1 Literature and Empire

DISCOURSE and counterdiscourse

The Russian Empire’s ambitious Southern campaign under Catherine the Great included two wars against Turkey (1768-74 and 1787-92) that led to the capture of the Black Sea coast, the annexation of the Crimea (1783), and the invasion of the Caucasus.

Cultural and political relations between Russia and Left Bank Ukraine already had a long history before the Napoleonic conflicts shaped the modern ideologies of imperialism and nationalism. Ukrai­nian statesmen, religious leaders, and artists and writers had figured prominently in Russian life since the time of Peter the Great. In the eighteenth century, Ukrainian culture had wielded enormous influ­ence within the empire. Harold Segel has described the “so-called Russian Baroque” as “not Russian but Ukrainian, and a Ukrainian strongly influenced by Polish models. Its zenith was reached in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries when the ‘Ukrainian school’ held hegemony over Russian literature.”² In 1721, following Peter’s victory over Sweden, the designation of tsardom had been adopted and Russia had been proclaimed an imperia, or colonial empire. Since that time the ideologists of empire and autocracy had frequently been Ukrainians. Following the Napoleonic Wars, the reas­sertion of an imperial identity was accompanied by the drive to inte­grate a millennium of history into an overarching imperial narrative - an operation that required the appropriation of Ukraine’s earlier history and cultural identity, a history that predated its political rela­tionship with Muscovy or the Empire.

Right Bank Ukraine, which had never been part of the Russian Empire, was initially seen as a more problematic case. It was viewed in ruling circles as “Poland” and only gradually in the middle of the nine­teenth century did this attitude shift, as, on the one hand, Ukrainians pioneered research into the history and ethnography of the territory and, on the other, imperial attitudes became more assimilative.

Constituting the discourse

of EMPIRE

The increasing contacts between Russia and Ukraine that occurred after 1654 had led to the realization that there were profound differ­ences. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century both Left and Right Bank Ukraine were still distinctly foreign entities to Russians; much of the history and geography of these two territories was still presented in integrationist narratives as intractable material. Accord­ingly, under the pressure of nationalist and imperialist ideologies, the project of “domesticating” Ukrainian history and culture became a priority. This project experienced large-scale interference from Rus­sia’s other imperial narratives, notably those, like the descriptions of the Caucasus and Poland, that were devoted to overcoming strong native resistance. Components of the imperial outlook toward the latter two surfaced periodically in discussions of Ukraine. They are evident in exhortations to demonstrate loyalty to the empire,justifica- tions for the imposition of political rule and cultural homogenization, condemnations of treasonous rebellions, exultations in military victo­ries, celebrations of economic enrichment, and constant reminders of a mission to civilize and improve.

Russian writing constructed a literary Ukraine through a series of dominant narrative structures, organizing metaphors, and tropes. These crystallized imperial discourse as a series of fundamental interlocking components: the anarchic nature of the borderland, the existence of a unitary Rus/Russian nation, the vastness, power, and glory of empire, the inevitability of absolutist rule, the organic Russian nation, Russia’s unique mission, the legitimacy of expansion, and the redemptive nature of assimilation.

Anarchic Borderland

One fundamental trope is that of the borderland. As such, Ukraine has also figured prominently in Polish literature, which also main­tained an imperial frame of reference for much of this period and which claimed Ukraine’s history and culture as its own. While Russia was expanding along its southern and eastern borders, Polish society continued to play a prominent role in much of Ukraine. Throughout the nineteenth century much of Polish society still dreamed of regain­ing within a future Polish state the Ukrainian territory it had lost in the late eighteenth-century partitions. Even after the loss of its own sovereignty, Polish society under Austro-Hungarian rule still domi­nated the cities, schools, and cultural life of Eastern Galicia, a territory that demographically was overwhelmingly Ukrainian.⁶ In Right Bank Ukraine, which found itself under Russian rule from 1793, the Polish gentry continued to play a leading role for much of the nineteenth century.

There are, consequently, interesting parallels between Russian and Polish representations of what both considered to be their Ukrainian “borderland.” In both literatures it is a “wild land,” a violent and often degenerate place that constitutes the limits of civilization and the boundary with Asia - a zone of dangerous cultural confrontation and mingling. Sometimes depicted as sparsely populated “virgin” land, sometimes as culturally amorphous, hybrid, or tainted with foreign influences, the borderland is nonetheless always seen as “belonging” to and requiring assimilation into the hegemonic and vastly superior metropolitan culture. In this way Ukraine played the role of a colonized “other” in the development of both a Russian and a Polish identity.

The adoption of the term “Ukraine” (Okraina, Ukraina) itself serves as an example of how the colonized must struggle to transform the language of domination. It is generally taken to mean “borderland,” although it has been claimed that when it first occurred in the Kyiv Chronicle under the date 1187, it was used in the sense of “the land around” or “the land pertaining to” a given centre.⁷ In the late sixteenth century the term was used extensively as a description of Poland’s bor­derland region and was adopted by Ukrainians to distinguish their nationality from the Polish. Ukrainians have also called themselves “Ruthenians” (ruski, rusyny, rutentsi) and “Little Russians” (malorosy). The latter term stems from the Byzantine manner of describing areas closer to Byzantium as “lesser” or “little” and areas more remote as “greater” or “great”: Asia Minor, Graecia Minor and Graecia Magna.

In Polish literature the idea of Ukraine as a barbarous eastern borderland appeared in the sixteenth century and was current in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when from 1569 to 1793 the country came under Polish rule.¹⁰ The most famous fictional portrayal, however, became Henryk Sienkiewicz’s With Fire and Sword (Ogniem i mieczem, 1884), whose treatment of the revolt of 1648 has been described as “the base line from which many Poles survey all Ukrainian relations.”¹¹ The defining metaphoric and narrative structures of Rus­sian literature appeared in the early decades of the nineteenth century, when the vast empire was imposing its rule over far-flung territories and conducting assimilatory policies under the guise of missions to civilize, enlighten, and modernize.

A Single Rus/Russian Nation

The construction of a literary Ukraine in Russian literature was com­plicated by ambiguities surrounding what constituted a nation and national identity. The pre-Romantic understanding of “natio” as a community of nobles united by political loyalty elided any reference to the peasantry. In the post-Herderian and post-Napoleonic period, the universalism of the Enlightenment was replaced with the concept of national uniqueness. Russian thinkers began to see peasants as the ethnic “source” of the national spirit. Polish and Russian writers turned to the Ukrainian peasantry to discover their own national identity and win broader political support. Like the Orientalist phase of British rule in India, this practice was partly a literary vogue, but it was also born of a political malaise that recognized the enormous and dangerous gulf between the ruling classes and the peasant sea around them: “Underlying Orientalism was a tacit policy of reverse accultura­tion, whose goal was to train British administrators and civil servants to fit into the culture of the ruled and to assimilate them thoroughly into the native way of life.”¹² A similar gesture was made by the Polish gentry when they attempted to forge a Polono-Ukrainian ideology and identity out of the Romantic revival. However, the revolts of 1830-31 and 1861 made clear the insurmountable religious/cultural/class divide between the Polish gentry and the Ukrainian peasants on the Right Bank. The Russian gentry also felt that the Ukrainian peasantry, by virtue of their Orthodox faith, related language, and history, should be included in a tripartite (triedinaia) “Russian” nation made up of the East Slavs (the Russians, Belarusans, and Ukrainians), which they often designated collectively as “Rus.” The “philo-Ukrainian” attitude could last only as long as Ukrainians accepted their role as members of such an imagined Rus nation. In much the same way as Anglicism, a movement that opposed the promotion of native languages and literatures in India, came to ascendancy in the 1830s, a russifying tendency accelerated when, after the 1840s, it became clear that many Ukrainian intellectuals refused the pan-Russian national identity and even appeared to hold separatist aspirations. In the course of conduct­ing research into their own national character through studies in folklore, ethnography, literature, and history, both Russian and Ukrai­nian intellectuals frequently reached the conclusion that they were, indeed, distinct peoples. Ukrainians made a point, in particular, of challenging and undermining the idea of a unitary Rus nation.

Vastness, Power, Glory

A literature glorifying imperial rule was a powerful factor in shaping public attitudes and disseminating a pro-tsarist ideology. It formed the background of expectation, the norm against which rare refusals of support or even rarer statements of opposition acquired signifi­cance. Extolling the empire’s vastness and military invincibility had by the nineteenth century become a well-established tradition among major writers. The Ukrainian Feofan Prokopovich (Prokopovych in Ukrainian) gave the ideology of absolutism a full and early articula­tion. His encomium to Peter the Great, delivered on 24 July 1709 in St Sophia Cathedral - in the tsar’s presence, on the occasion of the victory at the battle of Poltava - stands at the head of a long line of works glorifying state power and military success.¹³ It impressed the tsar and ensured a brilliant career for its author. Prokopovich’s cele­brations of power in a range of genres were subsequently emulated, so much so that when Adam Mickiewicz delivered his Paris lectures of 1842-44, he complained that Russian literature adored absolute power and expansionism, going so far as to depict the state as an entity without any borders marking the limits of its rule. Gavrila Derzhavin, Russia’s greatest eighteenth-century poet, was described by Mickiewicz as “a faithful representative of the idea of conquests. He encourages Russians; he applauds their triumphs; he denigrates and insults their enemies... In his ode on the fall of Warsaw one sees clearly the pretentious idea of the Russian Empire standing up to the entire universe in its omnipotence. Derzhavin says emphatically: ‘We need no allies. What use alliances? Take a step, O Russia, one step more, and the universe is yours!’”

Ewa Thompson has argued that Mickiewicz’s voice, like that of others arguing against the “pathologies of nationalism called empires,” was unfortunately consigned to “the archives of Central European thought, which the American community of interpreta­tion has ignored, privileging instead the Russian and German inter­pretive hegemony.”¹⁵ Derzhavin’s love of the sublime in all forms dovetailed with the idea of empire: he spoke of its glory and power, composing odes to celebrate military campaigns by General Aleksandr Suvorov in Europe and by Valerian Zubov in the Caucasus and Persia.¹⁶ Countless similar genuflections to vastness and invincibility by major talents, as well as by a host of epigones, served to legitimize imperial rule. Eighteenth-century Russian literature was later described by Vasilii Rozanov as “support of the government” and Georgii Fedotov dubbed it “the cult of empire, a genuine rapture in the presence of autocracy.”¹⁷

The Requirement of Absolutism

By giving writers a psychological stake in power and glory, the imperial mystique exerted a seemingly irresistible attraction and Conservatizing tendency. Nikolai Karamzin can serve as an example. Later in life he stopped writing literature in order to devote his energies to the influ­ential History of the Russian State (Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskogo, 1816-26). In this work, the cult of individual sentiment that had been his literary trademark gave way to the worship of a strong, autocratic state: “beginning as a reforming, almost revolutionary, force,” wrote Mirsky, “Karamzin passed into posterity as the symbol and perfect embodiment of Imperial Russia’s official ideals.”¹⁸ Karamzin felt that “autocracy founded and resuscitated Russia” and that any change in her constitution “has led in the past and must lead in the future to her perdition, for she consists of very many and different parts; what save unlimited monarchy can produce in such a machine the required unity of action?”¹⁹ Here he expressed full agreement with Tsar Alex­ander I, who stated that the “least weakening of autocracy would lead to the separation of many provinces.”^2o

Karamzin is an example of the intellectual who assumes the role of explaining and legitimizing the integration and colonization of subject peoples in the name of preserving a powerful state. This motivation led in the 1820s and 1830s to the invention of the concept of narodnost (nationality), which was later expanded to include non-Russian peo­ples and places, the concept of the new, imperial nature of Russian literature (one that served Russians and non-Russians alike), and the elaboration of a literary Ukraine, Caucasus, and Siberia.²¹ The argu­ment that Russia’s size required both an authoritarian regime and drastic assimilatory policies seduced historians over the following decades. Much more recently Christopher Hill has written that “mili­tary defence in that country of flat open plains demanded a highly centralized government under a single leader; and the autocracy sub­sequently survived to give some uniformity to administration for the medley of backward and illiterate peoples who composed the vast Russian Empire.”²² The same triumphalist Karamzinian rhetoric is employed in dismissing the viewpoint of non-Russians (“playthings of world politics”) and sanctioning repression against a supposedly obdu­rate, reactionary peasantry, as occurred in the requisitioning that led to the famine of 1921: “The grain was extracted, the cities fed and the revolution saved. Less than ten years later the cities repaid their debt by sending hundreds of thousands of tractors and harvesting machines to lighten the age-old toil of the poor and middle peasantry, now organized into collective farms; whilst the kulaks and speculators followed their leaders of the right s.R.’s into oblivion.”²³

Russia's Mission

Size and military successes inspired a sense of divine ordinance or his­torical inevitability. Like Aleksei Khomiakov, Mikhail Pogodin, and other contemporary writers, Tsar Nicholas I, who ruled from 1825 to 1856, had a powerful sense that Russia’s international conflicts had been and continued to be fought in the name of God and the true faith. The theme of a crusading “holy Russia” led by a true “Russian God” had emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century alongside the con­trapuntal theme of the hopelessness of resistance by smaller peoples.²⁴ Orthodoxy, autocracy, and narodnost - the three tenets of Official Nation­ality first announced by Count Uvarov in 1833 - fused into a mystical concept of Russia’s uniqueness and were used to justify its global histor­ical mission. Iver Neumann has described this concept as “a variant of Russian Messianism where the Christian idea of Moscow as the Third Rome was played down, but where the Christian historicism underpin­ning this idea was retained.”²⁵ Russian messianism was already evident in Vladimir Odoevsky’s Russian Nights (Russkie nochi, 1844), which fore­saw a “young and powerful” Russia showing mankind the way and occu­pying the “first place” among all nations.²⁶ It reappeared in many guises over the decades, assuming at times the mantle of a Pan-Slavist conquer­ing mission in Europe, at other times a civilizing absorption of Asia or a global calling. Nicholas Riasanovsky has written that “Russia expanded to become Slavdom, Russian destiny advanced to the Elbe, Vienna, and Constantinople. Indeed, the entire world was to be recast in response to this call of fate, through blood and iron if necessary. The Messianic Russian future called for an adventurous, aggressive, even revolutionary, foreign policy that represented the very opposite of the conservative and legitimist orientation of Nicholas I and his government.”²⁷

The civilizing mission was linked to the practice of Russification, which began to take hold in the reign of Nicholas I. The tsar demanded the use of Russian at court functions, in place of French, which had been the language of educated society. His administration and the min­istry of education under Uvarov “embarked on a great program of spreading knowledge of Russian in the non-Russian areas of the empire. Writers and journalists supported the same cause.”²⁸ At the same time the proponents of Official Nationality affirmed the superi­ority of Russian over other languages. Nikolai Grech, the grammarian, announced that “our language - one can say this confidently - is supe­rior to all the modern European languages.”²⁹ His colleague Faddei Bulgarin anticipated a future where everyone knew Russian: “The Rus­sian language, which without doubt holds first place in melodiousness and in the richness and the ease of word construction, is the language of poetry and literature in all the countries of the globe.”³⁰

The Organic Russian Nation

Iver Neumann has argued that the Romantic nationalist framework, which arose at the time of the Napoleonic wars, has defined Russian nationalist thought up to the present day. At its root lies the concept of the “organic nation, understood as a living being where each part is dependent on the others, and where no basic conflict of interest can therefore exist. The state is seen as the ‘head’ of the organic nation, embodying its will, defining its interests and defending it against harm­ful internal microbes and external onslaughts.”³¹ Ukraine, accordingly, was described as a limb of one body: “Little Russia is a living part of Russia, created by the mighty Great Russian spirit.”³²

The Russian state, like the Russian language, was held to have unique qualities and powers that made it irresistibly attractive to other peoples. Organicism and magnetic power became key points in the often-repeated argument that Russian expansion was nonviolent. Pogo­din contrasted the growth of Western powers, based on conquest, oppression, and conflict, with the rise of the Russian Empire, which he claimed was based on freely accepted invitations and harmonious relations: “Our state was founded on love, the Western states on hate.”³³ This influential idea was elaborated by Slavophiles like Aleksei Khomiakov and by Nikolai Danilevsky, who in his Russia and Europe (Rossiia i Evropa, 1869) spoke of smaller nations within the empire as destined to “gradually and imperceptibly fuse with” the dominant nationality, “be assimilated by it and serve to augment the variety of its historical manifestations.”³⁴ They were, in any case, “simply ethno­graphic material” serving another nation’s encounter with its destiny.³⁵ Another version of this argument was to admit the reality of violence but absolve the Russian intelligentsia of complicity and, of course, to accept the inevitability of complete assimilation. In 1910 a liberal pub­lication could admit the “terrible denationalizations that have filled the last fifty years” while simultaneously absolving the Russian intelli­gentsia of all responsibility, claiming that “not a shadow of coercion” was exerted by it on other nationalities.³⁶ In an article published in 1934 in Germany, the leader of the emigre Eurasianists, P. Savitsky, used a modified version of the same argument to claim that the organic nature of Russia’s “Eurasian” identity was unique. He asserted that the “brotherhood of nations” concept had always ruled Eurasia, where “great political unificatory attempts,” such as those of the Scythians, Huns, and Mongols, had always originated. Among the Eurasian peo­ples there had never been “higher” or “lower” peoples and “mutual attraction was stronger than rejection.”³⁷ The “brotherhood of peo­ples” slogan was also part of the official rhetoric of the Soviet regime.

Only in the 1920s and 1930s was this idea of organic growth and nonviolent assimilation challenged. Mikhail Pokrovsky, a Marxist his­torian, indicted the Russian Empire as having been built almost exclu­sively on aggression.³⁸ “Great Russia,” he declared, “was built on the bones of ‘aliens,’ and it is no great consolation to the latter that eighty percent of its blood flows in the Great Russians.”³⁹

Romantic nationalism, with its characteristic organicism and con­cern for cultural vitality, was used to justify policies of Russification after the two Polish revolts of 1830 and 1863, and consistently after 1880. It was the driving force behind the thinking of Slavophiles and Russian Panslavists, and it was the core faith behind such twentieth­century ideologies as Scythianism, Eurasianism, Smenovekhism, and Russian national bolshevism.

The Legitimacy of Expansion

Russian nationalists frequently claimed that all smaller and politically weaker peoples were to be made subservient to a morally and culturally superior Russia, which by virtue of its size and military strength was ordained to govern, educate, and assimilate. The literature of empire, in supporting this claim, played a role similar to its counterpart in the West: it was, in Edward Said’s words, if not “the origin and cause,” then at least “the vital, informing, and invigorating counterpoint to the eco­nomic and political machinery that we all concur stands at the centre of imperialism.”⁴⁰ Prominent literary figures upheld the right of expan­sion. Mikhail Lomonosov, in his “Ode on the Coronation Day of the Tsarevna Elizaveta Petrovna” (Oda na den vosshestviia na vserossiiskii prestol Ee Velichestva Gosudaryni Imperatritsy Elisavety Petrovny 1747 goda), advocated taking the Amur “from the Manchurian,” anticipat­ing that mountains of gold would then flow into imperial coffers; Ryleev and other Decembrists advocated the “liberation” of Mexico from Spanish rule and the annexation of California⁴¹; and Tiutchev called for the conquest of Constantinople by the Russian “state giant” in his “Dawn” (Rassvet, 1849) and mused on endless expansion in his “Russian Geography” (Russkaia geografiia, 1848-49):

Moscow and Peter’s city, and the city of the Constantines - These are the secret capitals of the Russian realm.. But where are its limits and where its frontiers

To north, east, south and west?

Seven internal seas and seven great rivers.

From Nile to Neva, from Elbe to China,

From Volga to Euphrates, from Ganges to Danube.

That is the Russian realm.. and it will never fade,

As the Spirit foresaw and Daniel prophesied.⁴²

Dostoevsky, who praised Danilevsky’s book Russia and Europe (1869), noted his disagreement with the author on only “one opinion”: for suggesting that after the Turks had been driven out of Constantinople, the city should be shared with Greece and other Slavic states. He wrote:

Such a conclusion is astonishing, in my view. What kind of comparison between the Russians and the Slavs can there be here? And who will establish equality among them? How can Russia participate in the ownership of Con­stantinople on an equal basis with the Slavs if Russia in every respect is unequal to them - to each little nation separately and to all of them combined? Had he felt like that, the giant Gulliver might have assured the Lilliputians that he was equal to them in all respects, but this would have been patently absurd, surely... Constantinople must be ours, conquered by us, Russians, from the Turks, and remain ours forever. It must belong to us alone.⁴³

His reasoning was that “only through Russia and her great centralized power can the Slavs continue to live on earth.” Without Russia, they would “disappear into the European ocean.” Their destiny was to merge into a “union of the Slavs” over which Russia would rule. Dividing the city would, in his opinion, only cause bickering and “hinder the union of the Slavs and halt the course of their proper existence.”⁴⁴ As for the non-Europeans, the cultural and racial supe­riority of Russians over Asiatic races, he argued in his Writer’s Diary (Dnevnik pisatelia), justified a civilizing and colonizing mission in Asia. He described Russia’s war against the Turks as “a great Christian cause” and called for the victory of the tsar.⁴⁵

Contemporary Russian nationalists often echo these sentiments. Neumann reports that the editor of Our Contemporary (Nash sovre- menik), Stanislav Kuniaev, was asked in 1990 by an Italianjournalist to explain the revival of Russian nationalism and answered, “The question is asked in an incorrect manner. Nationalism is for small peoples who fear extinction. The Russians are a great people. Russia speaks like Christ used to speak: come to me and share my spirit.”⁴⁶

Redemptive Assimilation

The expansionist rhetoric, particularly in times of military conflict, was bolstered by the idea that Russia’s size, might, and superior religious and cultural life were so irresistibly attractive to neighbouring peoples that they would willingly embrace an opportunity to become part of the state. Nineteenth-century ideologists argued for the redemptive nature of incorporation into the Orthodox and Russian state. Echoing the claims made by romantic nationalists for the Russian faith and language, they affirmed that “holy” Russia, as opposed to the sinful West, demonstrated a humane culture. Universal “responsiveness” was most famously claimed by Dostoevsky as “the principal capacity” of the Russians, something no other nation possessed. In his speech on the unveiling of Pushkin’s monument he claimed that this quality made Pushkin a national poet: “The very greatest of these European poets could never exemplify as intensely as Pushkin the genius of another people... Pushkin alone, of all the poets of the world, possesses the quality of embodying himself fully within another nationality.”⁴⁷

Katya Hokanson has pointed out that this supposed capacity of writers to represent the other “authentically” is “a version of reincar­nation - in other words, they do not merely represent, but actually embody, incarnate, the other.” Such a “capacity for mimetic simula­tion,” in Dostoevsky’s opinion, made Russian writers superior to Euro­pean and excused them from having to see or represent themselves as they appeared in any other people’s narrative.⁴⁸ It is an argument for the complete appropriation of another’s voice, a justification for the imperial monologue: the other language and author, it is being suggested, are not required; Russians, because they best understand foreigners, may assume the authority to speak for and about them. In fact, of course, Russian writers were merely mapping their own desires, fantasies, and ambitions, which frequently mirrored the imperial aspi­rations of the state or of nationalists. Apotheosizing the supposedly universalist spirit of the Russian “soul” over several generations was the literary counterpart to and equivalent of colonialism; it went hand in hand with the reality of conquest and forcible assimilation.

The Slavophiles and native soil conservatives (pochvenniki) of the 1850s and 1860s were particularly prone to such faith in the univer­sality of Russian culture. The idea, however, had already been expressed with reference to history, literature, and philosophy by Karamzin, Petr Viazemsky, Petr Chaadaev, and Mikhail Pogodin.⁴⁹ One pochvennik, Apollon Grigorev, however, sympathized with Kostomarov’s assertion of an independent Ukrainian cultural-historical tradition. He was a “cultural federalist and political decentralist who believed in regional self-administration but not in political separatism.”⁵⁰ His localism led him in 1863, as editor of the journal The Anchor (Iakor), to publish an unsigned article that defended the right of Ukrainian nationality to a life of its own.⁵¹ Other pochvenniki, like Dostoevsky, quickly distanced themselves from this position after the Polish revolt of 1863, fearing that localism would result in separatism. After 1864 Dostoevsky bolstered his faith in Russian cultural universality by com­bining it with the idea of Russian Orthodoxy as the highest point of human evolution.

Liberal thinkers, too, were caught up in expansionary schemes and redemptive scenarios. Vissarion Belinsky developed - this time out of universalist, Hegelian principles - a theory of nationality that ranked nations globally and insisted on Russia’s right, by virtue of her racial and cultural superiority, to assimilate them. The argument for a “pro­gressive” Russian assimilatory policy resurfaced in various contexts throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was an article of faith for Russian liberals like Struve and for many bolsheviks. A similar argument for the progressive nature of large nation-states and for the “reactionary” nature of small ones was also part of the Marxist tradition and, significantly, was vigorously contested by Ukrainian Marxists.⁵²

Russians, of course, borrowed their arguments for the redemptive and progressive nature of assimilation from Europe, appropriating the latter’s claims to be the initiator of cultural processes, the natural source of culture and innovation. The Russian ideology patterned itself on hegemonic ideas used by Western imperial powers: just as they claimed historical advantages and qualities of race and intellect, culture and spirit, that gave them permanent superiority over others, Russia, which by the end of the nineteenth century covered one- seventh of the earth’s surface,justified the conquest and assimilation of neighbouring nations and territories by claiming the same advan­tages, while simultaneously asserting that these neighbours lacked an intrinsically interesting history because they had been cut off from universal historical processes. Moreover, Russians were often moti­vated in their need for territorial expansion by a desire to emulate Europe, in order to establish imperial credentials. A sense of insecurity vis-a-vis Western states lay behind this desire to emulate. Dostoevsky’s comments from 1881 can serve as an example. He had carefully followed the Russian advance into Central Asia, and when the Turk­men fortress at Geok Tepe fell to Russian forces, he commented that Russia would finally gain Europe’s respect only by making further conquests in Asia. He described Asia as Russia’s “outlet to our future” and as an “undiscovered America.” The push toward Asia would pro­vide a “renewed upsurge of spirit and strength.” Above all, he admitted candidly, “In Europe we were hangers-on and slaves, while in Asia we shall be the masters. In Europe we were Tatars, while in Asia we are the Europeans. Our mission, our civilizing mission in Asia will encour­age our spirit and draw us on; the movement needs only to be started.” He spoke of the riches - metals, minerals, and coal fields - in these

boundless lands, that would “at once become Russian land in every place the Russ settled.” The subjugation of Asia would impress Euro­peans like no other arguments: “Europe is crafty and clever; she’ll guess what we’re up to at once and, believe me, she’ll begin to respect us immediately!”⁵³

The conviction that cultural hegemony was Russia’s birthright per­meated the concepts of race, nation, religion, class, and gender, pen­etrating a wide range of official and unofficial publications that systematically legitimized colonial attitudes. Conservatives, liberals, and radicals strove to preserve the state’s integrity, expand its bound­aries, and laud the benefits of assimilation to a superior Russian culture. AlfredJ. Rieber wrote that “outside the extreme left, begin­ning with Chernyshevsky, there was no anti-imperialist sentiment among Russian intellectuals and political leaders comparable to that in Western Europe in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.”⁵⁴ Alexander Herzen’s statement that “Ukraine must be recognized as a free and independent country,” which appeared in the thirty-fourth issue of The Bell (Kolokol), published in London on 15 January 1859, stands as one of very few - startling - exceptions to the rule.⁵⁵

Even though the violence of empires was condemned by some lib­erals and radicals from a humanitarian standpoint, nonetheless, as Georgii Fedotov put it, “the results of that violence were accepted as inevitable,” just as assimilation was accepted as “the inevitable result of civilization.” It was only a question of time: “Half a century more and all Russia will be reading Pushkin in Russian.. and all ethnographic remnants will belong in museums and specialized journals.”⁵⁶ By ignor­ing imperial history and the question of nationalities, added Fedotov, the liberal camp surrendered the field to Russian nationalist interpre­tations. As a result not only liberals but also, in part, the revolutionary intelligentsia accepted the “naive idea that the Russian state, in con­trast to all other Western states, was built not on violence, but through peaceful expansion, not through conquest, but through colonization. Similar convictions are typical of nationalists of all nations.”⁵⁷

There was also a profounder lesson that went unassimilated. A contributor to The Bell described the government as a vampire sucking the blood of the non-Russians and noted the deliberate policy of denationalization: “Our government, which dislikes pure nationalities, has always tried to mingle and reshuffle them as much as possible. Disjointed tribes are usually meeker, and it seems that the governmen­tal stomach digests mixed blood more easily, there is less sharpness in it.”⁵⁸ This view, which was shortly afterwards echoed by Engels in his comments on the Irish question, connected internal despotism with the oppression of another nation, insisting that the violence and cynicism inherent in such a policy inevitably rebounds upon and corrupts the perpetrator nation. The contributor to The Bell described the desire for territorial expansion as evidence of infantile and imma­ture desires:

The unity of the agglomeration, the preservation of its excrescences, the defence of undigested pieces swallowed with difficulty - all this is extraneous and inimical to the fortunes of a people. In the name of a strong, invincible empire the people were crushed and fleeced; in its name serfdom, bureacracy and compulsory conscription were maintained... The common people, those complete slaves, were robbed of all civil rights, while the conceited notion of the Russian Empire’s invincibility was maintained in them, as a result of which they developed both an arrogance towards foreigners and a cringing servility before the invincible authorities.⁵⁹

This argument - that the political practices and ideologicaljustifica- tions of imperialism ultimately profoundly damaged Russians as well as Ukrainians - was used in several contexts by advocates of Ukraine’s national rights, from Mykhailo Drahomanov in the 1870s to Viacheslav Lipinsky in the 1920s and Ivan Dziuba in the 1960s. The refusal of even the “Scottish variant,” which would have provided for partial recognition and a “limited form of assimilation,” led irrevocably to the growth of fierce opposition.⁶⁰

The Economic Benefits of Empire

Already in the eighteenth century historians had observed that the union with Ukraine had been the most important factor in the rapid growth of Russian power.⁶¹ In the nineteenth century the economic motives for conquest were frequently stated frankly, as the above comments by Dostoevsky make clear. In the conclusion of a play written in 1845, which described Ermak’s conquest of Siberia on behalf of the empire, Nikolai Polevoi wrote:

One eagle’s wing has touched

The diamond mountains of rich India.

The other is resting on the floes of ocean ice,

Waves of gold are flowing from the mines and sands of Siberia. The Bashkir, the Persian, the Mongol, the Indian,

and the Chinaman.⁶²

Urging the annexation of the Caucasus, one commentator wrote in 1862, “A territory will be annexed which abounds in metals, crops and cattle.”⁶³ In the early years of bolshevik rule Engels’ words that Russia should only be mentioned as the “detainer of an immense amount of stolen property” could be cited approvingly at party con­gresses,⁶⁴ and Mikhail Pokrovsky could examine the stark economic reasons for imperial expansion: “While the empire of Peter and Catherine only knew wars for commercial routes, the empire of Nicholas I opened the age of wars for markets, one of which, the Persian, very quickly fell almost entirely into the hands of young Russian capitalism. By the 1830s people had been dreaming about a campaign to India, and practical preparations were being made for the capture of all Near Eastern markets.”⁶⁵ Pokrovsky and later histo­rians have linked plans for the capture of Constantinople and the straits to assurances of grain exports. The empire made great efforts to settle the Black Sea littoral and develop its agricultural production. Soon the Ukrainian territories became known as the granary of Europe and more grain was shipped through Odessa than any other port in Europe. Because the trade was of major significance to the imperial economy, keeping the Black Sea and the Dardanelles open to shipping became a preoccupation of domestic and foreign policy. Calls for the conquest of Constantinople cannot be divorced from this economic imperative. The conquest of the Caucasus and Transcauca­sia has been similarly linked with the perceived need to extend the Russian customs boundary, and the Russian “spiritual mission” in Afghanistan and Central Asia has been described as a cover for com­mercial reconnaissance.⁶⁶ Some imperialists even had their eyes on ousting the British from China. Nineteenth-century Russian protec­tionism, concludes Pokrovsky, confronted English free trade “almost everywhere across the face of the earth.”⁶⁷

In the context of this inter-imperial rivalry it is useful to recall that the acquisition of Ukraine was frequently touted as the prelude to an economic bonanza, in the same way as its potential loss was frequently described as an irreversible blow to the empire’s treasury and strategic geopolitical requirements.

Mazepists, Little Russians, and Khokhols

Andreas Kappeler has suggested that three different attitudes toward Ukrainians should be distinguished.⁶⁸ Disloyal Ukrainians, those who in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were considered revolu­tionaries or suspected of conducting an independent foreign policy or of maintaining an anti-Russian orientation (pro-Polish, pro­Crimean Tatar, pro-Ottoman, and so on), were called cherkasy. After the revolt of Ivan Mazepa in 1708 they were collectively branded as mazepists (mazepintsy). The term was revived at the end of the nine­teenth century, when supporters of the national movement were sim­ilarly described as neo-mazepists.

Members of the elite who were not perceived as a threat, who had been coopted into the imperial gentry and were making their way up the social hierarchy through imperial service, were viewed as “Little Rus­sians” (malorossy in Russian). These loyal servants of empire, whose armies had helped defend and extend its borders and who had contrib­uted greatly to imperial culture, once acculturated and integrated into the gentry as a whole, were not considered a separate ethnic-national group but merely a colourful, regional variant of the Russian people.

The third term used to describe Ukrainians, khokhols (khokhly), denoted a peasant people, innocent and uncivilized, who lacked polit­ical leadership or rights and constituted human material to be con­sciously exploited by political elites. As the Ukrainian elite lost its local leadership function, it either assimilated and fused with the Russian hierarchy or dropped in social rank to the lowest level, that of the disenfranchized peasantry, or khokhols.

Ukrainians, as a people who were considered to be racially, confes- sionally, and linguistically related to Russians, were not discriminated against individually; indeed, as Little Russians they were encouraged and expected to assimilate. As an ethnos, however, they were fiercely discriminated against legally, socially, and politically, dispossessed of their very language, history, identity, and name in a way that racially, confessionally, and linguistically distant peoples were not. The choices for Ukrainians, therefore, were complete assimilation, persecution as mazepists, or being held in contempt as khokhols. The door, in short, was open to complete assimilation, but the refusal of this invitation was liable to the strictest punishment.

This conceptual framework has considerable heuristic value and allows for a nuanced reading of the colonial archive. It helps to explain the apparently incompatible attitudes held toward Ukrainians as a people by the mythmakers of empire, who might treat them as “brothers,” condemn them as duplicitous and disloyal, or ridicule them as ignorant serfs. They could appear in literature as honourable partners in empire building (Little Russians), treacherous enemies (mazepists), or colonized masses (khokhols). This conceptual framework also allowed imperial administrators and Russian writers to shift between depictions of a delightfully picturesque, related ethnic group, a brutal and inscrutable population of terrorists, and a malleable, naive peasantry. The various ideological operations justified the struc­ture of inequalities in society and worked to convert people to the imperial design.

OPPOSING the discourse of empire

Ukraine, whose different regions have spent generations under Polish, Russian, and Austrian rule, has been profoundly affected by the expe­rience of political subordination. For generations Ukrainian intellec­tuals have faced the dilemmas of accommodating to or resisting assimilationist pressures. Hegemonic attitudes expressed in neighbour­ing societies and literatures have been either absorbed, challenged, or transformed in Ukrainian writing. This heritage of interaction with a dominant cultural force is a prominent feature of contemporary liter­ature, because redefining what it means to be Ukrainian still necessi­tates a dialogue with hegemonic views. The counterarguments aimed at Russian colonial discourse might be summarized in negative terms: denial of a single Rus nation that included Ukraine and Belarus, rejec­tion of the claims of an organic Russian nation and of the authoritar­ian imperative, refusal of the legitimacy of Ukraine’s conquest and subordination, and denial of the idea that Ukraine’s union with Russia had produced or would produce economic riches. The fundamental constituents of the national counterdiscourse have emphasized the earlier existence of a protonational consciousness and the reconstitu­tion in the modern period of a strong national sentiment, continuities across generations, the country’s cultural distinctiveness, and historical integrity.

National Consciousness

The rise of Romantic nationalism in the first half of the nineteenth century not only generated the political and literary narratives that constructed the imperial vision and the identity of the Russian national state but also produced a counterdiscourse of national self­definition in Ukrainian society. While Russian writers were giving expression to a national consciousness of an imperial state, Polish and Ukrainian writers were “nation-building” in a different sense: they were attempting to instill pride in popular history and folklore, to “revive” or “construct” the national consciousness of stateless peoples. Different dynamics were shaping the three cultural processes: Russia was consolidating an empire; Polish society was developing an irriden- tist ideology aimed at the recovery of an independent state (which often, in their minds, included Ukrainian territories); and the Ukrai­nian intelligentsia was engaged in the creation of a self-conscious national movement. Writers sought to represent each nation as a cultural entity with its own history and unique identity, while establish­ing claims to cultural and territorial integrity.

There is a distinction, however, to be made between the kinds of nations represented by the Russians, Poles, and Ukrainians. Hegel and Engels had designated nations that had a long tradition of indepen­dent state life, like Poland and Russia, as “historical.”⁶⁹ In the nine­teenth century they had a nobility and a more differentiated class structure, and they controlled the cities both on their own ethno­graphic territory and on territories where Ukrainians were a majority. Because in the nineteenth century they could not point to a recent tradition of independent state life (a history), Ukrainians, on the other hand, were designated by Engels as a “nonhistorical people.” Ukraine’s past had been marked by greater discontinuities between epochs; it had lost most of its gentry to Russification and Polonization over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, after the cossack rebellions had failed to create a lasting, viable state; and by the nineteenth century Ukrainians were a predominantly “peasant” people. There was there­fore a distinction to be made between “state nations” like the Poles and Russians (even if in the case of the Poles statehood had recently been lost) and “stateless people” like the Ukrainians. Members of Russian and Polish societies were significantly better educated and had a more mature national consciousness. Consequently, there were important differences in the manner in which the claims of the three intelligentsia of the three societies could be presented and the “debate” conducted. Russia, for all its backwardness compared to Europe, summoned the resources of a powerful empire. Poland, for­merly an enormous power, mobilized an influential social elite that was dedicated to regaining its statehood. Ukraine, whose claim to exist as a political entity was vigorously denied by both Russian and Polish societies, necessarily relied on tactics of agitation and education by a small cultural elite. The first spoke from a position of strength, indeed hegemony; the second defended its case for much of the nineteenth century in a situation of political subordination but social dominance, not only in the Polish heartlands but also in Eastern Galicia and Right Bank Ukraine; and the third entered the debate from a position of both political and social subordination.

Ewa Thompson has recently argued for a taxonomy of nationalisms that could distinguish between defensive and aggressive models. The effort to “know and cultivate one’s own history and idealized tradi­tions” ought to be delineated from “Self-assertion through conquest and suppression of other traditions.”⁷⁰ For most of the last two centu­ries Ukrainians have treated their nationalism as a defensive posture, in the same way that Franz Fanon treated nationalism in The Wretched of the Earth. It was a reaction of the oppressed to the sickness of colonialism. Recent postcolonial theorists, like Leela Gandhi, have similarly argued that the interpretive community in the West has often failed to make these distinctions: “the antinationalist phobias of first- world thinkers and their readiness to attribute chauvinism to the assertions of nationhood by stateless or empire-dominated nations are echoes of a Hegelian perception of a ‘lack’ characterizing all but the strongest nationalisms of Europe.”⁷¹

Some limited advantages could be gained by Ukrainians from inter- and intraimperial rivalries. The Russian Empire tolerated a “loyal” Ukrainian patriotism in the 1820s as part of its search for a Russian identity and, after the Polish revolt of 1830-31, as a way of undermin­ing strong Polish influences in the Right Bank territories. By the second half of the century, however, as concerns about separatism spread, publication of Ukrainian books was banned or severely restricted by the Valuev and Ems edicts (1863 and 1876 respectively), and the national movement was outlawed.⁷² In Western Ukraine such an outright proscription did not occur, because the Austro-Hungarian Empire supported a weak version of the Ukrainian movement as a counterbalance to Polish dominance.

Throughout its history Ukraine generated intellectual elites who endeavoured to define and defend its separate cultural identity. They represented it as a nation with a history, contradicting mainstream Rus­sian and Polish intellectuals who throughout much of the modern period represented the national movement both to the West and to Ukrainians themselves as an “invention,” a “plot,” of Germany, Austria, or the Ottoman Empire, or of a few ambitious intellectuals. At stake, of course, was Ukraine’s right to exist as a political entity, a right that was resisted in Russia by the military, social, and economic powers of a repressive state. In the nineteenth century tsarist authorities, Slavophiles like Nikolai Danilevsky and liberals like Belinsky all argued, moreover, that Ukraine was already fully assimilated. Even the name “Ukraine” was avoided: “Little Russia” served official purposes, but this name was usually elided to “Russia” (or to “Rus,” which had the added advantage of amalgamating pre-Muscovite and non-Muscovite history into an apparently seamless whole). Ukrainian intellectuals presented the counterargument of historical agency: at points in history Ukraine had been an independent actor in the Polish-Russian-Ukrainian con­test; Ukrainians had played a role in constructing views of the “other” and “our” in the literatures of the three nations; they had a separate identity, and the failure to recognize this distorted the real picture of Polish and Russian identity as much as that of Ukrainian identity.

The identity issue is particularly difficult to disentangle in the first half of the nineteenth century, when many Ukrainian intellectuals appeared to speak with a Russian voice. The official Russian policy of encouraging pride in a Ukrainian identity (albeit as part of the wider imperial one) in order to counteract Polish influence led to the publication of Ukrainian histories and songs, the appointment of Mykhailo Maksymovych as the first rector of Kyiv University in 1834, and the growth of a “Ukrainophile” literature in Russian with strong anti-Polish and anti-Jewish sentiments. However, the doctrine of Offi­cial Nationality also fostered the idea of a purely Russian identity, as opposed to the “greater” Russian or imperial one.⁷³ Imperial military successes against Turkey and Persia and particularly against Napoleon in 1812 encouraged writers to speak of a universal mission for “Russia” and the “Russian people” and to attach metaphysical or mystical con­notations to the term “holy Rus” (sviataia Rus). By the second half of the nineteeenth century “holy Rus” came to signify a “greater” Russia into which the Ukrainian and Belarusan identities had been uncere­moniously collapsed. George Luckyj has written of the two contradic­tory stimuli - a tolerated, weak, loyalist, local Ukrainian patriotism and a powerful, aggressive, statist Russian nationalism - as generating the tension fundamental to a sense of Ukrainian identity at this time and as igniting the “slow-burning fuse of national consciousness.”⁷⁴

Continuities

Beneath the loyalist stance of many nineteenth-century Ukrainian patriots there lay inadmissible links with earlier oppositional attitudes. As Frank Sysyn has pointed out, the country was no tabula rasa for nation-building before the nineteenth century: the traditional elite had not been entirely extinguished, nor had it lost the memory of the two eighteenth-century polities abolished by the empire - the Zapor- ozhian Sich, and the Hetmanate.⁷⁵ The recollection of being a distinct political nation in control of a patria fuelled oppositionist attitudes and an emerging anti-imperialism among the new intelligentsia. Nineteenth­century intellectuals could turn for evidence of an earlier Ukrainian political consciousness to the eighteenth-century chronicles, particu­larly those of Hryhorii Hrabianka (1710) and Samuil Velychko (1720), which were republished in the mid-nineteenth century.⁷⁶ They could find this evidence in political documents like the anonymous “On Improving the Situation” (O popravlenii sostoianiia) from the 1750s, which argued for national state autonomy as a requirement of Ukrainian society, and in the “Appeal of the Little Russian Gentry” (Proshenie malorosiiskago shliakhetstva) from 1764, which proposed that Russia and Ukraine were equals and asked that the legal accords originally signed between the tsar and the hetman be respected.⁷⁷ The appeal, for example, called for a high level of internal autonomy, free election of the hetman, an independent Ukrainianjudicial system, control of the financial-budgetary system, territorial integrity of Ukrainian lands with clearly defined borders and custom-houses, an end to appointing priests from Russia who were unfamiliar with Ukraine, a return of debts owing in Turkish and Prussian wars, and the establishment of univer­sities, gymnasia, and printing presses. Other examples of oppositionist and pro-Ukrainian attitudes can be found among enlightened nobles like Count Aleksandr Bezborodko, Hryhorii (Grigorii) and Ivan Pole- tyka, and Vasyl (Vasilii) Kapnist.⁷⁸

Analogous attitudes were expressed in literature. The best-known examples are the long poem by Semen Divovych entitled A Conversa­tion of Great Russia with Little Russia (Razgovor Velikorossii s Malorossiei, 1762), the anonymous History of the Rus People (Istoriia Rusov), which was probably written in the early nineteenth century and soon circu­lated in scores of copies, and Ivan Kotliarevsky’s Eneida (Aeneid) (1798-1842), which has been described as a rallyingcry for the Ukrai­nian gentry elite, “through and through an argument for a modern, relevant national consciousness.”⁷⁹ By writing in the Ukrainian vernac­ular, Kotliarevsky was projecting a non-Russian readership, a different identity with its own evolutionary dynamic, sensibility, and horizon of expectation.⁸° In recent times his work has been interpreted as a veiled critique of imperial policies.⁸¹

Even the supposedly apolitical writings of Hryhorii Skovoroda can be read as a form of protest. His celebrated desire to escape from the world’s vanity and avoid a loss of identity can be read as a refusal of the Russian state-nationalism. “I refuse to follow the drum and enslave cities,” he wrote, “or to use my state position to intimidate the poor.”⁸² Strong antimilitarist and anti-imperialist sentiments occur in several poems: he quips that in search of peace “armies march, set fire to and destroy cities, continue bombardments for entire ages.”⁸³ In his “Con­versation on True Wisdom” he has Wisdom inform Man that she exists in all countries. When Man asks in astonishment whether this means that she also exists in China and other “barbaric” countries, she answers positively.⁸⁴ The writer’s message is that all national forms of life are equally valuable because the eternal meaning of life can be expressed in all of them.

Skovoroda’s belief in the secret inner light that provides identity and guides each conscience was an implicit rejection of civilizing missions and hegemonic notions. In both his teachings and his life he waged a countercultural struggle against the spirit of his time, with its “striving for profit, for power.. greed, cupidity, careerism, luxury and worldly cares.” To all of these he counterposed purity of heart, mod­esty, and simplicity.⁸⁵ When set against the metropolitan glorification of military campaigns and disparagement of foreign lands, these state­ments reverberate with subversive undertones. Russian scholars, as Chyzhevsky has pointed out, have completely ignored the Ukrainian context in order to interpret Skovoroda in terms of Slavophile views, going so far as to falsify quotations.⁸⁶ Chyzhevsky makes the point that Skovoroda’s sources (which were German and classical), his language (a modernized version of Ukrainian Church Slavic that served as the literary language of contemporary Ukraine), and his style all make him a typical representative of the Ukrainian baroque.

One of the key issues here is the evidence that a national elite had survived into modern times and was able, out of Romantic nationalism, to generate a new ideology of national consolidation and rebirth. It has been pointed out that in the last decades of the eighteenth century, as autonomy was being liquidated, the Cossack leadership, or starshyna, became extremely active in literature, publishing journals and newspapers and translating French philosophes, ancient litera­ture, and scholarly works of geography and medicine.⁸⁷ The use of the Ukrainian recension of Church Slavic had continued in the Kyiv Academy until Russian was introduced in 1784, and locally published books were used in educational institutions until they were banned by an imperial edict in 1785. It was the Left Bank gentry that succeeded in 1805 in founding and funding Kharkiv University, an event that had such an important effect on intellectual life in the early part of the century. The university’s staff and programme reflected Ukrainian demands for cultural visibility.⁸⁸ The various journals and almanacs that came from its press made a conscious attempt to portray the land and country in a positive light. In the first decade of its existence 210 books appeared - as many as in all the rest of the empire. The selection of themes and the purpose of the research conducted by intellectuals in the first decades of the nineteenth century (sometimes described as the “unconscious” awakening of patriotic feelings, the “unwitting” setting apart of the Russian and Ukrainian people, and “loyal” investigations of racial differences and separate origins in stud­ies by Mykhailo Maksymovych, Osyp Bodiansky, Mykola Kostomarov, and others) were indicative of a cultural-political agenda and perhaps not as innocent as their own declarations or as later critics have maintained. Even purportedly loyalist writings, when analysed in the light of imperial-national dynamics, reveal profound anxieties con­cerning the imperial vision. The surface of texts might not reveal ripples of dissent, but their deeper mythical and metaphorical struc­tures describe powerful political feelings. It is difficult not to agree with Sypovsky, who, in surveying Ukrainian themes in Russian literature in the first half of the nineteenth century, argued that the emergence of an anti-imperial Ukrainian literature reflected the survival of an old heritage. He saw the appearance of Shevchenko not only as a new beginning, an initiation ex nihilo of a new paradigm, but also as the culmination of a submerged, denied - yet potent - tradition.⁸⁹

Distinctive Culture, History, and Identity

Whatever the historical and political interpretation put on Ukraine’s cultural differences by intellectuals, the fact of its distinctiveness was attested to by a host of observers. Russian, German, French, British, and other travellers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries attested to the profound differences between Russians and Ukrainians. Feeding a separate political and historical identity was a vital indige­nous, vernacular culture that existedjust beneath the surface of offi­cially Russian, imperial life. To quote Mirsky, “Before the centralising reforms of Catherine, Ukrainian civilization remained very distinct from Great Russian. The people had their rich store of folk poetry, their professional itinerant singers, their popular puppet theater, their highly developed artistic handicrafts. Wandering scholars strolled the land; churches were built in the ‘Mazeppa’ baroque style. The one language spoken was Ukrainian and the Moskal was an exotic figure so seldom seen that the name was synonymous with soldier.”⁹⁰

Ukraine had developed a wide network of schools attached to the churches and serviced by deacons. But this popular education system, which was entirely lacking in Russia, was destroyed by Catherine when she eliminated the cossack order and enserfed the population. The historian Dmytro Bahaly calculated that the ratio of schools to popu­lation in Ukraine was higher in 1732 than in 1884 and observed a strong connection between the level of popular education and the strength of national consciousness: protests against Catherine’s reforms were strongest where the level of education was highest.⁹¹

The evidence of a distinctive popular culture was used by Ukrainian scholars to bolster claims to nation status. Published literature, songs, stories, and dramas were analysed by Mykola Kostomarov, Volodymyr Antonovych, and Mykhailo Drahomanov to demonstrate the existence of a protonational identity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centu- ries.⁹² Works of art, such as the painting of the Cossack Mamai, which enjoyed enormous popularity over centuries, have also been seen as encoding in symbolic form the national identity and will to survive.⁹³ It is important to remember the influence of this common, quotidian culture in considering the circumstances that influenced writers to take pro-Ukrainian and anti-imperial positions. Separated by political boundaries, nineteenth-century Ukrainians could still recognize a shared culture, history, and sense of identity, which they shaped into a national movement that led to the establishment of a state in 1917-19.

The nature of government in conquered territories, like the nature of colonialism, can, of course, vary. There were two distinctive features of the colonization of Ukraine. The first was the inclusion of Ukraini­ans among those who benefitted from conquest and settlement. Dra- homanov points out that the evidence of the political songs points to Ukrainians supporting and identifying strongly with the anti-Tatar and anti-Turkish campaigns.⁹⁴ This was partly because they had suffered for generations from military raiders from the South who had carried off booty and slaves and partly because they hoped to benefit from the imperial conquest of the Black Sea littoral. Although some Ukrainians did indeed benefit from the securing and settlement of new lands, as soon as the Turkish and Tatar threats had been eliminated, hundreds of thousands of free peasants and cossacks were thrown into another form of slavery - serfdom - or suffered from the imposed system of tsarist military colonies. The tsarist administration, in the words of one observer, was more fortunate than England, which had to travel to New South Wales in pursuit of its imperial designs, or than Holland, which had to purchase its own territories. Tsarist colonialism involved not expansion into overseas territories but into neighbouring lands.⁹⁵

The second distinctive feature of the colonization of Ukrainians was the imposition, alongside a colonial administration and economic exploitation, of a policy of full assimilation on a “consanguineous” people. The goal of full assimilation, according to Ivan Dziuba, was justified by a unique ideological construct: the state first recognized neighbouring peoples as equal citizens of the empire and bestowed all “rights” upon them. Only then did it make war upon them “to affix to them by any means whatsoever this equality and these rights. One result of this unique approach was that any resistance against the conquerors was designated in advance as ‘treason to the Father- land.’”⁹⁶ Dziuba has described as “clever, complex and flexible” the tactics employed to suppress, corrupt, and denationalize subordinated elites. The state made use of the “hypnotic power” of the universal and invincible mission of tsardom as the Third Rome, or as the liberator of the Slavic people from the Turks or other peoples, the policy of divide and rule, the use of informers, and Russification.⁹⁷ Especially effective, in Dziuba’s view, was the wide dissemination of the theories of a common Fatherland and consanguinity, which allowed Russian chauvinists like Mikhail Katkov, the “faithful Cerebus of abso­lutism,” and Vasilii Shulgin, a “symbol of antisemitism and Ukraino- phobia,” to employ a particular rhetoric of brotherhood, love, and liberation that is characteristic of Russian colonialism. These discourses constituted part of a Machiavellian process aimed at breaking down inward resistance, and they were often successful.⁹⁸

This political-ideological counterdiscourse of national resistance has been an inextricable part of the story of the emergence and evolution of modern Ukrainian literature. The latter’s rapid development in the nineteenth century has been described by George Grabowicz as a move from an underground existence in manuscript form in the early decades, to the status of a provincial addition to imperial literature, and finally, at the end of the century, into a differentiated, dynamic, and self-defining entity.⁹⁹ Grabowicz has also noted the rejection, from the first, of the imperial semantic system and normative poetics. In an important article on the different “horizons of expectation” of Russian and Ukrainian readers, he has pointed out that although the Ukrai­nian literature emerged from a wider context that it shared with Russian literature, the horizon of expectation for both literary publics quickly diverged. The awareness of a Ukrainian consciousness among Russians and the internal self-awareness of Ukrainians were quite different things. Russians held to an uncrystallized, single-culture con­sciousness throughout the century, continuing to view Ukrainian lit­erature as nothing but a literary experiment, a witty prank (umnaia shalost), as Nikolai Polevoi called it, long after it had developed into a form of national self-assertion for Ukrainians.¹⁰⁰ This development of Ukrainian writing into a differentiated literature was underesti­mated by Russian intellectuals. The reason lay partly in proscription but also partly in a politically induced myopia: the Russian readership’s horizon of expectation in the century’s second half embraced a nil admirari attitude at the same time as large sections of this public actively supported the government’s refusal to allow any publishing in or public use of Ukrainian.¹⁰¹ It is the thesis of the present study that the diverging visions conditioned by the two horizons were created by two contradictory dynamics: the imperial-colonial modelling of Ukraine in one and the generation of counterimages and competing narrative structures in the other. The denial of literary status was implicitly, and toward the end of the century explicitly, a denial of national status. The existence of a certain kind of writing - usually defined as educational, ethnographic, folkloric, or historical - could be registered as long as it was accepted that the writings were investi­gations into a dead literature. The theme of the death of Ukrainian literature, the Ukrainian polity, and sometimes the language were, in fact, prominent in both Polish and Russian Romantic writings. Throughout the century, political considerations, consciously expressed or unconsciously absorbed, continued to deny the literature any role as a serious intellectual medium.

THE romance of ambivalence

To this account of conflicting discourses and diverging national iden­tities should be added a note on ambivalence. The formation and portrayal of national identities in the cross-currents of debates on empire is a complex and fascinating aspect of Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian literatures. Polish literature “orientalized” Ukraine,just as Russian literature orientalized the Caucasus and, to a degree, Ukraine, in order to strengthen its own claims to membership in the “civilized” part of the globe and the empire-building club of nations. An often- cited complication in discussions of Polish and Russian identities, however, is their own ambiguous relationships to Europe. The insta­bility in Polish and Russian self-imaging stemmed from the fact that both identities were viewed by Westerners, and sometimes by them­selves, as semi-European or “oriental.”

Self-definition vis-a-vis Western Europe was inextricably intertwined with self-definition vis-a-vis one’s neighbours. Since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Poland and Russia first came into contact with an “alien” Ruthenia (Ukraine and Belarus) situated between them, writers of the different nations had traded in identity myths and stereotypes. The early writers distinguished between Ruthenia, or Ukraine, and Russia. Nineteenth-century writers drew on these earlier myths and stereotypes to produce canonical literary formulations. It is significant that the focus gradually shifted to a binary opposition between Poland and Russia and the elision of Ukrainian society. Mick- iewicz, in his lectures at the College de France, his “Road to Russia” (Droga do Rosji, 1832), and his Forefathers’ Eve, III (Dziady, ill, 1832) provided what Czeslaw Milosz has described as “a summation of the Polish position toward Russia.”¹⁰² Mickiewicz described Russia as rad­ically foreign. The Polish-Russian relationship was portrayed in terms of antinomies: good and evil, faith and heresy, culture and barbarism, freedom and despotism, spirit and matter.¹⁰³ Whereas Poland was seen as a leader among freedom-loving nations, Russia was portrayed as a threat to the world. The clash between nations was solved in an unforgiving manner. The “Wallenrod complex,” after Mickiewicz’s Konrad Wallenrod (1828), described a pattern of behaviour that sanc­tioned hatred and revenge against the enemy. On the other hand, already in Catherine the Great’s time Russian literature portrayed Poland as an equally foreign and inimical “hydra” that required slaying by heroic figures. Anti-Polish attitudes became particularly prominent in Russian literature during the two Polish insurrections of 1830-31 and 1863. Before the nineteenth century the Polish-Russian hostility reflected two states with competing imperial ambitions; after the par­titions of Poland it demonstrated two hostile national consciousnesses.

Such attitudes naturally influenced the Russian and Polish views of Ukraine. However, competition for the territory and patrimony of Ukraine restrained both Polish and Russian writers from drawing too radical a division between themselves and “the land of the cossacks.” In the Romantic period both literatures in fact created Ukrainian schools, which aimed at domesticating Ukrainian history and folklore within their own literatures. In Polish literature Juliusz Slowacki, Antoni Malczewski, Jozef Bogdan Zaleski and Seweryn Goszczyriski, as well as the minor writers Tymko Padura (Tomasz Padurra), Tomasz Olizarowski, Michal Grabowski, and Michal Czajkowski wrote on Ukrai­nian themes. In Russian literature the Ukrainian school was repre­sented not only by Ukrainians like Vasilii Narezhny, Vasilii Kapnist, Orest Somov (pseudonym Porfirii Baisky), Aleksei Perovsky (pseud­onym Antonii Pogorelsky), and Nikolai Gogol but by Russians like Kondratii Ryleev. These writers generally discounted separatist politi­cal claims but recognized and attempted to subsume Ukraine’s cul­tural identity within the larger Polish or Russian identity.

The literary Ukraine therefore had a highly ambivalent status in Russian and Polish literature. It was sometimes viewed as a sister Slavic culture and people, sometimes as a branch of the “greater” Polish or Russian. Moreover, it must be remembered that it was still possible in the nineteenth century, as it had been throughout the early modern period, for individuals to live in two cultures, to maintain a dual iden­tity and loyalty. Before the age of Romanticism a member of the elite order could express allegiance to two or more political-national com­munities (the larger state structure and the local realm). The recorded culture of a political nation (such as the Polish-Lithuanian Common­wealth or the Russian Empire) could therefore be seen as a lingue franche - like medieval Latin, the medium and heritage of more than one nation. At points in their history Ukrainian intellectuals viewed the use of Polish in the commonwealth or Russian in the empire in precisely these terms. From the mid-seventeenth century, as Ukrainian clerics moved to Muscovy and effectively took over Muscovite religious, educational, and intellectual life, a Ukrainization of Muscovite culture occured that resulted in an attempt to produce a common high culture based on a shared literature and ideology. In the eighteenth century, as imperial Russia moved to develop a high culture based on the Rus­sian vernacular and a secular literature, this common high culture was challenged by a process of Russification.¹⁰⁴ Nonetheless, in the eigh­teenth and well into the nineteenth century, Ukrainians could still claim to be making contributions to Russian imperial culture without denying their Ukrainianness. Writers like Prokopovich (Prokopovych), Kapnist, or Gogol, simply by virtue of writing in Russian, were not making uncomplicated declarations of identity.¹⁰⁵

By the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, however, those who still tried to maintain a dual Ukrainian-Russian identity were, increas­ingly, struggling with the issue of a divided loyalty. George Luckyj has described the choice for Ukrainians in the first half of the century as the horns of a dilemma: Gogol or Shevchenko? Empire or Ukraine?¹⁰⁶ As assimilatory tendencies progressed and the imperial concept of a political nation became closely identified with a single ethno-linguistic, or cultural, nation - the Russian nation - the idea of a disappearing Little Russian identity was frequently mentioned.¹⁰⁷ Ukrainian nation­alists reacted by increasingly enjoining their countrymen to reject this imperial identity and work in their native language for their own cultural nation, in expectation of eventually forming a separate polit­ical entity. As George Grabowicz has pointed out, it was only toward the end of the century that a shift to monolingual systems and to the demand that a “high art” (previously the prerogative of the cosmopol­itan, or “imperial,” function) occurred.¹⁰⁸ A similar pattern held in Galicia under Austrian rule, where the national movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries increasingly demanded a clear statement of loyalty and branded as apostates those who, like Ivan Vahylevych or Mykhailo Yatskiv, worked in Polish.¹⁰⁹

The important point here is that the intersection of political and cultural identities produced a wide spectrum of responses to the issues of empire and nation that is not amenable to simplistic formulation. The importation of Ukrainian churchmen, intellectuals, and artists begun by Peter the Great and continued by subsequent monarchs made imperial “Russian” writers out of many Ukrainians. It also pro­duced writers like Prokopovich, Kapnist, and Gogol, who manifested an acceptable dual identity: politically they were imperial Russians, culturally Ukrainians. As assimilatory processes accelerated in the nineteenth century, the trend moved toward an unambiguously Rus­sian identity, both politically and culturally. There are many examples of a slow assimilation or denationalization, a drifting across lines of demarcation and sometimes back again. However, at the same time as many individuals assumed a Russian (or, in Right Bank Ukraine, a Polish) identity, others moved in the opposite direction, exchanging their Russian (or Polish) identity for a Ukrainian one - a fact that caused consternation among members of the rejected culture, which claimed to be more progressive and enlightenned and therefore enti­tled to assimilate but not be assimilated. Significantly, the reasons given for making the transition to a Ukrainian identity were political: they were connected to an identification with the peasantry, a covert anti-imperialism or incipient nationalism. Volodymyr Antonovych and Tadei Rylsky made public cultural identifications of this nature in the 1860s, exchanging a Polish for a Ukrainian identity in Right Bank Ukraine. Mykola Kostomarov and Marko Vovchok (Mariia Vilinska) are famous, though more ambiguous, examples of a commitment to move from a Russian to a Ukrainian identity. This transfer of national and cultural allegiances is a largely unexplored phenomenon that affected many prominent figures in all three Slavic groups. There were also examples of the Wallenrod complex, individuals who hid their real loyalties while harbouring dreams of betrayal and revenge. Vasilii Kapnist, the Ukrainian nobleman who carried out a secret mission to Berlin in 1791 to request Prussia’s help in throwing off the imperial yoke in the event of a Russo-Prussian war, was one example.¹¹⁰ Imperial anxieties concerning such repressed national aspirations surface in nineteenth-century literary portrayals, particularly of Mazepa, Ukraine’s most famous Wallenrod.

There were stigmas attached to being associated with the less well- situated and frequently despised Ukrainian identity. The self-hatred that resulted from internalized class, cultural, and national stereotypes has been a feature of writing by Ukrainians for centuries. David Frick has described how in the seventeenth century the pressures of adapt­ing to the ideal of becoming a “political Pole” demanded a distancing from the societal image of the “unpolitical” Ruthenian bumpkin and caused intellectuals to shift ground in the confessional and cultural wars.¹¹¹ The loss of the Ukrainian upper classes to Russian and Polish cultures was lamented by intellectuals who criticized Ukrainians for lacking self-respect. Panteleimon Kulish did so in his postscript to Homestead Poetry (Khutorna poeziia, 1882).¹¹² Ivan Franko, Mykola Khvylovy, and Ievhen Malaniuk made the analysis of national self­hatred an integral part of their creative work and polemical writings.

Examples of identity-confusion among writers have been equally disconcerting for observers. They have been seen as the product of various forms of dissimulation, border crossing, passing, and mimicry. Ivan Franko, examining Ivan Vyshensky’s response to Polish cultural dominance in the early seventeenth century, marshalled evidence to indicate a typical response of the subaltern: “they [the Ruthenians] learned to hide within themselves their real thoughts, to say and do one thing, and to think another thing, whereby with time the mask became one with the face, such that individuals did not themselves even realize what was genuine and true in them and what was masked.”¹¹³ Writers were frequently caught at the conjunction of several opposing discourses, and as a consequence, the disjunctions displayed in their works traced the lines of discursive conflicts. One insight of feminist theory into discourse analysis is that

individual subjects should not be seen simply to adopt roles which are mapped out for them by discourses; rather, they experience discomfort with certain elements implicit in discourses, they find pleasure in some elements, they are openly critical about others. Individual subjects are constantly weighing up their own norms against what they assume other individuals or groups perceive their position to be. In this way, the process of finding a position for oneself within discourse is never fully achieved, but is rather one of constantly evalu­ating and considering one’s position and, inevitably, constantly shifting one’s perception of one’s position and the wider discourse as a whole.¹¹⁴

The writers and texts analysed here present many examples of such instabilities in self-assessment and shifts in self-positioning.

The two major interlocking discourses discussed might be viewed as forming what Mary Louise Pratt has called a “combat zone” in which “cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.”¹¹⁵ The Russian-Ukrainian power relationship was a complex one that dis­played reciprocities. It would be wrong to view it simply as a top-down model, a strictly ruler-ruled relationship. The presence of Ukrainians in the imperial administration at various levels, their involvement in contributions to Russian as well as Ukrainian cultural life meant that attitudes among Ukrainians toward imperial culture ranged from acceptance of assimilation in exchange for the recognized role of junior partner in empire-building, through various forms of coexist­ence, to the stubborn refusal of an alien civilization. Most often, however, it was a complicated negotiation that involved some complic­ity in the interests of survival, while allowing “native” resistance to be inscribed into cultural production in a wide variety of ways.

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