Demonology notes
While going through I. P. Coulianu’s Tree of Gnosis, a suicide bullet of a book and the logical last but not the concluding step to the abyss which his oeuvre covers, in regards to the search of the origins of dualism a familiar name was mentioned: that of Mykhailo Drahomanov. The man is accused of making the wrong conclusion as to the presence of the same type of the trickster myth in different parts of the world, attributing it to territorial diffusion; in regards to the work itself, given its impact, no doubts about its scientific value arose throughout the future research done on the subject. Drahomanov was among its precursors; because of this, I thought Drahomanov's works preceded those of Nechuy-Levitskii; I was wrong, as Nechuy-Levitskii published his “Світогляд Українського Народу” in 1876.
Myhailo Drahomanov’s essay “Notes on the Slavic Religio-Ethical Legends: The Dualistic Creation of the World” is available to us either in the original bulgarian or in an obscure english translation published in America in 1961 by an academic with a predilection for the old world-type of scholarship of the XIX century. A Ukrainian translation isn’t found, despite the plans of one of Drahomanov’s friends. Two years after the essay was published in the «Сборник за народни умотворения, наука и книжнина» (1893, Bulgaria), Ivan Franko mentions the work in a letter exchange with its author:
>You’re writing that your “Dualism” should be translated in German. I’d gladly work on it, were there a place to print it. (…) Meanwhile, I’ll start publishing it in the “Ж. і сл.” after all, making my way through the put-off works.¹
The work isn’t found in the existing six volumes of Franco’s mentioned periodical, “Житє і слово”, of which he was the editor and his wife the publisher. Whether he changed his mind or ran into problems with censorship during the publishing remains unknown: the topic of culled articles is brought up in the very same letter from Franko to Drahomanov. It is easy to imagine an essay centered on the myth of the trickster (Satanaїl) to be found unsuitable by the censors.
Scouring the volumes, too few in the retrospective, would hardly be a waste of time regardless — the typesetting and the ornaments around the eternally relevant works, greek myth and poetry, translated ancient scrolls — there are two particular articles that absorbed my attention in a comfortable descent of not too steep of an angle (the subject matter wasn’t new), with the mentioned arcane phraseology providing a relief due to the familiarity.
In the volume V of “Ж. і сл.” (1896), in the section with the articles of the scientific kind, the “Brief history of devil worship” article was published in two parts in translation by a “K—iy S.” and which could’ve been translated more directly, the ghosts suggest, if not for the article ending in the poetic praise and exhilarated murder.
After Baudelaire’s invocation, the victim’s outline in black ink on paper is brought upon by Rapisardi:
Cказав се і звернувсь, де сонце ясне
Із за гори палаючи вставало,
І бога торкнувся промінєм острим
І проколов його наскрізь. Немов би
Ярке залізо хто встромив у воду,
Так образ божив засичав — неначе
Вапно сидить гасючися водою
В повітрі образ божив розіллявся
Лиш трепечуща хмарка піднялась…
The translated passage finds itself, in the full poem, between the ancient art of changing forms and names and the death only of a simulacrum, the demiurge, after which the justice finally is found.
The second part of the essay starts with the bargain. The author mentions timely enough that the conditions of the deal are brought upon through not only greed but also love; and that it’s the want of sacred knowledge that makes up the magic’s source.
In the volume VI of "Життє і слово", the following article can be found: “The belief in charms and witches.”, translated from German by the same K—iy S., and presented as a follow-up of sorts. Glancing through the index, the article is supposed to be two pages, but in reality takes up a dozen. The borgesian mistake made me search for the different digitalised versions of the volume, but I couldn’t find any other than the one found everywhere, which is the same. The collected index, published separately in 1962, contains the same mistake (depending on whether it’d be considered correct to list the pages as mentioned in the original index or by the actual page count). The local libraries I hadn’t checked.
1. From Franko's letter to Drahomanov, 25.01.1895: "Ви пишете, що Ваш «Дуалізм» варто б перекласти по-німецькому. Я радо зробив би се, коби було де видрукувати. Не знаю, чи взяв би сю статтю Вейнгольд до своєї «Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde». В усякім разі маю надію, що через проф. Брікнера (поляка в Берліні) і Вейнгольда можна буде найти накладця для сеї праці. А тим часом я все-таки почну печатати її в «Ж. і сл.», скоро протовплюся трохи з позачиненими працями".