We Are Also in Europe! (…For Real?)

east central europe 41 (2014) 112-118

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I my v Evropi ! / We are also in Europe! (…for real?)

Ostap Sereda Ivan Krypiakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies

Being asked by the editors of the East Central Europe to comment on the mas- terpiece of a living classic of Central European intellectual history, Jerzy Jedlicki, I felt perplexed for rather a long time and could not start the response. Painting a big picture is a privilege of the big minds. Of course, even a humble attempt to imitate the great master could be at least a useful exercise of seeing beyond the specific temporal and regional context, to which I am adjusted as a typical case-driven historian. But my situation became even more problematic after the political crisis, closely intertwined with the issue of Ukraine’s negated belonging to the European space (however understood), erupted into desper- ate attacks of protesters and the brutal use of force by riot police on the central streets of Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. Inter arma silent musae? At the very beginning of his essay, Jerzy Jedlicki defines “borderland” or “province” through its dependence on the impulses from the “centers”— “venues, where discoveries and inventions were made, novel thoughts and ideas, institutions, and technologies tested.” These “centers,” although plural, formed the core of “European civilization,” while most of the countries that are normally defined as European today “remained provincial for a long time,” that is, they were unable to produce innovation by themselves and could only absorb foreign (ultimately Western) models by blending them with the local heritage. As a scholar of Ukrainian history, I immediately recognize a familiar pat- tern. One can, for example, find the similar stimulating impact of the Latin Church, and identical transfer of innovations through German-dominated patriciate and Jewish communities in the medieval towns of Poland and Ukraine. In fact, one should realize that often the very same towns are taken into consideration, since Professor Jedlicki outlines the story of the common Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The telling observation that “within the limits of the Commonwealth of the Two Nations, the further eastward one went, the weaker were the endeavors to attain a European orderliness” is exactly about the Ruthenian/Ukrainian “wild fields” of the Commonwealth, although not named as such. The Ukrainian narrative for obvious reasons

I my v Evropi ! / We are also in Europe! (…for real?) 113 becomes more peculiar since the mid-seventeenth century and especially since the end of the eighteenth century, but parallels remain striking. One can, for example, find identical attitudes to the respective immediate Western neighbor: similar to the Polish attitude to Germany is the Ukrainian attitude to Poland, in spite of the tremendous influence of Polish cultural centers, and it is marked by “an admixture of distrustful reserve.” And yet a scholar of Ukrainian history should rather question the scheme in which the West or Europe is seen as the only center that shaped the Eastern European borderland. It is clear that educated Ruthenian authors of the early modern and modern periods realized that the main cultural centers are far away from their country, yet often they took into consideration not only one, but several centers. Following the definition of the Eastern European borderland by the Belarusian intellectual Ihar Babkou, I would rather insist on its polycentric character. Perhaps it will indicate that the European identity of Ukraine (similarly to that of Belarus) is clearly much more questionable than that of Poland. To remain a “periphery of Europe,” a country first has to be rec- ognized as a part of Europe, and Ukraine is constantly not (explicitly or implic- itly). And even the fact that Ukraine has been sharing so much with Poland’s history and culture, also including its peripheral status, does not help in this case. Why? Partly because Ukraine has been sharing no less with Russia’s history and culture; and apparently even Professor Jedlicki admits that the Russian empire could be alternatively seen as “a periphery of the Western culture,” or as “a fundamentally different Orthodox or Eurasian civilization.” The leading Ukrainian historian, Natalia Yakovenko, who has studied refer- ences to the West and Europe in early modern Ukrainian texts, claims that for the first time the concept of Europe appears in a Ruthenian text in 1591, namely in the collection of poems “Prosphonema” that were recited by students of the Lviv Orthodox Confraternity school as a salutation. The term “Europe” referred then to a space where the Ruthenian/Rus’-ian people—rossiiskii rod—lived. One can also learn from the brilliant study of Professor Yakovenko that at the same period self-names based on the Greek forms, “rossiiskii narod” and “Rossiia,” began to be used systematically in opposition to Latin self-names for Rus’, “Ruthenia,” and “Roxolania,” and that “rossiiskii rod” figured in the very same line with Europe in “Prosphonema.” Probably it shall be mentioned en passant that a less scrupulous reader could, no doubt, read “Rossiia” from 1591 as an early manifestation of a pan-Russian national identity of the Ruthenians, yet such a superficial conclusion would simply ignore the late sixteenth- century context. The “choice of name” represented a choice between “East” and “West,” which seems to be a paradigm of modern Ukrainian history, although these east central europe 41 (2014) 112-118