A. Portnov, T. Portnova, S. Savchenko, V. Serhiienko, Whose Language...? Ab Imperio, 4/2020 the objectivity myth and emphasized the relevance of any historical text’s literary form but also, as some critics have argued, “denied the possibility 3 Andrii PORTNOV of fruitful professional discourse except within communities of believers.” White’s influential theory provoked no discussion in either Soviet or dias- Tetiana PORTNOVA pora Ukrainian historiography. During late perestroika, historians usually Serhii SAVCHENKO debated the challenges of writing new history in terms of “filling the blank Viktoriia SERHIIENKO spots” and overcoming Soviet censorship.4 There were Ukrainian scholars who responded to some of their Moscow-based colleagues’ call to embrace the methodology of the French Annales school and study mentalities,5 or make history a “true science” and study historical sources with mathematical methods.6 In the 1980s and 1990s, neither the drift toward historical anthro- WHOSE LANGUAGE DO WE SPEAK? pology and microhistory nor the strengthening of the traditional positivist Some Reflections on the Master Narrative approach by means of the historical method’s “machinization” helped to address the challenges of Metahistory. of Ukrainian History Writing One of the very first Ukrainian surveys of American poststructuralist his- tories warned that these encouraged scholars to take a narcissist stance and allow arbitrary analysis.7 Later a prominent Ukrainian conservative historian, Yaroslav Dashkevych, denounced White’s “extreme relativism” and warned against the dangers of this approach for “national history, in particular those nations that in the nineteenth century were defined as nonhistorical.”8 Inter- estingly, the Ukrainian translation of Metahistory has never been published, and it is hard to find enthusiasts of White’s model in Ukrainian-language “The past” becomes history only as thought, which is the historiography, unlike, for instance, the Polish historical profession.9 Why? negation of chaos and the selection of what is “important”: It seems that the majority of historians are not particularly interested in the “important” for my, “present” life. ... Therefore, from every epistemological problems posed to “empiricists” by “philosophical” analyses historical text we learn first of all about its author: about his of historiography, such as White’s. In particular, the question of choosing the worldview, ideology, etc., and about his generation and epoch. Lev Bilas, Ideology as History and as Poetry, 19611 3 Peter Novick. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American His- torical Profession. Cambridge, 1988. P. 603. 4 One of the most important texts was Serhii Bilokin’. Chy maiemo my istorychnu nauku? In Metahistory Hayden White contends that the past does not exist // Literaturna Ukraїna. 1991. January 10. 5 A. Ya. Gurevich. O krizise sovremennoi istoricheskoi nauki // Voprosy istorii. 1991. apart from its descriptions, language is not a neutral medium, historical No. 2–3. Pp. 21–35. narratives are constructed according to certain tropes, and that “we can tell 6 I. D. Koval’chenko. Kolichestvennye metody v istoricheskikh issledovaniiakh. Mos- equally plausible, alternative, and even contradictory stories without violat- cow, 1984. ing rules of evidence.”2 This rhetorical relativism not only deconstructed 7 S. I. Zhuk. Zakhidna istoriohrafiia ta epistemolohichni problemy istorychnoiї nauky // Ukraїns’kyi istorychnyi zhurnal. 1994. No. 1. P. 51. 1 Lev Bilas. Istoriia iak ideolohiia i iak poeziia (Z pryvodu dvokh novykh prats’ O. Ohlo- 8 Yaroslav Dashkevych. Postmodernizm ta ukraїns’ka istorychna nauka // Ukraїnski blyna) // Suchasnist’. 1961. No. 7. P. 48. problemy. 1999. No. 1–2. P. 116. 2 Hayden White. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. 9 See Ewa Domańska. Historia egzystencjalna. Krytyczne studium narratywizmu i hu- Baltimore, 1973. manistyki zaangażowanej. Warsaw, 2012. Pp. 25–50. 88 89 A. Portnov, T. Portnova, S. Savchenko, V. Serhiienko, Whose Language...? Ab Imperio, 4/2020 language for modeling the past is not perceived as methodologically impor- deviations. We also want to draw attention to some overlooked or forgotten tant. The Marxist-Leninist legacy probably does not have much to do with historical texts that deserve more attention today. Our essay does not aspire it. The advice of the Canadian historian Orest Subtelny in the early 1990s to cover all the possible topics or to present a comprehensive bibliography. to his Ukrainian colleagues – that they not abandon Marxism completely We see this text, based on our research and teaching experience in differ- because its cognitive potential has not been exhausted – was rather naive. ent fields of Ukrainian history, as an exercise in self-reflection that invites Subtelny implied that Ukrainian Soviet historians deeply interiorized the further investigations and discussions. Marxist approach and reminded that: “As the work of Eric Hobsbawm and … that of Roman Rozdolsky, demonstrates, it is possible to be a good histo- What is Ukrainian history? rian and a Marxist.”10 This could be true, but serving a regime that claimed to be Marxist-Leninist is not the same as being a Marxist. In the late Soviet Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s programmatic article announcing the deconstruc- Union Marxism was more a rhetoric, a collection of quotations that illustrated tion of the traditional scheme of interpreting Russian history appeared in Ukrainian in 1904 in a multilanguage collected volume published by the St. whatever thesis the authorities needed, a rhetoric more than a method. This 11 is why nobody took Subtelny’s advice particularly close to heart. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. At the time, Hrushevsky was a professor We would like to suggest that Ukrainian historiography en masse (as of East European history (“with Ruthenian the language of instruction”) at produced by thousands of university lecturers, researchers at Academy Lemberg/Lwów/Lviv University in the Habsburg Empire. In this article he of Sciences institutes, and independent scholars), since the second half of called for separate treatment of the three East Slavic nationalities’ histories as the nineteenth century and up to the present, has followed several main individual histories of different peoples (narody) and rejected the traditional, paradigms. Often overlapping, they have survived throughout all political state-focused approach. Hrushevsky postulated the continuity (tiahlist’) of Ukrainian history as the history of Ukrainian people and identified a se- regimes. The first such paradigm is empiricism as characterized by the cult ries of “national revivals” during its course. His call to clearly distinguish of “fact” and “historical truth.” The second is an understanding of the his- between the Russian state, the territory of Russia, and the Great Russian torical profession as a service to the nation/people. Not surprisingly, thus people brought Hrushevsky to a bold conclusion about the beginnings of broadly defined, the key tropes of these main paradigms have survived for Ukrainian history: many decades without significant change. We understand “tropes” as mechanisms for capturing and communicating The Kyiv period passed not into the Vladimir-Moscow period, but meaning in a most concentrated way, which inevitably involves elements into the Halych-Volhynian period of the thirteenth century, then into of symbolic language. Such tropes produce and sustain a logically closed, the Lithuanian-Polish period of the fourteenth–sixteenth centuries. The self-referential paradigm. Inside this paradigm, the language of ideology and Vladimir-Moscow state was neither heir nor progenitor of the state of Kyiv, it grew on its own root, and its relation to Kyiv can rather be politics directly converts into the language of scholarship, which is perceived compared with the relation of the Roman state to its Gaul provinces, as quite convincing by the community of likeminded “ours.” In other words, rather than the continuity of the two periods in the political and cultural we are talking about common symbolic resources allowing the incorporation life of France.12 of certain local subjects, themes, and personalities in the general historical scheme. These tropes set common parameters for understanding the course As a number of scholars have noted, Hrushevsky’s scheme had some 13 of history and the selection and interpretation of historical sources in a way unnoticed predecessors in the 1890s. Still, the modern scheme of Ukrainian that corresponds to the basic scheme. 11 By presenting and analyzing some of those tropes we want to reflect M. Hrushevsky. Zvychaina schema “russkoї” istoriї i sprava ratsional’noho ukladu istoriї Skhidnioho Slov’ianstva // V. I. Lamanskii (Ed.). Stat’i po slavianovedeniiu. St. on their intellectual genealogy as well as to show some alternatives and Petersburg, 1904. Vol. 1. Pp. 293–304. 12 Ibid. P. 299. 10 Orest Subtelny. The Current State of Ukrainian Historiography // Journal of Ukrainian 13 See D. I. Bahalii. Akademik M. S. Hrushevsky i ioho mistse v ukraїns’kii istoriohrafiї Studies. 1993. Vol. 18. No. 1–2. P. 42. (Istorychno-krytychnyi narys) // Chervonyi Shliakh. 1927. No. 1. P. 172; V. M. Zaruba. 90 91 A. Portnov, T. Portnova, S. Savchenko, V. Serhiienko, Whose Language...? Ab Imperio, 4/2020 history was duly associated with Hrushevsky’s name, particularly after the direct political opponent of the socialist Hrushevsky, but in terms of history