonwealth and

prevent its destruction by its voracious neighbours. In fact, the Confederates actually caused

Russian intervention and the final destruction of old Poland. Ewelina’s father loyally served the

Russian Empire as a senator in Saint Petersburg, one of her sisters, Caroline, charmed both the

Polish poet Mickiewicz and the Russian poet Pushkin before marrying a Russian general and

spying for the Russians, and her younger brother Adam chose a career in the Russian military,

helped put down the Polish rising of 1830, and ended as Commander of the Kiev Garrison. He

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died in 1888 at Verkhivnia, having purchased it from the Hańskis. (After 1860, this brother

engaged the artist Napoleon Orda as a music teacher on his estate and it was probably at that

time that Orda engraved the famous picture which appears as an illustration to the present

article).

A second brother, Henryk, to whom Eve was most close, was a writer who told tales of

old Poland, including one story titled “The Zaporozhian” on the Cossacks of southern Ukraine,

but he too turned out to be an apologist for Russian autocracy, who declared Poland completely

dead. Ewelina could not fail to be influenced by such a family, and there is no evidence that her

political views in any way differed from theirs, though she may have had some special interests

in certain Polish cultural trends such as the romantic writers of the Ukrainian School of Polish

Literature, like Antoni Malczewski and “the nightingale,” Józef Bohdan Zaleski, who hailed

from Ukraine and wrote passionately on Ukrainian themes.

The one exception to this rule of general indifference to the Polish national cause was

Ewelina’s uncle, Wacław Rzewuski (1784-1831), who was called Viacheslav Revusky in the

Ukrainian language, and seemed to be aware of the nefarious role his great family had played in

the Polish struggle for independence. He went his own way, traveled extensively in the Middle

East, dressed as an Arab “emir,” bred Arabian horses, and even wrote an entire book on that

subject. He was a friend and collaborator of the Austrian Orientalist, Joseph von Hammer-

Purgstall, whose German translations from the Persian poet Hafez deeply influenced Goethe,

who, in turn, composed his own famous West-Östlicher Divan. Rzewuski also took a

sympathetic interest in Ukrainian culture. He patronized the poet Tymko Padurra, who wrote in

the Ukrainian vernacular and sang of an older time when Poles and Cossacks had fought together

against common enemies like the Turks and the Muscovites. The “Emir,” as he was called,

joined the Polish Rising of 1830 against the Tsar but disappeared without trace in battle. It was

rumoured that he had escaped to Arabia, where he lived on among the Muslims. Poets and

authors like Mickiewicz, Słowacki, and Wincenty Pol magnified his legend.

As for Ewelina’s husband, Wacław Hański, he was the exact opposite of her adventurous

uncle. His family was not quite as distinguished as the Rzewuskis but they were very rich indeed.

Hański himself was soft-spoken and sober and a great collector of books and artifacts. He once

boasted that none of the furniture at Verkhivnia came from Russia; it was all imported. But he

was no intellectual, and Eve could not share her adventures into the world of the mind with him.

Moreover, he suffered from bouts of depression that were quite hard on his younger wife. He

loved her, it was said, but was not in love with her and busied himself with the administration of

his estates.

On a different level, Hański had much prestige as Marshal of the Nobility of Kiev

Province. But this turned out to be a stain on his patriotism too, for as Marshal, he carried out

instructions from Saint Petersburg and from D. G. Bibikov, the Military Governor of Kiev,

Volhynia, and Podolia (a veritable kingdom, as big as all of France, exclaimed Balzac) to

disenfranchise the minor nobles of his province, thus greatly contributing to its rapid

russification. The 340,000 Polish nobles whom Hański had helped to disenfranchise were

reduced to the status of peasants, subjugated to heavy taxation, lost the right to a higher

education, and were often forced into the Russian military, where they had to serve an

excruciating twenty-five years under difficult and sometimes dangerous conditions.

As to Hański’s treatment of his Ukrainian serfs, it was no better, and probably even

worse, than his treatment of his fellow Poles. He was known for his severity with them. Eve’s

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Left: Wacław Seweryn Rzewuski (1784-1831), Ewelina’s uncle, called “Emir Rzewuski,” or sometimes “Goldenbeard,” was the only prominent member of the family to display any strong Polish patriotism. He traveled to Arabia in search of Arabic thoroughbred horses and patronized traditional Ukrainian culture. Right: Wacław Hański (1782-1841), Ewelina’s first husband, the wealthy owner of Verkhivnia and local Marshal of the Nobility, who mistreated both the Polish lesser gentry and his Ukrainian serfs.

relative, Stanisław Rzewuski, testified that years later these serfs recalled his brutal behavour

towards them, and this, at a time when noblemen could insult, beat, or even kill a serf without

incurring any punishment more severe than confession in church and a small penance. More

conscientious Polish noblemen of that time like the writers Seweryn Goszczyński and Józef

Kraszewski never ceased to denounce the savagery with which some of their compatriots treated

their serfs. A more recent student of those far-off times, the historian Daniel Beauvois,

speculates that perhaps Eve’s romantic and idealized letters to Balzac, which may have

exaggerated the spiritual level of his work, reflected some kind of subconscious desire to escape

from the dubious ethics of the world from which she came.

At any rate, in 1842, a letter arrived for Balzac informing him that Hański had died. The

debt-ridden novelist, who was now approaching the height of his fame, was ecstatic! Now, some

eight years after their first meeting, he and his Slavic beauty could at last be wed, or so he

thought, and he wrote to her such. The response was extremely discouraging. Eve had heard of

his womanizing in France and “set him free.” Moreover, he had complicated her inheritance. Her

family, who had never liked or accepted the plebeian Frenchman with his unrefined manners,

contested the will, fearing the estate would fall into the hands of a foreigner and adventurer. The

court in Kiev agreed with them and Eve now had to go to Saint Petersburg to appeal the verdict.

But he continued to write passionate letters to her and by the middle of the next year, the tone of

her letters changed and she invited Balzac to join her and Anna in the Russian capital.

Balzac immediately went to the Russian embassy in Paris to apply for a visa. He was met

by a young diplomat named Victor Balabin who already seemed to know something of him.

Within the embassy plans were immediately laid to make use of this popular writer with

monarchist views to counteract the effect of a scathing criticism of the Russia of Tsar Nicholas

that had just been published in France. This book, called La Russie en 1839 (Russia in 1839),

was by the Marquis de Custine, whose father had been executed during the French Revolution

and should have been favourable to the Russian monarchy, but was not. Balabin thought that

Balzac’s appearance and manners left much to be desired, but still recommended that the

government try to use him to erase the embarrassment of de Custine’s book.

By the summer of 1843, Balzac was in Saint Petersburg with Eve. It was the first time

that they had seen each other in many years, and pursued by his creditors and terribly

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overworked, he had visibly aged. She, however, was just as attractive to him as ever and they got

on well together. Largely at his urging, they laid their plans for a marriage sometime in the

future. The Russian government, however, stood in the way. Even if Eve won her lawsuit, she

would not be allowed to marry a foreigner as this would give him certain rights to the

inheritance. Balzac had offered to become a Russian subject and go to the Tsar himself to get

permission for their marriage, but the Tsar would not see him, despite his fame and potential to

do much for the Russian image abroad. Nevertheless, Balzac and Eve spent two glorious months

together in the Russian capital. They strolled the streets together, saw the sights, and made love.

In the fall, he returned to Paris, still hoping to one day marry and see Eve’s magnificent

Verkhivnia set in the midst of the wide Ukrainian steppe.

Events then moved in rapid succession: news arrived that Eve was pregnant. Balzac was

ecstatic and was sure it was a boy whom he immediately named Victor. But Eve lost the child,

Balzac’s sorrow only alleviated by further news that Eve had won her lawsuit and that her

daughter Anna could get inheritance rights. Anna meanwhile had agreed to marry Count Jerzy

Mniszech, the owner of a large estate in Podolia, near the border with Austrian Galicia. They

came west for the ceremony and wed in Dresden. Balzac was a witness. By this time as well, Eve

had begun sending Balzac money to pay off his ever recurring debts, though she could never

quite keep up with his free-spending habits.

Nevertheless, by 1847 her old objections to Balzac visiting Ukraine had all dried up and

she finally invited him to come to Verkhivnia. He wasted no time procrastinating, then writing

that for him Ukraine with its wide steppes, peasants, and Jews, with its conjunction of

“civilization and barbarism,” as he put it, was the one place where he could discover “completely

new people and things.” In September, he left Paris and traveled by train and then coach across

the continent. The trip was relatively uneventful till he reached western Galicia, which had been

turned upside down by a great peasant uprising the previous year. The local Polish aristocracy

had rebelled against the Austrian Emperor, but the clever Austrians used the emperor’s

benevolent reputation among the peasants to turn them against their landlords. The result was a

massacre, the last great “jacquerie” seen in Europe west of Russia. By the time Balzac passed

through, the rebellion had been extinguished and order restored, but the peasants were now

starving. Balzac blamed it all on the noble Polish rebels, whom he thought inspired by unrealistic

Polish émigrés in France. “Let men die, but long live principles!” he exclaimed sarcastically. His

prescription: replace Austrian rule with Russian autocracy and social order!

Crossing the border into the Russian Empire, Balzac felt he was indeed leaving Europe.

He was greatly impressed by the wide spaces, endless fields of wheat, empty lands and roads

dotted every now and then by the great houses of the Polish aristocracy, almost all in the

neoclassic style: “...those rare and splendid dwellings,” he wrote, “surrounded by parks, with

their copper roofs shimmering in the distance.” Finally, he reached Berdychiv, which he

considered the beginning of “Ukraine,” where he was surrounded by a crowd of Jews who, he

later claimed, suspiciously eyed his golden watch. He was still more than forty miles from Eve

and her home. “It was the desert,” he later wrote in his unfinished Lettre sur Kiew, “the kingdom

of wheat, the Prairies of Fennimore Cooper, and their silence. The sight filled me with dismay,

and I fell into a deep sleep. At half-past five, I was awoken [and] ... saw a Louvre or a Greek

temple, gilded by the setting sun, overlooking a valley.” It was Verkhivnia.

Balzac spent the next four and a half months at Verkhivnia with Eve, Anna, and her

husband Jerzy or “Georges,” as he called him. They got on very well and Balzac was happy. He

had finally found his refuge from his relentless creditors, his oasis in the desert. He even

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managed to do some writing, starting his Lettre sur Kiew and composing a few other pieces. But

at the same time, he seemed oblivious to the injustice surrounding him. He took a very mixed

view of the peasants and serfs he saw and met, thinking them potential insurgents, like the Polish

peasants of western Galicia. Peasants, in Balzac’s view, especially French peasants, were

generally sly, greedy, idle, promiscuous, and at the same time, not very smart; but in “Russia,” at

least, so he thought, well controlled by the Tsar. In Ukraine, he believed them happy, secure

under the benevolent emperor. Unlike in France, they actually sang on their way to work! They

were like children and serfdom was actually good for them. “In this paradise,” he noted, “there

are actually seventy-seven different ways of baking bread from the abundant wheat!”

Of course, Balzac was completely unaware of the geographical and ethnographical

peculiarities of the land he was visiting: he had no accurate idea of where Ukraine actually began

or ended (simply following Polish traditions) or of the linguistic and cultural differences between

Ukrainians and Russians. (In his view, Hański was a “Ukrainian” count.) For him, Eve was his

“north star” and Kiev “the northern Rome.” Little did he know that the Russians of that time

considered Ukraine to be their own South, their “Russian Italy.” Moreover, only a few months

before his arrival, the Tsar’s police had arrested and condemned to prison and exile the most

fruitful leaders of the Ukrainian national awakening of that time, the poet Taras Shevchenko, the

historian, Mykola Kostomarov, and the novelist, Panteleimon Kulish, and accused them of being

members of a clandestine underground organization called the Cyril-Methodian Brotherhood. Its

declared aim was the abolition of both serfdom and the Russian Tsardom, and their replacement

by a free federation of independent Slavic states, of which Ukraine would be one, in fact, the

centrepiece.

Left: A self-portrait in pencil by the Ukrainian national poet, Taras Shevchenko (1845). Right: Title page with frontispiece of Shevchenko’s first book of poems , The Kobzar [The Blind Minstrel] (1840), composed in the Ukrainian, not Russian, language. Balzac was totally unaware of the existence of either Shevchenko or a distinct Ukrainian language or nationality.

When Balzac went to visit Kiev, he actually met some of the Tsarist officials who had

dealt with the Cyril-Methodians. There was, for example, the historian I. I. Funduklei, the Civil

Governor of Kiev, who gave a large banquet in honour of Balzac, which the local notables, both

Russian and Polish, attended. A cultured man, Funduklei had earlier tried to warn Kostomarov of

his impending arrest, but had been unsuccessful. Had he been able to do so, the sentences passed

on the Brethren, so infamous in Ukrainian history, would probably have been much lighter.

There was also Mikhail Yuzefovich, a school official of Ukrainian background, who turned

against the Cyril-Methodians and pursued nationally-conscious Ukrainians throughout his long

career in government service. Three of Balzac’s letters to him have been preserved. And there

was also Bibikov, the Military Governor, to whom Balzac eventually had to apply for permission

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The Roman Catholic Cathedral in Kiev. Watercolour by Shevchenko (1846). Most Poles were Catholic, most Ukrainians and Russians were Eastern Orthodox, and religion divided Poles from Ukrainians much more than did language. This was because most Poles in Ukraine were also well acquainted with the Ukrainian language, which some of them loved quite passionately, as was the case with the Polish poet of “the Ukrainian school of Polish Literature,” Józef Bohdan Zaleski (1802-1886).

to stay in Ukraine. Bibikov had forwarded the reports on the Brethren to Saint Petersburg, where

they were read by the Crown Prince Alexander himself. There is absolutely no evidence that the

French novelist had any inkling of what had been transpiring in Kiev just before his arrival.

In January, 1848, Balzac “very sadly” left his Ukrainian dreamland for France where his

literary obligations and creditors awaited him. The next month revolution broke out again, Louis

Philippe was overthrown, and a new French Republic declared. Balzac predicted a quick demise

for the republic, but he was upset with these events and the complications that they brought to his

work. He fled back to Ukraine just as soon as he could get a visa. The Tsar, who by now was

very suspicious of Frenchmen, granted it, but noted in the margins of the request: “Yes, yes, but

under strict surveillance.” On September 20, 1848, the besieged writer again departed for

Ukraine.

This time he traveled a bit more slowly, and after crossing the border into the Russian

Empire, stopped at Vyshnevets, the great castle/palace complex that was the pride of the

Mniszech estate in Podolia. The castle had been built in the seventeenth century and renovated

several times by the famous Vyshnevetsky family to which the legendary Cossack “Bayda” had

belonged and to whom Poland owed its King Michael “Wiśniewecki,” “the Ruthenian king,” as

some have called him. At this time, Balzac dreamed up the idea of using Ukrainian lumber from

the Mniszech estates to export to France, where there was a great demand for railway ties. But,

as usual, this project never got off the ground, and no one ever took it up either before or after

Balzac’s untimely death. The writer resumed his trip eastward and by October 2 had arrived at

Verkhivnia where Eve, Anna, and Georges were already awaiting him.

Balzac settled in quite well at his dreamy Ukrainian residence, where he expected to do

much writing, trapped, as it were, by the snow and ice of the long Ukrainian winter, long that is,

as compared to that of France. He was, of course, well-liked by Anna and Georges, but also by

the household servants who found him “wise” and “considerate.” He missed the Parisian cuisine

to which he was accustomed, but soon grew to like the local tea blends and the food products

made from millet, buckwheat, oats, barley, and even tree-bark. (Ukrainians traditionally made

excellent sherbet from the sap of the poplar tree, and buckwheat porridge, which they call kasha,

has long been a staple of the country.) He was treated as the “old man of the family” surrounded

by respect and affection and was viewed as a kind of king by the servants. “The domestic who

serves me here was recently married,” he wrote his sister in France, “and he and his wife came to

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pay their respects to their masters. The woman and man actually lie down flat on their stomachs,

touch the floor three times with their heads, and kiss your feet.” What is astounding to the

modern reader, however, is that the Frenchman concluded from this that they really knew how to

do things right in “Russia!”

But all was not well in this earthly “paradise.” Though word eventually came that he

would be permitted to wed Eve, who had passed legal title of her estate to Anna, Balzac’s health

took a sharp turn for the worse that winter. It had been bad for years, constantly aggravated by

late hours, overwork, and too much coffee. His heart was ailing, and now he caught a terrible

cold. It seemed that life was finally beginning to drain from him, he who had always been so

strong. By springtime, Eve, seeing the writing on the wall, finally had mercy on him and agreed

to marry. On March14, 1850, they were wed at a small ceremony in the Church of Saint Barbara

in Berdychiv. Both Balzac and Eve fell sick on the way back to Verkhivnia.

Eve quickly recovered. But Balzac did not. He blamed the Ukrainian winter for his

illness, which the local physicians could not cure, and decided to return to Paris, to a house he

had bought and furnished with his wife’s Ukrainian money, but the trip to France only

aggravated his condition and everyone soon knew that he was dying. He passed away in Paris on

August 15, 1850, in his debt-ridden house filled with expensive art and artifacts from all over

Europe, and the large print of Verkhivnia, given to him so many years before by Hański, still

hung prominently on the wall. Balzac had never ceased to dream of that paradise on earth he

called “Ukraine,” but of which he really knew, or chose to know, so little.

********

At his graveside, Balzac’s friend, Victor Hugo, pronounced a funeral oration, which

stressed the nation’s unity in mourning at his passing, but Marxist literary historians, both then

and now, have seen the French writer’s life as filled with what they call “contradictions.” They

mean, of course, political contradictions: a reactionary and supporter of absolute monarchy who

through his writings battered down the falsehoods and exposed the injustices of bourgeois

French society, and so fulfilled a “progressive” function. But the non-Marxist historian may take

this point much further, that is, beyond economics and politics, and see the great irony of the

foremost founder of “realist” European literature, who was totally “unrealistic” when it came to

his personal life. He remained to the end an unthinking child when it came to his finances, a

harebrained businessman always concocting new but unsuccessful schemes, a sociologist who

could not see the forest for the trees, a lover who throughout most of his adult life strove for the

unreachable, the forbidden, and the distant, and last of all, a dreamer, who saw paradise where it

was not. He was, in fact, no realist at all when it came to life, not literature, but rather a hopeless

romantic, and the tragedy of his biography was fully revealed by his late marriage and early

death, just returned from a dreamland that bore no relation whatsoever to reality. The terrible

revolutions and wars that consumed that dreamland in the century following his death proved it

beyond any possible doubt.

Verkhivnia today is a school of agronomy in an independent and democratic Ukraine,

where the great grandchildren of serfs study in the halls and parlors where Honoré de Balzac and

Ewelina Hańska once walked and sat, discussed literature, and sipped birch juice. It is said that

in 1917 the last private owner of Verkhivnia, still a Rzewuski, seeing the storm of revolutionary

destruction all around him, wanted it that way, and before fleeing west, beseeched the local

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peasants not to burn it to the ground. Those simple Ukrainian peasants, so it seems, were far

more “civilized” than Balzac ever thought.

Sudna Rada, or, “The Village Council considers a Judicial Question.” Engraving by Taras Shevchenko (1844). Shevchenko was not only a talented poet but also an artist, who deeply sympathized with the Ukrainian peasantry from which he himself originated. Born a serf, by sheer talent he rose to study at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Art, and eventually became his country’s best loved poet.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE:

For general introductions to Ukrainian history, which discuss the role of the Polish gentry in

Right Bank Ukraine, and even mention the Rzewuski family, see Paul Robert Magocsi, A

History of Ukraine: The Land and its Peoples (Toronto, 2010), and Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A

History (Toronto, 2009).

The life of Balzac has been recounted many times in several different biographies. The

most extensive available in English is by Graham Robb, Balzac: A Biography (New York, 1994).

For a shorter treatment, see David Carter, Honoré de Balzac (London, 2008). Important

biographies by Stephan Zweig (1946) and André Maurois (1965), written in German and

French respectively, have been translated into both English and Russian. The former is very

critical of Eve accusing her of class prejudice and of having a condescending attitude towards

Balzac.

A number of famed “Balzaciens,” as Balzac scholars are called, have written biographies

of both Honoré and Eve, the most important being Marcel Bouteron in the 1920s and Roger

Pierrot in the 1990s. As well, Bouteron was first to publish the Lettre sur Kiew in 1927; repr. in

Cahiers Balzaciens, V-VIII (Geneva, 1971), with unsigned annotation by the Ukrainian scholar,

Ilko Borshchak, while Pierrot also edited Balzac’s Lettres à Madame Hanska in 4 vols. (Paris,

1967-71), with extensive annotation. These important letters are also available in an older

English translation by Katherine Presscott Wormeley (Boston, 1900; repr. Kessinger, 2010), 786

pp.

There are several studies in French dealing specifically with the relationship between

Balzac and Madame Hańska of which the book by the Polish scholar, Sophie de Korwin-

Piotrowska, Balzac et le monde Slave: Madame Hanska et l’oeuvre Balzacienne (Paris, 1933)

deserves special mention because of its extensive treatment of Eve’s cultural milieu, though the

author is somewhat of an apologist for her. Daniel Beauvois, “Le monde de Madame Hańska:

État de la société polonaise d’Ukraine au milieu du XIX siècle,” L’Année balzacienne, no. 14

New Series, (Paris, 1993), 21-40, is more critical and well-informed about the rather severe

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Ukrainian-Polish, and Russian-Polish, national and social tensions of that time, and also the

looming Russian-Ukrainian conflict.

I have, of course, also made full use of the essays in English by Elbert Hubbard, Balzac

and Madame Hanska (East Aurora, New York, 1906), and Vincent Cronin, The Romantic Way

(Boston, 1965). On the many controversies surrounding Eve, see the concise outline by Zygmunt

Czerny, “Hańska, Ewelina z Rzewuskich, Madame de Balzac,” [Hańska, Ewelina, née

Rzewuska, Madame de Balzac] in the Polski Słownik Biograficzny, vol. IX (Wrocław, 1960-61),

286-7, which argues that Eve was actually the principal author of most of Balzac’s novel titled

Les Paysans [The Peasants], which paints a very dark picture of these country folk and for which

he supposedly used materials from Verkhivnia.

After the French author’s death, Eve financed and partly edited his voluminous Oeuvres

complètes, and many other French editions appeared thereafter. A few English editions of his

collected works were then published, though none have been re-edited or revised since. By

contrast, a Russian edition in 20 vols. first appeared in 1896-99, replaced by new Stalin-era

editions in 20 vols. in 1933-47, and 15 vols. in 1951-55, a Khrushchev-era edition in 24 vols. in

1960, and again in 24 vols. in Moscow in 1997-99. This alone testifies to the official Communist

stamp of approval on Balzac, and his enormous reputation in the USSR and in Russia right up to

the present day. In Poland, an eight volume edition of his Wybór dzieł [Selected Works] was

published as early as 1880-84, but a full collection has never appeared, while in eastern Ukraine,

readers relied on Russian translations until the 1920s, when a period of intense Ukrainianization

brought Ukrainian language translations of several of his works, though, again, a full collection

was never published.

A number of essays in Ukrainian or Russian contain important materials on the theme of

the present essay. These begin with F. Savchenko, “Balzak na Ukraini (1847-1850),” [Balzac in

Ukraine], Ukraina no. 1 (Kiev, 1924),134-51, and then, Leonid Grossman, “Balzak v Rossii,”

[Balzac in Russia], Literaturnoe nasledstvo, nos. 32-33 (1937), which is really a small book, and

continue with Ilko Borshchak, “Honore Balzak (1799-1850),” and “Ukraina i ukraintsi v

lystuvanni Balzaka,” [Ukraine and Ukrainians in Balzac’s Correspondence], Ukraina, no. 3

(Paris, 1950), 186-91, in which Borshchak, put off by Balzac’s “miserly” notes on Ukraine, in

contrast to the more sympathetic and substantial contributions of his friends and colleagues,

Victor Hugo and Prosper Mérimée, only grudgingly admits his greatness, and then, there is D. S.

Nalyvaiko, Onore Balzak: Zhyttia i tvorchist [Honoré Balzac: Life and Work] (Kiev, 1985), a

work published on the very threshold of the Gorbachev reforms, which compared the French

novelist to Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Gorky, and called for a complete edition of

his works to be published in the Ukrainian language, though this was never done, even into the

early twenty-first century. Nalyvaiko further argued that what Tolstoy was for Lenin, Balzac was

for Marx.

Readers of Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian encyclopedia articles on Balzac are

respectively informed that he was translated into Russian by Dostoevsky, influenced Kraszewski,

Prus, and even Słowacki in Poland, and “always enjoyed great love and popularity in Ukraine,”

where Ivan Franko and Lesia Ukrainka read him, and a novel about his life by Natan Rybak was

published in 1940 and reprinted many times, as well as translated into both Russian and Yiddish.

(See, for example, Ukrainska radianska entsyklopediia, [Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia] vol. I

(Kiev, 1959), 431-2). Finally, the quote giving Engels’s general characterization of Balzac is

taken from A. I. Puzikov’s lengthy article following the official Party Line: “Balzak, Onore de,”

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Kratkaia literaturnaia entsiklopediia, [Short Literary Encyclopedia] Vol. I (Moscow, 1962),

427-35, esp. 431.

__________

THOMAS M. PRYMAK, PhD, a historian, is a Research Associate with the Chair of Ukrainian

Studies, Departments of History and Political Science, University of Toronto. He has taught at

several different Canadian universities and is the author of numerous studies in the field. His

most recent book, published by the University of Toronto Press in 2015, is titled Gathering a

Heritage: Ukrainian, Slavonic, and Ethnic Canada and the USA.