Fatherland in Early Eighteenth-Century Ukrainian Political Culture

FRANK E. SYSYN

In describing the resignation of Vasyl' Kochubei as chancellor of the Hetmanate in 1700, the early eighteenth-century historian Samiilo Velychko characterized him as “serving faithfully and diligently God, the great sovereign the Russian tsar, his Little Rossian fatherland, and the Zaporozhian Host” (3: 41, p.

There is still no study of early modern Ukrainian political culture that traces the appearance of otchyzna (modern Ukrainian vitchyzna) referring to Ukrainian territories as the inhabitants’ fatherland to which they owed loyalty and in whose interest they should act. Medieval Ukrainian had used the term to designate an ancestral inheritance or estate and a hereditary ruler’s state or territories.³ Cer­tainly the new use of the term came from Polish ojczyzna as the equivalent of Latin patria.⁴ In the early modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, ojczyzna was most frequently used for the entire state and country. It could at times still refer to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania or the Kingdom of Poland as well as to narrower fatherlands.⁵ Its use as ancestral lands or estates, patrimony (ojcowizna), was rare.

As the term developed from the original meaning of homeland, its use for the state and its territory and the population inhabiting them evolved so that ojczyzna occupied the highest emotional register in Polish political discourse.⁶ Appeals to the inhabitants’ loyalty and patriotism were made more frequently to the ojczyzna than to the Rzeczpospolita, the Commonwealth.

With fatherland’s encompassing meaning of state, country, and population, its interests could be espoused by many political actors in the Commonwealth. The king or Diet could call for policies in the interest of the ojczyzna, but the no­bles could just as frequently resist the monarch or the institutions of state in the name of the ojczyzna. This conceptualization as passed on to the Ukrainians placed loyalty to the fatherland as the inhabitants’ common inheritance that sur­passed any loyalty to a given ruler or government.

Only further research can reveal how and when patria, ojczyzna, and otchyzna were first used to refer to Rus' and the Ukrainian lands in a manner similar to that used for the Commonwealth in the Polish tradition. While instances occurred before 1648 in referring to Ukrainian territories, no Rus' or Ukrainian political entity existed in the early modern period that could serve as a political fatherland until after the Khmel'nyts'kyi Uprising.⁹ Khmel'nyts'kyi’s references to fatherland were still to the Commonwealth or the Kingdom of Poland.¹⁰

By the 1670s, a Ukrainian chronicler advocated in his compilation on Ukrainian history that his readers should know the history of their fatherland, otchyzna.¹¹ Paraphrasing a quotation from Joachim Bielski’s dedication in 1597 to Sigismund III in publishing the Polish historical work of his father Marcin Bielski, the copyist of the Hustynia Chronicle that covered the history of Ukraine up to the 1590s, Mykhailo Losyts'kyi, declared that every man had an inborn love and attachment to his otchyzna similar to that of a lodestone for iron.

While Losyts'kyi made no connection of his discussion of fatherland to the political events of mid-seventeenth century Ukraine, Feodosii Sofonovych re­ferred to a continuous Ukrainian political history more concretely in writing a chronicle cycle that concluded with the history of the Cossack Hetmanate up to the 1670s. He exhorted his intended readers, the Rus' sons, to know their history because he who does not know the history of his fatherland (otchyzna) and tell it to those who ask about it would be considered ignorant. He alluded to the po­litical revival through his statement that he wished to explain how the Rus' state or domain (panstvo) had arisen and continued to the present day.¹²

Although the task of tracing the use and development of otchyzna in seven­teenth-century Ukrainian political discourse remains before us, the term had clearly taken on major significance as a designation for the Ukrainian lands and the Cossack Hetmanate in the Mazepian age and generation. The massive text of the Velychko chronicle, written in the 1710s and 1720s, provides ample evidence of the importance of the concept of fatherland in early eighteenth-century Ukrainian political culture.

Another mystery of the Velychko text is why a long-time resident of the Hetmanate and member of its general military chancery devoted so much at­tention to the Zaporozhian Sich or Kish and cast the Lower Dnipro Cossacks and the letters attributed to them as a moral authority and voice of tradition.¹⁴ This preference of the learned scribe of the Hetmanate's chancery and servitor of the Hetmanate's elite poses additional problems for an examination of the uses of “fatherland” in the text because otchyzna frequently occurs in letters from the Sich Cossacks to the hetmans, therefore purportedly sent from the frontier outside the hetman's control.

The Velychko text demonstrates the shift in the conceptualization of the fa­therland from the old Commonwealth to Ukraine and its political structures. Of the scores of uses of fatherland, a few refer to the Commonwealth and occur in letters from Polish kings and officials, with the texts either in Polish or in Ukrainian translation.¹⁵ The translations in Velychko are a sign of the increasing cultural estrangement of the Ukrainian elite from the Polish world. In almost all other parts of the text, whether Velychko's direct narrative or the documents, uses of otchyzna refer to Ukraine. They often appear in the context of defending it against the Poles and the Commonwealth and are vivid examples of the po­litical alienation of the Ukrainians from the Commonwealth that had occurred during the Khmel'nyts'kyi Revolution.

This shift and new usage can be seen in the earliest part of the text in the letters ascribed to Hetman Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi. In a letter to the Crown Hetman, Mikolaj Potocki, at the outset of the revolt, Khmel'nyts'kyi criticizes the Polish lords' and officials' (such as Daniel Czaplinski's and “other inconstant Poles'”) depredations as making these good-for-nothings and drunks “traitors to their own fatherland, the Kingdom of Poland” (1:1:5, p. 23).¹⁶ That the Kingdom and the Commonwealth are no longer the Ukrainians’ fatherland is clear in the Bila Tserkva universal, dated June 1648, the purported full explanation by the hetman of the reasons for the revolt. In it, Khmel'nyts'kyi calls for support from whomever holds “dear the integrity of your fatherland.

We find many elements of the early eighteenth-century Ukrainian conceptu­alization of fatherland in the statements attributed to Khmel'nyts'kyi in the Bila Tserkva universal. The fatherland had become the land that should serve as the focus of its inhabitants’ identity and loyalty. While no polity existed at the time the Bila Tserkva universal was purportedly issued, in writings on or attributed to later periods the fatherland is the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Hetmanate. The fatherland was frequently called Little Rossian Ukraine, which for the eighteenth-century reader meant the territories where Khmel'nyts'kyi had established a new political order. The inhabitants and political elite of that fa­therland were to strive to maintain its wholeness, both in terms of unity and well­being. The defense of the interests of the fatherland was a justification for taking up arms. In essence the components of the seventeenth-century Polish concep­tualization of the ojczyzna had been adapted to the post-Khmel'nyts'kyi Ukrainian political culture. That political culture arose at a time of instability and shifting borders that make it imperative to carefully examine each of these uses of father­land in the text.

Numerous instances of otchyzna in the text illustrate that the fatherland was the focus of its inhabitants’ loyalty. Velychko, like the earlier Ukrainian historians, provided an explanation of why he wrote his work and for whom he intended it. He signed his preface as “a true son of Little Rossia” who wishes “to you, a reader of that same fatherland” all good blessings (1, p. 4). His history therefore was in­tended to inform and inspire the other inhabitants of the fatherland, emphasizing its anthropomorphic nature by calling them its sons. That sentiment appears in hetman Ivan Mazepa’s universal of 28 July 1692 against Ivan Petryk, in which the hetman maintains that the devastation of the Right Bank would bring tears to the eyes of “every well-wishing son of his fatherland” (3:33, p. 108). The fatherland for which its sons should care was a political entity under the hetman’s authority. In discussing the politics of the Right-Bank hetman Iurii Khmel'nyts'kyi and the Left-Bank hetman Iakym Somko, Velychko maintains that Khmel'nyts'kyi could have received a revision of the Pereiaslav articles through negotiation with the Russian tsar to the benefit “of the whole Little Rossian fatherland” (2:13, p. 26). “For the general good of our Little Rossian fatherland”, the Zaporozhian Sich Cossacks claimed they did not wish to question the election of Hetman Ivan Vyhovs'kyi, though he, unlike Khmel'nyts'kyi, had been elected without their consent (1:10:12, p. 170).

The fatherland in Velychko’s history was referred to as Ukraine, Little Rossia, and Little Rossian Ukraine. Before Khmel'nyts'kyi’s uprising, the geographic name Ukraina had referred to the borderland that was largely encompassed by the Kyiv and Bratslav palatinates.¹⁷ An even greater area, including as well the Chernihiv and Volhynian palatinates, was called the four borderland palatinates.¹⁸ The Khmel'nyts'kyi Uprising created a unity for much of the Ukrainian territory and demarcated political and social boundaries. After the revolt, Ukraina came to be associated with the lands of the emerging Cossack Hetmanate.

Little Rossia in various forms (Malaia Rossiia, Rosiia, Rus’ or Rusiia) had been revived at the end of the sixteenth century by the Ruthenian Orthodox clergy to refer to Ukrainian and at times Belarusian territories and was used on occasion in the title of the metropolitans of Kyiv.¹⁹ After the Pereiaslav Agreement, the name, along with Great Rossia, was adopted for the tsar’s title and Little Rossia became standard for the title of the metropolitan of Kyiv. It also came to be associated with the Cossack Hetmanate, though as a geographic name and an ethnonym Little Rossia-Little Rossian was still at times used for Ukrainian and Belarusian territories outside even the territories claimed by the Cossack Hetmanate.²⁰

Although we do not yet have a study of the exact geographic limits for these terms or the reasons for their varied uses in Velychko’s chronicle, one finds fre­quent mentions of both terms used to describe the Cossack Hetmanate, often with the clarification of “on both sides of the Dnipro.”²¹ Both terms are used to represent the fatherland and in nominal and adjectival forms are associated with the word otchyzna.²² One can see the alternation of both terms as synonyms in a letter by Hetman Doroshenko writing to the Zaporozhians once about “your fa­therland Little Rossia” and once about “your fatherland Ukraine” (2:12, pp. 296, 299).²³ Velychko combined the two geographic names in “Little Rossian Ukraine,” which is both frequently used as a name for the fatherland or appears in the ad­jectival form “Ukraino-Little Rossian” before otchyzna²⁴. It would seem that the use of “Little Rossian Ukraine” may have been an affirmation of the unity of the Right Bank and the Left Bank at a time when international treaties and rival ad­ministration and hetmans were dividing that unity.²⁵ It is possible that “Ukraine” referred more to the Right Bank and that the term “Little Rossia” was taking hold in the Left Bank, though there are many cases that do not correspond to this divide and in which Ukraine and Little Rossia are synonyms.²⁶

The major message Velychko addressed to all the sons of the fatherland was that they should care about its integrity. The Khmel'nyts'kyi Uprising had pro­vided a political unity for much of the Ukrainian territory that was breaking down throughout the late seventeenth century. Hence the constant appeals by all sides throughout the text are for the unity of the fatherland. The unity of the fa­therland is presented as of the highest value, especially as the chronicle reaches the period of multiple hetmancies and the division of Ukraine along the Dnipro, which was internationally sanctioned by the Treaty of Andrusovo in 1667. Blaming power hungry hetmans for this situation, Velychko laments: “From such action and such a situation, one Little Rossia that lies along both banks of the Dnipro, the unfortunate and fallen Cossack-Rus' fatherland” was divided in 1670 into three hetmancies and three parts, and he quoted the Bible on the consequences of a house divided (2:11, p. 238). The theme of the division of the fatherland and its negative consequences is often repeated. Indeed, Velychko explains having un­dertaken his history after having carried on military campaigns in the Right Bank and being moved by its devastation to explore how this situation had come about. In his introduction to the first work in the chronicle, he laments that the “once flourishing our Ukraino-Little Rossian fatherland” had become deserted (1, p. 3) and how he had collected accounts of the fall and decline of “our that-bank fa­therland.” A universal attributed to Mazepa against the Right-Bank leader Petryk asserts the hetman's efforts to maintain “the integrity of the whole Little Rossian country, the common fatherland of all” (3:33, p. 106).

The sons of the fatherland were to judge their political leaders by whether they acted for the benefit and unity of the fatherland. The Zaporozhians wrote to Vyhovs'kyi that they had not opposed his hetmancy, expecting good for the Lit­tle Rossian fatherland, but he had brought about the devastation of their Little Rossian Mother, “who has raised you from a miserable dung heap, enriched you, and made you worthy to sit next to princes” (1:11:6, pp. 196-7). In the Bila Tserkva universal, Khmel'nyts'kyi charges Ivan Barabash as being an “enemy and ill-dis­posed to our fatherland” (1:1:17, p. 51). In contrast Khmel'nyts'kyi is praised as being of “good intention for our fatherland” (1:11:6, pp. 195-6) and in a letter from the Zaporozhian Kish to Hetman Petro Doroshenko as “our good hetman, a gen­uinely well-disposed son of our Little Rossian fatherland” (2:7, p. 98). In another letter to Doroshenko, the Zaporozhian Kish otaman asserts that although a son “of our Little Rossian fatherland,” Doroshenko was not behaving in a filial manner in his treatment of the fatherland (2:10, p. 224). In a letter to Hetman Ivan Samoilovych the Kish otaman Ivan Sirko charges that earlier hetmans had only ostensibly been honestly benevolent builders and protectors of the fatherland (2:19, p. 469). In writing to Hetman Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi on his decision to accept the protection of the Russian tsar, the Sich Cossacks advise to do so for the benefit of “our Little Rossian fatherland and all the Zaporozhian Host”, but they call on him to make sure that there would be nothing in the pacts harmful to “our fatherland” or ancient liberties (1:7:2, pp. 93-4).

The interests of the fatherland are seen as worthy of the highest loyalty, above all in rising to their defense. Hetman Ivan Vyhovs'kyi, in calling on the Zaporozhi- ans for the support they had given his predecessor Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi, asked them to assist in the defense of the Little Rossian fatherland, for which they would be rewarded by God and their mother Little Rossia (1:10:12, p. 169).

Loyalty to the fatherland could even justify opposing the existing political order. The Bila Tserkva universal contains a call to take up arms in defense of the father­land. In Khmel'nyts'kyi's explanation for this call, the integrity of the fatherland accompanies religion and Cossack rights as a reason for joining the revolt. This justification purportedly occurred in a period before the Cossack Hetmanate ex­isted and when the Polish king was the legitimate ruler. Ukraine as the fatherland was being read back into the mid-seventeenth century in order to justify revolt against the Polish state, which was in fact viewed by many mid-seventeenth century Ukrainians as their fatherland. In texts about later periods, Khmel'nyts'kyi was held up as an example as the liberator of the fatherland.²⁷ Later in Velychko's work, discussions occur of taking up arms in defense of the new political order that had emerged from the revolt. Hence Velychko describes Hetman Ivan Briukhovets'kyi as calling for all to fight the Poles “for the faith and the fatherland” and then judges his victory in driving King John Casimir and 100,000 Poles “from his fatherland Little Rossia” as possibly greater than Khmel'nyts'kyi's (2:5, p. 84). The interests of the fatherland could also be used to justify changing sovereigns. In a letter to the Zaporozhians defending his seeking Turkish protection, Petro Doroshenko insists that when Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi had gone under the tsar's high hand he had not intended that their fatherland Little Rossia be divided into two or three, but that at Andrusovo the Russians and the Poles had divided the fatherland Little Rossia in two (with that part from Pereiaslav on going to the former and the part from Chyhyryn on and the holy city of Kyiv going to the Poles (2:12, pp. 298-9).

Velychko's chronicle and the numerous documents he cited (or created) illus­trate how the Cossack Hetmanate had come to substitute for the Commonwealth as the fatherland for early eighteenth-century Ukrainians. The political divides of late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Ukraine make for other shades of use of the term otchyzna. For the Left-Bank Hetmanate, the Right Bank, which contained the historic centers of Khmel'nyts'kyi's revolt and of Cossack history, was more and more cut off. The devastation of the Right Bank had resulted in resettlement to the Left Bank. Hence one can find in the mentions of “our that- bank fatherland” indication that fatherland is also being used in the sense of homeland or even “old country”. One also sees this in the attention to Chyhyryn as the old capital of the Hetmanate.²⁸

The second divide was the traditional division between the settled territory and the steppe. It also constituted the divide between the Cossack Hetmanate and the Zaporozhian Sich or Kish. The importance of the steppe region to Cossack history and mythology is seen in Khmel'nyts'kyi's Bila Tserkva universal. He calls Chyhyryn, Terekhtemyriv, Pereiaslav, Poltava, and other “Ukraino-Little Rossian cities and villages lying on both banks of the Dnipro” “our furthest borderland and last half-wild lands,” “our ancient fatherland.” He also calls them a center of staunch Orthodoxy coming from the times of Saint and equal-to-the-apostles Prince Volodymyr (1:1:17, p. 47). While the southern lands of the Hetmanate were connected with the unsettled steppe, the hetmans exerted less and less control over the Zaporozhian Sich after Khmel'nyts'kyi's time. After 1667 it even had a separate international status. Nevertheless, the connection between the Het­manate and the Sich was not only historical. The Sich Cossacks depended on the settled area for replenishing their ranks. Therefore, when they write about the Ukraino-Little Rossian fatherland in the documents attributed to them in Vely- chko's work, the fatherland at times has the meaning of land of their birth and origin, though also at times simultaneously this usage occurs alongside that of fatherland in the broader sense. The view that the Sich was outside the fatherland emerges most clearly in a letter by Hetman Petro Doroshenko to the Kish otaman and the Lower Dnipro Cossacks, maintaining because they lived in the Lower Dnipro fields “far from their fatherland,” they did not know what was occurring in the world or in their fatherland (2:12, p. 295).²⁹

The fatherland had taken on primary importance as an object of loyalty for the Mazepian generation. For that generation the fatherland was the Cossack Hetmanate and the Ukrainian territory, not the newly forming Russian state and empire.³⁰ The problem that the Ukrainian elite faced in the early eighteenth cen­tury was what should happen when the interests of the fatherland and sovereign conflicted. The thorny nature of this problem is clear in the Bila Tserkva uni­versal, where all iniquities that led to Khmel'nyts'kyi's rising up in defense of the fatherland are attributed to the Poles, not the Polish king. Even in the texts that condemn Russian policy in Ukraine and depict attempts to overthrow or change sovereignty, the figure of the sovereign is avoided. Indeed, in the political debate of letters ostensibly between Petryk and the Poltava Cossacks, the Cossacks argue that wrongs could be righted by an appeal to the sovereign. Petrine policies, the division of Ukraine, and the exigencies of war ultimately forced Mazepa to choose between fatherland and sovereign. Yet as a reading of the Velychko chronicle shows, even after Mazepa's defeat Ukraine continued to be viewed as the father­land and a major focus for Ukrainians' loyalty.³¹ How long Ukraine continued to be seen as the fatherland remains to be studied. Certainly, a new conceptualization of the Russian Empire as a fatherland contended with the Ukrainian concept in the eighteenth century. Yet the Ukrainian concept of otchyzna may well have sur­vived to the very end of the Hetmanate and served as a basis for the Ukrainian national revival of the early nineteenth century. Even if the concept did not remain vital throughout this period, the attention of the leaders of the national revival to the Cossack chronicles and the publishing of the Velychko manuscript in the 1840s to 1860s ensured that the early eighteenth-century view of fatherland shaped modern Ukrainian identity.

NOTES

Originally published as “Fatherland in Early Eighteenth-Century Ukrainian Political Culture,” in Mazepa e il suo tempo: storia, società / Mazepa and His Time. History, Culture, Society, ed. Giovanna Siedina (Alessandria: dell'Orso, 2004), 39-53. Copyright 2004 by Edizioni dell'Orso. Reprinted with permission.

1 The Skazanie o voine kozackoi zpoliakamy is published in Letopis'sobytii v Iugo-Zapadnoi Rossii v XVII veke, 4 vols (Kyiv, 1848-64). The first volume appeared in a new edition, which corrected the Russified orthography of the nineteenth-century edition, in: Samiila Velychka Skazanie o voine kozatskoi z poliakamy, ed. Kateryna Lazarevs'ka, Monumenta Litterarum Ucrainicarum 16 (Kyiv, 1926). In the present article, section, chapter and page number are given according to the 1926 edition for volume 1 and chapter and page num­bers according to the nineteenth-century edition for volumes 2 and 3. There is a modern Ukrainian translation by Valerii Shevchuk, Samiilo Velychko, Litopys, 2 vols (Kyiv, 1991).

2 I am opting for the usual translation of ojczyzna/otchyzna as “fatherland”, though I find much of merit in David Althoen's suggestion that the proper translation should be motherland because ojczyzna is feminine in gender and frequently referred to as a mother. David Althoen, That Noble Quest: From True Nobility to Enlightened Society in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1550-1830, 2 vols, vol. 1 (PhD diss. University of Michigan, 2000, revised for dma Printing and Publishing, 2001), 192-9.

3 See Slovnyk staroukrains 'koi movy XIV-XVst., vol. 2 (Kyiv, 1978), 111-12. One can find this use in the Synopsis in reference to Iaropolk Monomakhovych being driven out of his otchyzna. See Sinopsis, Kiev 1681. Facsimile mit einer Einleitung, ed. Hans Rothe. Bausteine zur Geschichte der Literatur bei den Slaven 17 (Cologne-Vienna, 1983), 254.

4 On Metropolitan Petro Mohyla's use of otchyzna nasha in a Church Slavonic work in reference to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, see Ihor Sevcenko, Ukraine between East and West: Essays on Cultural History to the Early Eighteenth Century (Edmonton-Toronto, 1996), 179. The rector of

the Collegium, Ihnatii Oksenovych-Starushych, used otchyzna in a similar manner in 1641 in his funereal verses for Prince Illia Chetvertyns'kyi. See Mykhailo Hrusevs'kyi, Istoriia Ukrainy-Rusy, vol. 8, pt. 2 (New York, 1956), 115.

5 For the use of fatherland in the Grand Duchy for both the Grand Duchy and the Commonwealth as a whole, see Arturas Tereskinas, The Imperfect Body of the Community: Formulas of Noblesse, Forms of Nationhood in the Seven­teenth-Century Grand Duchy of Lithuania (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2000), 57-8.

6 See Ewa Bem, “Termin ‘ojczyzna' w literaturze XVI i XVII wieku. Refleksje o jczyku,” Odrodzenie i Reformacja w Polsce, vol. 34 (1989): 131-57 and Althoen, That Noble Quest, 1: 190-215.

7 During the interregnum after the death of King Wladyslaw IV in 1648, Adam Kysil' insisted that it was impossible to negotiate with the Cossacks in the name of the Commonwealth, which meant nothing to them. He maintained the Cossacks only conceived their allegiance as to the king. See Frank E. Sysyn, Between Poland and the Ukraine: The Dilemma of Adam Kysil, 1600­1653 (Cambridge, ma, 1985), 149.

8 Althoen, That Noble Quest, 1: 217.

9 In the mid-sixteenth century Stanislav Orikhovs'kyi (Stanislaw Orze- chowski), of mixed Ukrainian-Polish parentage, referred to his patria as Rus' (Russia). This probably referred to Galicia, the Ruthenian palatinate. See Frank E. Sysyn, “Concepts of Nationhood in Ukrainian History Writing, 1620-1690,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 10, no. 3/4 (1986): 397. The first use of otchyzna referring to the Ukrainian or Ruthenian territories as fatherlands with seemingly a political context is by Zakhariia Kopystens'kyi in the Palin- odiia of the 1620s that has the affirmation “in our fatherland, that is in the Rus' land” (v otchizne nashei, to est' v zemli Ruskoi), see his “Palinodiia,” in Russkaia Istoricheskaia Biblioteka, tom 4: Pamiatniki polemicheskoi literatury v Zapadnoi Rusi (St Petersburg, 1878), col. 1055. If one presumes his use of “Rus' land” is taken from the Old Rus' chronicle tradition, one can see it as based in an appellation of an earlier Ruthenian polity.

10 On the political culture of Khmel'nyts'kyi's hetmancy, see Frank E. Sysyn, “The Political Worlds of Bohdan Xmel'nyc'kyj,” Palaeoslavica 10, no. 2 (2002): 197-207.

11 Polnoe sobranie russkikh letopisei, vol. 2 (St Petersburg, 1908), 233. The attribution of the bulk of the passage to Bielski was pointed out by Oleksii Tolochko in his introduction to The Hustynja Chronicle, compiled by Oleksii Tolochko, The Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, Texts, vol.11 (Cambridge, ma, 2013), lvii. He does not, however, point out the significance of Losyts'kyi's adaptation of the text to describe Rus' and the Rus' people

or nation or include these sentences in his comparison with Bielski.

12 Feodosii Sofonovych, Khronika z litopystsiv starodavnikh (Kyiv, 1992), 56.

13 See Mykola Petrovs'kyi, “Psevdodiariush Samiila Zor'ky,” Zapysky Istoryko- filolohichnoho viddilu vuan, no. 17 (1928): 168-204.

14 Velychko's biography is scanty in details outside of what he tells us in the history. He mentions that in 1690, in his teens, he began to serve in the Za- porozhian Host in the home of Kochubei and after fifteen years rose to serve in the General Military Chancellery. After Mazepa's execution of Kochubei and going over to the Swedes, Velychko was imprisoned for some years, but we do not know for what reason and what side he was on in those turbulent years. Freed about 1715, he settled in the villages of Zhuky and Dykanka in the Poltava area, where he wrote his history. One possible explanation for the pro-Sich sentiment is that the chancellerist wrote his work while residing in the Poltava regiment, which was closely tied to the steppe and the Za- porozhian Kish. On Velychko, see the introduction in the modern Ukrainian translation by Valerii Shevchuk and laroslav Dzyra, “Samiilo Velychko ta ioho litopys,” Istoriohrafichni doslidzhennia v ursr, no. 6 (1971): 198-223.

15 See for example Dominik Stanislav Polubyns'kyi's (Dominik Stanislaw Polu- binski's) letter to Hetman Mazepa on his political submission to the Russian tsars and hetman because of his return to his ancestral Orthodox faith. In this letter, the Flag-bearer of Smolensk still calls the Commonwealth, the father­land (otchyzna, 1694, text in Ukrainian, 3:35, p. 214). Also see the Galician castellan Wladyslaw Jozef Skarbek's speech in Lviv to the Ruthenians of 1694 (3:35, p. 247). Velychko describes it as given in the Latino-Polish language, but the text is in Ukrainian with Slavonic elements. For uses of ojczyzna in the usual Polish way, see the instructions of King August to the pre-Diet dietines (3 July 1698) (3: 38, p. 491).

16 The letter is dated 29 December 1648. However, as some other letters in this section are dated 1648, it belongs to the events of 1647 or early 1648.

17 On the name “Ukraine,” see George Y. Shevelov, “The Name Ukrajina ‘Ukraine',” in his Teasers and Appeasers: Essays and Studies on Themes of Slavic Philology (Munich, 1971), 199-206.

18 See this use in Adam Kysil's speech before the Diet in 1641 in Frank E. Sysyn, “Regionalism and Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ukraine: The Nobility's Grievances at the Diet of 1641,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 6, no. 2 (1982): 167-90.

19 See Zenon E. Kohut, “The Development of a Little Russian Identity and Ukrainian Nationbuilding,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 10, no. 3/4 (1986): 559-76, and Serhii Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford, 2001), 279-91.

20 For Velychko's limiting “Little Rossian Ukraine” to the Right and Left-Bank Ukraine, excluding Volhynia and Galicia, see 1, p. 3. Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi's Bila Tserkva universal was addressed to all Little Rossian Ukraine along both banks of the Dnipro and to more distant Ruthenian towns, but included in the provinces it called Sarmatian Cossack all the Ukrainian and Belarusian territories (1:1:17, pp. 46-7). Velychko refers to Lviv as a “Ruthenian-Little Rossian city” in discussing the late seventeenth century (3:35, p. 246).

21 See vol. 2:17, p. 391 for Little Rossia with the phrase “on both sides of the Dnipro” and of Ukraine divided into two or three. Also see 2:12, p. 296 and 2:9, p. 169.

22 We find the Zaporozhians writing in 1662 about “our Little Rossian father­land” (2:3, p. 36 II). Velychko refers directly to Briukhovets'kyi's “own father­land Little Rossia” (2:5, p. 84). For uses of Ukraine along with fatherland in nominal and adjectival forms, see, 2:12, pp. 297-8 and 3:34, p. 173. For alterna­tions of Little Rossia and Ukraine, see 2:13, pp. 332-3, in which the fatherland is referred to as Little Rossia and later the term “all Ukraine” is used.

23 One sees similar alternation of “our Little Rossian fatherland” and “Ukraine, our fatherland” in a letter on the Pereiaslav negotiations from the Zaporozhian Sich to Hetman Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi (1:7:3, p. 94).

24 For “our Ukraino-Little Rossian fatherland” see 1, p. 3; 2:3, p. 34; 2:25, p. 541. The Zaporozhians write to Doroshenko about “our unfortunate Ukraino- Little Rossian fatherland” (2:7, p. 98).

25 Brian Boeck has suggested in an internet discussion that “Little Rossian Ukraine” was used to differentiate it from other borderlands, or “Ukraines”, of the Muscovite and Russian state. I find no evidence of this in the Velychko text. There is no mention of any other Ukraine in the entire work. In addi­tion, the use of “Little Rossian Ukraine” decreases in the second part of the text on the period after 1658, when contacts with Russia are increasing.

26 Mazepa once refers to the Right Bank as “the fatherland Ukraine, the other- bank land” (3:33, p. 108). On the other hand, in writing about his travels on the Right Bank, Velychko referred to it as “our Ukraino-Little Rossian father­land” (1, p. 3) and at times refers to the Left Bank as “this-bank Ukraine” (1, p. 4). For use of Ukraine and Little Rossia as synonyms, with Left-Bank Lokhvytsia as located in Ukraine, see 1:12:1, p. 200.

27 A letter from the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Hetman Ivan Samoilovych declared that Khmel'nyts'kyi “liberated all our fatherland, Little Rossian Ukraine” (2:25, p. 541). In contrast Vyhovs'kyi is criticized in a letter from the Zaporozhian Cossacks for returning the Little Rossian fatherland, which had been freed by Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi from the Polish Kingdom only through great shedding of blood of the Cossack brothers, to the Kingdom (1:10:12,

p. 170).

28 See it referred to as the “renowned ancient and brave leaders' and your hetmans' capital” (2:17, p. 392).

29 In a letter from Otaman Sirko to Hetman Ivan Samoilovych, he writes of something affecting not only the Cossacks of the Lower Dnipro region, but also the entire Great and Little Rossian world, thus differentiating the Sich Cossacks from the Little Rossian world (2:19, pp. 469-70). Velychko discusses a call by the Crimean Tatars to the Zaporozhians to join them in a campaign against Little Rossia and an answer by the Zaporozhians that they would not fight against their Little Rossian fatherland (3:33, p. 105).

30 The chronicle has two instances in which “fatherland” appears to mean the Russian state. Dominik Stanislaw Polubinski not only called the Common­wealth his otchyzna, but asked to be accepted as a citizen (obyvatel) of the fa­therland (otchyzna) of their Tsarist majesties (3:35, p. 214). In a letter in 1695 of Patriarch Adrian to Hetman Ivan Mazepa, the patriarch calls for the need to extend the borders of the “Rossian fatherland (otechestvo) and autocracy” (3:36, p. 266). Whether the Russian term otechestvo was synonymous with Ukrainian otchyzna in this period is questionable.

31 Although generally favorable to Peter and negative about Mazepa's “treason,” Velychko condemned the tsar for not fulfilling his promises during the con­flict to the Little Rossian nation and the Zaporozhian Host to maintain and expand their liberties and for abolishing the office of hetman and erecting the Little Rossian Collegium (2:23, pp. 519-20). On the depiction of Russia in the Velychko chronicle, see Frank E. Sysyn, “The Image of Russia and Russian-Ukrainian Relations in Ukrainian Historiography of the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” in Andreas Kappeler, Zenon E. Kohut, Frank E. Sysyn and Mark von Hagen, eds, Culture, Nation, and Iden­tity. The Ukrainian- Russian Encounter, 1600-1945 (Edmonton-Toronto, 2003), 133-41.