Remy, Johannes Brothers or Enemies: The Ukrainian National Movement and Russia from the 1840s to the 1870s (review)

Abstract

SEER, 95, 3, JULY 2017 568 communities in Russia — the Uniates strike me as especially promising — would have offered more opportunities to interpret the story in compelling ways. And whereas the book is explicitly about state policies and practices, the Old Believers themselves remain a bit too spectral in this account. Even so, scholars of religion and especially dissent in Russia, as well as those focusing on governance and state ideology, will benefit handsomely from reading this well-researched book. Department of History Paul W. Werth University of Nevada, Las Vegas Remy, Johannes. Brothers or Enemies: The Ukrainian National Movement and Russia from the 1840s to the 1870s. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, Buffalo, NY and London, 2016. x + 329 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $65.00. The book under review is the result of extended work in the Academy of Finland, at the University of Helsinki and then at different universities in Canada where the author moved in 2009. Covering the period from the 1840s to the 1870s, when mutual antagonism emerged between the Ukrainian national movement and Russian imperial government, the book examines Ukrainian national activism, its relation to Russia and Russian and the imperial policies on the Ukrainian question. Apart from archival materials located in Russia and Ukraine, the study is based on extensive published and existing research literature. Consequently, the author offers a systematic analysis of Ukrainian national activists’ perception of Russia and Great Russians and brings to light archival materials unused by Remy’s predecessors (Alexei Miller, Serhiy Bilenky, Faith Hillis and others) (p. 10). The book has eight chapters, organized chronologically,andissuppliedwitharichbibliography,includingrarearchival and published sources some of which are hard to find, for instance, seven titles prepared in Ukrainian by father Vasyl Hrechulevych (Vasilii Grechulevich) during the years 1849–59 (pp. 298–99). Chapter one provides background material on the emergence of the Ukrainian national movement before the 1840s and outlines the terminological and conceptual framework, including the terms ‘Little Russia’, ‘Little Russian’, ‘Ukraine’, ‘South Rus’’ and ‘South Russian’ (pp. 19–20). The author bases his research on the assumption that the idea of independence did not enter Ukrainian national discourse at the end of the nineteenth century, but in the late 1850s, as discussed in detail in chapter five (pp. 113–56). A special emphasis is placed on the state and status of Ukrainian-language publications, beginning with Ivan Kotliarevsky’s burlesque poem, Eneїda (1798), and works written REVIEWS 569 ‘in a more serious tone’ by Mykhailo Maksymovych, Osyp Bodiansky and especially Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko and Taras Shevchenko, whose first collection of poems published in 1840 was considered the highest achievement of Ukrainian literature of its time (pp. 15–18). As the author rightly states, despite the importance of historical mythology for the Ukrainian nationbuilding project, language is the litmus test that defines the limits of the prospective nation (p. 15). In the next chapter, Remy argues that the preexisting building blocks of nationhood — history, folk culture, language and religious confession — were first creatively employed by the members of the Slavic Society of St Cyril and St Methodius (Mykola Kostomarov, Mykola Hulak, Vasyl Bilozersky, Taras ShevchenkoandPanteleimonKulish).AstheSociety’sstatutestipulated,Russia was to be one of the constituent republics of the Slav federation, placed on an equal footing alongside the others, while Kyiv was to become the capital of all the Slavs (pp. 22–23). According to Remy, what is significant about this period is the fact that after the Society’s disclosure, the tsarist authorities became alert to the danger of Ukrainian nationalism which impacted a number of subsequent decisions related to censorship (p. 59). Remy defines the years 1855–59 as ‘a period of liberalization’ (p. 61), during which, for example, the Cyrillo-Methodians, who were still serving their sentences, were finally pardoned. Compared to its output during 1846–54, Ukrainian publishing increased sevenfold; Vasyl Hrechulevych published several collections of sermons in Little Russian, and Panteleimon Kulish produced most of his important non-fiction works in Ukrainian with the help of his new Little Russian orthography (p. 66). Aseparatechapter,dealingwiththestereotypingofRussiansintheUkrainian journal Osnova, provides the first systematic study of censorship policies relating to Ukrainian publications (pp. 81–112). As the author...