‘Shchedryk’: How a Ukrainian protest song became a Christmas classic
Alongside such festive standards as ‘O Holy Night’ and ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’, the sprightly ‘Carol of the Bells’ sits joyously in the Christmas canon of much-loved seasonal songs outside the pop charts.
However, the song’s roots reach back centuries before its popularised 1930s version, with which we’re all familiar, stretching back to Ukraine’s cultural history before the arrival of Christianity and originally performed as a celebration of spring’s arrival.
Based on the folkloric story of a swallow’s flight into a household to signal the bountiful months ahead, the tale was long associated with the seasonal shift toward warmer days around March, before the Julian calendar placed New Year’s in January.
Such festive songs were known as ‘Shchedrivky’ in the Ukrainian tongue, and popular across the country as the 20th century arrived. While possibly sketching lyrics as early as 1904 in the Eastern Pokrovsk region, composer Mykola Leontovych’s resurrection of the old folk song lifted the soaring, four-note ostinato, which would take on extra dimensions of national identity and resistance during the country’s febrile political engulfment across the 1910s.
As the Tsarist regime collapsed by the end of the First World War, the newly announced Ukrainian People’s Republic sought to establish a socialist state autonomous from the Bolsheviks centred in Moscow. Eager to drum up global support, the Ukrainian National Chorus was sent around the world while the former Russian Empire was embroiled in civil war, before reaching New York’s Carnegie Hall in October 1922, performing Leontovych’s ‘Shchedryk’ piece to a sold-out audience only two months before the Soviet Union was finalised back home.
US audiences fell in love with the little swallow classical piece. In 1936, the American composer of Ukrainian descent, Peter Wilkowski, rearranged Leontovych’s ‘Shchedryk’ for the NBC Symphony Orchestra and afforded Anglicised lyrical revisions for a wholly more obvious Yuletide theme, boasting references to bells, carolling, and the “merry, merry, merry, merry Christmas” line. It would prove a smash, yet Leontovych would never see his piece flourish across the States. 15 years before, the composer was shot by a Soviet agent in a robbery gone wrong, dying of blood loss before the authorities were able to save him.
Years later, the Christmas feelings of national resistance would test the country’s resolve once again during Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. In a grim illustration of Moscow’s cultural suppression, Leontovych’s statue is now missing from Pokrovsk, and the music school named after him is boarded up and abandoned.
Yet, reports of soldiers in trenches performing ‘Shchedryk’, even with weapons doubling up as makeshift instruments, have attested to the piece’s national endurance as a soundtrack to Ukrainian pride. One young soldier, 22-year-old Roman, told the BBC last year that Leontovych’s famed folk reimaging is the “pride of our country, it’s freedom, it’s in our souls, I get goosebumps from this song.”
‘Shchedrivky’ has evolved beyond a mere festive singalong, but a paean to Ukraine’s cultural identity, a song that burns brighter when such values are ever under threat.
