honore de balzac
TRANSCRIPT
Thomas M. Prymak University of Toronto
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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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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.