Why Dumy (Ukrainian Folk Ballads) Resonate with Ukrainians
For centuries, Ukrainian folk ballads have provided cathartic healing for people in Ukrainian lands.
Ukrainian dumy
were complex, accessible works of oral literary culture that resonated with
people in Ukrainian lands. Their multiple layers included a Christian and
Cossack ethos, a triadic structure in narratives that reflected a symbolic rite
of passage Grabowicz (2011-2014) (p. 5), pagan elements familiar to
society, literary devices, and an evocative performance style where the laments
were chanted using the recitative technique.
According to Ukrainian
Minstrels: And the Blind Shall Sing, Kononenko (2015) (p. 31),
the dumy’s content was considered serious material and described either the
Turko-Tatar period, the rebellion led by Khmelnytsky, or everyday life of 17th
century peasants from Ukrainian lands. Dumy used metaphors, irony, contrast,
parallelism, pathos, and repetition to accentuate an idea - as well as trebling
to emphasize the importance of the number three, prevalent since pre-Christian
times.
While their ethos
was deeply Christian, the epic songs also had elements of pagan folk beliefs
that ebbed and flowed through their stories. Minstrels (kobzary), who were
usually blind, sang dumy that always reinforced Christian values and frequently
referred to Christian lands and the spilling of Christian blood. Kobzary also
sometimes featured birds and wolves as spirit animals who interceded between
life and death, mourning pious heroes and taking them back to the earth to rest,
such as in the Flight of Three Brothers from the City of Azov. Tarnawsky,
Kilina & Moyle, (1979) (p. 81).
Flight of
Three Brothers from the City of Azov exhibited strong elements of Christian
belief with pagan undertones. In this duma, the biblical golden rule was
violated by the oldest brother who let his youngest brother run behind him in
dangerous conditions while he and the second brother rode horses. His attitude showed
disregard of the youngest brother, despite the pain that he was enduring. The
youngest brother’s separateness foreshadowed the coming tragedy he would have
to undergo with no help. The oldest brother’s dominance was also contrasted
with the vulnerability of the youngest brother:
“… From the city of Azov, from bitter slavery, three
brothers were fleeing
Two mounted, the third on foot,
Running behind his mounted brothers
As if he were a stranger,
Cutting his white Cossack feet
On the rough roots, on the white stones,
Drenching his tracks with blood.”
The youngest
brother was depicted as yearning to get back to Christian lands and values,
with white symbolizing his own purity as well as that of natural stones. In
good faith, he asked them to wait and carry him on a horse for part of the way:
“Wait a while, graze your horses,
Wait for me,
Take me with you,
Carry me at least a little ways toward the Christian cities.”
But the oldest
brother said that he couldn’t do that because it would jeopardize his own
escape. He continued to treat the youngest brother with disdain, lacking
compassion. Rather than help his youngest brother, he cared only about his own
safety:
“We will not be able to escape
If we take you with us.
Pursuers will come from the city of Azov,
… They will catch us...”
No matter how
much he was mistreated, the youngest brother still believed in his older
brothers with faith, caring, and brotherly love. Ironically, when he thought
they perished, he said he would bury them so that they wouldn’t be at the mercy
of scavenging animals:
“…And I would find the brave
Cossack bodies,
And I would bury them in the open field,
And I would not leave them to the mercy of beasts and birds.”
The affirmation of the ninth commandment (to not lie) and tenth commandment (to
not covet) was also prevalent, reinforcing a Christian moral code. After the
youngest brother had died, the oldest brother relayed to the middle brother
that he considered lying to their parents about what had happened to the
youngest brother, which was a violation of the ninth commandment about lying:
“The oldest brother spoke with words:
‘Brother, when we come home to our father and mother,
How will we tell them the truth?
If we tell them the truth,
Then Father and Mother
Will curse us forever.”
The tenth
commandment, to not seek what others have, was violated by the oldest brother
when he said that without the youngest brother alive, he would get more of
their parents’ property after they were gone:
“When our old father and mother die,
We will divide the land and the cattle in half,
And a third one will not be in our way.”
Structurally in
this duma, the third brother underwent a symbolic rite of passage in the three
phases described in Grabowicz (2011-2014) (p. 5), accepting his own
transformation from Christian family man to an inadvertent practitioner of
earth-based spirituality. In the preliminal phase, he was separated from his
brothers after walking behind them when they were riding horses. In the second,
liminal phase, he was in “limbo” fighting to stay alive with no food or water:
“In the steppes the Cossack was plagued
By three misfortunes at once:
The first misfortune was lack of water,
The second misfortune was lack of bread,
And the third misfortune - a wild wind that blew him off his feet.”
In the third, post-liminal
phase of reaggregation, the third brother laid down to rest and communed with
animals who wanted “to celebrate the dark funeral of life before its time.”
In the tragic
situation of the youngest brother dying alone in the steppe, it was animals who
assumed the community role of caretaker. The central communication in this duma
was between the third brother and the animals and birds who cared for him and
arbitrated between the realms of life and death for him. He spoke to them just
as he would to humans, asking them to wait until his soul left his body. In an
animistic way, the animals took on human-like souls as the young Cossack
accepted his return to the earth:
“He looked at
them,
And he spoke with words:
‘O you grey-maned wolves,
And you grey-winged eagles,
My beloved guests,
Wait just a little while,
Wait until the soul parts from my body...’ “
In this part of
the duma, animism came to the fore; interceding spirit animals and birds gathered
around the youngest brother and mourned him, and the young Cossack was at one
with the earth and all of its creatures:
“…The cuckoos also flew down
And sat around his head,
They wailed like his own sisters.
Small birds also flew down…
And they cried and wailed mournfully:
Thus they celebrated the dark funeral.”
Both at the
beginning and near the end of the duma, negative parallelism was used to
accentuate what was happening (by poetically comparing it to what was not
happening):
The first five
lines of the duma used negative parallelism to emphasize the main event in the
story. The upward movement in the duma’s metaphors indicated that something was
rising, or brewing:
“Oh, it was not dust swirling,
And it was not fog rising,
But from the Turkish land,
From the infidel faith,
From the city of Azov, from bitter slavery, three brothers were fleeing;”
Near the end of
the duma, negative parallelism phrasing was repeated to emphasize the calm gentleness
with which the brave Cossack’s soul had now departed. In this case it was a
cloud and the patter of rain conjured in a downward, concluding movement:
“It was not a cloud coming,
Nor fine rain falling,
But the brave Cossack soul
Departing from the body.”
Even though the oldest
brother in Flight of Three Brothers from the City of Azov violated
biblical commandments, he was not the character that one would have remembered.
It was the youngest “brave Cossack soul” who would have inspired audiences and
kept them contemplating aspects of his powerful faith. The moral of this tale
was deeper than two older brothers being punished by death for their selfishness.
It was likely more about the grace with which the youngest brother lived his
life. It is possible that in the 17th century, following the havoc
caused in Ukrainian lands by some humans, the duma described the breadth of a
full spiritual realm in which audiences could find solace.
Duma performances
were individualistic, cathartic and healing, depending on the poetic expressiveness
of a kobzar. As explained in Dumy: Ukrainian Folk Epic by Kononenko (2022) (p.
1), dumy contained rhyme but had an irregular line length ranging from 3-16
syllables. The lines corresponded to topics and occurred in tirades, switching
in rhyme and expression when elements in the content changed. In the expressive
performance of Flight
of Three Brothers from the City of Azov by Ovaram Hrebin’, the lira
instrument accentuated the ongoing, endless aspect of storytelling. From the
beginning of the duma, the kobzar’s voice intonation did not fully fall until
the thought pattern about white Cossack feet cut on white stones and being
drenched with blood, had been completed. He maintained the tension of that
thought for 11 lines, accentuating and foreshadowing the tragedy to come. At
times while chanting the epic song, the kobzar moaned in sadness, and at other
times he spoke a line for effect, then returned to lament in recitative.
In other
examples, dumy reached audiences through stories of suffering that cut across
social classes, stories about the power of Christian confession and
self-sacrifice, and
stories where
birds and rivers played main characters. Baida described how a noble
Vyshnevetsky (Baida), who fought the Tatars as a Cossack Hetman, was imprisoned
after refusing to marry a sultan’s daughter. Here too, three structural phases
symbolizing a rite of passage were delineated - with Baida’s capture as the
first, his suffering while hanging by hooks the second, and his slaying of
three Moslem members of royalty the third. In The Storm on the Black Sea)
Tarnawsky, Kilina & Moyle, (1979) (p. 73), two brothers were saved
from a treacherous ocean through the act of confession which summoned the
faraway prayers of their parents. In Marusia from Bohuslav, Marusia
sacrificed her own well-being while living as a slave in the Ottoman Empire. Even
though Marusia had converted to the Muslim faith, she chose to set her master’s
captive Cossacks free on Christian Easter, an act that likely caused her
Ottoman master to punish her later.
The coexistence
of Christianity and paganism in dumy also mirrored the duality of the
audience’s spirituality. Folk beliefs were alluded to in a duma where two
rivers talked to each other, conveying trustworthy information about the
location of the Cossacks (as depicted in Conversation Between the Dnieper
and the Danube) Tarnawsky, Kilina & Moyle, (1979) (p. 79). Similarly,
narration was provided by a cuckoo lamenting the tragedy of a Cossack on a
faraway gravemound without his kin (in Lament of the Cuckoo) Tarnawsky,
Kilina & Moyle, (1979) (p. 107). This aspect reinforced folk traditions
where the presence of birds had the power to signify the future.
As laments, dumy
were direct expressions from the soul of the kobzar to the souls of the people,
serving a need to commune and heal cathartically. As an oral tradition, dumy
healed people’s souls during a time of great misfortune and hardship on
Ukrainian lands. Kobzary underwent several years of training in dumy to
accomplish this artfully - although, according to Kononenko (2015) (p. 65),
the work “existed to provide for the blind rather than foster art.” They nonetheless
combined many historical, literary, spiritual, and musical elements at their
disposal to convey ideas through stories that reached people emotionally.
Bibliography
Grabowicz, Oksana I. Dumy as Performance Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 2011-2014.
Kononenko, Natalie. Dumy: Ukrainian Folk Epic. The
Oxford Handbook of Slavic and East European Folklore, 2022.
Kononenko, Natalie. Ukrainian Minstrels: And the Blind
Shall Sing. Routledge, 2015.
Tarnawsky, Kilina & Moyle. Ukrainian Dumy.
Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and Harvard Ukrainian Research
Institute, 1979.
