Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [364]
‘Forgive me,’ he said calmly, ‘but the Ukraine is part of Russia. You should write in Russian therefore.’ His tone was not unkind, but it was firm. ‘Besides,’ he added with a dismissive shrug, ‘Ukrainian is only spoken by peasants.’
There was silence. Olga glanced anxiously at Karpenko. Then Sergei spoke: ‘How boorish.’
And Olga trembled. Was this the start of the quarrel she dreaded?
The little Cossack saw her face and understood at once. ‘It’s quite true that Ukrainian is the peasant’s language,’ he readily agreed. ‘But that’s why I’d like to use it – for writing about village life, you see.’ If he thought, however, that he had saved the situation, he was premature.
‘Quite right.’ Sergei was determined to defend his friend. ‘After all, our own Russian literature has only existed for a generation. Why shouldn’t the Ukrainians start their own?’ He smiled contemptuously. ‘Or is having their literature strangled at birth by an illiterate Russian to be another benefit of the Tsar’s rule?’
Olga caught her breath: a gratuitous insult. Alexis went pale; but with an effort he ignored Sergei. Turning to Karpenko, however, he asked dangerously: ‘Do the people of the Ukraine dislike the Tsar’s rule?’
The Cossack smiled gently. He could have said that the Ukrainian peasants had no special love for Russia; he might have mentioned that, under the programme of Russification, the towns were losing all their ancient liberties. He could have remarked that even his own family remembered bitterly that their ancestor, a proud Cossack landowner, was sent in chains by Peter the Great to his new capital in the north, and never heard from again. But instead he was tactful.
‘When Napoleon invaded,’ he quietly reminded Alexis, ‘the Tsar had no more loyal troops than the Cossacks. And on the eastern side of the Dniepr, where I come from, the landowners have been glad of Russian protection since the time of Bogdan. On the western side of the Dniepr, however, where there’s more Polish influence, Russian rule is accepted but not particularly popular.’ It was a fair assessment, and even if it was not quite what Alexis wanted, he could hardly argue. For the moment, he relapsed into silence.
And it was now that, casting about in his mind for a more cheerful topic, and without thinking too much, young Karpenko rattled on.
‘Do you know,’ he remarked, ‘funnily enough, about ten miles from where we live, there’s a place where my family used to have a farm once. It has a new name now, but in Peter the Great’s time it was called Russka.’
This, as he hoped, diverted their thoughts. Nobody had heard of it, though Ilya at once remarked: ‘Many northern place-names derive from the south. The Bobrovs formerly came from near Kiev, you know, so the village you speak of may once have been ours.’ He smiled. ‘There’s something we have in common, my friend.’ The fact that the Cossack’s ancestor had run away from the northern Bobrov estate and discovered this Russka in the south was unknown to them both.
‘I wonder what sort of place it is now,’ Olga said.
And then Karpenko made his great mistake. ‘Actually,’ he confessed awkwardly, ‘it’s a military colony.’
He realized his error the moment he had spoken. Alexis sat bolt upright. Sergei grimaced. And Alexis suddenly smiled. Now was his chance to put everyone in their place.
‘A military colony,’ he said with a triumphant look. ‘There’s a splendid improvement.’ And despite himself – he could not help it’ – the Cossack winced.
For of all the changes that the Tsar’s government had made in the Ukraine, the military colonies were the most universally loathed. There were about twenty of them, each large enough to support an entire regiment, and they covered a huge area. Since Karpenko could think of nothing to say in favour of these terrible places, he bit his lip and said nothing.
But Sergei,