THE SOCIAL ROLE AND ECONOMIC STATUS OF BLIND PEASANT MINSTRELS IN UKRAINE

WILLIAM NOLL

An article published in 1904 describes the results of a survey conducted in 1903 in Kiev gubernia on the numbers and kinds of kobzari and lirnyky, the blind peasant minstrels of Ukraine. The survey was the result of calls for such research at the twelfth meeting of the South-Western Imperial Archeological Society in Kharkiv in 1902. The survey was flawed in various ways. Among many other drawbacks, repertory and other basic characteristics of music practice were not included in the questionnaire. In addition, large numbers of minstrels were likely left out of the survey count. Nevertheless, it can be said that the survey reflected at least a partial regional census of Ukrainian minstrels of the time: in Kiev gubernia 289 minstrels were surveyed. Of these only three were reported to have been kobzari, and 286 were lirnyky. On the Left Bank, Hnat Khotkevych at about the same time found thirty-seven kobzari and twenty-eight lirnyky in just two counties (Rus. uezd, Ukr. povit) of Kharkiv gubernia. Other, more modest attempts at surveying the number of blind minstrels were undertaken, such as in the Poltava region, where in the 1880s Martynovych found (haphazardly and unsystematically) 375 itinerant musicians. Although these surveys were conducted in only a limited part of Ukrainian territory, it is possible to extrapolate from them and make an estimate for Ukraine as a whole. On the conservative side, it seems certain that there were well over two thousand blind minstrels in the Ukrainian countryside in the early twentieth century, and likely even three thousand. On the more extravagant side, Slastion estimated for Poltava gubernia alone over three thousand blind minstrels, which seems high.

By the early 1950s, there were only a handful of blind minstrels left in the Ukrainian countryside. Today there are none. Given the fact that peasant minstrels had thrived in Ukrainian villages for at least two hundred years, and possibly longer, the questions “What happened to them?” and “Why did they disappear?” are not only intriguing, but also important to our understanding of the history of rural expressive culture in Ukraine as well as of the cultural policies of the Russian and, later, the Soviet empires.

It is useful first of all to place the blind minstrels in their cultural milieu of peasant society and analyze in situ their social role and economic status in the village. I shall do this by comparing certain music norms of the blind minstrels with those of other village musicians. Next, I shall discuss unique features of the repertory of the blind minstrels, examining the significance of this repertory in village life and how their role and status changed through time. After this, I shall examine how and why certain cultural policies of the Soviet state likely favored the radical elimination of the musical art of the blind minstrels. This in turn will illustrate the significance of specific rural music practices in the life of the village and the general role and status of musicians in rural civil society. More broadly considered, this examination will help to illustrate the differences between the expressive culture of peasant society and that of the national state cultures constructed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I cite here primarily those sources from the mid-nineteenth century to the present that utilize the ethnographic method of face-to-face interviews conducted during fieldwork with participants in the activities in question (here the blind minstrels, their families and certain officials), or (less often) observations directly from fieldworkers. Sources of questionable authenticity or consisting primarily of second-hand accounts I have rejected outright. Many philological methods, especially those practiced before the late nineteenth century, produce highly questionable interpretations of cultural history, often based on blatantly false data. Because I largely reject non-ethnographic data as source material, the past of the blind minstrels before the mid-nineteenth century is not discussed here, since there are virtually no reliable ethnographic sources with which to undertake such a discussion. The nature of, and conclusions that derive from, the small number of historical written sources on the blind minstrels from before the mid-nineteenth century (before ethnographic method was utilized), then, produce problems different from those derived from ethnographic material. Important methodological questions regarding their use in a manner consistent with current social science practice dictate that they receive separate treatment. Therefore, they are not discussed here.

ECONOMIC NORMS OF GROUPS OF MUSIC MAKERS

Some of the most important musicians in the Ukrainian village up to collectivization can be placed into three separate groups: blind minstrels, instrumental music specialists, and women music specialists. Considered together, members of these three groups of music makers carried special and unique performance practices that defined much of the musical life of the village in most regions, including many of the symbols of historical, regional, religious, and even national consciousness. The musicians in all three groups were farmers in the sense that they and their families relied upon the agricultural labor of the peasant family enterprise for at least part of their maintenance, while music was a source of supplemental income. All peasant households were engaged in both farming and home industries or services, and music activities can be viewed in light of these broad peasant economic norms. There were rarely “professionals” in the village, as the term is commonly understood today— the local blacksmith, the local wheelwright, the village tailor, even the local miller as well as local musicians, relied on farming to sustain themselves. Their crafts, home industries, or specialties were supplemental to their agricultural income. Their economic role as specialists was part of a broad economic pattern in peasant society.

This pattern included the activities of the kobzari and lirnyky, most of whom had families and homes. Most were not the homeless vagabonds portrayed in Shevchenko’s poem “Perebendia” in Kobzar as well as elsewhere. This inaccurate characterization of the kobzar as a pitiful old vagabond is especially unfortunate because it became so widely held, even among some specialists. Perhaps the blind minstrels are better thought of as traveling musicians who worked on the road for roughly half the year, the other half spent at home with their families. It is inappropriate to apply the term “professional” to the blind minstrels, or to any others who utilize their skills or craft for only half the year and derive only part of their income from this activity.

In certain months, the minstrels traveled through villages and small towns, stopping and performing next to churches, in market squares, near fairs or monasteries, or among village houses. From plying their craft they earned cash and foodstuffs, most of the former taken home whenever possible and pooled with other income of the peasant family enterprise. An especially lucrative performance context was the festival for the local patron saint of a village parish (in Ukrainian, khram). Some minstrels had pupils, others did not. Generally, pupils paid for their learning time. Most minstrels probably did not travel great distances, but only to villages and towns no more than a few days’ journey by foot from their home village. Others traveled widely, even two or three hundred kilometers or more from their village. In those months when they were not traveling, they were home with their families, who took care of the agricultural aspects of the peasant household. The blind minstrels were not idle in the off months. Most often they, like other blind villagers, spent working time making rope by twisting hemp, or woodworking, or other tasks that could be carried out while stationary. Those who had arable land (a field) either rented it out, or their families worked it. Most minstrels rarely performed in their own village, and especially not in the off months. They were known there as neighbors and not as the special characters that they were in places far from home. As such, they could not always easily seek a living on the streets of their home village. In addition, in the off months there was a great deal of other work to do, which was family or home based.

The next group of village music makers, the instrumental music specialists, spent most of their time as musicians in the village at weddings, or sometimes during dosvitky. The latter (known in some regions as vechernytsi) were evening gatherings of young people held from autumn to Lent, usually in the home of a local widow or unmarried woman who rented out her home to girls and young unmarried women of a given kutok (“corner”) of a village. There village girls and young women gathered to sew, embroider, and spin as well as to sing and tell jokes and gossip. Later in the evenings, boys and young unmarried men sometimes came by, and the young people would socialize, sing, dance, joke, and so on. Two or three instrumental musicians (i.e., fiddlers, hammered dulcimer players, drummers, bass players, and others in various regional combinations of instruments) were occasionally hired by the boys, who would pool their resources to pay the musicians. However, weddings were the economic mainstay of instrumental musicians, who were almost always men. They were paid a combination of cash, foodstuffs and in some regions linen products for their services. Their social status in the village often tended to be rather low, as they were viewed as individuals who drank too much and were frequently away from home for long periods of time (i.e., during performances at village weddings). They were sometimes also viewed as undesirable because of their perceived contacts with Satan, or their connections with black magic. They generally did not have paying pupils. Their activities as music specialists were no more than a supplement to their farm-derived income. Agricultural matters took up most of their labor time, as they did the time of virtually all peasants.

Vocal music practice at weddings was a separate and unique repertory, dominated by women and girls. Most of the vocal music rituals associated with the complex wedding sequence of the village were sung by both relatives and specially invited guests, some of whom assumed ritual characters that dictated the role each played in the wedding sequence. Most of these character roles were for women only. Whenever possible, villagers invited the best singers to fill those character roles, that is, they invited individuals who could be relied upon to remember the special ritual songs of the three- to seven-day village wedding, and who knew and could perform the hundreds, or even thousands of verses of song texts in more or less fixed local sequence. Not everyone in the village had the ability to remember the intricate nuances of the wedding sequence. Villagers knew who the best singers were, and they were in demand, for it was unthinkable not to properly realize the ritual sequence of events at the wedding. Although they were held in esteem and enjoyed a consistently high social status, these women music specialists were virtually never paid in cash for their services. Indeed, no one seems to have thought of their special skills as a payable service. Occasionally they were given extra foodstuffs, or still more rarely, linen products. The activities associated with ritual vocal wedding music occupied a small percentage of these women’s time, which as with the instrumental music specialists, was devoted primarily to the concerns of the peasant family agricultural enterprise.

Although this is only a thumbnail sketch, one can see that the economic activities of these three groups of village music makers were in some ways similar, in other ways different. The minstrels, the instrumental music specialists, and the women music specialists derived a supplemental income from their activities as village musicians, that is, income supplemental to the agricultural labor of the musicians’ household. However, the specific activities and contexts associated with music as well as the economic status of these three peasant groups differed. The minstrels traveled widely as musicians, while the instrumental music specialists and the women specialists performed virtually always in music contexts their native village or in contiguous villages. Yet all three groups of musicians were part of the agricultural life of the village. Their economic role was similar in that music was only one part of the total income of the peasant family enterprise. It was dissimilar in that the kobzari and lirnyky usually earned a large percentage, in many cases even most, of the total family income through music, while the instrumental music specialists earned only a small percentage of total family income through music, and the women music specialists at weddings did not earn cash at all through music.

In contrast to the economic norms, the social role of each of these three groups was not at all the same. In particular, the blind minstrels held a unique place in peasant society. Both the instrumental music specialists and the women music specialists were absolutely vital elements in village ritual life, either in events that occurred according to the calendar or in events that occurred in conjunction with family life, or both. The blind minstrels had nothing to do with that. They were not a part of the ritual life of the village in the sense that they did not usually take part as musicians in weddings, funerals, or calendric events and rituals. In villages in the Kharkiv region in the 1920s, lirnyky were openly and frankly contemptuous of most of the music repertory of the village, calling it “street” (vulychna) music. The minstrels were viewed, and viewed themselves, as being different from other village musicians, many believing that they had a special purpose in life, one provided by God in the form of their blindness and in the nature of the music they performed (i.e., their repertory). While the instrumental music specialists and the women music specialists were admired by villagers for their skills and usefulness to the community as participants in ritual events, many of the kobzari and lirnyky seem to have carried in the village a kind of avtorytet — a moral authority. This is one of the differences in social role that set the blind minstrels apart from all other musicians in the village, and it is this difference that would later have disastrous consequences for the minstrels in the early years of Soviet power.

REPERTORY AND MORAL AUTHORITY OF THE BLIND MINSTRELS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

To understand why the minstrels carried a kind and degree of moral authority in the village, it is necessary to briefly examine what, where and for whom they performed. Although they were peasant born and bred, and although theirs was an art based on village music practices as well as rural textual themes, the minstrels and their music were beyond ritual, beyond the village itself. Their social role can be seen as having been entirely different from that of other peasant musicians. They were the bearers of some of the most important symbols in rural life, particularly those symbols that today would be called religious or national, but that then were deeply imbedded in peasant society, and as such were inseparable from the daily lives of rural dwellers. It is probably not an exaggeration to say that the minstrels were among the most important groups of people in the cultural history of rural Ukraine. Their repertory consisted primarily of three components: first of all, religious music; second, the epics that in publications are usually called dumy as well as historical songs; and third, satirical and humorous songs as well as dance music and other genres. The religious songs were by far the most important repertory component for the minstrels (and for their audiences), both in terms of income and social status, and for both kobzari and lirnyky. The epics at that time were of limited importance, while the genres of the third component (satirical songs and dance tunes) appear to have been of increasing importance to minstrels from the late nineteenth century to collectivization.

In the seventy years preceding the arrival of Soviet power in the countryside, the genre with the largest number of individual pieces and the one most often performed by virtually every kobzar and lirnyk was the religious song, known in some, but not all villages as the psal’ma. The ethnographic literature from the second half of the nineteenth century conclusively indicates that every minstrel knew many of these, often twenty or more. As in any other oral genre, the psal’my varied from performer to performer, from performance to performance, as well as from each other in terms of musical style and form. The most basic formal differences were that some had strophic form, while others were performed in a recitative that was also common for the heroic epics. The minstrels also sang or recited various prayers on request. Unfortunately, systematic collection and analysis of the psal’my and especially of the prayers was not undertaken by all ethnographers. Several sources document psal’my texts, collected as early as the mid-nineteenth century. However, far fewer music transcriptions were made. What we mostly have from the scholarly literature of the time are the titles of the psal’my, sometimes with general descriptions, and less often with the frequency of their performance. The actual performance practices of psal’my were seldom considered by the ethnographers, and today are lost for all but a few of the minstrels.

The second genre that the blind minstrels performed, and the one most widely collected by nineteenth-century scholars, is the historical and heroic epic that today is commonly known as the duma. The word duma was formerly never used in the village, nor was it used by the blind minstrels, who had other words or terms for this part of their repertory. These terms varied greatly by region, locale, time period, and from one minstrel to the next in one region, e.g., kozats’ki pisni, kozats’ki psal’my, nevol’nyts’ki. In the Kharkiv region in the 1920s, the word prychta or rozkaz was widely used to refer not only to what we today would consider dumy, but also to psal’my, that is, either word described both genres. In other cases, the one word psal’ma was used to refer to both genres, e.g., the kobzar Mykhailo Kravchenko called dumy “zaporoz’ki psal’my”. Duma in fact is an old literary word that gained wide currency among intellectuals in the nineteenth century. Although today the word duma is usually regarded as describing something quintessentially Ukrainian, up to the 1920s it was probably virtually unknown in villages in most regions, including those on the Left Bank, where most of the kobzari lived.

As a performance genre, the repertory of dumy up to collectivization was typical of oral performance art in that it does not seem to have been a unified whole, but varied to a certain extent through time and by region as well as by performer in any given time and region. This part of the minstrels’ repertory was by no means integral to the performance practices of any one minstrel. Most minstrels in the second half of the nineteenth century knew only one, or two to four dumy, while the most famous (and exceptional) knew five, eight, or even ten. Some minstrels, including both kobzari and lirnyky, did not perform dumy at all. Virtually all minstrels of the time performed many psal’my. It is almost impossible to know now what percentage of blind minstrels did or did not perform dumy. The ethnographic literature of the time is flawed in this regard, because many of the ethnographers did not conduct active fieldwork among those minstrels who did not know dumy, virtually ignoring them. One of the most active fieldworkers, Opanas Slastion, frankly admitted that he did not take note, and made no written record, of the existence of minstrels who did not know and perform dumy, as they were of no interest to him.

Dumy were performed primarily in Left Bank regions, to a more limited extent in those Right Bank regions contiguous with the Dnieper, and not at all in western Ukraine. Data from the ethnographic literature of the time indicate that it is a mistake to assume a dichotomy in repertory between the kobzari and lirnyky of Left Bank Ukraine in the nineteenth century, a common assumption among many dumy scholars. On the contrary, it seems that most kobzari and lirnyky in Left Bank regions held a more or less common repertory, composed primarily of psal’my, dumy, satirical songs, and dance ditties. Many lirnyky on the Left Bank commonly performed dumy. For example, the lirnyk Nykyfor Dudka knew two dumy and eleven psal’my, the lirnyk Stepan Tertii knew three dumy and twenty-three psal’my, and Slastion described one lirnyk who knew 120 psal’my and kozats’ki pisni (Cossack songs). Virtually all kobzari performed primarily psal’my. Khotkevych estimated that most kobzari in the Kharkiv region in the 1890s knew three to five dumy, and twelve to twenty psal’my, but some knew many more: Pavlo Hashchenko knew forty-two psal’my and Petro Drevchenko knew forty-four. The same was true in the Chernihiv region and Poltava region. The kobzar Khvedir Kholodnyi (born in the late 1820s) knew seven dumy but seventy psal’my. The kobzar Mykhailo Kravchenko knew five dumy but twenty-three psal’my. Even one of the kobzari who knew more dumy (mostly learned from books) than was usual for that time (as recorded in the ethnographic literature), Terentii Makarovych Parkhomenko, knew ten dumy, but twenty-eight psal’my.

Philologists believe that some thirty-two dumy were known to one degree or another in nineteenth-century Ukraine, each with several or even dozens of variants. However, this can be seen as a misleading notion. As noted above, an individual minstrel most often knew only two to four (often fewer, rarely more) dumy. Furthermore, as Kateryna Hrushevska notes, of the thirty-two or so dumy collected during the nineteenth century, only ten or fewer were actually extant, i.e., still actively performed by village minstrels, in the late nineteenth century. The others, she believes, were merely carry-overs from an earlier period and existed in published form only, not in oral practice. In Sperans kyi’s survey of the repertory of thirty minstrels from the Left Bank, mostly kobzari active between ca. 1880 and 1902, he found ninety psal’my, twenty dumy, and twenty satirical songs. Of these, only thirty psal’my, eight dumy, and eight satirical songs were collectively held by more than ten percent of those surveyed. Whether or not most of the dumy found in published nineteenth-century collections were merely carry-overs from the perhaps distant past, when dumy are viewed as only one (and at that not the major) part of a larger oral performance practice of peasant minstrels, they look different than when viewed in the static analysis of a collection of individual texts. Many questions remain as to the possible distribution, aesthetic standards, and meaning for the peasants of dumy performance practices in the nineteenth century.

The genre known as psal’my, most philologists would likely agree, is completely separate from the dumy. This conclusion is based on an analysis of collected texts. However, another interpretation is possible if these two genres are examined from the viewpoint of the actual ethnographic material, of performance context and native (i.e., peasant) perception. In the village context, little or no distinction was made between psal’ma and duma. In the late 1920s, one researcher was told by a blind lirnyk in the Kharkiv region that there were two psal’my “pro Oleksiia” (about Alexis). One was “pro Oleksiia Bozhoho cholovika” (about Alexis, a man of God), and the other was “pro Oleksiia Popovycha” (about Alexis Popovych). As philologists understand the terms, the first was a psal’ma, the second a duma. However, villagers, including the blind minstrels, often had no taxonomy, no system of classification to conceptually separate the two genres. Frequently they distinguished one performance (and thus one genre) from another only by the specific titles. To a certain extent, the psal’my and the dumy were, for them, a single performance genre, i.e., the prychta or rozkaz described earlier. Both psal’my and dumy were rendered in the same performance contexts, by the same performers, for the same peasant audiences, in a musical style that was often identical. Furthermore, if we group the psal’my and dumy together as a single perceived unit — as in fact many villagers did — the two genres together can be seen as a larger whole that contained some of the most important symbols of village life. This is to say, both the melodies and the texts of the two can be seen as complementing each other. Not only were the two often part of a single musical performance style, but the texts of the psal’my and the dumy contain collateral symbolic material. Both reflect high moral standards, the inculcation of fidelity and loyalty to one’s family, one’s people, and one’s religious beliefs. The one repertory group derives its message and its power from the spiritual quest of human life, especially from Christian values, while the other contains lessons derived from both the secular and the spiritual world. The texts of both extol the virtuous and recommend contempt for sinners, traitors, and slackers. Nothing comparable in symbolic content exists in the performance practices of other peasant music specialists nor in any other part of village music practice in Ukraine.

The unique and multifaceted character of the music practices of the blind minstrels of Ukraine was sometimes obscured by the very scholarship that tried to bring it to light. The reasons for this are to be found in the characteristic features of East European scholarship of the time. Most of the Ukrainian and Russian intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who collected material from the minstrels were not interested in their musical culture, or in the minstrels as musicians, but only in collecting texts from them, which the scholars could later publish. The idea apparently was to publish the “poetry” of the nation. Until approximately the last third of the nineteenth century, most of these scholars were philologists or historians who usually made no attempt to place the texts either in their performance or musical contexts. That they provided little or no information about the musicians, or the performance contexts, or the methods they used in collecting the material, is understandable as part of the scholarly limitations of the time. More troubling for us today is that some of them literally altered the texts that they were collecting, deleting repetitions and rearranging sections so that they would neatly fit into verses, like urban poetry. In still other cases, they simply made-up texts of their own, pretending that they had been “discovered” from some ancient kobzar. These practices put the usefulness of most of the early literature into question. Some of these scholars were likely motivated by an interest in constructing an image of national consciousness based on heroic epics and historical songs, a national poetry that could be compared to similar genres and national poetry from other parts of Europe.

It was not until the 1850s or 1860s that scholars attempted to directly record the village voice, and identify their interpretations or analyses as a separate section of their publications. Another aspect of the earlier method was continued, however-that of concentrating on the texts and ignoring the actual performance practices. Moreover, most collectors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and a large percentage of scholars right up to the present) ignored or paid little attention to the religious aspects of the minstrel’s repertory. Today, more than a hundred years later, one can only speculate about their reasons for doing so. Perhaps they contemptuously considered religious elements in the minstrels’ performance practices a degradation of a once exclusively secular practice, of Cossack origin. In addition, overtly religious elements did not lend themselves to an easy and direct national identification. Orthodox psalmody was not unique to Ukrainians, but found among all of Ukraine’s Orthodox neighbors. It seems possible that the researchers of the time deliberately and selectively sought out those aspects of the minstrels’ repertory that were unique to Cossack Ukraine, while they deleted from their studies most materials that fit less neatly into a national program, much as Slastion simply ignored those minstrels who did not perform dumy (see above).

One revealing source for this attitude is a letter from the ethnomusicologist Klyment Kvitka to the folklorist Filaret Kolessa in 1908 discussing the terms of their agreement, by which Kolessa would travel to the Poltava region to record the music of kobzari on wax cylinders. The expedition was secretly funded by Lesia Ukrainka, Kvitka’s wife. In the letter, Kvitka instructed Kolessa that the secret benefactor (Ukrainka) wished that Kolessa seek out only kobzari, not lirnyky, and that he record only dumy. The specific instructions were to ignore “the repertory of the lirnyky [sic] as well as psal’my, kozachky, and so forth.” Kvitka went on to explain the reasoning: that psal’my and other aspects of the repertory would still long survive, but that there was very little time left to research the dumy, which he and the benefactor felt were quickly dying out. Of course they were wrong about the psal’my, but they had no way of predicting the turn of events and the suppression of religious culture and its institutions and rituals under Soviet power.

Finally, most of the researchers of the time ignored the obvious fact that the minstrels were above all else performing musicians. Although this fact seems obvious, it is only tangentially treated or discussed in a large percentage of the ethnographic, folklore, and philological literature from Eastern Europe. The “melody,” as they call the musical sound, is regarded by them as separate from the “song” or printed text. This of course reflects a widespread, although no less regrettable, practice in folklore studies, not only in Eastern Europe but in Western Europe and North America, especially from before 1950 or so. The usual result of this application is a distortion of the actual performance practices, the expressive culture as it exists. If the minstrels were musicians, their art was performance, live musical sound rendered spontaneously and open to all the vagaries of oral art. A musico-sociological analysis would seem to be a basic necessary element in attempting even a cursory examination of dumy. Concentrating exclusively on a static textual analysis provides, at best, an incomplete knowledge of the performance practices of these musicians, and at worst a misrepresentation of Ukrainian culture.

The kobzari and lirnyky were not the only wandering musicians in the Ukrainian countryside. Up to collectivization, and in a limited fashion still after World War Two, there were other groups of wandering or traveling musicians. Some were blind; some were not. A few were probably homeless beggars, while most had homes to which they periodically returned, as with almost all of the minstrels. Some had a repertory similar to that of the blind minstrels, only without instrumental accompaniment. Many, and perhaps most, were women who sang unaccompanied. Their preferred performance contexts were next to churches or monasteries, although they also performed in market squares and wandered among village houses. Some sang in groups of three or more women. Others sang solo or in duet, or more rarely with a man or men. Their repertory consisted mostly of a “begging song,” versions of psal’my, zhalisni pisni (laments) such as “Syrotyna” (“The Orphan”), as well as songs derived from the liturgy. There were individual women, usually blind, who wandered with a man—a lirnyk, kobzar, or other blind man. These were frequently married couples. Often both sang, sometimes in duet, sometimes in alternating solo performances. In addition, there were itinerant musicians who played fiddle and sang psal’my, about whom little is known. Finally, since the early twentieth century, but especially from the 1920s, there were traveling blind harmonia (harmoniia) musicians who performed psal’my as well as other genres. In addition to substituting the harmonia for the lira, many of them seem not to have continued such peasant performance practices as the vocal recitative and the instrumental drone.

In most regions, all wandering musicians in general, including blind minstrels, were collectively known to villagers as startsi. It seems, however, that the blind minstrels, the kobzari and lirnyky, were regarded by many, and regarded themselves, as different from the other startsi. Among many villagers, the minstrels held a higher status than other startsi, and were more respected, with a unique place in the rural social hierarchy. This, however, is only a generalization. The minstrels and other startsi were not uniformly respected. A certain percentage of the village population was apathetic, or in some cases even hostile to them and their music practices. There are descriptions in the ethnographic literature of minstrels being beaten by villagers. Regarding their self-image, several minstrels from the nineteenth century said that their blindness was “an act of God” and a command to preach Christian teachings among the people. This applied to both kobzari and lirnyky. This is compelling evidence as to why the minstrels held their prayers and psal’my in such high esteem. That these elements were in such demand among the people seems to testify to the effectiveness of the Christian content of the minstrels’ art.

One important aspect of the economic status of the blind minstrels is that the learning process was paid for, and they chose and regulated their own students and controlled the learning process in general. Parts of the ethnographic literature describe loose regional organizations that in some locales may have resembled guilds and in others were closely tied to large “schools” of minstrels, primarily among the lirnyky. These organizations do not appear to have been brotherhoods directly attached to a church, although there is evidence that some of them kept candles lit before chosen icons in particular churches. In most locales there seems to have been no set hierarchy. In some regions, dues might have been paid. However, regarding hierarchy, dues, and discipline, as well as many other matters, the ethnographic literature is self-contradictory or unclear. Part of the confusion results from the fact that most of the research on the regional organizations was conducted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when most researchers of the time believed a priori that these organizations had previously been stronger. This assumption significantly colored their research. The case suggesting that such organizations had been stronger in the past and had declined through time is not convincing, being based largely on the reminiscences of a few elderly minstrels as well as highly questionable and unreliable written sources. In any case, in the 1903 survey of Kiev gubernia, no such organizations were found, and in the 1890s they apparently did not exist in much of western Podillia. Where these organizations are discussed in the ethnographic literature, there usually does not seem to have been a centralized authority; rather, they were regionally based. Membership was by invitation only, and the first and foremost membership qualification in most cases was to be blind.

The peasant minstrels, and probably their regional organizations, were spread over a large area— using current borders, over virtually all of Ukraine (perhaps excepting some Carpathian regions), most of Belarus, parts of southern Russia (e.g., Kursk, Ostrogozhsk, Belgorod, Briansk, Orel, and other counties bordering Ukraine and Belarus), as well as the Kuban and eastern Poland. Lirnyky were found in all regions, but kobzari only in central and eastern Ukraine, especially in the Left Bank regions of Poltava, Chernihiv, and Kharkiv. The minstrels had secret names for their members, a kind of secret language, and certain performance requirements for students, although the latter were not well defined and seem to have varied considerably from master to master.

Blind boys or young blind men, ranging in age from about six to about thirty (but most often from ten to twenty), served an apprenticeship or learned as paying pupils under a master minstrel for periods ranging from a few days to six years, although most seem to have studied for one or two years. During this time, they performed, but their earnings went to their master. Many pupils had more than one master, leaving one and going to another two, three or more times. The ethnographic literature contains a few descriptions of a “graduating” ritual granting permission to perform as an independent master, although it is unclear Whether this ritual was widespread or rare. Evidently not all, but perhaps only a minority of performers, went through this ritual. Only the minstrels and their pupils were allowed by custom to play the kobza and lira. No one else in the village did so. That these instruments were reserved for blind village males is not an unusual occurrence, when viewed in comparison with other parts of the world. In Japan and western India, for example, blind musicians performing a plucked lute and singing epics or religious songs are common, or were until the early twentieth century. Indeed, certain repertory and instruments were reserved only for them. Blind musicians of various types are common in many parts of the world. This topic is too broad, however, to be considered further here.

In teaching a pupil to play one of the two instruments, the kobza or the lira, the teacher generally laid his hands on those of the pupil, demonstrating the technique by tactile example. Pupils learned prayers and “begging” texts known to all startsi, usually rendered in a recitative. In addition, they learned the repertory as well as the “secret language” or jargon, and a kind of moral code by which minstrels were trained to live in an upright manner. The code of conduct seems to have been especially important in the relationship between master and pupil, even though sometimes the code was loosely maintained. Among some of the minstrels the code of conduct was apparently observed mostly in the breach, according to interviews with some of them in the historical ethnographic literature. There are descriptions of minstrels who were drunkards, or who were cruel to their pupils and beat them. Regardless of whether they could live up to the high standards in their own lives, however, a projection of the image of moral authority seems to have been a significant part of being a minstrel, both in terms of their repertory and in their public lives. A large percentage of the public expected minstrels to observe high moral standards and lead extraordinary lives. The minstrels seem to have often tried to hide their daily lives-and their human weaknesses, especially for alcohol —from other villagers, perhaps to reinforce the image of being among “God’s chosen.”

TRANSFORMATIONS OF MINSTREL PERFORMANCE PRACTICES FROM THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY THROUGH THE 1930s

The social role and economic status of the village minstrels, like any other elements of culture, were not static. It is a spurious, if widespread notion that peasant culture of the nineteenth century was part of an unbroken chain, with no fluctuations and no changes, that stretched far back into time. Documenting specific changes in that culture is difficult, however, because of a lack of reliable data. There is insufficient ethnographic data to discuss changes in the expressive culture of the village minstrels before the mid-nineteenth century in more than a general way. There are dozens of ethnographic sources that can be utilized for the period after mid-century. A full generation before the establishment of the Soviet state, the role and status of the blind minstrels were undergoing numerous changes, partly as a result of normal rural developments similar to those occurring over most of Eastern Europe at that time, and partly as a result of steadily increasing contact between village minstrels and urban researchers. This contact would alter the perception among the intelligentsia of rural music practice, and it was their altered perception that eventually would become the standard view found in popular Ukrainian culture about the music of the blind minstrels—a view that became so widely accepted that it impacts on national identity even today.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, urban intellectuals took a keen interest in the minstrels, either as what they thought of as living anachronisms (a common interest among Russian intellectuals), or as carriers of national (read: Ukrainian) culture. Several urban researchers journeyed to the villages to transcribe the texts of their repertory and write their biographies. Some of them stayed and lived with the musicians in the villages for long periods of time, even studying under them. The artist Lev Zhemchuzhnikov wandered the countryside of the Left Bank in the 1850s, as did Panteleimon Kulish. Another artist, Opanas Slastion, studied with kobzari in the Poltava region and journeyed frequently to the Chernihiv region and less often to the Kharkiv region, from the 1870s to the early twentieth century. Yet a third artist, Porfyrii Martynovych, lived for long periods in villages in the Poltava region between the 1860s and the early years of the twentieth century-more than forty years. In addition, some Ukrainian intellectuals brought selected minstrels to cities to perform on stage or to live with them for periods of time. For example, the Ukrainian composer Mykola Lysenko brought the kobzari Ostap Veresai, Terentii Parkhomenko, and others. In 1908 Lesia Ukraїnka and her husband, the ethnomusicologist Klyment Kvitka, brought the kobzar Hnat Honcharenko from the Kharkiv region to live with them while they recorded his performances at their home on wax cylinders. At the twelfth meeting of the South-Western Imperial Archeological Society in Kharkiv in 1902, the writer and cultural activist Hnat Khotkevych organized concerts of Ukrainian minstrels and other village musicians for the scholars gathered at the conference. Tours took place in the late nineteenth century and especially in the early twentieth century of Ukrainian and Russian cities, during which minstrels and other village musicians performed on stage for large numbers of people.

One result of this contact was the development of a sharp division, both in the kinds of audiences who patronized the art of the minstrels, and in the concomitant types of repertory found in this division. For the overwhelming majority of the minstrels, there remained primarily or even only the peasant audience of long standing, which preferred psal’my and satirical songs. On the other hand, a very small number of minstrels found that they could dramatically increase their earnings by playing to the desires and the requests of the Ukrainian patriotic intelligentsia. It was especially such people who selected certain kobzari (rarely lirnyky) and brought them to urban areas and to stages on which to perform. To the selected few, they paid large (by village standards) sums of money to perform in concert what they wanted to hear, namely, the heroic epics. This division in the audience, repertory, and economic status among minstrels can be said to have begun in a rudimentary fashion in the 1860s, when Panteleimon Kulish began sending money to the kobzar Ostap Veresai. The most significant influence of the intelligentsia on the performance practices of the minstrels, however, occurred roughly between the 1880s and World Warl, when ethnographers, folklorists, and members of the (mostly urban) Ukrainian intelligentsia singled out for special patronage a few kobzari who consciously altered their performance practices in order to curry the favor of the pany (wealthy or educated members of the elite) and thus earn more money. The ethnographer Krist notes that around 1900, the kobzar Ostap Butenko performed dumy primarily for pany because they paid more for this genre. Horlenko was told much the same by the kobzar Ivan Kriukovskyi in the 1880s. Still other kobzari purposely learned texts of dumy which they had likely never heard before from books or from members of the intelligentsia and set these texts to music. Mykola Lysenko, Hnat Khotkevych, and Opanas Slastion are a few of the Ukrainian elite who figured prominently in this process.

The most glaring example of this influence or put another way, the most successful entrepreneur among the blind minstrels—was Terentii Parkhomenko of the Chernihiv region. He told the ethnographer Speran’skyi that in the 1890s he earned about 200 rubles a year, on the high side of the usual income for village minstrels, which I estimate to have been between 50 and 200 rubles a year. By 1903, however, he claimed to have been earning up to 600 rubles a year, a large sum for a villager of the time. He had learned only two or three dumy from his teachers (oral practice), but had purposely learned another seven or eight dumy from books or from members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia. He was candid in his explanation of why he did so—it was to increase his earnings. He was evidently successful, as the intelligentsia brought him to urban concert stages and to their homes to perform, far from the performance contexts of the village. They were not particularly interested in hearing psal’my or satirical songs, but rather the texts on Cossack themes.

One can easily understand the reasons both sides (listeners and performers) had for engaging in this activity. The elite consumers of dumy (the intelligentsia) needed dumy performers to confirm their vision of the Cossack-Ukrainian past.

The peasant performers of dumy (the kobzari), in order to increase their earnings, needed to learn material that did not then exist in their oral practice. Of course, this situation was not unique to Ukraine. National cultural norms in nearly every region of Europe were constructed by specific people who altered peasant cultural norms, absorbing some, destroying others, and placing these norms on a dynamic axis between nation and region.81

Stated another way, some of the changes in repertory and economic status of rural minstrels of the time were partly due to the influence of educated Ukrainians and their interest in creating urban-rural links, especially in expressive culture, that could be seen as elements of a greater Ukrainian culture shared by all. In Ukraine, as in other parts of Europe in the nineteenth century, national activists used elements of peasant culture as vehicles for creating and institutionalizing national networks in which a formerly regional cultural element was transformed into a national cultural element. For example, when Hnat Khotkevych began his school of bandura performance in the first decade of the twentieth century, the teachings were aimed primarily at young Ukrainian cultural activists. It can be said that he was trying to create a new category of performance, one based partly on village music and partly on urban composed genres. His idea was apparently to expand the numbers of people who participated in what could become a national, instead of a village or regional, music practice. The participants in his school were sighted, and most were of urban origin. Until the advent of Soviet power, they learned a repertory that was varied and included all of the music genres of the blind minstrels, including the psal’my and other religious genres as well as dumy. In addition, it included an urban practice music that was written out in notation, for the most part original compositions of Khotkevych and other participants. Such schools seem to have had little or no effect, however, on the performance practices of most blind peasant minstrels, who continued to perform their mixed repertory of religious and satirical songs, with the occasional minstrel also knowing a smattering of a heroic epic or two. This division in repertory and audience that was characterized by, among other things, an urban-rural or elite-peasant differentiation, continued for several decades. Most peasant-born blind minstrels seldom or never took part in the largely urban practices of the formally schooled elite. This remained true for many minstrels even after Soviet power had changed the demographic composition, ideology, aims, and methods of influence of the elite group.

The Khotkevych schools marked the beginning of a movement that would grow to enormous proportions, the development of what can be called “national bandurists.” In the Soviet period the Khotkevych ensembles and ideas were transformed into another vehicle. By the late 1920s, the repertory of these national bandurists had changed drastically. Virtually all psal’my and other religious elements were gone, as were many of the dumy. They were replaced with bland arrangements of folk songs, music by Soviet composers, and revolutionary songs. In addition, there was a concerted effort to turn the bandura into a conservatory concert instrument on which one could play the music of Bach, Beethoven, and the repertory of European classical composers. This secularized repertory, but in particular the arrangements of folk songs, came to be regarded by urban populations as the real and actual repertory of the kobzari and lirnyky. Since the 1930s, young students of bandura in Ukraine, North America and elsewhere, usually in ensembles or conservatories, learn only this secularized repertory, invented in the first decades of the twentieth century, and mistakenly regarded as both quintessentially Ukrainian and a continuation of the longstanding traditions of the village minstrels.

In the 1920s, offshoots of the urban national bandura ensembles appeared among sighted youth in both the village and the city. During the time of wide dispersion of elements and symbols of Ukrainian identity and cultural consciousness that is often referred to as “Ukrainization,” hundreds of urban and village bandura ensembles were formed all over Ukraine in which young men and women performed a secularized and standardized repertory. Some toured widely, especially in village clubs, and received payment from attendees at their concerts. In other words, they kept the gate. Their repertory consisted largely of arrangements of what they thought were folk songs. Many of these performers could read music notation. One of the aims of the Soviet authorities in the 1920s was to create a new kobza art form, one specific and suitable to socialism, and open to all. They laid emphasis on its potential for mass appeal, but also on its possibilities for developing “ensembles of kobzar-Komsomolists” (kapely kobzariv-komsomol’tsiv).

By 1930 a general repression of rural cultural life in Ukraine, including music, was already well under way. The peasant instrumental musicians and the village women specialists were to feel this repression keenly, both in the proscription of religious elements in village rituals and in the regimentation of village music practice by administrative authorities. But a far more drastic repression was aimed at the blind minstrels and some of their organized counterparts, i.e., those in the touring ensembles of national bandurists.

The blind minstrels were a difficult social group for the administrative authorities to control. In the early 1920s they were ordered by the state to stop traveling and plying their trade on the road. Apparently, administrative officials did not feel that it was dignified to perform on the street in the new world of the Soviet Union. Minstrels were to remain in one village and teach only local inhabitants and those from the outside whom the state would send to them. The students did not have to be blind, as had been the minstrels’ (and villagers’) usual requirement before Soviet rule. Instead of on the street, performances by the minstrels were to take place on stages in schools and village clubs or other facilities maintained under government auspices. Famous kobzari of the 1930s such as Iehor Movchan, Fedir Kushperyk, Pavlo Nosach, and Petro Huz’ rarely performed in village contexts, and were probably under direct supervision of the Party and NKVD at least part of the time. Large-scale performance contexts were arranged for them, such as in factories and for the Red Army. They also performed in concerts at universities, houses of culture, Young Pioneer and Komsomol clubs, and the like.

The extent to which the blind peasant minstrels honored the administrative proscriptions and prescriptions of the state is unknown. Many were probably forced to do so. It seems certain that in a short period of time, there was a decline in whatever private teaching still existed in village practice on a master-pupil basis, radically altering the social organization of this rural music. According to elderly musicians and others with whom I conducted interviews in several regions of the Left Bank, the NKVD actively discouraged private study with minstrels, arresting or threatening with arrest those who practiced this activity. If the minstrels could not travel and could not choose their own students, places of performance, or kinds of teaching materials (i.e., repertory), their lifestyle and musical art would be completely changed, which was likely the aim of the administrative authorities. This can be seen as an effort by the state authorities to control yet another segment of the peasant population, bringing the lives of the minstrels under close supervision, as was happening concurrently in most segments of society at this time. Obviously, these were difficult proscriptions for the minstrels, for honoring them would mean the effective end of the performance practices, repertory, lifestyle, social organization, and economic status of the blind minstrels as well as an end to their historic role as carriers of the cultural symbols found in religious and heroic genres. Certainly by the late 1950s, and in some regions likely by the outbreak of World War II, these control mechanisms had all but obliterated the minstrels’ distinct social role. Their art and social role were intertwined, and changing the one transformed the other.

It seems likely that these proscriptions reduced the unique moral authority of the minstrels. It nearly totally altered their economic status. They had earlier derived much of their authority from the fact that they were not locals, but occasional visitors with uncommon performance practices, whose words and deeds exhorted all who heard them to lead the good life according to the commands of God and Church as well as custom. They alone were able to perform on certain instruments and a certain repertory. They had been further set apart by their blindness and gender-specific exclusivity, their “secret language,” and selective master-pupil teaching methods. Their longstanding social role was nearly destroyed by the prescription of the state-sanctioned secularized repertory and performance practices, which required no distinctiveness of person, gender, place, time, or context and could be performed by anyone, anytime, anywhere. The aim seems to have been to transform the peasant minstrels into “national” (read: Soviet) bandurists who were to practice a specific kind of music under strict state control.

The peasant minstrels largely had been economically independent of state concerns and had practiced their art according to longstanding village economic norms. The prohibitions on travel, street performance, and paid teaching of pupils of their choice destroyed any economic independence they might once have had. Required to become a part of the socialist economy as stage performers, they became almost totally dependent on the state for any income earned from musical activities. Even if it did not mean arrest, resistance by an individual minstrel meant loss of income by ending or limiting his public musical performances. Living under such threats and restrictions, he often no longer had a reason or an opportunity to continue practicing the longstanding repertory.

According to interviews with surviving relatives of blind minstrels that I conducted in several regions of Ukraine, in the early 1930s many of the blind minstrels had not complied with the order to stop traveling, and were still traveling at least part of the time. Their continuation of longstanding patterns was apparently viewed with alarm in the administrative organs of the Soviet state. One result may have been physical threats. Several articles have appeared in the Ukrainian press over the last few years discussing what is described as a gathering of blind minstrels in Kharkiv in 1934 (or 1937), sponsored by the state. According to the story as developed in these articles, about 230 of the blind minstrels disappeared during this gathering, presumably arrested or shot. However, this matter needs to be approached cautiously. Although it is of course entirely possible that this gathering took place, I am not aware of reliable documentation that conclusively shows this to be true. In addition to consulting archival sources, I have interviewed relatives of village minstrels and startsi of the time. No archival information has emerged. More important, no one from these families claims to know anything about such a gathering. Research on this matter continues. In any case, it seems certain that large numbers of minstrels were repressed over the period from the 1920s to the early 1950s. If we consider that in the early 1900s there were more than two thousand, and likely three thousand blind minstrels (or even twice that many), the fact that there were only a handful by 1950 does not seem plausible without the negative intervention of the state, including arrest and/or execution.

One can only speculate about how the lives of blind minstrels and other startsi were affected by the famine of 1932-33 in central and eastern Ukraine, and the famine of 1947 in several regions including most of western Ukraine. Blind minstrels and other startsi made a large part of their living by wandering rural roads, which became clogged with many others during the famines. The minstrels’ normally fragile economic base would have been totally shattered at such times. Millions competed for small amounts of food, and part of this competition took place on village roads in the form of begging. Minstrels and other startsi, as well as the blind and crippled in general, were probably among the most likely to have perished in large numbers at such times.

The touring ensembles of national bandurists in the 1930s were also having their performance practices proscribed, and many performers were under physical threat as well. I have interviewed elderly relatives of especially village ensemble members who describe how many of these performers, and in some cases whole ensembles, were arrested and disappeared.

To answer the question of why the repression of musical life in Ukraine took place, one can of course proceed from the assumption of a general repression by the Communist authorities of Ukrainian culture, and especially of rural civil society. With the regimentation of rural life came the destruction of many unique peasant cultural norms of long standing. The repression of the blind minstrels can be seen in the broader context of the effort to destroy those cultural elements that were still a part of a distinct peasant society. The blind minstrels were an uncontrollable source of moral authority in the village, and direct competition for a totalitarian state. The bulk of their repertory consisted of genres that included both religious and national symbols, neither of which were tolerable to the organs of power. The minstrels were a self-governing and autonomous social group within peasant society. The group chose whom to admit, how to train them, and how they should live. In addition, they traveled widely. These activities were apparently unacceptable to the state power and control then still being built.

The other group of performers, the national bandurists, can be seen as part of the rising tide of national consciousness. Many in both groups, minstrels and national bandurists, died as a result of the repression of specific aspects of Ukrainian culture and civil society. Aside from this similarity, it is useful to note significant differences in the social roles, economic status, and fate of the blind minstrels and the national bandurists. The performance practices of the peasant minstrels were specific to a small group of people (blind village males) and were almost entirely orally transmitted. They were also specific to a certain cultural milieu. As that milieu began to disappear with collectivization and the forced socialization of virtually all kinds of village cultural life, the minstrels’ role as a moralizing influence probably decreased greatly. The national bandurists, on the other hand, were drawn from the population at large. Their repertory (secular), their musical instrument (bandura), and their performance practices (including notated music) were, like any other non-context-specific (or popular) repertory and mass-produced instrument, accessible to virtually anyone who wished to learn or purchase them. The national cultures constructed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in most parts of the world were, and remain today, a part of vast consumer markets readily available to anyone with even a modicum of purchasing power. Although hundreds of national bandurists were arrested in the Stalinist period, there were always more to take their place. One had merely to purchase an instrument in a store in order to begin to take part in the national music culture. Not so with the blind minstrels. Their instrument and performance practices, their social role and economic status, their art — in fact their existence- were imbedded in peasant society, in a cultural fabric that had developed over hundreds of years. When the peasant social structure and its cultural fabric were drastically altered, the blind minstrels disappeared. Once they were gone, they were gone forever.

CONCLUSION

Today, the blind minstrels of the Ukrainian countryside no longer exist. Thousands of bandura performers play a secular and standardized repertory in a style that is perhaps best described as urban in nature, derived from the musical techniques, forms, genres, and styles of twentieth-century urban popular music, including Soviet music genres and styles, as well as older art music of the European elite. They are far removed from the music practices of the blind peasant minstrels. The actual performance practices of the kobzari and lirnyky are no longer carried by most of today’s bandurists, whose economic status as performers is entirely different from that of the minstrels. These bandurists either depend largely on salaried positions in conservatories and music schools, or perform as part-time amateurs. While these differences are obviously significant in an evaluation of current practice, so is a similarity, namely an echo of the former social role of the minstrels. Some contemporary bandurists proudly compare a perceived role as national poets with the moralizing role of the blind minstrels, even while ignoring the fact that their instrument, repertory, and style of performance have virtually nothing in common with the music practices of the kobzari and lirnyky. Furthermore, films, books, and the plastic arts in Ukraine today, as in the recent past, often include the symbol of the kobzar as moral authority. This is not only because of Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar, nor is it merely a poetic symbol. It is also testimony to the power carried by the blind peasant minstrels, as well as to the former significance of their role in the civil society of the village. Decades after the demise of the blind peasant minstrels, their moral authority still holds sway over Ukrainian consciousness.

NOTES