The_Construction_of_Nationality_in_Galician_Rus__en.pdf

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John-Paul Himka
The Construction of
Nationality in Galician
Rust: Icarian Flights in
Almost All Directions
E.
J.
Hobsbawm argues that the literature on nations and nationalism
entered a particularly fruitful phase in the late 1960s, a phase that
marks a turning point in our understanding of the subject. lOne might
make the case that the 1980s marked even more of a turning point, since
at this time the emphasis in the literature shifted to the problem of the
social construction of nationality and national cultures. The purpose of
this essay is to apply the framework of cultural construction developed
in the newer literature to the particular case of the Ukrainians of East-
ern Galicia. It is hoped that this confrontation of the general theoretical
literature with a concrete case study will serve both to explore the util-
ity and the limitations of the new thinking on nationalism and to gen-
erate fresh formulations and questions with regard to the history of the
Ukrainian national movement in Galicia. After sketching the general
thrust of the newer literature, the essay that follows will look at differ-
ent "constructions" that competed or could have competed for the cul-
tural loyalties of the inhabitants of the easternmost extension of the
Habsburg monarchy. The people under consideration call themselves
Ukrainians in the twentieth century, but in the nineteenth they called
themselves
rusyny,
usually rendered in English as Ruthenians. For rea-
sons that will become obvious, I will use the historical name in this
essay; I will also make use of their traditional name for their own terri-
tory: Galician Rus'.
109
110
Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation
The Cultural Work
of
Nationalism
One of the most striking features of the new literature (especially
Hobsbawm, Emil Niederhauser,2 and Ernest Gellner)3 is a major dis-
placement of emphasis with regard to the so-called national character-
istics. The nationalists themselves and much of the older literature on
nationalism emphasized that certain characteristics-particularly lan-
guage, but also others, including religion, historical experience, and
territory-created nations.
4
The emphasis of the new literature is rather
that nations create these characteristics. In particular, it has focused on
"the invention of tradition" and the
questione della lingua,
that is, on the
active role national awakeners played in constructing a version of the
past and a standard literary language. Where the awakeners them-
selves thought they were only reviving an existing national culture,5
their most recent analysts think rather that they were creating a new
culture.
6
The fullest theoretical development of this view is by Gellner.
Gellner divides the whole of world history into three phases-
hunting-gathering, agrarian, and industrial-and postulates that
nationalism is a form of politics appropriate to the transition between
the second and third phase; in fact, it creates the cultural-political con-
ditions in which industrial society can function. Although Gellner's
framework of industrialism does not seem directly relevant to persis-
tently agrarian Galicia, his view on the cultural work of nationalism
certainly is. He postulates that the nationalists create a new cultural
amalgam that, on the one hand, contains enough elements of the tradi-
tional culture of a particular ethnic community to be accessible to and
function as a source of identification for its members, but that, on the
other hand, also contains the essential elements of the new universalist
culture appropriate to the industrial age. Nationalism thus uses ele-
ments of traditional culture to create a new cultural unit that can par-
ticipate in a larger modern society based on a shared cognitive base and
a global economy?
Whether one prefers Gellner's "industrial culture" or Benedict
Anderson's "print culture"8 or even the loaded older terms used with
regard to a similar conceptualization (e.g.,
high culture, civilization, his-
tory),
it is clear that many East Central European peoples developed one
of these cultural systems as part of their national awakening. The case of
the Ruthenians of Galicia is not untypical in this regard. Before the
national awakening, they lacked, for example, their own professional
John-Paul Himka
111
theater and composers in the classical style-these did not constitute
components of the authentic culture of Galician Rus'; but by the 1860s
they had both a national theater company and a number of orchestral
works with national themes. Such examples of the introduction of new
cultural pursuits following models from the general European high cul-
ture, but with a national twist, could constitute a long list. Perhaps head-
ing such a list would be the creation, through translation, imitation, and
original composition, of a literary medium capable of expressing all the
concepts contained in other European literary mediums.
Elements of the traditional culture were incorporated into the new
culture, but this was a very selective process.
9
Selectivity is most obvi-
ous in the case of language (since, of course, not all dialectical features
could be absorbed into a single literary standard), but the principle
extends to everyone of the national characteristics. Not all customs, for
example, found a place in the new national culture. The Ukrainian
national culture readily incorporated painted Easter eggs
(pysanky),
which could be taken as an expression of the high aesthetic demands of
the folk culture, but the tradition of night courting
(dosvitky,
vechornytsi),l°
which seemed to suggest 'savagery and immorality, was
rejected.
A number of features of the Galician Ruthenian case are particu-
larly interesting.
For example, almost totally neglected or misunderstood by the
new literature,11 but extremely important in the Galician Ruthenian
(and, for that matter, the Galician Jewish) case, was what might be
termed a "larval stage." Before the creation of the new Ruthenian
national culture came a stage in which educated Ruthenians assimi-
lated to Polish culture/ that is, into an alien "high" culture. Whether it
would have been possible for the Ruthenians of Galicia to have pro-
ceeded directly from their traditional cultural environment to the task
of creating the new national culture is an open question, but there can
be little doubt that this larval stage accelerated the process. The same
applies to the creation of a modern Jewish culture on the territory of
Galicia at the end of the nineteenth century; until then the Jewish elite
had tended to assimilate to German and, later, Polish culture. The
Czech national revival also began from a situation in which the better-
educated classes were acculturated or at least deeply steeped in Ger-
man culture. It is within the framework of the recent emphasis on
nationalism's creation of a new high culture that the function of this
112
Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation
acculturation becomes clear, even if this point has not been brought
out: the very earliest "awakeners," and their predecessors, entered a
foreign high culture, which provided them with a model upon which to
base a new, national high culture.
Also, in Galician Rus' there was not only an acute
questione della
lingua
and fashioning/refashioning of a national language, but a
prominent
questione della religione
and fashioning/refashioning of a
national religion, that is, a modification of the traditional Greek
Catholicism (movements for ritual purification to shed Latin-Polish
accretions) or abandonment of it for "the faith of the forefathers"
(Orthodoxy). Although there are many other cases in which national-
ism has introduced considerable modification into traditional religious
practices and allegiances (e.g., the
Los von Rom
movement in Austria,
the creation of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, the
establishment of national patriarchates in the Balkans), this is a topic
that has not received the attention it deserves in the literature.
But perhaps of greatest interest in the case of the Galician Rutheni-
ans, at least from the perspective of the national-construction literature,
is that in the nineteenth century the Galician Ruthenians elaborated
two very distinct and mutually exclusive constructions of their nation-
ality (Ukrainian and Russian), could well have been drawn into a third
(Polish), exhibited tendencies toward a fourth (Rusyn), and had at least
the theoretical possibility of formulating a fifth (a hypothetical nation-
ality, with serious historical underpinnings, that would have included
the peoples now called Ukrainians and Belarusians). This proliferation
of real and hypothetical constructions on the basis of a single, socially
and culturally rather homogeneous, and territorially quite compact
ethnic group would seem to confirm the validity of the new approach
to the study of nationality. It would also, however, seem to raise a new
question, which can be formulated in different ways: why did some
constructions fail and some succeed? how free was the emergent
national intelligentsia in its creative work of national-cultural construc-
tion? to what degree did the national characteristics after all determine
the viability of the national construction plans? The case of Galician
Rus' offers unusually rich material for the exploration of this theme. In
the remainder of this essay, I will begin the exploration and suggest
questions and directions for further research. As an organizing frame-
work, I will examine each of the constructions in terms of the cultural,
John-Paul Himka
113
political, religious, and social factors influencing its development or
lack of development.
Natione Polonus, Gente Ruthenus
The most important question to ask initially is why the Galician Rutheni-
ans did not simply assimilate to the Polish nationality.12
In
the past, the
acquisition of a high culture had often been synonymous with adopting
Polish culture, not developing Ruthenian culture to a higher level. Thus
in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Ruthenian nobil-
ity became polonized, abandoning its ancestral religion and adopting the
Polish language;1
3
the assimilation of the traditional elite created the sit-
uation of the early nineteenth century in which the Ruthenians consti-
tuted a largely plebeian people with only a thin stratum of clergy at the
(rather low) summit.
In
the eighteenth century, after Galician Ruthenians
accepted the church union with Roman Catholicism, the clergy of the
Ruthenian church consisted of an elite of Basilian monks who monopo-
lized episcopal office, received the most lucrative benefices, and acquired
a formal education, and also of parish priests who were poor, informally
and imperfectly educated, and of such low social prestige that their sons
could be enserfed; the former were largely Polish by culture, the latter
Ruthenian. 14 Ruthenians who migrated to Galicia's largest city, Lviv,
were steadily assimilated to Polish culture until at least some time in the
late nineteenth or early twentieth century.1
5
When an entire generation of candidates for the Ruthenian priest-
hood acquired a higher seminary education as a result of the Austrian
reforms of the late eighteenth century, the immediate result was lin-
guistic and cultural polonization. A polonized Ruthenian described the
situation in the first half of the nineteenth century:
The education of the Ruthenian clergy ... acquainted it with the
civilized world, showed it various needs and paths. . . . You
wouldn't say his wife was the spouse of a Ruthenian priest,
because she began to dress up like some countess in hats, scarves,
and fashionable dresses; guests from the manor came over fre-
quently, and the reception was lavish.
But if one of the parishioners had need to come over, he did not
dare to go right into the chamber, because the floor was washed

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