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Adrian MANDZY Stories of Khmelnytsky Adrian MANDZY Stories of Khmelnytsky. Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising /Ed. by Amelia M. Glaser (Stanford University Press, 2015) melia Glaser needs to be complimented on putting together the Stories of Khmelnytsky. Within 224 pages, the editor links the interpretations and Athoughts of well-established senior scholars from different fi elds on a high- ly controversial fi gure. The goal of the work is clearly stated as “without attempting to resolve, the fundamental literary questions Khmelnytsky’s image provokes: How can drastically different mythologies surround a single fi gure?” (P. 4). The answer, of course, is that this is the norm, as any individual may be a hero to some and a villain to others. Since the middle of the 17th century various individuals, groups and causes have manipulated Khmelnytsky’s multi-faceted legacy for their particular political agendas. Glaser’s work states that Khmelnytsky’s legacy in Ukraine is very vis- ible – his statue on a horse in Kyiv dominates the city’s central urban space and his image appears on the fi ve hryvnia banknote. At the same time Ukrainian historians are often at odds how to understand the actions and motives of the Cossack leader. For example, Viacheslav Lypyns’kyj (Ukrainana Perelomi, 1920) praises Khmel- nytsky for fi ghting against the tendency of the lower echelons of Cossack society who do not see the national signifi cance of the revolt. Simultaneously Lypyns’kyj chastises Khmelnytsky for wasting the energy of the masses by accepting limited autonomy when the Sejm ratifi ed the 1649 Treaty of Zboriv. Nowhere is the complexity of the issue more noticeable than when looking at the plethora of phrases that scholars used to discuss the events of 1648. Polish scholars often refer to the Khmelnytsky Uprising, but Ukrainians used different names: during the mid to late Soviet period it was called the War of Liberation (Vyzvol’na Vijna), some called it the War of Ukrainian National Liberation, others still refer to the event as the rebirth of the Ukrainian State or the Revolution of 1648. Scholars and the general public have long recognized that the events of 1648 were critical to both Poland’s and Ukraine’s development, but as the editor points out these events were also fundamental to Jews. Glaser is correct in placing the Jewish point of view into a narrative that far too often relegates the destruction of the region’s Jewish populations into the sidelines. Within Ukrainian scholarship inclusion of the Jewish devastation into the Khmelnytsky story is not new, but this work interweaves the desolation into a broad based perspective and places it within a proper context. 299 One point of contention in the work is that “Khmelnytsky’s legacy continues to affect Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, and Russian national identity” (P. 3). It is quite accurate to say that Jews, Ukrainians and to a degree Poles see Khmelnytsky as part of their identity, but it is much harder to claim this for the Russians. Russian general histories most often place Khmelnytsky in the context of “gathering the land of the Rus”, without a doubt a serious point of reference, but Khmelnytsky is in no way a cornerstone of national or even imperial identity. This idea is also challenged in TarasKoznarsky’s contribution, where he states: “In the Russian historical narrative, Cossack Ukraine is but a brief episode in the reign of Aleksei Mikhailovich”(P. 97). Many Ukrainian historians have claimed that Khmelnytsky, for better or worse, is what made modern Ukraine. In the ubiquitous Acknowledgements we learn that the book came out of a con- ference held in 2012. Published conference proceedings, by their very nature, are often discombobulated and are only held together by tenuous threads. The existence of a thesis goes a long way to bring together scholars who have an interest in the legacy of Khmelnytsky, but some gaps inevitably remain. There are a few glaring omissions, including no serious discussion of how Khmelnytsky and his command- ers were a point of reference for the Ukrainian revolutionaries of 1917, specifi cally the new regiment named in honor of B. Khmelnytsky. Formed in May of 1917, the Kyiv based regiment was attached to the 10th Russian Infantry Division but suffered its fi rst casualties from “Muscovite cuirassiers and Don Cossacks” while the troops traveled to the front on 8 August 1917 (Istoriia Ukrains’koho Vijs’ka, 1953, p. 362). Though Gennady Estraikh’s well written and insightful chapter discusses how the Soviet Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky was viewed by Jews in North America, the overall body of work pays only a passing reference to the UPA and their views of the Cossack leader who created the modern Ukrainian state in 1648.Such gaps are common when attempting to link together scholars from various disciplines, conti- nents and ethnicities. The work follows a general chronology. One of the most insightful chapters in the work is Adam Teller’s study of Natan Hanover. Hanover had fl ed his home in 1648 and later published his chronicle that directly linked Khmelnytsky with the Jewish massacres. Unlike other Jewish works, which blamed the Orthodox masses for the bloodshed, Hanover focused his hatred on the Cossack leader. Hanover, ac- cording to Teller, “paid signifi cant attention to the developments in the non-Jewish world that led up to the outbreak of the uprising and shaped its course” (P. 24). Tell- er argues that Hanover’s information about current events most likely came from personal contacts between Jews and non-Jews (P. 31). Teller recognizes Hanover’s view “though hostile” was “multifaceted, and in one or two places even ambivalent, suggesting a much more complex attitude toward the man and especially his cause” (P. 26). Teller’s claim is supported by Hanover’s discussion of two Jews who played an instrumental role in the events of 1648. One Jew was the arendarzz Zechariah So- bilenki, who informed on Khmelnytsky’s activities to his noble lord and employer, which led to Bohdan’s arrest. The second Jew was Jacob Sobilenki, who “was one of Khmelnytsky’s confi dants and helped him secure his release from prison” (P. 28). 300 Adrian Mandzy From this evidence it is clear that Jews and non-Jews not only shared geographic space, but were conscious of the events in each other’s communities. Additionally, these contacts shaped Hanover’s views of Khmelnytsky and in turn Hanover’s de- piction of Khmelnytsky as the person responsible for the fate of the Jews came to dominate Jewish popular consciousness. Goerge Grabowicz’s contribution deals with nineteenth century depictions of Khmelnytsky in Polish, Russian and Ukrainian literature. Grabowicz quantifi es this statement by saying “the separateness of the two literatures (Russian and Ukrainian) is neither fi xed nor clear in the fi rst decades of the nineteenth century” (P. 63). This statement suggests both Ukraine and Russia were heavily interlinked, which may not be the case. As an imperial power, Russia played a strong role in Ukraine, but Ukraine’s role in Russian society was far more marginal. An example of the mar- ginal nature of Ukraine in Russian consciousness is beautifully illustrated in the fol- lowing chapter by Taras Koznarsky (P. 89–90). In 1847, the police caught Mykola Kostomarov with an incriminating document. When questioned by the authorities Kostomarovstated that he copied the offensive literature from Khmelnytsky. As a result the police searched throughout the Empire for a man who had been dead for almost two centuries. Izabela Kalinowska’s and Marta Kondratyuk’s chapter on the various portray- als of Khmelnytsky in modern cinema bring a new dimension to the historiography. Polish, Soviet and Ukrainian fi lms are reviewed not for “historical accuracy” but the authors note the fi lms have “more to do with the ideological requirements of the pres- ent than with a restaging of an objectively ascertainable past” (P. 199). The majority of the discussion focuses on three fi lms, the Soviet Bohdan Khmelnytskyy (1941), the Polish With Fire and Swordd (1999) and Bohdan-Zinovii Khmelnytsky (2007). All three fi lms present Khmelnytsky as a character critical to the events of the mid 17th century but the most recent Ukrainian fi lm portrays Khmelnytsky as full of self doubt and powerless. The authors point out how this interpretation is at odds with the 1999 Polish portrayal of Khmelnytsky as “a man with a vision of Ukraine’s future” (P. 208). The article notes that the 1999 Polish fi lm is an adaptation of a 19th century novel which strips Khmelnytsky of his barbarity and “suggests a common ground for reconciliation and cooperation” between Poland and Ukraine (P. 209). Kalinowska’s and Kondratyuk’s analyses of the Soviet 1941 movie convincingly argued how this fi lm both fi ts the general Soviet fi lm genre of heroic leader, and merge together the question of nationality, religion and class warfare. The work is not without its faults and it is unclear for whom the book was written. Most of the non-Slavic speaking world is generally unfamiliar with Khmel- nytsky and the few English works on the Cossack leader are rather dated. Converse- ly, Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians are quite familiar with Khmelnytsky, but for many the English language is an obstacle. The number of western scholars who work on Khmelnytsky is rather small, as is the number of graduate students who study this part of the world. No book is free of typographic errors i.e. Mazepa was elected Het- man in 1687, not 1887 (P. 98), but the periodic use of Chmielnicki or Khmel’nitskii in place of Khmelnytskyis distracting.
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