Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) is a well-known French writer who produced an enormous number of novels and short stories depicting the French society of his days, which he collectively The Human Comedy. Balzak is recognized as a founder of the “realist” tradition in European literature and is generally considered to be one of the greatest novelists of all time. What is less well-known about him is that for many years he dreamed of moving eastward to Ukraine and eventually spent almost two full years of his life on an estate about a hundred kilometers or so from Kyiv, on the western or Right Bank of the Dnieper River near the town of Berdychiv. The story of how this happened constitutes the real “novel of his life”.
Honore de Balzac as the author of innovative novels, received a steady stream of letters from female readers all over Europe. But in 1832, one letter stamped at Odessa in the Russian Empire drew his particular attention. It was carefully written on quality paper and was obviously composed by some very cultivated person. The letter praised his previous writings but expressed disappointment with his latest book, which appeared less sympathetic to women.
Two more letters shortly followed which have not survived. Finally, a fourth letter, dated November 7, 1832, arrived, and it was preserved for history:
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….. The letter was anonymous, signed only L’Étrangère (the feminine form of “the foreigner”). Balzac replyed via the royalist French newspaper La Quotidienne (The Daily), which was the only such French paper that was allowed into the Russian Empire. He signed it: H.d.B – A. l’E.
But only in September of 1847, Balzac managed to orginise his trip to Ukraine. He was greatly impressed by the wide spaces, endless fields of wheat: “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, where Balzac’s future wife Ewelina Hańska was waiting for his arrival.
In January of 1848, Balzac “very sadly” left his Ukrainian dreamland for France where his literary obligations and creditors awaited him, but on September 20, of the same year, the writer again departed for Ukraine.
He missed the Parisian cuisine at first but soon grew to like the local tea blends and the food products made from millet, buckwheat, oats, and barley. It was during the second stay in Ukraine that Honoré de Balzac wrote in his letter to Mz Shyrkovycheva: “When you visit Ukraine, this Heaven-on-Earth, where I have already noticed 77 ways of baking bread… I thought I had collected a lot; but when I looked at the number of bread kinds brought from Ukraine, I understood that my knowledge is just an iceberg head and there’s no end to this”.
On March 14, 1850, Balzac and Eve were wed at a small ceremony in the Church of Saint Barbara in Berdychiv.
