Abstract
Reviewed by: Tomasz Jakub Hen-Konarski, European University Institute, Florence, Italy
This exciting volume has its origins in a conference that took place in San Diego in April 2012. It consists of 12 contributions plus an introduction from the editor and an afterword. The book grapples with the questions of how and for what purposes so many disparate images and narratives were constructed around Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the successful uprising of Ukrainian Cossacks he led against Poland-Lithuania in the mid-seventeenth century. While being the key national hero for Ukrainians and one of the arch-villains of the Ashkenazi memory, Khmelnytsky occupies a much less prominent, though recognizable, position in the historical narratives of Poland and Russia. It is the malleability and richness of conflicting meanings that is emphatically addressed by the diverse team of authors, including historians and literary scholars, specializing in four national contexts: Jewish, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian.
The contributions are divided into four sections organized on a chronological basis. The first one, comprised of articles by Adam Teller, Frank Sysyn and Ada Rapoport-Albert, deals with the second half of the seventeenth century. The second one, with texts by George Grabowicz, Taras Koznarsky and Roman Koropeckyj, is devoted to nineteenth-century Romanticism. The third one contains contributions from Amelia Glaser, Israel Bartal and Myroslav Shkandrij, and spans from the 1880s to the 1940s. The closing section with papers authored by Gennady Estraikh, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Izabela Kalinowska and Marta Kondratyuk is unequivocally twentieth-century. The afterword by Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, a literary scholar whose first book dealt with the Cossacks in an exclusively Russian context, serves as a coda.
It is impossible to do justice to the content of this volume, but the main directions can be outlined. Compilations of this sort are often a bit confused and incoherent, but in this case almost all articles contribute to the same discussion, falling into two main categories. First, there are texts dealing with the stories and images built around Khmelnytsky himself in various times and by various actors. Here, especially captivating are analyses of Teller and Koznarsky. The former recovers the usually overlooked ambiguities in the way in which Natan Hanover presented the Jewish–Ukrainian relationship in his oft-quoted Yeven Metsulah. Koznarsky in turn documents the structural intimacy between the early-nineteenth-century Ukrainian and Russian descriptions of hetmans Khmelnytsky and Mazepa (the latter being the arch-villain of Russian Imperial narrative). Puzzling evidence is also brought out by Estraikh (Jewish perceptions of the Soviet Khmelnytsky Order) and Kalinowska and Kondratyuk (motion pictures devoted to Khmelnytsky in USSR, Poland and the independent Ukraine), though they by no means exhaust their topics. In the second category there are studies devoted not so much to the mythologized Khmelnytsky himself as to the symbolical figure of Ukrainian Cossacks in general: here the most surprising is Bartal’s article on the use of Cossack symbols by the activists of the Second Aliyah at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The volume contains a chronology of major events associated with Khmelnytsky’s actions and their later depictions, as well as a useful bibliography of primary sources. This would suggest an ambition to cover at least the most important aspects of the Khmelnytsky-related mythologies, which is clearly not the case. Several crucial topics are not addressed here, such as the early modern Polish-Lithuanian, Islamic and Orthodox Rumelian sources and traditions dealing with Khmelnytsky. Others are only touched upon, like the historical memories of the early modern Ukrainian Hetmanate or the erection of Khmelnytsky’s monument in Kiev in the 1880s. Those questions are by no means a terra incognita, researched among others by Faith Hillis, Zenon Kohut, Serhii Plokhy and Frank Sysyn (whose text on Hrabianka is present here). Perhaps it would have been useful to reprint some older studies in order to make the volume more complete. Another notable issue is that despite the emphatically pluralistic character of the project, the articles themselves show how strong compartmentalizations along national lines still are. Examples of transnational cross-fertilization, evidently at play in the case of Khmelnytsky-related mythologies, do not feature prominently, though they pop up from time to time, only to enhance the impression that something really important is missing. Lastly, it is a pity that this volume has been prepared in line with the misleadingly self-evident logic of East European area studies. Khmelnytsky invites comparisons with figures of charismatic masculine nation builders from other parts of the world: William Tell, Garibaldi or J. M. Rosas are just a few possible examples. As has been rightly noted by Kornblatt in her afterword, the same can be said of the Cossack myth. Even a more traditional, non-comparative study of Khmelnytsky’s presence in the early modern media of other European countries would help to qualify the Eastern European essentialization.
The above remarks are not so much criticisms as rather suggestions for the future. The volume proves that the topic is relevant and stimulating. Though not always fully satisfying, the contributions are never boring. Anybody interested in political mythologies, charismatic leadership and historical memories reaching to the early modern period will find it useful and enjoyable.