Where is our past taking us?

Natalia Yakovenko is one of Ukraine’s most well-known contemporary historians, whose field (and the times) is marked by turbulence. Despite her statement that she “does not believe that a historian’s book can influence a people’s world perception,” her scholarly works attest to the contrary. One of the reasons is that in her monographs Dr. Yakovenko interprets past realities (including political events) in a strictly unbiased manner. Nevertheless, she is convinced that, first, “a historian is unbiased only when he is dead” and second, that any, even the best, reconstruction of the past is always just a reconstruction that is found unconditionally under the inevitable influence of modern realities, even if the reader fails to notice this influence.

Dr. Yakovenko’s scholarly world is not restricted to Ukraine, Kyiv, and the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, where she heads the Chair of History. She is a prominent and active member of the European community of historians and maintains links with several associations, particularly in Poland. Her studies and books testify to the use of the most modern research methods.

The celebrated French historian Marc Bloch once said: “A good farmer loves plowing and planting his field no less than he does harvesting.” This is true of Dr. Yakovenko.

Not all readers of The Day will agree with the ideas and conclusions expressed by Professor Natalia Yakovenko. Everyone is welcome to join this discussion.

PREFACE

Prof. Yakovenko, could you tell us a bit about your scholarly biography? What are your working languages? What foreign periodicals do you read regularly? Can one be a historian knowing only one’s native language? What books are you working on now?

N.Ya.: Someone once wrote that his scholarly biography is as straight as Nevsky prospekt [in St. Petersburg]. Mine takes a winding course. To begin with, my university diploma states that I am not a historian but a “classical philologist.” Classical philology is a peculiar rudiment of undivided knowledge against the backdrop of the latter-day fragmentation of disciplines that somehow crept its way into the 20th century. Like before, it embraces “everything”: classical languages (Greek and Latin), literature, history, and culture. Today such knowledge is referred to as interdisciplinary. My professors at the Chair of Classical Philology in Lviv University, who had studied under Austrian and Polish rule, did not know this fashionable word, but they thought in an “interdisciplinary” manner.

That was probably why my switch to Ukrainian history — frankly speaking, caused by circumstances — was painless. I was in the historical archives, translating old documents from Latin, and suddenly I realized how interesting all those people mentioned in the documents were to me. I began studying Ukrainian history independently. As befits a neophyte, and a trained “classical philologist” at that, I took the distant route of approach and began with Mykola Markevych’s History of Little Russia. To put it mildly, it is somewhat anachronistic, but it is definitely free of the virus of “the only correct Marxist-Leninist methodology.” I followed this in order with Kostomarov, Antonovych, Hrushevsky, etc., all the way to the “methodologically correct” Soviet production and parallel with this, to that non-Soviet literature that I could access with my reader’s card.

One time I said half-jokingly that I was fortunate not to have undergone a systematic faculty course of training in history. This thoroughly offended one of my critics: how could I brag about my own ignorance? But I was truly lucky. That virus was introduced into the consciousness of every history student so well that even today some have been able to get rid of it. In my case, the old-world classical philology chair taught me to wonder at the multitude of aspects of the past rather than turn them inside out, looking for class principles and progressive regularities. Where you will place the concrete knowledge that you have acquired actually depends on this: a map of uncharted territory or a school map, where every episode corresponds to a little slot of “regularity” planned in advance.

Getting back to my scholarly biography, after my transition from classical philologist to historian, it took a more or less customary course: candidate of science, then my doctorate, followed by a professorship. My working languages? When it is necessary, I read in a number of languages (Latin is the mother of the new European languages). As for the sources of “my centuries” (16th-17th), my working languages are Old Polish and Latin. I read mainly Polish periodicals on a regular basis, which is understandable because my Polish colleagues and I are “living” in one state — the Rzeczpospolita. Of course, I try to keep track of English— language periodicals published by the Ukrainian study centers at Harvard and the University of Alberta in Edmonton. I read other foreign journals whenever I have access to them.

My plans for the future are a risky subject, so I won’t talk about what I’m gathering materials for. I will only say that this study, like the book Parallel, has to do with images and perceptions of people who lived in the 16th and 17th centuries. In addition to vague plans there are also specific commitments. I have promised two books for Krytyka Publishers in 2007. One of them is a simpler task, a reprint of Ukrainska shliakhta [The Ukrainian Nobility] which has become a bibliographic rarity. I am planning to make only a few corrections, but on the whole I will leave the text unchanged because I have long regarded it as something that is not “my own.” Today I would have written this book completely differently — on top of it, I am no longer interested in social history.

The tentative title of another book is Introduction to History (I might think of a better one because this one sounds too didactic). The matrix of the text is a course of the same title that I am teaching my students at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. To a certain degree they will be my co-authors. To help sell this book, I will add that this work is rather remote from traditional works in this genre; there is no lecturing or didactics. This book is about the spirit of the times that determined ways of writing the most varied “histories” — from Herodotus to the postmodernists; about what is hidden in between the lines of their works; about the conditional nature of any source and how historians coped/cope with this; about chimerical peripeteias in the stylistics of history writing; about academic ethics, and so on. In a word, this book is supposed to be a journey to the land of “history.” I hope it will be interesting not only to people from our guild.

ABOUT CONTEMPORARY AND ANCIENT COLLEAGUES

Which world historian(s) would you place first and why?

N.Ya.: Publius Cornelius Tacitus. It’s like a dish you learn to love in childhood. My own “childhood” was classical philology. I also have a weakness for stylistically sophisticated and “dramatized” texts. Tacitus was unmatched in this sense. True, some Byzantine historians also wrote brilliantly, but their original works are still inaccessible to me — and to love a translation is like falling in love with a photograph.

Would you please name the young Ukrainian historians whom you consider the most promising?

N.Ya.: Here another question arises: the criterion of “youth.” A historian is a vegetable that has a long period of maturation, because even if one has a God-given talent, he must first read a staggering amount of special literature and masses of sources. Thus, if one considers that a historian slightly over 40 years of age can be regarded as “young,” I believe that Oleksii Tolochko is the most intellectually self-sufficient in Ukraine and the most promising. As for talented and educated “younger young people,” who have proclaimed themselves with their first works, today we have quite a choice. I will not single out some so as not to annoy others. I would say that we have entered a phase of great changes: the kind of history being written by these young people is essentially different from their predecessors’. Here everything is different in terms of topic, manner of exposition, method of interpreting sources, and researchers’ emphases. To characterize these changes in a more general fashion, they can be called the “Westernization” of Ukrainian historical scholarship. This is no surprise, as these young scholars have studied and done their internship abroad, i.e., they have a different perception of history: not as an internal matter but as knowledge beyond borders, which must be obtained/described according to the parameters of a certain “international convention.”

CAN WE UNDERSTAND PEOPLE OF THE PAST?

Which century in the history of Ukraine is the closest to you? Why? Which Ukrainian figure do you consider the most attractive? Are you certain that you perceive this personality the way he actually was, not the way we are accustomed to think about him? Do you think it is possible in principle to reconstruct the way people thought in the past and their attitude to certain events?

N.Ya.: My Century sits on two chairs, ranging from the mid-16th to the mid-17th century. Why is this work so close to me? Because I have many, many friends there, people about whom I know arguably more than they ever did. In addition, those times were rich in intrigue. To me these people resemble characters from a detective story; we know how it ends, but I don’t know what they will do on the way to the finale.

As for the most attractive figure, before I name the “chosen one,” let me first explain my choice. It is not because of his moral qualities or historical achievements (there don’t seem to be any fateful ones). What makes this figure attractive is not because he is fascinating but because he excites — he excites by his incomprehensibility and hypertrophied popularity among his contemporaries. At the same time, whenever we talk about this person and make a negative comment, they — his contemporaries — placed an exclamation point. What we regard as risky arrogance, they called his inherent dignity; what we regard as cruelty, they regard as proof of a noble, just temperament; what strikes us as a boyish love of military adventures, they praised to the heavens as a supreme military spirit. I will not intrigue you any further and will reveal my hero whose name is odious to devotees of Cossack history — Prince Yarema Vyshnevetsky whom I call the “last prince,” in the sense of the last knight-prince, because after Yarema Ruthenian princely blood did not dry up; it only flowed in the veins of court politickers and salon blowhards.

Here, too, lies an answer to your second question — about how close we can get to understanding the way people who lived centuries ago perceived their realities. I would put it this way: the simpler the individual, the easier he is to understand, although we will never be able to lift the “curtain of time” (after all, do we people of today fully understand each other?). A tough nut like Prince Yarema slips out from under the microscope because to study him in every detail one must, to use Robin Collingwood’s expression, “replay in imagination” that which he never lived through: the pulsing of proud princely blood, innate awareness of his mission in life, and many other things that are odd at least from our current point of view. But one still wants to.

Which of your discoveries, minor or major, do you consider the most important?

N.Ya.: The return from oblivion of the Ukrainian nobility. I mean not only stating the very fact of its existence, which was done in the book Ukrainska shliakhta, but also what I’m working on now, trying to show that we owe the fact that Ukraine entered a new time, in fact synchronously with the rest of Europe, to this nobility (its ways of perceiving itself and the world).

EXTRAPOLATON IN HISTORICAL STUDIES

I don’t know whether historical scholarship uses the term “emergence” borrowed from the theory of large systems, which is used in cases when two plus two does not make four owing to certain links among elements. In other words, is it possible to synthesize the parameters of certain groups and societies within a certain epoch?

N.Ya.: I haven’t come across this term. As for modeling groups and societies proceeding from the behavior of individual persons, this is something without which history cannot exist. We are not permitted to know about every person at every second of his life: this kind of history, people joke, can be seen only by the eye of God. In trying to find a way out of this stale-mate situation, people have tried all sorts of sophisticated exegetic systems, i.e., methods of abstract modeling. These are positivism, Marxism, functionalism, and structuralism. Today they are regarded skeptically, but the problem of the correlation between the “individual” (single) and “social” (collective), which is at the basis of any changes in society, i.e., it is a kind of key to explaining great social shifts, has not disappeared. Therefore, I believe that staunch opponents of generalizing models are not being totally sincere, or at least they are engaged not in applied studies but some hazy theory of historical cognizance. But we, applied historians, simply cannot do without some sort of synthesizing scheme in which a group can be “inscribed” on the basis of knowledge about a concrete individual — even when we swear to our methodological purity.

MODERN AND POSTMODERN TRENDS

What do the terms “modern” and “postmodern” mean in historical scholarship? I have always associated them strictly with contemporary philosophy, although it is obvious that philosophy and history influence each other.

N.Ya.: The birth of the “modern” in historiography is linked to the “revolt” of some young French historians against their positivistic fathers. This was a well- known group concentrated around the journal Annals of Economic and Social History that appeared in 1929. The research credo of the first “annalists” was based on the ideas of the prominent sociologist Emile Durkheim, who viewed society as a community of people, which is formed as a result of the collective (social) attaining supremacy over the single (individual). The existence of such a society is realized in various forms of social behavior, and those forms in their turn are determined by the collective consciousness of its members.

Thus, in order to understand a certain society, one must above all research mass and repeated manifestations of social behavior that reflects this consciousness. This principle served as the basis of a research trend that the “annalists” themselves called “new,” i.e., modern history. Half a century later, when their ideals were being called into question, the next young generation of historians proclaimed that they would write a “ new new” history — a postmodern one. I will not burden your readers with explanations of what this “new new” history desires. I will only say that it was born in the 1970s and that its founding fathers were not only Frenchmen but Italians and Americans.

As for postmodernism as a philosophy and general cultural current, in the “pure form” of historical scholarship (if one can even speak about this at all in view of the variety of postmodern manifestations) it is present only in the works of theoreticians of historical cognizance. They believe that text written by the historian is not a “reconstruction” of the past but its “construction,” a product of a certain “linguistic-cultural reality” to which the historian subconsciously submits in recreating his convictions, the cultural conventions of the period, and so on. In contrast, applied historians actually continue to believe that they are reconstructing the past, although under pressure from postmodern critics they have been forced to admit that the kind of history they are writing is, above all, their subjective interpretation of sources, which allows for many answers to one and the same question.

This was actually the last nail in the coffin of expectations to learn about the past as it “was in reality.” Therefore, it was not postmodern historians, as some people like to circulate this bugbear, who whispered this scary story to honest people. Those scholars simply completed that which on the philosophical level was argued cogently by the Neo-Kantians already in the late 19th century and methodologically “codified” in the first quarter of the 20th century by Robin Collingwood. The “subordination” of historians to philosophers, which was begun in the age of Enlightenment, ended with this: today, philosophers are summarizing what we are doing rather than dictating “high fashion” to us.

HOW IS UKRAINIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY FARING?

We often hear complaints about the crisis in current Ukrainian historiography. Is this true? If so, what is the cause?

N.Ya.: In the first place, I think that the peak of the crisis has passed. We are recovering, and the most convincing proof of this is the works of those “younger young” scholars whom I just mentioned. Moreover, in the past couple of years I have often had occasion to see them at international conferences and compare them with our neighboring historians — “ours” look much more impressive. As for the recurrences of the “1990s crisis,” I think the main reason is that a number of historians, especially those who are middle-aged and older, continue to perceive the past through the canons of the national historiographic model of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

What is more, these canons are additionally entangled by holdovers from “the sole correct Marxist-Leninist methodology” about the inevitable regularity and “motive forces” of the historical process. The mixing up of these anachronisms with Western scholarly terminology, and calls for “uprooting mythology” and “updating” methodological tools are in fact causing this crisis in Ukrainian historical scholarship, which is divided into concepts mastered long ago and new ones that have still not been assimilated. Behind the former are patriotic aspirations: to prove the continuity of the statehood tradition and liberation struggles of the Ukrainian people. What is positive about the latter is the attractiveness of novelty and prospects of liberating history from its function as “life’s teacher.”

In a word, what is meant here is the conflict between the civic feelings of the historian and the academic requirement to distance himself from political engagement. There is no need to explain on which side are found the sympathies of the patriotic-minded reading public that wants to continue reading “heart-strengthening” history, for it is so easy and pleasant to believe in something absolutely authentic. But the historian must study history rather than play the role of Pythia [sister state of philosophy — Ed.] and interpret her “lessons.” In fact, the meaning of these very “lessons” is lost when we admit that there is no finite and absolute meaning by definition, because for every question a historian asks of a source there can be as many answers as there are historians.

WHO IS IMPOSING THE IMPERIAL DISCOURSE ON US: RUSSIA OR THE UKRAINIAN TV CHANNEL ERA?

To what extent have the historical works of Russian scholars linked with Ukraine changed? What place does Ukraine occupy in Russian history? Do the views on Ukraine of young Russian historians differ from the traditional ones?

N.Ya.: In general, they have changed. Compared to Russia, Ukraine is increasingly often interpreted as a “detached,” “other” space. However, Ukrainian studies on the whole comprise a very insignificant segment of Russian historiography and is limited to literally a handful of names — the young and “younger young” historians. Whether these works or, to put it mildly, the “traditional” imperial discourse about Ukraine become well known in Ukraine depends above all on us.

For example, on Jan. 8, the Era television channel aired a Russian documentary after the 11:00 evening news. I don’t know the title of the documentary because I started watching it late. It was about the Russian Orthodox Church and Christian virtues. Not a word was said about the Ukrainian presence in the ecclesiastical space of the Russian empire in the 18th century, precisely when the graduates of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy were creating its new visage. The beginning of church education is dated to the founding of a seminary in St. Petersburg — without any mention of Mohyla Academy or the many teaching seminaries that Kyivan monks were establishing throughout the country. And I have no words to describe the Westernphobic accents scattered throughout the film.

So my question is: does the person who chose this excessively specific production not know anything about history? Does s/he not have a clue about the fact that the history of the church is being written not only by warriors of the invisible front from the Moscow Patriarchate as well as by Russian researchers who have a totally different kind of thinking, like Viktor Zhivov? So who is imposing this imperial discourse on us: Russia or Ukraine’s television channel Era?