Observations on the Problem of “Historical” and “ Non-historical ” Nations

There is a problem I wish to raise in connection with George G. Grabowicz’s comprehensive, erudite, and penetrating analysis of A His­tory of Ukrainian Literature by the late Dmytro Chyzhevsky, “Toward a History of Ukrainian Literature,’’ Harvard Ukrainian Studies 1, no.

I beg to disagree. Leaving aside for the present the question of super­iority and inferiority, I consider the concepts of historicity and non­historicity—or, alternatively, of completeness and incompleteness—of nations legitimate categories of historical cognition. They are relevant in the context of East European and particularly Ukrainian history.

Professor Grabowicz approaches the problem from the perspective of literary history. My chief concern is the broader socio-political connota­tions Ofhistoricity and non-historicity. But, following Grabowicz’s lead, I will begin the discussion with some remarks about the literary aspect.

Grabowicz insists that the literature of each nation should be studied in terms of that nation’s unique cultural experience and not through the ap­plication of extraneous criteria. He pointedly asks “why a literature ex­pressing one culture, one set of historical experiences and influences, should be a yardstick for another’’ (511). Rejecting Chyzhevsky^,s char­acterization OfUkrainian literature as the “incomplete literature of an in­complete nation,’’ Grabowicz cites the example of Oriental literatures — Persian, Turkish, Chinese—which nobody calls incomplete although they lack certain genres found in West European literatures.

But the relationship of Ukrainian literature to other European litera­tures is not the same as that of Turkish, Persian, or Chinese literature. The latter are products of altogether different cultural traditions and Western criteria are, indeed, inapplicable to them. There exists, how­ever, a European cultural community, based on the shared heritage of classical antiquity and Christianity and strengthened by centuries of in­tensive cultural-literary exchange. Ukraine is undeniably a member of the European cultural community, albeit a somewhat marginal one. This impels us to apply to Ukrainian literature the common European stan­dards and criteria. A Ukrainian literary critic defined this position in terms opposite to those proposed by Grabowicz:

To criticize means to compare; we compare two magnitudes to as­sess their value. For decades our literature, and for centuries our whole national life, could not afford comparisons. Like a growing child, struggling for sheer physical survival, we considered our­selves a self-subsistent value. Nowadays, no one among us can doubt any longer that the spiritual strength of a people must be measured by the same procedure as the spiritual (and physical) strength of an individual: by setting it off against the strength of those whose measure is already known.... Just as the entire future of our nation depends on its relations with the peoples and states of Europe, so the development of our literature is bound up with the literatures of the [other] European peoples—the smaller and the larger, those near us and those distant, those neighbouring and re­lated, those hostile and those friendly.¹

The genres and features of any European national literature are hardly ever peculiar to that one literature alone.

The incompleteness of a literature becomes particularly glaring when its missing features have been, so to say, transplanted to neighbouring literatures. Let us use a Ukrainian example. It is commonly accepted that classicism is but poorly developed in Ukrainian literature, being repre­sented mostly by the “low” genre of travesty. This does not mean, how­ever, that classicism was unknown in Ukraine. Writers of Ukrainian background made signal contributions to Russian classicism: they in­clude I. Bohdanovych, M. Hnidych, V. Kapnist, and V. Narizhny. But this very fact demonstrates the fragmentary and incomplete nature of the Ukrainian literary process of that age.

The problem may be approached from a different angle. What deter­mines the completeness or incompleteness of a literature is not the pres­ence or absence of certain features, but rather whether a literature can satisfy all the essential cultural needs of its own society during a given historical period. Applying this criterion, we would have to say that Ukrainian literature of the Kievan period was complete (despite its heavy dependence on Byzantine models), whereas Ukrainian literature of the second half of the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century was patently incomplete.

The incompleteness of nineteenth-century Ukrainian literature was perceived by contemporary Ukrainian observers. Thus Mykhailo Mak- symovych wrote in 1840 to a Galician correspondent that in Russian Ukraine “there can be no [complete] literature in the South Russian [Ukrainian] language, but only individual works,” such as those of Kot- Iiarevsky, Kvitka, Hrebinka, and a few others. According to Mak- symovych, the main vocation of the Ukrainian language and oral folk poetry was to enrich the Russian literary language that he considered common to North and South Russia.² These ideas were voiced not by a Russian chauvinist, but by a man profoundly dedicated to the Ukrainian national-cultural revival, of which he was a founding father.

Later generations of nineteenth-century Ukrainian intellectuals were less complacent about this state of affairs. Writers, literary critics, and publicists of the middle and second half of the century—Mykola Kostomarov, Panteleimon Kulish, Ivan Nechui-Levytsky, Mykhailo Drahomanov, and others—explicitly recognized the reality of the prob­lem and discussed various strategies for dealing with it. (This could be the subject of a fascinating study in literary sociology.) Ukrainian litera­ture rose above the level of a “literature for domestic consumption” and began to emerge as a complete national literature only at the turn of the twentieth century. This resulted, on the one hand, from a marked intensi­fication of the literary process and the appearance of a galaxy of gifted writers who broadened the thematic and stylistic scope of Ukrainian liter­ature. On the other hand, of no less significance was the emergence of Ukrainian scholarly and journalistic prose and the ever-expanding use of the Ukrainian language in schools and for public and official functions in the Austrian provinces of Galicia and Bukovyna.

The thesis that the completeness or incompleteness of a literature is determined by its social function implies that the problem is not purely literary, but rather primarily sociological and political. Chyzhevsky was quite right in stating that an incomplete literature reflects an incomplete nation. I will continue the discussion on the plane of socio-political his­tory, concentrating on the distinction between historical and non- historical nations.

The concept of a non-historical nation may appear to be a contradic­tion in terms: the nation, like every other social group, exists in time and therefore is necessarily historical. This objection can be met on two levels. First, not every duration in time possesses the quality of “his­toricity.” The evolution of a natural species, or the life of a colony of social insects, cannot be considered historical because they lack the spe­cifically human element of consciousness. Man is a being endowed with mind and consciousness; consequently, every human community is to some extent historical. However, the mode of existence of primitive tribes and ethnic groups possesses only a rudimentary, embryonic histor­icity. The potential for historicity becomes actual only when a community achieves self-consciousness. Second, in the context of nine­teenth-century East European and Balkan history, the distinction be­tween historical and non-historical nations has a specialized, technical meaning which will be clarified below. One could substitute other terms for “non-historical nations”: thus Mykhailo Drahomanov spoke of “plebeian” nations and classified Ukraine among them.³ I consider the terms “plebeian,” “incomplete,” and “non-historical” more or less in­terchangeable, but I prefer the last, along with its antonym, “historical nation.”

Where did this distinction originate? I have made no special study of the problem, but I am convinced that Professor Grabowicz errs in ascrib­ing its paternity to Herder (510); this attribution is most unlikely, be­cause of Herder’s anti-statist attitude and his glorification of folk and folk culture.⁴ Nor has the concept anything to do with Gobineau¹ s fanciful ra­cial theories, as Grabowicz suggests.

“historical” and “non-historical” nations practice of the Habsburg Empire. By the time of the 1848 Revolution, the terms were already current in publicistic literature. It was inevitable that in the heat of political controversy they were often misused for polemical and propagandistic purposes. Among those who sinned on this count we find the co-founder of so-called scientific socialism, Friedrich Engels.⁵ However, such abuses do not detract from the objective histori­cal validity of the concept. Robert A. Kann, the outstanding authority on nationality problems in the Habsburg Empire, classifies the peoples of Austria-Hungary into two categories: “the national groups with indepen­dent national history” and “the national groups without independent na­tional history.” Among the former he counts the Germans, Magyars, Czechs, Poles, Croats, and Italians; among the latter, the Slovaks, Serbs, Slovenes, Romanians, and Ruthenians (Ukrainians).⁶ Hugh Seton- Watson draws a similar distinction between “the old continuous na­tions” of Europe and the “new nations,” among which he classifies Ukraine.⁷

But in what did the difference actually consist? Was it determined by the presence or absence of an independent national state? Professor Grabowicz comments: “By the reason of the loss of political indepen­dence the Polish nation in the nineteenth century would also have to be called incomplete... ”(510). Here Grabowicz comes close to the core of the problem, but he misses the essential point.

It is true, of course, that no independent Polish state was to be found on the political map of nineteenth-century Europe. We must not forget, however, that Polish statehood did survive in part in the form of Napoleon’s Grand Duchy of Warsaw and, later, as the Congress King­dom. From the 1860s the Poles enjoyed extensive political and cultural autonomy, approaching a sort of substitute statehood, in Galicia. The ex­istence of the Polish nation was explicitly recognized by the great powers in the Treaty of Vienna of 1815, and it was at all times accepted as a mat­ter of course by European public opinion. More important, the Polish community itself had a continuous sense of its national identity, ex­pressed in an uninterrupted chain of political actions and in a rich, variegated cultural life.

I conclude that the decisive factor in the existence of the so-called his­torical nations was the preservation, despite the loss of independence, of a representative upper class as the carrier of political consciousness and “high” culture. Usually, as in the cases of Poland and Hungary, this up­per class consisted of the landed nobility. However, in the Greek Phan- ariots we find a stratum of merchant patricians fulfilling the same func­tion. Conversely, the so-called non-historical nations had lost (or had never possessed) a representative class, and were reduced to an inarticu­late popular mass, with little if any national consciousness and with a culture of predominantly folk character. This differentiation is not an ar­bitrary theoretical construct, for it is grounded in empirical historical reality.

Professor Grabowicz denies the validity of this criterion. According to him its acceptance would imply the absurdity that “every nation that ever ‘lost’ an elite or ruling class through war or revolution (the Czech, the French, the Russian, the Chinese, etc.) would be incomplete’’ (510). Here Grabowicz confuses two altogether dissimilar historical situations: a change in the composition of a national elite resulting from an internal revolution, and a total (or near total) elimination of a national elite result­ing from foreign conquest. In studying the history of the French, Rus­sian, and Chinese revolutions, we see a traditional elite overthrown and superseded by a new elite of the same nationality. Moreover, the revolu­tionary elite, as a rule, absorbed a considerable portion of the traditional elite (what comes to mind is Viacheslav Lypynsky^,s observation that only those revolutions succeed that are supported by a dissident segment of the former ruling class).⁸ Thus in the case of internal revolutions, whatever one may think of their merits or demerits, there is no cause to speak of a break in the basic continuity of national existence or of a loss of a nation’s “historicity.” In his classic L^, Ancien Regime et la Revolu­tion (1855), Alexis de Tocqueville irrefutably demonstrated the con­tinuity between the old French monarchy and the modem French nation bom from the Revolution. The same applies, as Richard Pipes and Tibor Szamuely have recently argued, to pre- and post-revolutionary Russia.⁹ There can be little doubt that the Soviet state, in both its internal and in­ternational aspects, is the heir and Continuator of imperial Russia.

The Czech case is radically different, and there is no justification for bracketing it with the nations that underwent a change of elite through an internal revolution. After the White Mountain calamity in 1620, nearly the whole of the traditional Czech upper class was wiped out by the con­quering Habsburgs, and the Czech nationality found itself reduced to the peasantry and the lower social strata in the towns. The Germanization of Bohemia had advanced so far that the great Czech scholar Josef Dobrovsky is reported to have predicted, in 1791, that the Czech lan­guage was doomed to extinction.¹⁰ However, this tendency was checked and reversed by several countervailing factors which cannot be discussed here. The reconstruction of a politically self-conscious, socially and cul­turally mature Czech national community occurred relatively early in the nineteenth century. Thus the disruption in the continuity of the national existence of the Czechs was less deep than, say, that of the Bulgarians. The Czechs may be regarded as a borderline case between the non-his- torical and historical nations of Eastern Europe.

The results of the preceding analysis can be summarized as follows. In

“historical” and “non-historical” nations the post-Napoleonic era, the whole of Eastern Europe, including the Balkans, was divided among three great empires—the Russian, the Austrian, and the Ottoman. (The Ottoman Empire gradually crumbled in the course of the nineteenth century, but Russia and Austria-Hungary re­mained intact until World War I, discounting the separation of Lombardy and Venetia from Austria in 1859-66.) The three empires included many nationalities, which can be roughly differentiated into two categories: those which even under foreign imperial rule had a recognized status, and those which lacked it. The determining factor was the presence or ab­sence of a traditional representative class. Among the nationalities of the second type, those labelled non-historical, new elites evolved in the form of the intelligentsia. National movements of that type had a populist colouring, and in time they were to display a remarkable vitality. Still, the national strivings of the two categories showed clearly different char­acteristics throughout the entire era. Traces of these differences are noticeable in the social make-up and the collective mentality of East European nations even today.

Let us now look at the emotionally charged question of the superiority and inferiority of nations, which I have deliberately set aside until now. It is undeniable that initially the historical nations enjoyed strong politi­cal and cultural advantages over their plebeian neighbours. However, “superiority” and “inferiority” ought to be perceived in relative terms. No group, no more than any individual person, can actualize all values simultaneously. Strength in certain areas is always compensated by defi­ciencies in other areas, and vice versa. In the course of time, an initial ad­vantage can turn into a handicap, and a dialectical reversal can occur (Hegel’s celebrated discussion of the master-slave relationship is an anal­ysis of such a reversal). It is possible to demonstrate that “historicity” was not always an unmixed blessing. In certain cases, it burdened a na­tion with an undesirable legacy. The Romanians, for instance, possessed a national historical existence of sorts in the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, semi-autonomous entities under Ottoman suzerainty. This helped the modern Romanian state to emerge relatively early, in the middle of the nineteenth century. But another consequence was that Romanian public life was infected by an unfortunate tradition of Ottoman and Phanariot mores. Thus, those Romanians who until 1918 lived under Hungarian rule, as an oppressed minority and a typical non-historical na­tionality, were superior in civic culture to their compatriots in the autonomous principalities and in the later united Romanian Kingdom.

While the non-historical nationalities were striving to construct mod­ern national communities on a popular base—from the bottom up, so­cially speaking—the historical nationalities were faced with the opposite problem: the extension of the national community from a pre-existing elite to the common people. (Magyar-speaking and Polish-speaking peasants stood outside the pale of, respectively, the historical Hungarian and Polish nations; these nations coincided with the corporately orga­nized nobility.) The process of social democratization made it imperative to endow the nation with a broad popular base and to transform the for­mer serf into a citizen.¹¹ This was not an easy or painless task, as il­lustrated by the tragic experience of the 1846 Polish national uprising in western Galicia, when the patriotic insurgents were massacred and delivered into the hands of the Austrian administration by the Polish peasantry of the region. The problem proved particularly intractable and, indeed, insoluble whenever the bulk of the population differed ethnically from the local upper class who were members of the historical nation.

The political ideologies of the historical nations were dominated by the concept of state rights and historical frontiers; the plebeian nationalities that happened to live within these historical boundaries were to be kept in a dependent position and, if possible, assimilated. Such overly ambi­tious, unrealistic territorial programs exacted a heavy price. The great Hungarian national revolution of 1848-9 was handicapped by the resis­tance of minorities (in fact, regional majorities)—the Serbs, Romanians, and Slovaks. Owing to a favourable political constellation and the skill of their leaders, the Hungarians achieved a brilliant success in 1867 (the so- called Austro-Hungarian Compromise): the recognition by the dynasty and the Vienna government of Hungarian statehood and its full internal autonomy within the historical boundaries of the Lands of Saint Stephen’s Crown. However, half a century later, at the post-World War I peace settlement, the Hungarian state suffered dismemberment and all non-Magyar areas were detached from it. The Poles, too, strove to re­store the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth within its pre-partition frontiers. Polish claims were opposed by the spokesmen for the newly emerged Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and later also Belorussian national movements. This issue aggravated relations between the Poles and their eastern neighbours. In the end, the Poles were forced to reconcile them­selves, however reluctantly, to the permanent loss of the eastern border­lands of the historical Commonwealth. The neo-Byzantine dreams of the Greeks—their “Great Idea” —were the cause of enduring Greek-Bulgar­ian hostility; they also enticed the Greeks, in 1920-22, into an ad­venturous policy in Asia Minor, with the known catastrophic results. Finally, one historical nation totally disappeared from the face of the earth—the Baltic Germans, who for centuries had ruled the native Lat­vians and Estonians, but lacked a popular base of their own.

The gist of the preceding discussion is that the concepts of national su­periority and inferiority are relative. I disagree with Professor Grabowicz’s view that these concepts can be dispensed with altogether. In dealing with a specific historical problem, we are obliged, by the strength of the evidence itself, to acknowledge the superior or inferior performance of communities interacting together. For instance, in study­ing the history of a war we can, quite objectively, conclude that the mili­tary effort of one state was superior to that of another. This applies to all spheres of social and cultural life. Confusion occurs only if criteria which are adequate for one sphere are uncritically extended to other spheres, or are generalized.

Let me now probe into the underlying theoretical assumptions of Pro­fessor Grabowicz’s rejection of “the differentiation, and, necessarily, evaluation of nations according to superior and inferior, historical and non-historical, complete and incomplete.” Grabowicz charges Chy- zhevsky with “evolutionist thinking” derived from nineteenth-century anthropologists (Grabowicz mentions Morgan, Tylor, and Bachofen) “who shared the basic premise that all human cultures follow the same path and pass through the same stages in their cultural evolution” (512). Evolutionism leads to the establishment of an arbitrary hierarchy in which nations are ranked according to how far they have advanced along the path of universal progress. In contrast, Grabowicz, apparently influ­enced by modern structural anthropology, recommends that each culture be comprehended “as a functioning whole” (512). Being a whole, a na­tion and its culture, including literature, by definition cannot be incom­plete. According to Grabowicz, Chyzhevsky⁹S evolutionism and his application of ostensibly universal—in fact, West European-Standards to the history of Ukrainian literature causes him to slight its “uniquely Ukrainian ‘substance⁹ ” (509).

I am no apologist for unilineal, universal evolutionary schemes which tend to blur the specific character of historical epochs, nations, and cul­tures. I think, however, that Grabowicz⁹S holistic approach contains the danger of an opposite fallacy: it exaggerates the uniqueness of nations to the point where they begin to appear as isolated, autarchic monads. It is painful to find a scholar of Professor Grabowicz⁹S erudition and sophisti­cation in the compromising proximity of “the ethnocentric, parochial and ahistorical perspective” against which he himself inveighs in a dif­ferent context (506). I share Grabowicz⁹S conviction that each nation possesses a unique “substance” (character, essence, or quality). But I know of no other way to define this unique substance than by the use of comparative methods. It is not that one nation should serve as a “yard­stick” for another, but that nations must be matched against each other. The cognitive work of the historian is here grounded in the reality of the historical process itself. History means a constant confrontation, interac­tion, and interpenetration of communities and cultures. The uniqueness of a nation actualizes itself through this very process.

There remains one last question which is related to the problem of the completeness and incompleteness of nations. This question possesses considerable theoretical interest and, in the case of Ukraine, great practi­cal relevance. Grabowicz states: “When some classes or groups disap­pear or are ‘lost’ there occur changes in internal make-up, in institutions, in social stratification, but the nation does not therefore die or become in­complete” (510). I wish I could share Professor Grabowicz’s optimism. But a nation is an articulate community of consciousness and will, not just an aggregate of individuals who happen to share a common language and certain ethnic traits. In past ages, when the carrier of national self­consciousness was a representative class, that class’s disappearance — through physical destruction or a loss of nerve—indeed amounted to “the death of a nation.” What remained was an amorphous ethnic mass, at best an incomplete nation. Such national decapitation occurred twice in Ukrainian history, each time followed by a rebirth: the first in the seventeenth century and the second in the nineteenth and twentieth centu­ries. Of course, modern nations have become democratized, extending in principle to the whole people. This broadening of the social base makes the “death” of modern nations unlikely, short of actual genocide. But the Ukrainian case has some unusual features. Owing to the repressive policies of tsarist autocracy, the process of what can be called “primary nation-building” was much delayed in Ukraine. It made great strides during the Revolution and the 1920s, but it was never carried through to completion. In fact, the process of nation-building was checked and partly reversed during the quarter of a century of Stalin’s rule. It is debatable whether Ukraine even today can be considered a complete nation—and here I refer to more than the absence of political indepen­dence.¹² As I have argued elsewhere, the present masters of Ukraine seem determined to perpetuate this condition of national incomplete­ness.¹³ I point to this fateful problem, but its full discussion transcends the limits of the discussion set forth here.

Notes

1. M. Rudnytsky, Vid Myrnoho do Khvylovoho (Lviv 1936), 9- 10, 11.

2. K. Studynsky, ⁴⁴Z korespondentsii D. Zubrytskoho,” Zapysky Naukovoho Iovarystva im. Shevchenka 43 (1901):25-8; cited from M. Iu. Herbilsky, Peredova Suspilna dumka v Halychyni (Lviv 1955), 100, and J. Kozik, Ukraihski ruch narodowy w Galicji w Iatach 1830—1848 (Cracow 1973), 250.

3. See the title of his Italian-Ianguage essay, “La Ietteratura di una nazione plebea,” Rivista Internazionale del socialismo, no. 4 (1880), listed in the “Spys prats M. P. Drahomanova," in M. Pavlyk, Mykhailo Petrovyeh Drahomanov, 1841 -1895: Ieho iubylei, smert, Uvtobiohrafiia ³ spys tvoriv (Lviv 1896), second pagination, xvi. The contrast and conflict between the “aristocratic” and “plebeian” nations of Eastern Europe is fundamental to Drahomanov’s political thought, and it is analyzed in sev­eral of his treatises and major articles.

4. Cf. I. Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (New York 1977), 157-8: “His [Herder’s] national feeling was not political and never became so.... He believed in kinship, social solidarity, Volkstum, nationhood, but to the end of his life he detested and denounced every form of centralization, coercion, and conquest, which were embodied and symbolized both for him, and his teacher Hamann, in the accursed state.”

5. Cf. R. Rosdolsky, “Friedrich Engels und das Problem der ‘geschichtslosen’ Volker. (Die Nationalitatenfrage in der Revolution 1848— 1849 im Lichte der ‘Neuen Rheinischen Zeitung’),” Archiv fiir Sozialgeschichte 4 (1964):87-282.

6. R. A. Kann, The Multinational Empire: Nationalism and National Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1848-1918, 2 vols. (reprinted, New York 1970). A detailed discussion of the two categories of nationalities is to be found in v. 1.

7. H. Seton-Watson, Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics OfNationalism (Boulder, Colorado 1977), especially chapters 2 and 4.

8. V. Lypynsky, Lysty do brativ-khiborobiv: Pro ideiu ³ Organizatsiiu ukrainskoho monarkhizmu (Vienna 1926), 38-9 and passim.

9. R. Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York 1974); T. Szamuely, The Russian Tradition (London 1974).

10. M. Souckova, “The First Stirrings of Modern Czech Literature,” Harvard Slavic Studies 2 (1954):259.

11. Cf. the observations of the Ukrainian sociologist Olgerd Bochkovsky:

Among peoples that possessed their own states, or the so-called historical peoples, the development of national self-determination proceeded from the top to the bottom.... Several centuries were needed to transform the corporate, estates- bound society [of the feudal age] into a modern class society, while nationaliza­tion gradually expanded into depth and breadth. Modern democracy favoured the national awakening and rebirth of the so-called non-historical peoples that represent the second type of genesis of European nations. Among them, the pro­cess of self-determination proceeded from the bottom of society upwards.

O. I. Bochkovsky, Nauka pro natsiiu ta ii zhyttia (a reprint of two pamphlets, Narodzhennia natsii and Zhyttia natsii, which originally appeared in Lviv in 1939) (New York 1958), 26. Bochkovsky defines the concept of historical nations too nar­rowly, restricting it to those endowed with continuous statehood.

12. In 1977, the Soviet Ukrainian dissident Iurii Badzo wrote in an open letter: “Owing to the circumstances of our history, the process of the national consolidation of our people still remains unfinished.... As a legacy of the Russian Empire, we received a disorganized national organism. Our national rebirth did not have the opportunity to establish itself firmly.” ⁴Turii Badzo hovoryt: ⁴Pravo zhyty,’ ” Svoboda, 1 Septem-

ber 1979, 4.

13. I. L. Rudnytsky, ^tbRusyfikatsiia chy Hialorosiianizatsiia?," Journal of Ukrainian Graduate Studies 3, no. 1 (Spring 1978):78-84.