Ostap Sereda
Cultural Politics and Contested Identities in an East European
Borderland: Ukraine in the Long Nineteenth Century
Additional information:
This course aims at the problematization of selected key topics of the 19th-century Ukrainian
history and, in particular, at critical reflection on the notion of an Eastern European borderland as
contested, polycentric and culturally diverse space. The conceptual repertoire of cultural and social
history, and case studies on the regions that constitute nowadays Ukraine shall help to go beyond
either traditional linear nation-state-centered paradigm or reduction of borderlands to the peripheral
zones framed by imperial centers. Instead, the local agency and responses to the Austrian or
Russian imperial policies, national inventions of tradition, complicated trajectories of cultural
transfers and contested identities will be in the focus of the course. The competing projects of
nation(s)-building, in particular attempts of educated elites at shaping new “high” cultures, will be
reconsidered through the prism of cultural politics. In general, the course will explore the
mechanisms of the cultural construction of modern social, national and regional identities in
Ukraine still before the main waves of political violence by Soviet and Nazi regimes profoundly
transformed the country.
Learning Outcomes:
Using Ukraine as an exemplary case of East European borderland the course shall help students to
rethink the main traditional topics (nation-building, intelligentsia and peasants, culture and identity)
of the modern history of Eastern Europe, and to practice new approaches and concepts of the
cultural and social history.
Assessment :
Each student is expected to make one presentation based on optional (additional) readings, to write
two critical reviews of mandatory readings (one-two pages long), and to submit at the end of the
course a research paper (or, alternatively, to take an “open book” exam). The final grade will be
based on the assessment of class participation (active participation in discussions) – 20 % of final
grade; seminar presentation – 20 % of final grade; two critical reviews of mandatory readings – 20
% of final grade; research paper / “open book” exam - 40% of final grade.
Suggested introductory/background readings:
Serhy Yekelchyk, Ukraine. Birth of a Modern Nation (Oxford 2007), esp. pp. 13-84.
For further references students may consult two standard histories of Ukraine (both available in the
CEU library):
Orest Subtelny, Ukraine. A History (Toronto 1988)
Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of Ukraine (Seattle 1996)
Additionally, the texts by Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky and Roman Szporluk may serve as useful
examples of the Ukrainian historical paradigm; the texts by Mark von Hagen and Andreas Kappeler
address key problems of the Ukrainian history-writing:
Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky, “The Role of Ukraine in Modern History,” in Ejusd, Essays in Modern
Ukrainian History (Edmonton 1987), 11-28
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Roman Szporluk, “Ukraine. From an Imperial Periphery to a Sovereign State,” in Ejusd, Russia,
Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union (Stanford 2000), 361-394
Mark von Hagen, “Does Ukraine Have a History?”, Slavic Review vol. 54, no. 3 (1995): 658-673
Andreas Kappeler, “From an Ethnonational to a Multiethnic to a Transnational Ukrainian History,”
in A Laboratory of Transnational History. Ukraine and Recent Ukrainian Historiography, ed. by
Georgiy Kasianov and Philipp Ther (Budapest: CEU Press, 2009), 51-80
COURSE OUTLINE AND READINGS
1. Short theoretical introduction: borderland and identity, culture and politics
Ihar Babkou, “Ethics of the Borderland: Transculturalism as Belarussian Experience,” Crossroads
Digest no. 1 (2006): 8-17;
Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity’,” Theory and Society 29 (2000): 1-47;
Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” “Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870191,” in E.Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge1983), 1-14.
Additional:
Peter Burke, What is Cultural History? (Cambridge 2004), 49-126.
2. Repertoire of cultural traditions and identities in Ukraine prior to the 19th century
Serhii Plokhy, Tsars and Cossacks. A Study in Iconography (Cambridge, Mass 2002), 1-3, 5-18
(chapter 1: “Cossack Identity”); 45-54 (chapter 4: “The Image of the Hetman”); 63-72 (chapter 6:
“Cossacks, Bishops and Kings”); 73-75;
Barbara Skinner, “Borderlands of Faith: Reconsidering the Origin of a Ukrainian Tragedy,” Slavic
Review vol. 64, no. 1 (2005): 88-116.
Additional:
Gershon D. Hundert, “Jewish Popular Spirituality in the Eighteenth Century,” Polin 15 (2002): 93103; Karl E.Grozinger, "Tsadik and Ba'al Shem in East European Hasidism," Ibid, 159-168;
Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations. Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999
(New Haven 2003), 105-132 (chapter 6: “Early Modern Ukraine (1569-1914)”).
3-4. Cultural construction of imperial borderlands
Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia. History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford
2010), 1-62 (Introduction; chapter 1: “Inventing Galicia: The Josephine Enlightenment and the
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Partitions of Poland”), 63-110 (chapter 2: “Galicia Restored. The Politics of Metternich and the
Comedies of Fredro”).
Additional:
Kelly O’Neill, “Constructing Imperial Identity in the Borderland: Architecture, Islam and the
Renovation of the Crimean Landscape,” in Ab Imperio 2 (2006): 163-192.
5-6. Challenges of imperial integration and cultural assimilation
Andreas Kappeler, “Mazepintsy, Malorossy, Khokhly: Ukrainians in the Ethnic Hierarchy of the
Russian Empire,” in Culture, Nation, and Identity: The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter (1600-1945),
ed. by A.Kappeler, Z.Kohut, F.Sysyn, M.von Hagen (Edmonton 2003), 162-181;
Optional:
Zenon Kohut, Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy. Imperial Absorption of the Hetmanate
1760s-1830s (Cambridge, Mass. 1988), 237-298 (chapter 7: “Ukrainian Society Adjusts to the
Imperial Order”);
or
David Saunders, The Ukrainian Impact on Russian Culture, 1750-1850 (Edmonton 1985), 15-64
(chapter 2: “The Convergence of Ukraine and Russia”; chapter 3: “The Great North Road”).
Additional:
Alexey Miller, “Russification or Russifications?”, in Ejusd, The Romanov Empire and Nationalism.
Essays in the Methodology of Historical Research (Budapest: CEU Press, 2008), 45-65;
Richard Taruskin, “For Ukraine, He’s a Native Son, Regardless” [on D.Bortnyansky], in On
Russian Music (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2009), 53-57;
Oleksiy Tolochko, “Fellows and Travellers: Thinking about Ukrainian History in the Early
Nineteenth Century,” in A Laboratory of Transnational History. Ukraine and Recent Ukrainian
Historiography, ed. By Georgiy Kasianov and Philipp Ther (Budapest 2009), 149-168.
7-8. Cultural construction of nationality. Literature and identity
First class
Optional:
Edyta M.Bojanowska, Nikolai Gogol. Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism (Cambridge,
Mass 2007), 37-88 (chapter 2: “From a Ukrainian to a Russian Author”);
or
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Roman Koropetskyj and Robert Romanchuk, “Ukraine in Blackface: Performance and
Representation in Gogol’s Dikan’ka Tales, Book 1,” Slavic Review vol. 63, no. 3 (2003): 525-54;
Marko Pavlyshyn, “The Rhetoric and Politics of Kotliarevsky’s Eneida,” Journal of Ukrainian
Studies vol. 10, no. 1 (1985): 9-24.
Second class
George Grabowicz, “Three Perspectives on the Cossack Past: Gogol, Ševčenko, Kuliš,” Harvard
Ukrainian Studies 5, no. 2 (1981): 171-194;
Orest Pelech, “The State and the Ukrainian Triumvirate in the Russian Empire, 1831-47,” in
Bohdan Krawchenko, ed., Ukrainian Past, Ukrainina Present. Selected Papers from the Fourth
World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies (New York 1993), 1-17.
Additional:
John-Paul Himka, “German Culture and the National Awakening in Western Ukraine before the
Revolution of 1848,” in Hans-Joachime Torke and John-Paul Himka, eds., German-Ukrainian
Relations in Historical Perspective (Edmonton 1994), 29-44;
George Grabowicz, The Poet as Mythmaker. A Study of Symbolic Meaning in Taras Ševčenko
(Cambridge, Mass. 1982), 1-16 (Introduction: “Ševčenko’s Duality”); 147-162 (Conclusion:
“Ševčenko’s Mythopoesis”);
Elaine Rusinko, Straddling Borders: Literature and Identity in Subcarpathian Rus’ (Toronto 2002),
1-63.
9-10. Identity politics and imperial loyalties in the second half of the 19th century
First class
Optional:
John-Paul Himka, “The Ukrainian Idea in Second Half of the 19th Century,” Kritika: Explorations
in Russian and Euroasian History 3/2 (2002): 321-335;
Johannes Remy, “Panslavism in the Ukrainian National Movement from the 1840s to the 1870s,”
in Journal of Ukrainian Studies vol. 30, no. 2 (2005): 27-50;
or
Alexei Miller, The Ukrainian Question: Russian Nationalism in the 19th Century (Budapest:
Central European University Press, 2003), 61-95 (chapters 2-3), 155-177 (chapter 8).
Second class
Optional:
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John-Paul Himka, “The Construction of Nationality in Galician Rus’: Icarian Flights in Almost All
Directions,” in Ronald Grigor Suny and Michael D. Kennedy, eds., Intellectuals and the
Articulation of the Nation (Ann Arbor 1999), 109-164;
or
Paul Robert Magocsi, “Ukrainians and the Habsburgs,” in Ejusd, The Roots of Ukrainian
Nationalism. Galicia as Ukraine’s Piedmont (Toronto 2002), 73-82;
Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia. History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford
2010), 231-279 (chapter 6: “The Average Galician in the Age of Autonomy”).
Additional:
Daniel Unowsky, The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism. Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria,
1848-1916 (West Lafayette 2005), 52-76 (chapter 3: “The Ideal Monarchy: Galicia, 1880 and
1894”).
11. The issue of language in nation-empire relations
Johannes Remy, “The Ukrainian Alphabet as a Political Question in the Russian Empire before
1876,” Ab Imperio 2 (2005): 161-190;
David Saunders, “Russia and Ukraine under Alexander II: The Valuev Edict of 1863,” in The
International History Review 17, no. 1 (1995): 23-50.
Additional:
Alexei Miller, The Ukrainian Question: Russian Nationalism in the 19th Century (Budapest:
Central European University Press, 2003), excerpts;
Alexei Miller and Oksana Ostapchuk, “The Latin and Cyrillic Alphabets in Ukrainian National
Discourse and in the Language Policy of Empires,” in A Laboratory of Transnational History.
Ukraine and Recent Ukrainian Historiography, ed. by Georgiy Kasianov and Philipp Ther
(Budapest 2009), 169-210;
Witold Rodkiewicz, Russian Nationality Policy in the Western Provinces in the Empire (18631905) (Lublin 1998), 159-222 (chapter 5: “The language policy”).
12. Cult of Taras Shevchenko and nation-building
Ostap Sereda, “From Church - Based to Cultural Nationalism : Early Ukrainophiles , Ritual Purification Movement and Emerging Cult of Taras Shevchenko in Austrian Eastern Galicia in the
1860 s,” Canadian American Slavic Studies vol . 40 , no 1 ( 2006 ): 21-47;
Serhy Yekelchyk, “Creating a Sacred Place: The Ukrainophiles and Shevchenko’s Tomb in Kaniv
(1861-ca. 1900),” Journal of Ukrainian Studies 20, no. 1-2 (1995): 15-32.
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13. Contested names: national and individual
Iaroslav Hrytsak, “History of Names: A Case of Constructing National Historical Memory in
Galicia, 1830-1930,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 49, no. 2 (2001): 163-177;
Natalia Yakovenko, "Choice of Name versus Choice of Path. The Names of Ukrainian Territories
from the Late Sixteenth to the Late Seventeenth Centuries," in A Laboratory of Transnational
History. Ukraine and Recent Ukrainian Historiography, ed. by Georgiy Kasianov and Philipp Ther
(Budapest: CEU Press, 2009),117-148.
Additional:
Антон Котенко, Ольга Мартынюк, Алексей Миллер , «Малоросс», in: Понятия о России.
Ключевые общественно-политические понятия в России имперского пер и ода , ред.
А.Миллер, Д.Сдвижков, И.Ширле (Москва 2012).
14. Writing national history as cultural and political processes
Stephen Velychenko, “Tsarist Censorship and Ukrainian Historiography, 1828-1906,” CanadianAmerican Slavic Studies, 23, no. 4 (1989): 385-408;
Andriy Zayarnyuk, “Obtaining History: The Case of Ukrainians in Habsburg Galicia, 1848- 1900.”
Austrian History Yearbook 35 (2005): 125-151.
Additional:
Serhii Plokhy, Unmaking Imperial Russia: Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Writing of Ukrainian
History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005, excerpts.
15-16. “Intelligentsia” and “the people” (narod). The problem of “low” and “high” culture.
Cultural construction of peasantry
First class
Andreas Kappeler, “The Ukrainians of the Russian Empire, 1860–1914,” in The Formation of
National Elites: Comparative Studies on Governments and Non-Dominant Ethnic Groups in
Europe, 1850-1940, ed. By A.Kappeler, F.Adanir, A.O’Day (New York 1992), 105-132;
Serhy Yekelchyk, “The Nation’s Clothes: Constructing a Ukrainian High Culture in the Russian
Empire, 1860-1900,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 49, no. 2, (2001): 230-239;
Second class
John-Paul Himka, “The Transformation and Formation of Social Strata and Their Place in the
Ukrainian National Movement in Nineteenth-Century Galicia,” Journal of Ukrainian Studies vol.
23, no. 2 (1998): 3-22;
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Andriy Zayarnyuk, “Letters from Heaven: An Encounter between the ‘National Movement' and
‘Popular Culture , '” Letters from Heaven: Popular Religion in Russia and Ukraine , ed. by Ed.
John-Paul Himka and Andriy Zayarnyuk ( Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 2006 ), 165-200.
Additional:
John-Paul Himka, Galician Villagers and the Ukrainian National Movement in the Nineteenth
Century (Edmonton 1988), 59-104;
Paul Robert Magocsi, “The Kachkovs’kyi Society and the National Revival in Nineteenth-Century
East Galicia,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 15, no. 1-2 (June 1991): 48-87;
Serhy Yekelchyk, “The Body and National Myth: Motifs from the Ukrainian National Revival in
the Nineteenth Century,” Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 7, no. 2 (1993): 31-59;
Sergei Zhuk, ““A Separate Nation” of “Those Who Imitate Germans”: Ukrainian Evangelical
Peasants and Problems of Cultural Identification in the Ukrainian Provinces of Late Imperial
Russia,” Ab Imperio 3 (2006): 139-160.
17. “Urban revolution,” public space and metropolitan cultures
Harald Binder , ‘Making and Defending a Polish Town: “Lwow” (Lemberg), 1848-1914’, in
Austrian History Yearbook 34 (2000): 57-81;
Optional:
Michael Hamm, ‘Continuity and Change in Late Imperial Kiev’, in The City in Late Imperial
Russia, ed. b M.Hamm (Bloomington 1986), 79-121;
or
Patricia Herlihy, Odessa. A History 1794-1914 (Cambridge 1986), 233-262.
Additional:
Markian Prokopovych,, Habsburg Lemberg. Architecture, Public Space and Politics in the Galician
Capital, 1772-1914 (West Lafayette 2009), excerpts;
Ostap Sereda, “Nationalizing or Entertaining? Public Discourses on Musical Theater in Russianruled Kyiv in the 1870s and 1880s,” in S. O. Mueller, Ph. Ther, J. Toelle, G. z. Nieden (Hgs.), Oper
im Wandel der Gesellschaft . Kulturtransfers und Netzweke des Musiktheaters im modernen Europa
(Wien 2010), 33-58;
Roshanna P. Sylvester, Tales of Old Odessa. Crime and Civility in a City of Thieves (DeKalb,
2005), excerpts.
18. “Shtetl” and anti-“shtetl”. Jewish traditionalism, integration, and assimilation
Optional:
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Boerries Kuzmany, "Center and Periphery at the Austrian-Russian Border: The Galician Border
Town of Brody in the Long Nineteenth Century," Austrian History Yearbook, vol. 42 (2011): 67-88;
Natan M.Meir, “Jews, Ukrainians and Russians in Kiev: Intergroup Relations in Late Imperial
Associational Life,” Slavic Review 65, no. 3 (2006): 475-501;
or
Ezra Mendelsohn, Painting a People. Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art (Hanover and London
2002), ch. 1 (pp. 6-44) or 3 (pp. 83-149).
Additional:
Mark Zborowski, Elizabeth Herzog, Life is with People. The Culture of the Shtetl (New York 1964),
214-238;
Steve Jeffrey Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794-1871 ( Stanford 1986),
excerpts.
19. Urban national mobilization and mass violence. Anti-Jewish pogroms
Optional:
Harald Binder, “Urban Landscape and Printed Press in Habsburg Lemberg: The Kotsko Memorial
of 1912,” East Central Europe/L’Europe du Centre-Est vol. 33, pts. 1-2 (2006): 55-71;
Alexander Victor Prusin, Nationalizing a Borderland. War, Ethnicity, and anti-Jewish Violence in
East Galicia, 1914-1920 (Tuscaloosa 2005), 75-91 (chapter 5: “The Lwów Pogrom, November 2224, 1918”);
or
Caroline Hamphrey, “Odessa: Pogroms in a Cosmopolitan City,” Ab Imperio 3 (2010): 27-79.
Additional:
Omeljan Pritsak, “The Pogroms of 1881,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies, vol. 11, nos. 1-2 (1987): 843;
Anna Veronika Wendland, “Post-Austrian Lemberg: War Commemoration, Interethnic Relations,
and Urban Identity in Lviv, 1918-1939,” Austrian History Yearbook 34 (2003): 83-102.
20. Workers between ethnic and class lines
Alison Freig Frank, Oil Empire. Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 109-139 (chapter 4: “The Boys Don’t Sleep at Home.
Worker’s Dreams of Wealth and Independence”);
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Hiroaki Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s1990s ( Cambridge 1998), 35-69 (chapter 1).
Additional:
Mark Baker, “How to Make Kharkiv Workers into Bolsheviks: Lessons from the Hetmanate and
Directory, 1918,” Canadian American Slavic Studies 40, no. 1 (2006): 49-63;
Charters Wynn, Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms. The Donbass-Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia,
1870-1905 (Princeton 1992), excerpts.
21. Women’s contested identities and representations
Marta Bohachevsky-Khomiak, Feminists Despite Themselves: Women in Ukrainian Community
Life, 1884-1939 (Edmonton 1988), 47-56 (chapter 5: “Priests, Wives and Daughters”);
Christine Worobec, “Temptress or Virgin? The Precarious Sexual Position of Women in
Postemancipation Ukrainian Peasant Society,” Slavic Review 49, no. 2 (1990): 227-238.
Additional:
Keely Stauter-Halsted, ““A Generation of Monsters”: Jews, Prostitution and Racial Purity in the
1892 Lviv White Slavery Trial,” Austrian History Yearbook 38 (2007): 25-35.
22. Individual trajectories of identity-formation in the borderlands
Optional:
Mark von Hagen, “I Love Russia, and/but I Want Ukraine,” Or How a Russian General Became
Hetman of the Ukrainian State, 1917-1918,” in Белоруссия и Украина. История и культураю
Ежегодник 2004 (Москва 2003), 253-284;
or
Larry Wolff , The Idea of Galicia . History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford
2010), 111-157 (chapter 3: “The Galician Childhood of Sacher-Masoch”);
or
Ярослав Грыцак, Национализируя многоэтничное пространство: истории Ивана Франко и
Галиции, Ab Imperio 1 (2009): 23-50.
Additional:
Timothy Snyder, The Red Prince. The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (New York 2008), 51148.
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23. First World and Civil wars in Ukraine from the perspective of cultural history
Serhy Yekelchyk, “The Revolution at Eighty: Reconstructing Past Identities after the “Linguistic
Turn”,” Journal of Ukrainian Studies vol. 24, no. 1 (1999): 69-84.
Optional:
Felix Schnell, “Tear Them Apart… And Be Done With It !” The Ataman-Leadership of Nestor
Makhno as a Culture of Violence,” Ab Imperio 3 (2008): 195-221;
or
Andriy Zayarnyuk, “The War Is as Usual”: World War I Letters to a Galician Village,” Ab Imperio
3 (2010): 197-224.
24. “Long nineteenth century” in the cultural formation of Eastern Europe: legacy, nostalgia,
mythology
Tanya Richardson, Kaleidoscopic Odessa. History and Place in Contemporary Ukraine (Toronto
2008), 171-206 (chapter 6: “Between Cosmopolitan and Provincial: Spaces of History and the Place
of Odes(s)a”);
Larry Wolff , The Idea of Galicia . History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford
2010), 383-419 (chapter 10: “Haunted Epilogue. Galicia after Galicia”).
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