Hyphenated Histories: Articulations of Central European Bildung and Slavic Studies in the Contemporary Academy

Hyphenated Histories

Hyphenated Histories Articulations of Central European Bildung and Slavic Studies in the Contemporary Academy

Edited By

Andrew Colin Gow

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2007

This book is printed on acid-free paper. A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyrights holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters.

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CONTENTS

Introduction ............................................................................... Andrew Gow, University of Alberta

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Part One Current Institutional Realities: Local, Global, Educational Chapter One The Future of the Humanities and Humanities-History in the Automatic University ................. Andrew Gow, University of Alberta Chapter Two Beyond Bildung: The “Disciplinarity and Dissent” of Cultural Studies in the Global Managerial Academy ................................................................................ Markus Reisenleitner, Lingnan University ( Hong Kong ) Chapter Three Of Ruinous and Wasted Idylls: The Modesty of a Once-and-Future Literary History ........ Susan Ingram, York University

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Part Two Hyphenated Histories: Slavic Studies and the Historical Mode Chapter Four Of Crescents and Essence, Or: Why Migrants’ History Matters to the Question of ‘Central European Colonialism’ ............................................ Wladimir Fischer, University of Vienna

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Chapter Five Robinson Crusoes, Prostitutes, Heroes? Constructing the ‘Ukrainian Labour Emigrant’ in Ukraine .................................................................................. Natalia Khanenko Friesen, University of Saskatchewan

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Chapter Six The Politics of Language and Popular Culture in Dziga Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera” .................. Andriy Zayarnyuk, Monash University

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Chapter Seven Inverted Perspective and Serbian Peasants: Antiquities and the Byzantine Revival in Serbia .................. Marko hivkovin, University of Alberta

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Chapter Eight Spectacles of Pain: Susan Sontag and Russian World War II Photography ................................................... Elena Siemens, University of Alberta

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Chapter Nine Imagining a Soviet Nation: Cultural Representations of the Ukrainian Past at the Twilight of the Stalin Era ......................................................................... Serhy Yekelchyk, University of Victoria Index ..........................................................................................

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INTRODUCTION

The last decades of the 20th century saw major shifts in the academic landscape. These shifts have had profound effects upon both the organization of higher learning and the way scholars working in the humanities understand their disciplines, their mission and their tasks. Interdisciplinary forms of knowledge creation, the incorporation of the issues and concerns of social movements into curricula and academic debates, and, following the linguistic and cultural turns, the emergence of “theory” as a common language across and between disciplines have opened up humanities studies and research, once the keepers of traditional values, to contemporary social issues, public culture and political engagement, given access to formerly excluded and disenfranchised groups, and redened culture as a contested territory, rather than the shared values of a community imagined as a nation. Spearheaded by the (itself highly contested) intellectual practice of Cultural Studies, new interdisciplinary studies and post-disciplinary formations have become growth industries in the English-speaking academy and elsewhere, often at the expense of the traditional philological and historical disciplines. A theoretical vocabulary derived from poststructuralist philosophy and semiotics has developed into a lingua franca of intellectual tools applied throughout the globalised English-speaking academy. At the same time, this (often insightful, but sometimes glib and supercial) emphasis on theory has rendered many traditional, time-consuming forms of humanities training, studies and research all but obsolete: eld work, language training, archival research and comparative studies have been forced into a retreating battle under the double jeopardy of accountability frenzies in corporate university restructurings (which render them unaffordable) and paradigm changes (which seem to sublate them). The goal we set for the “Hyphenated Histories” conference held at the University of Alberta in May 2005,1 upon which all but one of the papers collected here are based, was to explore and respond to these paradigmatic shifts in humanities scholarship by trying to locate key moments of interaction and connection between theory and

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Organised by Andrew Gow, Srdja Pavlovim and Andriy Zayarnyuk.

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particular forms of practising history. While history as a hegemonic academic discipline—one disciplined academically—might always have been susceptible to the dangers of co-optation into the triumphalist narratives of nations coming into their own (be it in the form of a cultural history of the German Kulturnation, the British model of Whig history or the American tradition of exceptionalism) and might thus very efciently have prepared the grounds for its own demise (the end of history in global capitalism), history understood as a guideline for humanities practices has consistently resisted disciplining and totalizing by shifting, extending and destabilizing its own terrain. Art history, literary history, lm history, social history, micro-history, economic history, women’s history, postcolonial history, and other hyphenated histories have introduced elements of discontinuity, rupture and plurality into hegemonic historical narratives by initiating interdisciplinary encounters that have not only redened and rewritten debates over the terrain of the past, but have shared a common problematic with, and thus have left indelible traces in, the global syntax of theory itself. Thus, rather than ritualistically invoking the mutual need of history and theory, the conference explored specic instances of humanities research that dislocate the history/theory dichotomy, and recover history within theory as a site of knowledge and as a practice of intellectual or institutional resistance. We were willing to accept that our results might not sound or look as grand as those of most conversations focused on ‘Grand Theory’, but there is also method in (intellectual) modesty. The location of the conference—Edmonton, Alberta—was not accidental. While it is not immediately evident from the list, all the contributors to this volume, who held academic positions from Lvyv (Ukraine) to Hong Kong, either are or have at one point been closely associated with the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta, and especially with what are now the Departments of History and Classics, of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, and what was once Comparative Literature either as faculty members, research fellows, visiting scholars or graduate students. What is it about the institutional setting of the University of Alberta that has allowed for the specic synergy that the contributions collected here demonstrate in resisting the global trends in the academy referred to above? Like most cities, Edmonton marks a crossroads of a distinctive kind. Sometimes called “The Gateway to the North,” this river city has welcomed streams of immigrants from far and near since its founding as a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post in 1795 (it was named the new capital of the

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new province in 1905). The combination of Edmonton’s new status as the seat of government and a vision of education as a ladder to success helped to establish the university in 1908, and helped the university to begin a tradition of strong programs in the humanities. Its Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature degree, for example, is the oldest undergraduate program of its kind in Canada. “Redmonton” has long been a liberal blot on the federal and provincial electoral maps of predominately conservative Alberta, which has been governed by two very similar conservative-populist parties since 1935: rst by the Social Credit Party and since 1971, the Progressive Conservatives. The presence of the University of Alberta as well as a thriving cultural scene has in no small measure contributed to central Edmonton’s political dissonance with both its surrounding rural hinterland and its oil-fuelled suburban sprawl. That Edmonton has been understood as out-of-step with the rest of the province by successive populist Conservative governments was particularly evident in the 1990s, when the Humanities at the University of Alberta were the main targets of a series of brutal funding cutbacks (in Canada’s federalist system, education is, in the rst instance, among the provinces’ responsibilities), which led to a dizzying series of departmental recongurations. The Vice-President Academic at the time is said to have mooted the outright closure of Religious Studies and the ring of its distinguished faculty, as it was supposedly an irrelevant discipline (this was, of course, before September 11th, 2001). In less than a decade, both Comparative Literature and Religious Studies experienced numerous departmental recongurations and were reduced from departments to programs. History was to welcome faculty members (and some programs) from Classics and Religious Studies due to the many disciplinary afnities they share. While the siege mentality rapidly reversed itself into a Siegermentalität (victors’ mentality) as the price of oil shot up with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the provincial funding tap was suddenly turned back on, the previous dislocations are not so easily dispelled or forgotten. Particularly for scholars who understood their disciplines as hyphenated, this oasis of prosperity seems to provide an appropriate moment to reect on these institutional vicissitudes and to understand historically how and why those disciplines proved malleable enough to withstand the neo-liberal onslaught. The University of Alberta’s generous funding of the “Hyphenated Histories” conference, which we gratefully acknowledge, might be taken as evidence of the changing tides that the papers in this volume reect.

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Within the university itself, one structural feature must be credited with providing a respite from departmental dislocation and the resulting churn, namely the research centres. In this regard, the University of Alberta is well represented among Canadian universities, with 17 such centres associated with its Faculty of Arts. These centres provide scholars with an interdisciplinary space to discuss their research interests outside of their departments, in which they are usually responsible for representing one area of expertise. These areas are usually quite focused, e.g. eighteenth-twentieth century German and Austrian Literature; or Wilhelmine and early Weimar Germany—and therefore colleagues working in such areas are largely without any interlocutors knowledgeable in their particular area. At the University of Alberta, four research centres overlap with the areas of interest represented in this volume and have in various ways contributed to the work collected here: the Canadian Centre for Ukrainian Studies; the Medieval and Early Modern Institute; the Milan V. Dimic Research Institute for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies; and the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies. The essays in this collection fall into two parts. The rst section is more general and tries to make sense of current institutional realities. These include pressures that have made it more difcult to publish the results of the reective practice of reading and writing in monograph form, squeezing this work into more fragmentary varieties and venues of publication. Andrew Gow contrasts the curse of oppressive traditional modes of scholarly specialization and bourgeois Bildung (esp. as articulated in graduate studies) with the automation that defuses supervisory autocracy but replaces it with bureaucratic insensitivity and high-handedness. Increasing time-pressure strips the old system of its positive attributes and substitutes standard bureaucratic procedure for personal care and direction. Market ideology and its bureaucratic corollary, accountability, have undermined the traditional training system in the humanities, replacing erudition with standardized training and efcient scholarship. The history of the humanities serves as a site of knowledge in this polemical essay, which proposes a rather ambiguous form of resistance to a particular institutional hegemony. Markus Reisenleitner takes a more optimistic tack in relation to the (admitted) state of siege in which the ‘old’ humanities nd themselves. Reisenleitner focuses on research cultures and undergraduate teaching, and highlights the advantages of ‘doing’ cultural studies for students,

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scholars and institutions alike. He addresses the academic world after traditional Bildung, noting the ways in which Cultural Studies can be misused intellectually and institutionally to further the aims of the ‘global managerial academy’. His brief history of humanities disciplines and their formation provides the backdrop for the rise of cultural studies as a Marxist-inected post-discipline that would seem to provide both better critical advantage/leverage in discussing culture than the old humanities did and better congruence with the aims of relevance- and accountability-driven administrators. Susan Ingram contextualizes the New History of German Literature by reading two recent lms, My Name is Modesty and Lilya 4-ever, “. . . two lms which provide snapshots à la Benjamin of young women from the decaying margins of the Old World, and to show how reading them in terms of Benjaminian Bildung can recover differences in the origins of these young women and their (and our) hopes, dreams and nightmares.” In juxtaposing Kantian with Benjamian Bildung and mobilizing Ackbar Abbas’ concept of ‘postculture’ (“In a postculture [. . .] culture itself is experienced as a eld of instabilities”), Ingram reects on the challenges that cultural products participating in a postBildung aesthetic present to scholars with classical Bildung training and argues that Benjamin’s popularity with a stream of literary studies lies in its challenge to the theory/history dichotomy in allowing parallel readings of ‘high’ and ‘pop’ culture products. The second section of the collection consists of a kaleidoscope of case studies, demonstrating how the various disciplinary divisions of Slavic Studies can be overcome by adding together various hyphenated approaches: history and cultural studies, anthropology and oral history, lm studies and photography. Wladimir Fischer challenges the adequacy of post-colonial theory as a hermeneutic for understanding central Europe (esp. the former AustroHungarian Empire) after the collapse of 1918, pointing out that very few if any of the lands of the Dual Monarchy were ‘colonized’ in ways that might usefully be understood as parallel to the classical overseas colonialism of the maritime powers (or even of the Germans between 1938 and 1945). Fischer also transgresses the conventional protocols of the (academic) history of migrancy, labour and of the city of Vienna to (re-)discover the micro-history of working-class migrants in Vienna, thus offering ‘intellectual [. . .] resistance’ both to traditional historiography and to currently fashionable attempts to import post-colonial studies to post-Habsburg central Europe. Each of the other contributors is

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more concerned with one or the other of these two aspects of our joint research agenda (itself a result of the longer-term conversations that have occurred between various members of this group). Natalia Khanenko Friesen’s careful examination of the depiction of female Ukrainian migrant workers juxtaposes them with traditional practices of work-related migration (short- and long-term) and emigration. She challenges existing popular and political representations of such migrant women as ‘whores’ or ‘victims’ but also resists romanticizing tendencies and narratives: “Thus, we are clearly dealing with an imagined migrant who is essentially victimized, oppressed and stripped of personal agency, whose fate depends on external circumstances but not his/her own will. Newspapers and web publications’ titles reveal dramatically this kind of narrativization.” She demonstrates the porous boundary between ‘migration’ and ‘emigration’, and challenges her readers to empathize with her subjects without becoming their partisans. Her reassertion of migrant workers’ agency and capacity for choice challenges simplistic and ideologically fraught depictions (both positive and negative) of migrant workers. Andriy Zayarnyuk explores hybrid language, hybrid identity and hybrid culture, using lm to document real-life public language use in pre-WWII Ukraine. His work undermines both traditional Ukrainian nationalist narratives and their opposing Russo-centric versions regarding the existence and use of Ukrainian at that time, showing how much more complex identity can be than nationalist categories allow, thus also offering intellectual resistance to nationalist and ‘Sovietist’ paradigms. Marko givkovim exposes the soft intellectual underbelly of nationalism in scholarship and politics in the Serbian context. Acting as a ‘native ethnographer’, he chronicled the resurrection of nineteenth-century notions of Serbian antiquity (“Serbian is nearly identical to Sanskrit”) rooted in both ‘Aryan’ Indo-Europeanist fantasies and essentialist readings of the Serbian Volksgeist during the increasingly difcult years from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, from rhetorical escalation to civil war. Traditional Bildung (represented heuristically by the author) is confronted here by the hallucinogenic swirl of things that people want to be true—a consumer aesthetic that shaped public intellectual and historical discourse in a way reminiscent of the forces examined by Susan Ingram in this collection. History is here a double-edged site of knowledge: one the one hand, it can be ‘faked’; on the other hand, traditional historical Bildung both supports resistance to ideology and is sublated by its own irrelevance in the context of violent passions and warfare.

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Elena Siemens’ study of Russian war photography via a recent exhibition in Moscow shows how ideology determined both the ethics and the aesthetics of Soviet WWII photographers, who selectively censored what they saw, representing a largely benevolent face of Soviet ‘liberation’: “It is safe to say that even today most Russians feel shocked when confronted with evidence of the darker side of the liberation of Berlin, as well as that of other cities.” Siemens uses historical events both as sites of knowledge and as a resource for intellectual resistance to a certain orthodoxy. Serhy Yekylchyk explores Ukrainian resistance to Stalinist efforts to suppress nationalisms, especially Ukrainian nationalism, in the last years of Stalin’s reign, via an examination of historical literature that got around bureaucratic ‘ideological purication’ campaigns and depicted an (idealized) Ukrainian past in ction. He concludes “. . . one is tempted to surmise that the omniscient “father of peoples” realized [in 1952] that his viceroys had failed to fashion a Soviet Ukrainian culture completely separate from non-Soviet Ukrainian culture. Perhaps Stalin bemoaned the limits of the state’s ideological control over the production of historical works and the inuential role of local bureaucrats and intellectuals in shaping the sense of nationhood in his many nations. Perhaps he was also frustrated by the Ukrainian public’s apparent ability to “read” the much-edited cultural products selectively, interpreting them as narratives of their national past.” Yekelchyk thus nds in ‘history’ (or at least its depiction) a site of knowledge that resisted ideological pressures. The authors all belong to a loose international group of Albertarelated scholars who share an interest in the study of culture and whose collaborative work is instanced in the ejournal Spaces of Identity (www. spacesodentity.net) and a number of conference sections, international workshops and symposia reaching back to 1995, out of one of which (in May 2005, at the University of Alberta) most of these papers and the present volume grew. Thus these papers represent a stage in our on-going discussions with each other, and many of the papers reference other papers as well as other publications of the other contributors. I would not go so far as to say that this is a form of research collective, but that in over a decade of continuous discussion, we share a number of scholarly conversations and many of us share certain concerns, political stances and methodological positions/approaches. As our very diverse disciplinary and institutional afliations suggest, the subjects of our essays range over a large number of normative elds, from History through Cultural Studies to cultural theory, social

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anthropology, history of photography, migration history, university tradition and governance and literature studies. Binding all these together, however, is the rationale for the present volume: the sense that each of these essays addresses historical topics from the standpoint of culture and at least one other disciplinary tradition, within the framework of a shared conversation about culture, hegemony and (transnational) identity. The disciplines involved are so diverse that we have decided to skip the obligatory buzzword of interdisciplinarity and focus instead on the common strand shared by all the essays, expressed here as the ‘hyphenated’ nature of our various approaches to history. The call for papers for the May 2005 gathering began with the two paragraphs that I reproduced/paraphrased at the beginning of this introduction. This text was born of a wide collaboration among various members of the group who organized the conference and gave papers (these groups are not quite identical, as the paper presented by one of my co-organizers, Srdja Pavlovim, has already been published elsewhere, and the paper by Marko givkovim was added later). The later, revised version of each paper was read by a number of the participants, most of whom offered critical comments and suggestions as part of the refereeing process. I should like to thank Srdja Pavlovim and Andriy Zayarnyuk for their organisational work in 2004 and 2005, and Rhonda Kronyk for her careful reading of each article with an eye to both technical details and general effect; her suggestions for revision were very helpful. In the application for funding from the University of Alberta (which my co-organizers, Srdja Pavlovim and Andriy Zayarnyuk, and I would like to gratefully acknowledge), we added for the sake of clarity to the end of our programmatic text “This is at least in part a subversive agenda as regards the current practice and theory of ‘theory’.” The extent to which we succeeded in responding to our ambitious call is worth considering. Most of us implicitly or explicitly ‘addressed instances of humanities research that dislocate the history/theory dichotomy’, and some were especially concerned to ‘recover history within theory as a site of knowledge and as a practice of intellectual or institutional resistance’, while many did one or the other but not quite both. The nal judgement of our work belongs to the reader. Andrew Gow Edmonton, May 21st, 2007

PART ONE

CURRENT INSTITUTIONAL REALITIES: LOCAL, GLOBAL, EDUCATIONAL

CHAPTER ONE

THE FUTURE OF THE HUMANITIES AND HUMANITIES-HISTORY IN THE AUTOMATIC UNIVERSITY1 Andrew Gow University of Alberta

I. Reproduction Scholars, like snails, reproduce asexually. Asexual reproduction would seem, to anyone who has participated in the sexual variety, to be a much easier and safer proposition. Yet training graduate students is or can be an inordinately time-consuming and personally dangerous game of high-stakes poker with people’s lives.2 Graduate students in the

1 I should like to acknowledge the helpful comments and sharp critiques of this paper and earlier versions provided by Markus Reisenleitner, Susan Ingram, Wladimir Fischer, Selina Stewart and Michael Drolet. 2 My sociologist colleague Doug Aoki has expressed this terror as follows: “Not long ago, I greatly irritated two of my colleagues when I compared a doctoral student nally freeing her/himself from doctoral supervision to an animal escaping from a trap by chewing off its own leg (giving a new slant on the expression, “what you leave behind”). When Lacan says we must bring everything back to the function of the cut, I read him as insisting on the generality and everydayness of this kind of violence. My metaphor obtains to the extent that teaching—and especially Ph.D. supervision—is recognized as a transferential relationship, and therefore an inexorable repetition of past and familial trauma. OK, so maybe this is just more dire hyperbole. Still, surely it’s better that a professor concede her/his student will ultimately pay the material cost of that professor’s best intentions, rather than believe that any professor can achieve a benecence beyond the hopes of the most loving and devoted parent. We should be terried of any teacher who is convinced her/his teaching will bring only goodness and light into the lives of her/his students. My poor students.” http://www.arts. ualberta.ca/~aoki/Teaching/Courses&Students/course&students.htm. The general reader may well feel that this is overblown (‘dire hyperbole’), but many of those who have earned a Ph.D. in the traditional Germanic/central European (and by extension, American) mode will feel the resonances in Aoki’s articulation of the magnied, hothouse environment of the competitive seminar. We all suffer under the caste-based self-interest that is not too well concealed in the very traditional practice of scholarly self-reproduction, with its roots in the ultra-competitive atmosphere of the German (and by extension central European and American) academy, and with its articulation of prestige via lineage and ‘institutional charisma’.

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humanities must become scholars in what is—for their elds—a very short time when seen in historical perspective. Traditionally the training of a humanities scholar required well over twenty years of specialized education, beginning with elite schooling designed exclusively to lead to university education, and continuing—in many cultures—well into a student’s thirties or even forties (in the German Habilitation model, or the French doctorat d’état). The result was not merely specialized scholarly training or general Bildung, but a potent combination of the two designed to produce the ‘machine tools’ who would reproduce themselves in their students (and, to a less reliable degree, in their children, the wavering pinnacle of the quasi-hereditary Bildungsbürgertum, i.e., ‘bourgeoisie of education’). In the Anglo-American university, with its roots in the German/Humboldtian ‘research university’, doctorates in the humanities disciplines are still based on that older model. In practice, however, they represent accelerated, truncated versions; they are at least somewhat more egalitarian and accessible than the oppressive and socially exclusive German model. Our Ph.D. programs are far from ideal, however; they might better consist of a paid, relatively less-stressful process of gradual and painstaking intellectual and pedagogical maturation.3 Granting all the deciencies of the traditional elite model of ‘humanistic education’ at academic high schools: nonetheless, that model had some virtues. It is now vanishing, replaced by ‘relevant’ subjects that do not prepare students for university studies. Because, in North America, at least, graduate training takes place under increasing time constraints, and because most students nish high school with inadequate grounding in the humanities and social sciences, they have only three or four years of college to learn everything they need for graduate studies. Intense monetary and administrative pressure has been brought to bear on the length of graduate training, shortening substantially and detrimentally what might better be in the humanities an extensive, intensive, thorough

3 Everyone who ever earned a Ph.D. has a vision of a ‘better’ system; mine would include ten years after the M.A. of paid, contractual initiation into the profession, combining seminars, research, teaching and pedagogical training, leading after the award of the Ph.D. at the very least to the fall-back position of a modestly paid continuing contract as a lecturer (universities could ‘trade’ such people as need dictated). Advancement to tenured professorships could then occur by internal promotion to the limited number of vacancies or via ‘calls’ to other institutions as a function of research activity, publications, etc. At present, the (relative) independence of the tenure-track scholar is dearly purchased by the extreme free-market situation at the end of graduate school and the vagaries of the ‘free’ market.

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education, ending perhaps (in my ideal world) at a level somewhere between a conventional British or North American dissertation and a German Habilitationsschrift, with a nearly publishable book manuscript. Retrograde ideals of scholarship coupled to vast general Bildung have been shown to favour the children of the Bildungsbürgertum disproportionately, and have been repudiated in many academic environments. But if anyone is to become a humanities scholar, she still needs to time to assimilate and critically engage with the lengthy cultural and intellectual traditions that hang over us (and this requirement applies to the classical Indian traditions as much as to the classical European ones). While the scholarly model of the post-doctoral fellowship serves the social and especially the natural sciences very well, the relative lack of funding for such an interim stage in the humanities means that the Ph.D. will be the end of most scholars’ preparation for an academic career. In many humanities elds, this is having disastrous effects, as freshly minted scholars in traditional areas nish their Ph.D. lacking important portions of the basic ‘kit’ that humanities scholars must have in order to do serious work (e.g., a thorough knowledge of the primary foreign/archaic/ancient languages in which their primary sources are written; or sufcient general knowledge of a number of national literatures; or even—in the case of students enrolled in the more traditional programs—an adequate acquaintance with contemporary philosophical, literary and social theory and debates). Given the intense pressures on graduate student funding and on the funding of faculty positions in currently unfashionable elds (e.g., medieval literature and language), the options facing scholars are: 1. to acquiesce to these pressures and to rejig graduate supervision and teaching to circumvent gaps in funding; 2. not to supervise at all; 3. to resist the pressures that make graduate supervision in one’s own eld (which one was, after all, hired to provide) difcult or impossible, and to supervise despite crippling nancial stringency in public institutions all over the world. We need not choose just one of these options, but I submit that resistance is now necessary if we wish to preserve graduate training in the humanities. We could consciously follow the lead of the corporatising university and abandon the expensive and putatively ‘elitist’ programs in what are called ‘orchid subjects’ in German (Orchideenfächer), but I

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think that most practising scholars in the humanities would rather ght than give up good scholarship. So what would a scholarly politics of resistance to the rationalizing pressures of corporate culture in corporatised institutions under (late) capitalism4 look like? Oppressive conditions and (self-)reproduction are historically, at least, mutually reinforcing, whether we think of guild apprenticeships, physical reproduction, traditional parenting or traditional graduate training under the guidance of a Doktorvater. Research is a culturally specic, even locally specic5 activity that needs to be learned. How does the research-intensive university reproduce itself under the conditions of corporate capitalism? Specically, how can the humanities disciplines now under populist, utilitarian and administrative siege in western societies reproduce themselves, given the intensive and extensive training needed to learn the necessary languages, methods and methodology, source criticism, and varied skills in ancillary disciplines for the study of history, literature, religion, art, music, lm or other forms of culture? Any answer to these questions must examine both the ways in which graduate training functions and the means by which such training is made possible, directed, corsetted or even thwarted in specic institutional contexts. I take it as given that traditional, admittedly often oppressive forms of university training and production are facing numerous challenges (some deserved) from the corporate and managerial culture of business efciency, nancial accountability with its attendant logic of automation,6 efciency, predictability, closure, certainty. I also assume that resistance to such discourses is a necessary if often quixotic (-seeming) response to attempts to remake the university in the image of a corporation. If Fredric Jameson is right that every stance on postmodernism is also a political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism, then resistance to the streamlining, aesthetisizing populism of (postmodern) accommodation to accountability culture will be both political and grounded in particular intel-

4 See Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, in New Left Review I/146 ( July–August 1984), 53–92, for an exposition of this term and the possibly crippling role of a co-opted postmodernism. 5 Fredrik Barth argues, in “An Anthropology of Knowledge” (Current Anthropology, 43/I, February 2002, 1–18), that “My personal skills and embodies knowledge are likewise largely constituted on the basis of activity into which I have been socialized [. . .]”, and that “a knowledge that must have its wellsprings in individual experience yet becomes to a large extent conventional in social circles” (2). 6 What Horkheimer and Adorno have called automatism and Julia Kristeva “thanato-erotic desire”; I am using Kristeva’s language for my own purposes here.

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lectual value systems—perhaps even legitimately borrowing from rather ‘conservative’ or ‘elitist’ ones as well as from progressive politics. Universities have always had their own oppressive culture, of course, and a strongly conservative politics of resistance to outside inuences and attempts to introduce various forms of accountability (usually of populist inspiration)—but I take it for granted that these pathologies are no better and no worse than corporate ones, and thus not especially in need of replacement by corporate ones. Scholars love rigour; we love (sometimes impossibly) high standards, but as Foucault so trenchantly put it in Surveiller et punir, people are most oppressed when they ‘discipline and punish’ themselves under the paradoxical belief that such a self-imposed regime will ensure their freedom and liberation. So this piece begins with the knowledge that scholars participate willingly in an enterprise that requires certain kinds of self-oppression as the price of belonging to the scholarly world: it may be an oppressive culture, but it’s our culture! The next step in this argument would be, of course, to articulate an alternative to the traditional hierarchical university that does not fall into the arms of corporate/managerial ‘take-over’ and that simultaneously questions or opens up traditional forms of scholarly oppression, especially those realised in the institution of graduate supervision. I sketched such a model in note 3 (above), but this is not the place to elaborate on such ideas.

II. Space for freedom Two of the dwindling number of serious and stable institutions standing in the way of the corporatisation of the university and the commercial (rather than merely symbolic) commodication of knowledge are tenure (or the continuing contract) and collegial governance. If collegial governance is to function, as Victor Catano argued in the October 2003 edition of the CAUT Bulletin,7 then it must be based on the original premise of collegiality: namely collegial governance, the radically anti-monarchical, decentral principle that colleagues govern the university, especially in academic matters. This is messy, time-consuming, and open to abuse. It is also fundamental to academic and intellectual freedom.

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http://www.caut.ca/en/bulletin/issues/2003_oct/president.asp

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These functions require extensive mental, psychological, intellectual space, considerable Spielraum (‘room to play in’ or ‘room for ludic exercise’, as well as ‘wiggle room’, are possible translations); or as Herman Melville once quipped, “You must have plenty of sea-room to tell the Truth in”.8 This ‘space’ is needed for adequate training of future generations of scholars, and for the psychological and workplace health of highly trained, necessarily independent-minded researcher-teachers. This model has been retained in theory while it has been allowed to slide in recent years by the creeping centralisation of decision-making (ironically accompanied by the ‘down-loading’ of certain tasks from central ofces to departments and individuals). Markus Reisenleitner argues in this volume that the corporate model so often proposed by neo-liberal regimes as a remedy for the inefciencies of traditional collegial governance offers (possible) cost and time savings, but more importantly, enhanced control and supervision options to senior administrators and boards of trustees. The sites we can examine to test such ideas include our own (local) contexts, but for the sake of some notional comparative perspective we should also address far-away examples places characterised by much more centralised, bureaucratic forms of governance than in North American research universities. In Britain, to take an extreme example, detailed job descriptions set out such control-oriented minutiae as the requirement of academic faculty members to adhere to college policy except in cases of serious objection on grounds of academic or intellectual freedom, as well as specifying that faculty members are to be available for written (e.g., paper, email) and/or oral communication daily during term time (though ‘less often outside of term time’; taken from a recent job posting at Queen Mary College in the University of London). Even if basic standards for teaching are necessary, surely such micro-management of teaching practice does not conduce to the self-direction necessary for serious intellectual work. Some British ex-polytechnics require academic staff members to be in their ofce forty hours a week, an utterly ludicrous imposition of the norms of the desk job on academic work (most of which is done in one’s head in any case, and in physical terms requires uninterrupted solitude and takes place in a library, lab or in the eld, and NOT in an ofce!).

8 In: “Hawthorne and His Mosses”, by Herman Melville. The Literary World, August 17 and 24, 1850.

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III. Freedom Most professions have independent standards of conduct drafted and agreed upon by practitioners. In general, the more menial the job, the less initiative is expected from the employee (who is assumed to have minimal education and therefore minimal capacity to exercise initiative), and consequently the less freedom is accorded the employee in setting the terms under which she will work, in dealing with ofcial policy, etc. Graduate teaching under the North American regime, for example, has traditionally left the constitution of the supervisory relationship up to the supervisor and student. Many British universities now require that supervisors and students draw up and sign a mutually agreeable account of each meeting between them. While legal reasons might be adduced to justify such procedures, the risk of law-suits cannot possibly be high enough to justify so much additional paper-work. This level of interference and control is characteristic of regimes that place accountability above quality—for fairly obvious populist ‘political’ (i.e., moral and aesthetic) reasons. The glory of the top North American research universities has been that they combine the autonomy of the continental (especially the German) Professor with the self-direction of the liberal professions, of which university teachers are here generally thought to be (honorary) members. This model was, over the course of the twentieth century, applied not just to the masters (the Professors), but also to the journeymen (the Associate Professors), and then to the apprentices (Assistant Professors). The details of how the jobs of teaching and supervision of students are performed are left largely to the discretion of the instructor, who is presumed to know how best to conduct this business. This system relieves faculty members of much of the day-to-day administration carried out by professors elsewhere, which is a luxury but has a corresponding cost: it grants a level of administrative power to administrative functionaries that would be unthinkable and impossible in, say, Germany or France.

IV. The Corporate University: Production The corporate model stresses efciency, cost-effectiveness and, ultimately, productivity:

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• in the form of students taught by each faculty member—the informal ‘production norm’ at the University of Alberta is around 140 a year; • in the form of ‘years to completion’ for both undergraduate and post-graduate programs (these rates create statistics that in turn have repercussions for program ratings and, ultimately, nancing); • in the form of research production/publishing, which is the subject of the ve-yearly British Research Assessment Exercise, and is in my own university the primary criterion for awarding (quite generous) merit increments to salary. The problems with these three points of emphasis might seem clear, but I should like to elaborate on a few areas that require careful consideration in both practical and political terms. To the rst point, many faculty members, especially temporary ones, teach numbers of students far in excess of the ‘production norms’. Most of these people are junior faculty and temporary employees, and are thus paid the least of all academic faculty. The surplus value they create effectively pays for the research and writing time of more senior faculty. Some entire units of my university have quite different production norms. In one department involving studio work, faculty members have 18 contact/classroom hours per week (by way of comparison, the Faculty of Arts norm is six classroom hours plus two ofce hours) and constantly note in their grant applications their extraordinarily heavy teaching loads—yet none of these colleagues teaches large classes that would require many days of onerous marking per term, and all such colleagues fall far short of the ‘norm’ of a total of 140 student registrations in their classes each year. Some departments have successfully argued that their teaching functions require small classes and thus their overall student loads tend to fall beneath the ‘norm’ (four classes per year, of, say, 10 to 30 students each). In those departments for whose courses student ‘demand’ (whether spontaneous or directed by B.A. requirements) exceeds the norm ratio, all teachers and especially those with less prestige or power typically produce far above the norm. In many of the natural science departments at my university, the standard teaching load for full-time continuing faculty is half the standard load in the Faculty of Arts. This demonstrates how value and productivity are differentially calculated. Most importantly, such norms (even informal ones) not only sidestep the issue of the quality of teaching, they actually discourage its

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development, serious discussion about it, or attempts to measure it other than with methodologically crude numerical instruments in the form of ‘student evaluations’—which are, as the relevant critical scholarly research has shown, not much more than popularity contests, dressingup contests, prestige/aura contests, beauty contests, age contests, entertainment contests, gender contests, etc.: student evaluations reect signicant differentials related to the gender, ethnicity and age of instructors, for example, and cast doubt on the value of such evaluations in general—yet such evaluations are used to make personnel decisions (regarding hiring, tenure, promotion and retention).9 Even a mild version of standard employment equity policy, if applied to teaching, would disqualify such ‘teacher evaluations’ as sexist, ageist and ethnocentric (in the sense that the evaluations simply graph out pre-existing prejudices and expectations that students bring to university).10

V. Graduate studies: (re-)production It is in graduate supervision that academics/scholars reproduce themselves. Statistics regarding ‘years to completion’ can be used to argue about departmental ‘productivity’, but would seem to have little or no bearing on quality, on post-graduate job placement, on student satisfaction, or on the adequacy of training. Indeed, a regime that sets tight limits to a particular course of study (e.g., a four-year norm for a Ph.D.) imposes strict productivity rules on both students and faculty members alike, without inquiring carefully into quality or adequacy of training/learning beyond the impressionistic, anecdotal sense ‘one’ has that Ph.D. candidates who nish quickly are especially ‘likely’ candidates and will later be especially productive. Those disciplines with distant, complex or even vexed objects of inquiry—and especially those whose objects of inquiry must rst be constructed by the researcher—will necessarily require longer study careers of students who wish to master both the ancillary and primary skills (many of them highly complex and extensive, such as ancient or foreign languages) required by some

9

http://www.caut.ca/en/policies/questionnaires.asp, esp. note 3. See Hal Varian, “The Hunk Differential”, in: The New York Times Business section, August 28, 2003: http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~aoki/Teaching/Hunk_Differential.html, cited from Doug Aoki’s website. 10

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disciplines. A student lacking good knowledge of Latin and of at least one other European language could not possibly nish a Ph.D. in medieval cultural, religious or political history in fewer than six years, and might legitimately require eight or ten years (seven years after the M.A. was the average time to completion of all Ph.D.s in history at the University of Toronto in the 1980s, and just over six years is currently the average, after the M.A., in my own department, even though we will fund only four). Quantitative regulatory regimes and productivity norms, again, displace criteria based on quality or even on adequacy at the operative (production) level, though this would seem ‘counterproductive’ when in the dozens of academic hirings I have experienced, precisely the quality, adequacy and appropriateness of training, and level of research skills have been the main hiring criteria, and ‘time to completion’ an utterly marginal one. Thus one of our ‘production norms’ would seem to be markedly at odds with market demand (including our own hiring practice). This is not to say that we have no quality control in graduate studies—on the contrary, we have almost too much, in the form of onerous comprehensive or preliminary eld examinations, candidacy proposals and examinations, and dissertation advising and defenses; but these are all undermined by strong, nancially expressed time pressure to nish the degree within four years. In fact, some of these hurdles will have to go if students are not to be disastrously overloaded under our current speeded-up, under-funded regime.

VI. Prestige The ‘qualitative’ evaluation of publications has for a long time relied on such short cuts as subjective or even published consensual rankings of publication venues: types of journals, ranked according to vague and fusty criteria such as ‘top-drawer’ or ‘rst-class’; and types of publishing houses, which possess culturally and locally specic prestige according to the geographic, colonial and political situation of the beholder. Oxford University Press traditionally conferred the most prestige of all, but only in the English-speaking world, outside of which (and increasingly within) it is considered merely one of many good publishers, for example; McGill-Queen’s Press sounds very good in Canada, but is only alright in the USA and practically unheard-of elsewhere. Thus prestige

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is generally a very local, culturally specic function of well-established hierarchies,11 not a reliable index of quality or performance.

VII. Prestige and automation Beyond the level of assessment by prestige or fetish value, publications tend to be measured in terms of quantity: by number of articles or books; then by the sheer number of pages or even words published overall. Overt reliance on internal, intellectual or discursive measures of quality, so evidently subjective, political and subject to ideological pressure, is thus neatly avoided by evaluation teams. These latter are relieved to possess a seemingly balanced mix of qualitative and quantitative measures that allow (seem to allow) comparison of, say, a sculptor’s and a demographer’s yearly publication ‘output’ or productivity. This produces important administrative efciencies and automates the system to a surprising extent. Yet impressionistic or ‘aesthetic’ evaluations by experienced scholars tend to sound about the same as the results of the complex tables and grades and volume measurements that are commonly used. Automation actually reproduces in its structures the hierarchy of prestige by embedding such criteria (what kind of venue? local, national or international exposure? how prestigious?) in evaluation and largely excluding internal qualitative criteria ( just how is an economist-turned-associate-dean supposed to evaluate the quality of a sculptor’s work?). Such automation also streamlines and produces operational justications for its own methods, further reinforcing the benets administrators derive from it. In shaping scholars’ work, graduate students’ career paths and administrative procedure, automation produces further self-reinforcing efciencies, eliminates redundancies, eccentricities and digressions by passively imposing sanctions on them (even if only by ignoring them), and thus further magnies the rewards that accrue to those who stick closely to the approved formulae (producing, say, a large amount of relatively simple formulaic writing—whether straight-forward narratives, jargon-laden theory, work on well-established topics, otherwise fashionable writing, or overtly ideological 11 In the realm of universities, the ‘Sorbonne’ sounds quite grand outside of France, but within France is much less prestigious than the grandes écoles, which train all future members of the French public-sector elite (and are less well-known elsewhere as they concern only the French system).

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advocacy—and publishing it in conventional venues). Curiosity-driven scholarship/research, speculative thought, exploratory and experimental publication, and painstaking erudition do not conform to the formulae of such evaluative regimes and are thus rendered marginal—not by conscious processes, usually, but by the seductively efcient automatisms that makes these evaluative regimes so desirable in environments of accountability-obsession and micro-management.12 Nowhere else in the professions does prestige count for quite as much as it still does in academia—in the form of listings which note the institution from which faculty members received their Ph.D. (the yearly Newsweek college rankings in the U.S. rely heavily on this criterion, thus punishing schools for hiring graduates of non-Ivy or less-prestigious institutions), and even in putatively objective numerical measurement regimes, which actually institutionalize prestige as a criterion of measurement while hiding it from direct view or contestation. When prestige stands in for, or functions metonymically as, a guarantee of quality (and who has never heard the comment: “She/he must be good, she/he has a Ph.D. from Harvard/Berkeley/Oxford!”?), real argument or negotiations about intellectual quality, rigour, sophistication or importance are precluded or dismissed as irrelevant. This preserves polite congeniality (the evil twin, so seductively similar, of collegiality) and the privileges of existing power-holders in the academy, who are usually though not quite always the articulators and possessors of important kinds of academic prestige.

VIII. Automation in graduate studies Not only do time limits on Ph.D. studies favour automation, they are a crucial function of automated funding, admission and evaluative regimes. Training is thus compressed into a bare minimum of time and reduced, by necessity, to a core of skills and knowledge on which each supervisory committee must nd consensus. This streamlines, and smoothes out, the often very eccentric priorities, excursions and hobbyhorses to which scholars are (supposedly!) subject, and thus impoverishes

12 For a more frightening vision of automated evaluation in the natural sciences, see the chilling article by Richard Monastersky, “The Number that’s Devouring Science”, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Volume 52, Issue 8 (October 14th, 2005), p. A12.

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the intellectual eld and scope of such training. Streamlining is actively welcomed by those mainstream scholars who are rmly established in the tenderloin of their professional formation. This is in part because it removes distractions and alternatives for students while focusing approbation and prestige on such scholars’ chosen elds. Moreover, it further emphasizes and rewards hyper-specialization, which is inevitable when graduate students undertake to do in four years something that until very recently usually took at least seven and perhaps far longer. It requires graduate students to internalize ressentiment toward more speculative, more curiosity-driven, more erudite or highly skilled types of scholarly endeavour: why should others get six or seven years in which to perfect their Latin/German/Russian/statistics/method/ theoretical approach etc.? Why is all this ‘extra’ training necessary? When graduate students internalize the automational pressures that go with productivity-related time-compression, they undermine their own graduate programs and their own training by demanding a level playing eld for all graduate students in a department: and thus cooperate in their own abjection while imagining they are working for their own liberation. Only an impersonal, seemingly inevitable process could produce a false consciousness so perfectly opposed to one’s own (intellectual/academic/career) interests. The further conclusion that many students then draw in practice (and it is a perfectly rational, self-interested and healthy one) is that it is better to forgo studies that require lengthy and time-consuming acquisition of exotic or highly specialized skills and capacities and situate oneself in mainstream topics and areas that do not require such ‘exotic’ and lengthy training. Thus automation and time-compression work handin-hand to produce ever greater efciencies and increase productivity in graduate training as well as other areas: and simultaneously to impoverish the rich, complex, time-consuming and intellectually challenging character of traditional graduate studies in the humanities. The only response that does not concede the eld a priori is to construct countervailing structures: to teach as many demanding graduate seminars as possible, even on overload, to encourage one’s own students to take all those seminars (regardless of whether or not they need the ‘credits’), to require one’s own students to learn all the languages and other skills necessary in their eld (regardless of departmental norms) and to insist on serious engagement with general intellectual issues as well as the disciplinary issues of one’s own scholarly eld. The automatic model of acquiring a B.A. (take enough credits in the right areas) has

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long since begun to creep into graduate studies, with disastrous results, leaving only the Ph.D. thesis (and in Canada, the M.A. thesis) as a last area in which jumping through prescribed hoops is not sufcient to earn a degree—and yet the tendency in graduate studies also goes strongly in that direction. Claiming back and enlarging a space that should be inhabited primarily by scholars and their students and not by graduate committees, rule books, credit-hour minima, and Faculty-level intervenors seems to me the only feasible local response to so powerful a set of cultural and technical innovations/impositions. The space I am talking about is amorphous, and like all spaces, can be subjected to surveillance and discipline, such as the policy of requiring a written and signed protocol of each meeting with a graduate student. Resisting such intrusive methods of surveillance is only one aspect of reclaiming teaching and learning space. Ensuring the condentiality of supervision and advice would be another. Careful mentoring in teaching also requires spaces other than the ones available to graduate students. A teaching assistant whose duties consist of marking mid-terms in a large class does not receive adequate mentoring about teaching. Deciding what a given student needs is an integral part of the intellectual and academic freedom which tenure is supposed to guarantee: such space is needed not merely to ‘tell the truth in’, but to train graduate students to at least good standards in the less mainstream of the ‘erudite’ disciplines, and arguably in many more besides. When supervisors’ judgments about when students might be ready to apply for this or that scholarship, fellowship or award are simply pre-empted by administrative at, graduate students are forced to apply for fellowships before they are ready to do so, before they have even a marginal chance of success. Such obligatory exercises not only ‘discipline the subject’, they pervert intellectual activities by making them into exclusively bureaucratic enterprises, doomed to fail, yet coerced in the name of meeting quota, or ‘improving’ the rejection rates of adjudication committees and boards.13 Failure thus becomes a precondition for success when all students must apply for fellowships that most of them will not get. This merely replicates for graduate students what academics already suffer: a kind of pre13 See Doug Aoki’s gnomic remarks on academic ‘institutionalized rejection’—most of us must fail to get what we apply for if the rewards are to be attractive or worthwhile to those who do get them: http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~aoki/Research/Projects/projects.htm.

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professional abuse, dressed up in the rhetoric that “it’s good practice” (cf. “it builds character”). Graduate students are unable to resist administrative automation—every act of resistance can be interpreted as a sign of untness, and departments or Faculties of Graduate Studies can and do coerce students into wasting their time and working in self-destructive ways. Tenured scholars have a clear duty to exercise resistance to mandated churn and busy-work—especially when it actively saps the emotional resources students require if they are to do real work. What I don’t want to have to admit, but must (at least in part), is that reclaiming such space might entail the (re-)introduction of certain aspects of traditional supervisory autonomy—which includes the possibility of an oppressive mode of supervision. The administrative automation of graduate studies has tended to remove decision-making from the supervisor and concentrate it in the hands of collectives such as graduate committees and faculties of graduate studies. It is unfortunate that the fundamentally emancipatory impulses and attempts to prevent abuses of power have undermined individual scholars’ ability to supervise their students according to their own lights, and more importantly, have removed from the hands of those who know their own eld best the crucial decisions about how a graduate student ought to be trained for that eld—mitigating the tyrannical power of the one by replacing it with the dictatorship of consensus. Greater supervisory autonomy might open the way to certain kinds of abuse, but it limits that (potential) abuse a priori to small numbers of unfortunate people who end up with the very few colleagues who might be abusive supervisors. Bureaucratic intrusions into supervisory relationships and the resulting curtailment of supervisory autonomy affects everyone alike, and any misguided or unreasonable demand the system makes is imposed on everyone equally, not just on the poor students of the irascible or unreasonable Prof. X (who are free, after all, to seek a new supervisor). Thus a certain small-‘c’ conservatism mixed with a dose of libertarianism might seem here to be the lesser of two evils: the chance that a few will be badly treated is the cost or risk of freedom. The certainty that all will be treated alike (and that may well mean they will all be equally badly treated) comes at a higher cost in an institution devoted rst and foremost to fostering excellence, not sameness. Automation demands and rewards sameness. Perhaps—and I hesitate to suggest it, yet I don’t see any other option, really—a bit of traditional oppression and a bit of traditional chaos are in fact preferable to the much more

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efcient and intrusive forms of discipline and normalization that come with (most) bureaucratic interventions into supervision. Furthermore, a certain dose of traditional Bildung might be preferable to the extremely narrow and instrumental requirements of a (largely imaginary) fouryear Ph.D.

IX. Automatic down-sizing: The end of Eurocentrism and the ‘Twilight of the Humanities’ The pressures of automation work to limit both the disciplinary range of topics covered by faculty members and (therefore) the range of topics graduate students can in fact study. In the context of my university, this ‘normative centering’14 has resulted in the steady abandonment of positions addressing cultural, linguistic, historical or intellectual aspects of pre-modern Europe—the matrix of the humanities. The historical, cultural and literary elds easily accessible to our students—via the English language—are in no danger, but almost everything else in the study of the West between antiquity and the eighteenth century is quickly withering away, seemingly unlamented, as though a wicked Eurocentrism had been banished by the triumphal march of—well, of modernity, of English, of a deeply populist aesthetic.15 Automation demands and rewards sameness.

14 An analytic term for institutional and intellectual processes coined by the early modernist Berndt Hamm; see for example his article “Normative Centering in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: Observations on Religiosity, Theology and Iconology”, trans. by John Frymire, in The Journal of Early Modern History 3,4 (November 1999), 307–354. 15 While the study of pre-modern Europe is no longer a sacred cow, and this is only proper, it should not be a pariah either—but automation has magnied a general unease with Eurocentric visions of the world into the almost complete abandonment of the study of the European (non-British) past and its cultures, languages and literatures in this and other Canadian universities, reected in the amalgamation and downsizing (at the University of Alberta and at many others) or outright closure of language/literature departments (Carleton, McMaster and others).

CHAPTER TWO

BEYOND BILDUNG: THE “DISCIPLINARITY AND DISSENT” OF CULTURAL STUDIES IN THE GLOBAL MANAGERIAL ACADEMY Markus Reisenleitner Lingnan University

I am currently teaching in the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. When undergoing the professional ritual of exchanging name cards (indication of an academy that increasingly takes its cues from the business world, compulsively indicating corporate afliations and ranks), I often encounter two questions, both of which are equally hard to answer: 1. “So what exactly is cultural studies?” and 2. “Is what you do there, like, real cultural studies?” Nobody ever asked me such questions when I still self-identied as a cultural historian (surely as equally ill-dened a designation), and I have developed my own repertoire of evasiveness to brave, or at least survive, these encounters. What strikes me as remarkable in my new context, however, is that—a decade after the Sokal “scandal” and four decades after the foundation of the Birmingham Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies, from which at least the Anglophone lineage of cultural studies is commonly derived—cultural studies is still at the center of a contest over academic territory and disciplinarity, research ethics, pedagogy, the core curriculum, and a number of other issues that deeply affect the humanities. At the same time, cultural studies continues to be a success story and a growth industry in the English-speaking academy—particularly in academic publishing, a protable business in the English-language market, which is sustaining publishing empires like the Taylor & Francis group, as well as, maybe to a lesser degree, in the university itself, where cultural studies, often understood merely as a label (not real, in other words), has come to spearhead a group of interdisciplinary programmes, independent studies, post-disciplinary formations, and DIY degrees—the x-whatever studies that promise to provide a timely and relevant alternative to traditional elds like sociology, English, comparative literature, history and anthropology (and the student numbers that go with this).

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In this article I will explore some of the reasons, connections and articulations that have put cultural studies at the crossroads of the debate about the humanities’ changing roles in education, research, and the wider community. Specically, I will address the effects of managerialism, the increasingly global business of teaching in the English language, and issues of public accountability and private fundraising. Since “[d]ebates about cultural studies—seen variously as an area, a eld, a program, a discipline, or a conspiracy—reveal an overdetermined landscape of anxieties about the humanities” (Appadurai 28), I hope that by looking at humanities teaching and research in a university context through the prism of the story of cultural studies—its history, position, and ongoing development—, I can disentangle some of the strands that determine what is going on in the humanities today. The following is not meant as an exercise in true orthodoxy (i.e. describe why cultural studies is being attacked and then debunk those criticisms). My paper is not meant to promote cultural studies, real cultural studies, as the future of humanities education; it is meant to locate productive sites, to open up lines of ight in what I believe is an ongoing struggle against redening and marginalizing, if not obliterating, humanities research and expertise by relegating the humanities to a liberal arts idea of general education. I do not believe, as Bill Readings did in the early 1990s, that “[t]he University . . . no longer participates in the historical project for humanity that was the legacy of the Enlightenment: the historical project of culture” (Readings 3). I believe culture, nowadays in many ways divorced from the Enlightenment, is alive and well, but this is no guarantee for the survival of the humanities as academic disciplines. The cultural studies story, which I interrogate later in this paper, might suggest some productive ways of dealing with those challenges.

Challenges facing the humanitites Everybody teaching in humanities-related contexts is deeply aware of current challenges, which have produced, in many cases, a veritable siege mentality among academics. Departments are closed or amalgamated, positions are rare and precarious, and teaching loads, evaluation exercises, fundraising for research projects, and demands for public service put increasing strain on scholars and turn time into a very precious commodity. The inherent contradiction between an ever-more

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specializing research agenda—resulting in the accountability tyranny of “performance indicators” such as “refereed articles”, in Meaghan Morris’s words “these largely unread repositories of the parochialism of sometimes British, usually American blind reviewers” (Morris “On the Future of Parochialism: Globalisation, Young and Dangerous, and Cinema Studies in Tuen Mun” 20)—and the demand on humanists to produce “useful” knowledge for a wider audience—in the form of project reports, reference works, non-specialist journals and magazines and other research-based media articles—has created the strange situation that humanities scholars are constantly challenged to provide more community interface, but are, on the other hand, held accountable with reference to the standards of an expert culture that produces rigorous but highly specialized and inaccessible knowledge. “[A]t a time when the cultural industries from tourism to the arts form one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy, and when demand is increasing on a global scale for sophisticated forms of humanist expertise in the ethical, semiotic, historical and comparative cultural issues arising from geopolitical upheaval and rapid social change, the scholars who could most directly benet the nation in these respects may be disadvantaged if they take the time to do so. Endlessly exhorted to emerge from the ivory tower, humanists who go too far can end up out of the academy.” (Morris and McCalman 2.) It is probably sometimes therapeutically wise to develop, especially over a cold beer, a certain nostalgia for the good old days—the days when professors were, if not well-paid, denitely highly esteemed, enjoyed academic freedom, wrote learned books at a leisurely pace (without evaluation committees breathing down their necks), and generally were in a position to pursue their own interests for the benet of mankind while polite and motivated students deferred to their authority in decorous classrooms. Nostalgia can be therapeutic in order to convince ourselves that another university is possible because it was (the general model of a historical utopia), but it is not the equivalent of a strategy, or even a tactic, to tackle ongoing challenges—not only because it conveniently forgets to mention the exclusion of women and minorities, the classist base, the nationalist nature, the conservative politics, and the rampant cronyism of the university of the past. Such a nostalgia also disregards contradictions built into the very structure of the so-called “Humboldtian” system of tertiary university education, based on the idea of a research university, and its North American offspring, adapted during the late 19th century and, in its most explicit

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form of undergraduate teaching, married to the Oxbridge tradition in the unique idea of the Liberal Arts college. These American models are now rapidly imitated and adopted across the world, from Vienna to Hong Kong. (My university, for example, prides itself of being a liberal arts university, despite its by no means inconsiderable postgraduate program, which is generally thought to be incompatible with the idea of liberal arts; see below.) The Humboldtian model is built on the idea that university education—and the pedagogy somewhat ineffably ensuing from it—is based on research, the rigorous acquisition of new knowledge based on the specic methodologies and theoretical foundations of individual disciplines. Discipline is the operative word here, a term which for a long time was capable of articulating the pedagogical and professional implications of the model, and is now at the center of the humanities debate. Arjun Appadurai, in a collection of essays which probe the disciplinary nature of cultural studies and to which the title of my paper refers, draws our attention to this double meaning of the noun “discipline”: “(a) care, cultivation, habit and (b) eld, method, subject matter” (Appadurai 30). He goes on to demonstrate that in contemporary North American undergraduate education, the rst, anti-professional, meaning of discipline has increasingly become divorced from research as research itself has professionalized. This split is not only evidenced by interdisciplinary “foundation” and writing courses, but even more so by an institution unique to the North American university system: the Liberal Arts college, which is built upon the notion of a wide, interdisciplinary education to produce responsible citizens who serve the community, a fundamentally bildend function if there ever was one. “While imparting knowledge, their academic regimen was also intended to develop personal character and intellect—to turn out what continues to be confusingly styled ‘the whole person’, prepared to function knowledgably within a framework of civic responsibility” (Lang 134). The most recent buzzword at Lingnan is “enquiry learning”—a clear indication that research can no longer be taken for granted in the undergraduate curriculum. While liberal arts supposedly extends beyond the humanities, it is still a humanities-inected core curriculum which has informed the liberal arts “missions” of those institutions dedicated rst and foremost to teaching (rather than research). Moreover, the recent decline of the institution itself has been traced to the fact that “[g]eneric versions of that mission are now regularly included in even the most specialized undergraduate curricula” (Lang 133). (This kind

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of undergraduate education has up to now hardly existed in continental Europe, where only now Bachelor degrees are being introduced in many countries.) In graduate teaching, however, the training ground for future teachers of foundation courses in liberal arts colleges and the regulatory mechanism for the job market, it is the second notion of discipline (“eld, method, subject matter”) which, in Appadurai’s narrative, leads to the increasing professionalisation of graduate schools as well as rigidity and gate-keeping in traditional subjects. “Graduate training, with its intense bias towards the vocational, the professional, and the specialized appears directly contradictory to the idea of self-cultivation and liberality associated with the undergraduate ideology of liberal arts” (Appadurai 31). When put in those terms, the contradiction seems crass, but the merit of the meme “Humboldtian”—and the distinctive character of much of the late 19th and early 20th-century university—has been to reconcile those two contradictory notions, seemingly, and for most of the time quite productively, enabling a culture of co-existence between the formation of a liberal self and the development of means and techniques for the production of knowledge that is new and valid (if not relevant). Employing such catchphrases like “Freiheit und Einheit von Forschung und Lehre” or “Bildung durch Wissenschaft”1 (Ash 10), disciplinary status, and the splitting off of sub-disciplines (like sociology, political science, etc.; or the Philologien and hyphenated Geschichten such as Kunstgeschichte, Musikgeschichte etc.) had the function of fostering and protecting research and providing an adequate framework for verifying its results, but at the same time also insisted on having an educational function, with the occasional nod to General Education principles (like Lawrence Stone’s infamous exhortation for historians to “write in plain English”). Pedagogical principles have for the longest time been regarded as the quasi-natural extension of the discipline-based ideal of research, providing “the suture . . . between the discourse of departmental disciplinarity and the more general liberal ideal of scholarly discipline” (Appadurai 32). Unless we want to engage in the kind of nostalgic exercise I am trying hard to avoid, it has to be admitted that the fault lines between

1 Translated by a friend as “how to become really arrogant/sophisticated by knowing the right things.

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pedagogy, social relevance and professionalized research were always fragile, and they broke open in Germany early in the 20th century, leading to the emergence of a much more specialized—and rigid—system of highly specialized research and the slow disappearance of pedagogical criteria (which only lived on in niches like secondary school teachers’ training). In the Weimar Republic, “Humboldt” had already become part of a rhetoric that sustained culturally conservative professors in their assault against what they perceived as the threat of modernism (cf. Bruch). When the question of social relevance was taken up in Germany and Austria after 1968, it led not only to the clear politicization of universities (much has been said and written about that), but also to demands for a return to the “grundlegend bildende Funktion von Wissenschaft und insbesondere die der Öffentlichkeit zugewandten Geisteswissenschaften” (Frühwald et al.). This was clearly a response to a situation in which the element of Bildung—the common canon of a genteel bourgeois elite—had not so much been ceded to the specialization and professionalisation within the university system but rather relegated to the selective and streamed secondary school system. Allgemeinbildung was what provided access credentials to universities in the form of a certicate of maturity (Matura in Austria), after that it was specialization of one particular aspect of this Allgemeinbildung all the way. While the ’68 generation’s demands for a more pedagogically oriented academy was doubtless intended to strengthen the emancipatory and political function of university education, it also paved the way for an adoption of an American model of undergraduate curricula which is now spreading across continental Europe. In the British and American systems, however, the dichotomies inherent in the modern university’s notion of Bildung lived on at the university level, assuming the “peculiar political economy behind the debates over the canon that assumes that ten or fteen books, read in two or three courses, in a few thousand colleges and universities, in four years of the life-cycle of a modest number of Americans, are the decisive stage for the battle over literacy, standards, and cosmopolitanism” (Appadurai 28). However, several developments in tertiary education since the 1970s have led to a situation in which the articulation of research and pedagogy could no longer be maintained easily. While the discussion of these developments within the humanities is mostly focused on ideengeschichtlich explanations—like the breakdown of a canon in the culture wars or the linguistic turn and the ensuing uncertainties of poststructuralist and deconstructionist theories—, I would suggest we

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have to look at the wider social and institutional context to understand how this affected the humanities per se. The huge expansion, co-optation, and professionalization of the tertiary education system between 1945 and 1975 is well documented (Menand), but it is worth underscoring here that this contributed (particularly, but not exclusively, in the US academy, co-opted for national interests during the Cold War) to strengthening a scientic model of research. While a co-optation under the guise of disinterested professionalism has always been present in the model of the research university, between 1945 and 1968 professional specialization came to dene the ethos of the professor more strongly than ever—including the humanities—and strengthened the need for a disciplinary base, the methodological rigor, dened publishing machinery, clear hierarchies, and other infrastructural apparatus by which an expert culture sustains itself. This could not have been done easily if the university model had not already provided a foundation for scientic work dedicated to national interest—the model is derived, after all, from the Prussian academy, hardly an a-political space. Within the humanities, this post-war development has led to the introduction of such venerable cold war paradigms as area studies (which also changed the way some of the disheveled and antiquarian Philologien in continental Europe were practiced, and still has an impact on area-based centers whose work is strongly inected towards realpolitik). Specialization also prepared the ground and fostered the emergence of new paradigms like semiotics and poststructuralism, with their highly technical vocabulary, which could not have emerged without a professional research ethos within the academy and established graduate programs which were specialized, selective and time-consuming enough to deal with the complexities of the new theory-talk. While operating from a rmly disciplinary base before the ’70s, professional schools established a new, cross-disciplinary language, “ ‘theory’ as a lingua franca enabling the establishment of common ground for discussion and even research projects between scholars from different countries as well as disciplines and faculties” (Morris and McCalman 18). At the same time the very foundation of humanities professionalization—disciplines—were challenged from two sides: the level of extreme abstraction of methodological rigor and analysis, which led to the emergence of “high theory”; and the continuing perceived need to provide and expand the foundation for this professionalization in tertiary education in the undergraduate curriculum (taking its cues from liberal arts), a foundation that was

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distinct from disciplinary knowledge. The humanities, often personied by teachers trained in highly professional and research-oriented graduate schools, were mandated with the responsibility to churn out increasing numbers of “well-rounded” personalities with proper thinking and writing (often equated) skills—in short, were held responsible for the idea of Bildung, sometimes now more neutrally referred to as “cultural literacy,” the vaguely dened but ercely contested canonical standards on which the future of morality, civility and the survival of the world are thought to depend. (More recently the language of mission statements has updated these standards into economic terms; at my university, the administration is proud to “add value” to students in what, in business school speak, is “human resource development” but, in Hong Kong English, is called “whole person development.”) While humanities might be challenged to become more useful, in their pedagogical strand the “canonical story for the humanist culture of progress through free thinking” (Morris “Humanities for Taxpayers: Some Problems” 113) is by no means dead. Up to the ’70s, this foundation could still be provided by the humanities from a more or less secure disciplinary base. English, History and the ubiquitous Western Civilization courses could relatively easily reconcile specialization and what was regarded as Bildung in curricula and teaching practices as long as the clientele served was relatively small, elitist and homogeneous, “tied up with a particular bourgeois liberal conception of the self, with European conceptions of self and other, and with the many European imperialisms of the last four hundred years, as a key component of the civilizing of European elites” (Appadurai 33). But this uneasy articulation of Bildung and discipline was never in a good position to survive the juggernaut of developments that have affected university education during the last 30 years. The most commonly quoted reason for the breakdown of consensus over a canonized core curriculum sustained by traditional humanities disciplines is the diversication of the student body during the last 30 -some years. This in itself has to be seen as part of the wider movement of the globalization of tertiary education, which required new strategies of diversity management in immigrant societies, but at the same time turned the English-speaking academy into a protable import-export business for a world in which a diploma in English became a better investment than in Latin or Putonghua. “The current shift in the role of the University is, above all, determined by the decline of the national cultural mission that has up to now provided

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its raison d’être . . . which means that the centrality of the traditional humanistic disciplines to the life of the University is no longer assured” (Readings 3). A more diverse student body in English, Australian, and North American universities is accompanied by an ever-increasing number of branch ofces of these universities in Europe, the Asia-Pacic region and elsewhere, often (as in the case of Hong Kong or Eastern Europe) targeting the lower end of the student spectrum and thus being all the more called upon to provide very basic educational functions (in English) that are hard, if not impossible, to reconcile with a highly specialized disciplinary orientation. The discipline that has most to prot from this is probably English, becoming the privileged site and projection of expectations to instill the survival skills for a globalized world. While rising tuition fees might reverse the trend towards diversication for resident minorities in North America, this in itself does not halt the diversication process on a global scale, on the contrary: as nancing higher education continues to shift away from the idea of relying on corporate income and capital gains taxes toward sponsorship, investment and tuition fees, universities deriving a huge portion of their income from overseas students’ tuition fees or their overseas branch operations still need to provide basic “cultural literacy” to a diverse student clientele who can be sent home after they graduate, while the teaching is sustained to a large extent by graduate students and casualized sessionals, some of whom with equally precarious visa status—the group whose labor is easiest to casualize. Through these processes academic labor is incorporated into larger global movement of what Scott Lash and John Urry call “disorganized capitalism”, a form of market governance where particularly cultural work is outsourced in an elaborate system of subcontracting (Lash and Urry), resulting in the duality of underpaid contract workers and a handful of highly paid stars. For a casualized academic labor force, interdisciplinarity is the way to go, providing the “exibility” for the kind of departmenthopping that has become a survival strategy. These changes have, of course, affected all disciplines; but business and administration schools, not to mention the natural sciences, much less responsible for providing basic education functions, have been able to set standards of accountability in terms of output orientation, fundraising, and graduate placement, while the humanities have had to follow suit, professionalizing themselves along the lines of models invented for other schools of thought. At the same time organizational structures and structures of governance change according to a rhetoric

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that aims at introducing a “model” of the university more adequate to what is supposedly a global industry—despite the fact that the introduction of private sector corporate governance structures has often proven unsuccessful because a university, while incorporated into global economic ows, is still not a private company, but rather operates like a general public sector organization accountable to a wide and diverse range of stakeholders ( Jayne). The contradictions between the tasks assigned to the university under these circumstances are glaringly obvious and cannot be easily reconciled, no matter what pompous mission statements in glossy brochures and on ashy websites promise. One clear outcome of a market rhetoric is that universities are held accountable to notions of productivity which have distributed resources across the system, away from the humanities. Peer review has always accompanied an academy that understood itself as professional, but managerial practices that are dened by market-speak have attened differences between academic and economic productivity as well as between humanistic and scientic research. Humanities scholars are now called upon to demonstrate a culture of excellence (no matter in what) measured by “output” and “performance indicators,” “not criticism or scholarship” (Morris “Humanities for Taxpayers: Some Problems” 115). At the same time, under a performance indicator one could call “how many well-rounded, easily employable personalities have you churned out lately?”, they are called upon to teach vaguely dened core values, which nowadays seem to be located somewhere between Toastmasters and multicultural table manners—subjects for which a disciplinary base would indeed be hard to identify. Under these circumstances, the loss of disciplinarity pregured in both the continued demand for Bildung and the move to “high theory” could easily be translated by university managers into fundamental structural changes, “the loss of the bases for disciplinary reproduction, not by acts of abandonment committed by individual subjects of choice, reading Foucault or British Cultural Studies, but by the forced amalgamation of departments into hybridized schools and centers of which the increasingly lengthy, breathless, compound titles traced a managerial imperative and not an intellectual rationale” (Morris “Humanities for Taxpayers: Some Problems” 115)—ostensibly justied by the needs to teach interdisciplinary core curricula. “Administrators . . . love to ‘melt down’ the disciplines, since that would allow them to deploy faculty more efciently—and the

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claim that disciplinarity represents a factitious organization is as good an excuse as any. Why support separate medievalists in your history department, your English department, your French department, and your art history department, none of them probably attracting huge enrollments, when you can hire one interdisciplinary super-medievalist and install her in a Medieval Studies program, whose survival can be made to depend on its ability to attract outside funding?” (Menand). Apart from those dire consequences for personnel actions, such a move invariably involves a loss of expertise; while study centers and interdisciplinary programs might attract student numbers and offer a little bit of everything, they do not possess the credentials of professionalism ( journals, conferences, associations) that can guarantee the fulllment of performance indicators other than budget lines.

Cultural Studies’ position vis-à-vis the academy Scholars trained in more traditional disciplines sometimes hold cultural studies, despite its tradition of criticism, responsible for the dilution of disciplinary boundaries in the humanities that I have tried to connect to larger transformations within the academy. And indeed, cultural studies sometimes seems more concerned with dening itself against the disciplines, assuming a traditional academy that just exists, an intellectually stiing enterprise, against which the breaking up of disciplinary boundaries is placed. In the volume to which the title of my paper refers (Nelson and Gaonkar), a series of essays is dedicated to the precarious disciplinary status of cultural studies as both an “irritant and inspiration” (Nelson and Gaonkar 18). In a typical cultural studies move, the editors link cultural studies’ persistent refusal of disciplinary status to its political agenda: . . . the intense specialization of postwar academia—linking the right to speak with a narrow credentialing process—is increasingly apparent as a highly politicized compact between knowledge and power. Moreover, it is a compact in which academics cede almost all public power to specialists and to the agencies that fund and promote them. It also helps encourage a wider undemocratic notion of disempowered and broadly silenced citizenship. (Nelson and Gaonkar 12)

Cultural studies to the rescue. Well, maybe. Nine years after the publication of these pronouncements, cultural studies might be in better shape

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than most of the other humanities—with more departments worldwide, more programmes, more funding, more publication outlets, a 10 -year history of international conferences, and, since 2002, an international professional association. But does this mean that the refusal to be coopted by the powers-that-be prevailed in a small corner of the humanities, or is cultural studies just more versatile, more adaptable, in other words: more opportunistic, than other humanities disciplines? The latter explanation is certainly the one often heard from colleagues who see cultural studies as part of the process that has eroded the traditional disciplines and their insistence on analytic rigor, and has led to a spiral of decreasing standards in the humanities. Gayatri Spivak, in searching for a sense of disciplinarity for her own subject, Comparative Literature, even goes as far as comparing area studies, this cold-war creation of American imperialism, favorably to cultural studies because of its rigor and discipline: Without the support of the humanities, Area Studies can still only transgress frontiers, in the name of crossing borders; and, without a transformed Area Studies, Comparative Literature remains imprisoned within the borders it will not cross. Area studies have resources but also built-in, restricted, but real interdisciplinarity. . . . whatever we think about the relationship between Comparative Literature and Area Studies, the polarity between Area Studies and Cultural Studies is clear. Area Studies exhibit quality and rigor (those elusive traits), combined with openly conservative or “no” politics. They are tied to the politics of power, and their connections to the power elite of the countries studied are still strong; the quality of the language learning is generally excellent, though just as generally conned to the needs of social science eldwork; and the data processing is sophisticated, extensive, and intensive. Academic “Cultural Studies,” as a metropolitan phenomenon originating on the radical fringes of national language departments, opposes this with no more than metropolitan language-based presentist and personalist convictions, often with visibly foregone conclusions that cannot match the implicit political cunning of Area Studies at their best; and earns itself a reputation for “lack of rigor” as well as for politicizing the academy. . . . The real “Other” of Cultural Studies is not Area Studies but the civilization courses offered by the European language departments, generally scorned by Comparative Literature. (Spivak 7f.)

While this assessment might be overly harsh and polemical, I think it would, in any case, be mistaken to make too much of the aunted inter- post- trans- beyond-disciplinary status of cultural studies without taking into consideration the changing contexts in which cultural studies is being practiced. The connection between knowledge, power

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and discipline in itself has, of course, not totally eluded the more traditional humanities subjects, and some of them have adopted the “hyphenated” approach to push, and sometimes transgress, the narrow connes of consensus knowledge production. In the discipline I was originally trained in, History, the upheavals of the ’70s had already led to the rapid introduction of new, socially aware paradigms of thinking about the discipline of History by rethinking the role of academics. My teachers were academics for whom the “never again” lesson—the cooptation of historians by fascism and the discipline’s twenty-year long inability to deal with this cooptation after the end of the war—became a principled basis of their academic practice. Justifying one’s craft in terms of relevance and political impact had, by the mid-seventies, fundamentally changed a discipline which had not exactly been known for its political awareness or theoretical sophistication, and an interdisciplinary and political turn similar to the one taken by cultural studies led to a re-orientation of the discipline towards the social sciences. Re-invented as “social history,” the discipline took it upon itself in the parts of the world affected by fascism to deal with the deeper roots and historically grown structures that had facilitated the smooth transition from capitalist democracies to authoritarian regimes employing slave labor in the interwar years. In a wider understanding, the academic practice of History, motivated by an emancipatory interest in the social structures of the past, intended to give voice to the submerged historical actors and social groups that had been silenced in the traditional, statist versions of diplomatic and political history hegemonic for over a century. Social history remains committed to the Enlightenment project of providing a politically and socially aware rational pedagogy, enlarging both the groups of historical actors and the archives that offered access to their life worlds. This is just one example of many among humanities disciplines meant to show that what is often quoted as the most obvious quality of cultural studies—its political commitment, its interdisciplinarity, and its pedagogical impetus—might not be so unique after all. Still, it is cultural studies which has been, for the forty years of its existence, reviled and gloried for what has, after all, been a rather common practice in the academy, especially in the humanities, namely the making and remaking of disciplinary canons, methods, theories and practices. “At least since the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientic Revolutions, there has developed a broad consensus that the historicity of certain forms of inquiry is not the enemy of their productivity” (Appadurai 26).

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Yet there are specicities in the cultural studies formation that should not be brushed aside. A brief look at the genesis and formation of cultural studies might be useful in this context. Notwithstanding similar developments in other countries and even an earlier proposal for American formation of cultural studies (Carey) it is well established that cultural studies as an intellectual project came out of the British tradition of the New Left, a culturalist turn of Marxist thinking in the wake of the Soviet crush of the Hungarian uprising which meant to liberate left thinking from Stalinism and a rigid basesuperstructure model. I would suggest that cultural studies was right from its start a project which productively fused seemingly irreconcilable differences and then gave this fusion a distinct shape, sometimes at the expense of marginalizing or eradicating dissent—a process which could easily be seen as progressing disciplinarity. Even before cultural studies became a household name, the New Left movement itself had demonstrated how this could work. The appearance in 1960 of the New Left Review, central organ of the New Left, was itself a fusion of the New Reasoner edited by Edward and Dorothy Thompson, and the Universities and Left Review edited by Charles Taylor, Stuart Hall, Raphael Samuel and Gabriel Pearson, bringing together the “humanist, oppositional tradition in the Communist party of Great Britain” (Davies) and a leftist academic formation. An uneasy alliance, it was taken over by Perry Anderson after two years, and “theory,” this fairly recent common language of intellectuals inside and outside the academy, took center stage, productively translating continental European texts into the context of British left thinking. Even at this early stage the specicity of cultural studies’ MO becomes clear: in a period when universities were specializing and professionalizing rapidly, the New Left tapped into this movement of professionalization without being absorbed into it; the New Left Review, itself highly theoretical and difcult to access, could still claim that it stayed outside the (bourgeois) university apparatus and thus maintained a site of relevant political intervention. (Other publication venues followed suit in the late 60s and 70s, among them Screen, the History Workshop Journal, Verso Press, Methuen, etc.) If a movement between fusing different strands of new left thinking and then streamlining them into coherent intellectual gurations is characteristic of the newly established publication venues (arguably the most important achievement for establishing the label cultural studies in the academic world), the same holds true for teaching. The founding

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mythology of cultural studies stubbornly locates its teaching origin in adult education in order to draw out its commitment to community involvement and outreach. Raymond Williams famously claimed: “That shift of perspective about the teaching of arts and literature and their relation to history and to contemporary society began in Adult Education, and it didn’t happen anywhere else” (Williams and Pinkney 162), and it may be true that what the founding fathers “were doing was denitely not founding a new subject area” (Steele 15). Yet the movement into the academy was unstoppable, and it was strategically tapping into the general process of widening access to tertiary education in the postwar years. Cultural studies developed from the beginning, I would argue, a strategy of lling gaps in tertiary education that opened up when new social developments clashed with traditional structures. Its initial attachment to the core disciplines of the curriculum, English and History, was hardly a disadvantage: English was crucial to the civilizing mission of the former Empire at home and abroad (and widened its reach under the conditions of globalism), and History is married to the establishment of national community. From a strategic point of view, this disciplinary afliation was thus auspicious, and began to bear fruit early on; not only did Williams and Thompson land academic positions; the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was launched by Richard Hoggart already in 1962 (as a graduate research center under the department of English). New left- and cultural studies-related thought found its way into new degree programs and research units very quickly in comparison with other “new” disciplines, and when the Open University became functional in the 1970s, it owed much to this body of thought. Being at the same time inside the academy while remaining at the margin, claiming a new, relevant and timely pedagogy while mobilizing traditional mission statements made cultural studies exible enough to survive, while tapping into larger intellectual movements solidied what would otherwise be called disciplinary formation. While interdisciplinarity and political commitment, rather than narrow disciplinary formation, were promoted as cultural studies hallmarks, all this time cultural studies developed a distinct prole in its engagement with relevant issues of popular culture, subcultures and social movements, and colonial marginality. When Stuart Hall joined the Birmingham center in 1966 and became its effective director in 1968 (Davies 16), cultural studies began to emerge with a canon of methodologies and theory (mostly drawing on Althusser and the—equally Althusserian—translation of

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Gramsci into English) and sidelined other formations of cultural theory: most famously Thompson’s humanist focus on history, exorcised in the History Workshop Journal debate ( Johnson); and also Lacanian feminism, advocated, among others, by Rosalind Coward and John Ellis––a disagreement which, gave rise to one of the most popular books of its day, Language and Materialism (Ellis, personal conversation; Coward and Ellis). “The language of the Centre was earnestly Jesuitical and Presbyterian, as if the task was to create science rather than gay science, to struggle towards the invention of political correctness than to become politically playful” (Davies 37), but this also made it possible to give cultural studies a core, to stake out a terrain in which pedagogy, research, and political engagement could occur and productively ll the divide between specialization, teaching and outreach. “Stuart Hall popularized the term ‘cultural studies’ (appropriated from Hoggart and Williams) by developing a theoretical paradigm that would stand at the centre of what it was conceived of as being” (Davies 38). The high degree of specialization and canon formation characteristic for cultural studies at the center went all but unnoticed over the rhetoric emphasizing its politics and pedagogy. While other disciplines were ghting a retreating battle with the weapons of their heritage in specialization and professionalization as well as their civilizing mission, cultural studies, at least as canonical by the ’70s, endlessly relativized its own disciplinary status while at the same time seriously engaging in turf wars with its strongest contender disciplines, social history and the emerging gender studies. (Gender was accommodated, history was not.) With a common thread of connecting theory (structural Marxism), a site was established from which cultural studies could be taken seriously both from within and from outside the academy, a framework loose enough to suture the academic tidal waves still to come. By the 1980s, “[c]ultural studies had [established] a presence which appeared to shatter the pretences of insular academia. And, in many ways, because it was concerned with the media, it was able to use the media to get its point home” (Davies 139). While the neoconservative turn during the 1980s was certainly not conducive to furthering a new left political agenda, cultural studies was able to survive a conservative backlash academically by tapping into the increasingly numbers-oriented undergraduate teaching academy and the also increasingly lucrative publishing industry. And it traveled well—both into the core areas of an undergraduate humanities curriculum and the professional, specialized academy. Undergraduate teaching, as I pointed out before, was

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in dire need of accommodating diversity and defusing the attack on the canon of great white men—cultural studies had a proven history of doing just that, substituting it with the culture of experience and everyday life and placing a heavy emphasis on questions of identity, which went well with identitarian politics of difference—while at the same time teaching basic skills of “cultural literacy”—reading and writing, in English. One of Stuart Hall’s greatest achievement is that he taught students how to read politically, fusing textual analysis and political critique, and could be applied to pretty much anything that seems to matter in contemporary culture. And its leftist agenda was hardly a serious roadblock; conservatives needed to nd out what is “going on” as well—even outspoken Marxist Lawrence Grossberg’s books have made it onto the reading lists of some very conservative institutions when the insightfulness of cultural studies analyses became known in the academy. On a professional level, “the work fed into an international caravan of traveling scholarship which debated the ner points of deconstruction, modernism, postmodernism, gender, neocolonialism, post-Marxism . . . critical theory had become a performance for the academic cognoscenti” (Davies 140). The issue of identity (sometimes connected to questions of postcoloniality and globalism) made it easy to connect to local issues. (In Hong Kong, for example, the precarious status of a “Hong Kong identity” is still, eight years after the handover, a hotly debated issue.) These days the most successful of these transplants of British cultural studies, its practice in the US, seems to increasingly dene its center. One would assume that cultural studies would have been diluted by its integration into the vast system of undergraduate teaching and could not have maintained any semblance of a coherent academic practice at a professional level (going down the road of so many other interdisciplinary post-formations), and that would be true were it not for its attachment to the academic star system in which the label still carries a lot of cachet. Ioan Davies, among others, has offered a trenchant critique of this process, which is worth quoting at length: The way in which cultural studies as a Thing has been co-opted by certain groups in the United States raises quite a different issue. It is, of course, taken everywhere as an academic development, rather than a political or educational one . . . It is also a development which is launched through conferences, and conferences which are put together in such a manner that the proceedings are being structured as textbooks, even before the conference takes place: the performances are orchestrated, dialogue is

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markus reisenleitner ‘conducted’, the score is edited in advance. Thus who will be part of this Thing called cultural studies have been selected much in the same way as a rock extravaganza sponsored by Coca-Cola decides who is already signicant enough or who has great potential to be marketed now. One can imagine a committee of all that are great and good in cultural studies sitting down and dening the new wave. . . . The grandest version of these caravanserai is the one co-ordinated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. (Davies 158)

Davies’ acrimonious observations were very illuminating in regard to the “success story” of cultural studies. There can be no doubt that this is the latest stage of a disciplinary formation’s accommodation with the necessities of the contemporary academy—at a global level, not as a particular American trend, as Davies maintains, even though this is where the Big Men, and the occasional though hardly token woman, are being bought and brought (with increasingly less success after 2001). “Given its increasing visibility, exemplied in the proliferation of cultural studies lists by academic publishing houses, . . . cultural studies seems poised for a wholesale retreat into the privatized world of the academic star system and narrow professional self-interests dominated by the politics of status, glamour, and self-preoccupation” (Gray 205). I share Davies’s sense of moral outrage at this in many ways. But it has to be acknowledged that this provided cultural studies with a survival strategy in an academic climate that is all but outrightly hostile towards critical humanities, particularly with a Marxist pedigree; cultural studies has, in media-savvy ways, adapted to wider academic trends in order to maintain its identity while supposedly going against the grain of the mainstream. (And cronyism, be it in the form of quotation circles, publishing venues, or conference circuits, has always been a concomitant of disciplinary status; it does not, in itself, invalidate an academic discipline.) Has cultural studies become de-politicized? It can certainly seem that way, and in many ways it has become an empty signier. But that does not mean that you can’t do critical, cutting-edge, well-founded, rigorously researched and meticulously published academic work under the label, on top of engaging teaching and community work, because it is still recognizable as a discipline. I would certainly advocate less exclusionary, hierarchical and ultimately authoritarian and imperialist ways of maintaining an enabling center, but it seems clear that some such mechanism needs to be provided for an intellectual project, particularly a critical one, to survive. (The problem with the star system in

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cultural studies is not so much a moral one, although this is certainly also an issue; more importantly, the star system constantly threatens to disrupt cultural studies agendas from within by alienating academics who see it as an emancipatory political project.) In this light cultural studies’ rapid appropriation by university administrators—leading one commentator to refer to “engineering enlightened by cultural studies” as the “new deanspeak” (Menand)—is by no means surprising. Despite its rst institutionalization in a postgraduate research center and its continuing to display this mission proudly on its sleeve, cultural studies has very visibly emerged as an undergraduate pedagogical practice, and is increasingly institutionalized as such. (You do not nd cultural studies departments at Oxford, the University of Sydney or the University of Hong Kong, but you do nd them at the University of East London, Macquarie, and Lingnan.) Insisting on pedagogical practice, and reecting on it as such, turned out to be a good way to adroitly negotiate the ideological fusion of research, disciplinary knowledge, and pedagogy characteristic of the academy. Cultural studies has lived in the gaps, as it were, and I would suggest that it is precisely this particular angle which has hurled cultural studies to such prominent status in recent debates. This is why cultural studies could become an attractive and lucrative marketing label (the “X-factor” of the contemporary academy (Morris “A Question of Cultural Studies” 38), somewhat like the “World Music” of the education industry) in a diversifying academic landscape. Its “over-visibility of issues of identity (especially around notions of race and ethnicity . . . has enabled publishers simply to incorporate the concerns of the various constituency-oriented elds into their new chic category of cultural studies” (Grossberg 135). At the same time it has never really neglected developing its professional credentials. Cultural Studies departments are on a par with traditional disciplines like Philosophy and English in the now practically ubiquitous Research Assessment Exercises; this would not be possible without a solid infrastructure in publishing, particularly academic journals which have been tiered to conform with RAE guidelines. Like it or not, cultural studies is a discipline; there is a real cultural studies, not only because there are enough people who try to dene it, but also because it is a survival strategy in the managerial academy. It is important to have recognition from grant agencies and research institutions (the Canadian topia funding problems would likely not have happened if SSHRC had an appropriate research category and reviewers who felt committed to cultural studies as a discipline.

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Australia might be a model here, where renowned cultural studies scholar Graeme Turner was recently appointed President of the venerable Academy of the Humanities—a good example of how working through the institutions need not imply cooptation).

The road forward Obviously I do not have any solutions to offer for the future of the humanities, but I do think that there are some conclusions to be derived from these narratives. It does not seem likely to me that interdisciplinarity can provide an answer to the crisis of the humanities. Due to the contradictions inherent in tertiary education, this would be disastrous for both humanities expertise in public culture and for being able to comply with internal managerial practices that insist on professional output and performance indicators. While I do not believe there ever was academic freedom or disinterestedness (another word for an ideology that dare not speak its name), disciplinary status, oppressive as it may be in some ways, is also enabling as a safeguard against the tyranny of the economic bottom line. In this sense I would insist on cultural studies, not becoming, but being a discipline, and as such being able to sustain quality research and publications as well as institutional sites (departments, programs etc.); and it can be taught as a subject. It may be true that many cultural studies publications are mediocre, but that is also true for other disciplines––cultural studies does not have a monopoly on mediocrity. Cultural studies is not a shortcut to Mickey Mouse courses and DIY degrees. It has a canon, which is in some ways narrower than that of other disciplines, but one that can be made useful for teaching, research and funding purposes, and one that can, like any other canon, be taught, revised, contested, adapted, and changed, from within as well as in transdisciplinary dialogue. Admitting to this implies that it would behoove cultural studies to shed its arrogant assumption of being able to do everything the other disciplines do, and do it better; this is neither true nor productive for the survival of humanities expertise (and it is certainly not conducive to being taken seriously by one’s colleagues). Rather, cultural studies should try to build global networks that are not pre-selected best-of lists and instead encourage research that is truly transdisciplinary (in the sense of establishing a dialogue, rather than selectively appropriating, other disciplines) and be open for practices which are not carried

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by a sense of ownership or the political wisdom of the now not-sonew left. Instead of having a wake for a politically liberating project when it becomes institutionalized, cultural studies, precisely because it has become such a central site of negotiation within the teaching machine, could also become a site in the ght for the sustainability of academic work, reaching out, from a secure disciplinary position, to other disciplines. This need not imply giving up cultural studies as a political project. A thorough engagement with Marxism (in the case of cultural studies with a New Left agenda) is hardly the prerogative of a single discipline; neither is the desire to make an intervention—such a desire has sustained strands of social history, for example, for quite some time. Practicing cultural studies in Hong Kong makes a serious engagement with the problem “Marx” (Davies) not only possible but almost inevitable in an environment where many of my colleagues were raised under colonialism, with China as an alternative next door, a China which is currently proving once again that capitalism is not only possible but can thrive without democracy, human rights or freedom of speech. The cultural studies agenda of understanding culture as a site of difference may be metropolitan in a post-colonialist as well as a more everyday sense of the word, but this is not necessarily a bad thing—it might even be imported into other disciplines. Cultural studies has been tested by being transported to other contexts, and has done remarkably well. The contradictions between a contested undergraduate curriculum and specialized professionalisation are here to stay, and the humanities have to look for new ways to cope with them. Research has to be insisted on yet adapted to new demands. Pedagogy needs to be constantly considered and rethought (and not relegated to a nostalgia for a time when it was supposedly self-evident because the canon mattered—pedagogy is, after all, the strongest political instrument for the institution “university” itself ). In this sense my narrative suggests that other humanities disciplines might maybe want to become a bit more like cultural studies—not in what they do, but in how they pay attention to, negotiate, and adapt to institutional and social challenges, rather than insist self-righteously on an articulation of Bildung and discipline that no administrator is buying. Cultural studies’ insistence on constantly remaking itself, carried out under the guise of anti-disciplinarity, might have undermined its cachet with colleagues but has neither hurt its penetration of the academy nor its RAE results. Its critical pedagogy, which I would maintain is as liberating as any core curriculum can be,

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has at least tenuously bridged a rift between teaching and research that other disciplines found much harder to negotiate. Its opening up to contemporary issues and its embrace of, and by, the publishing industry has provided the professional backup needed for performance-indicator-crazed administrations. Its insistence on community outreach has satised demands for social relevance and “service learning”. Its hyperself-awareness has given it an edge in academic justication exercises like drafting the rationale for the next triennium’s mission statements and the next decade’s strategic plan. Its media-savviness has attracted students. And it is still fun to do it.

References Appadurai, Arjun. “Diversity and Disciplinarity as Cultural Artifacts.” Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies. Eds. Cary Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar. New York: Routledge, 1996. 23–36. Ash, Mitchell G., ed. Mythos Humboldt: Vergangenheit Und Zukunft Der Deutschen Universitäten. Vienna: Böhlau, 1999. Bruch, Rüdiger vom. “Langsamer Abschied Von Humboldt? Etappen Deutscher Universitätsgeschichte 1810 –1945.” Mythos Humboldt: Vergangenheit Und Zukunft Deutscher Universitäten. Ed. Mitchell G. Ash. Vienna: Böhlau, 1999. Carey, James W. “Reections on the Project of (American) Cultural Studies.” Cultural Studies in Question. Eds. Marjorie Ferguson and Peter Golding. London: Sage, 1997. 1–24. Coward, Rosalind, and John Ellis. Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject. London; Boston: Routledge and Paul, 1977. Davies, Ioan. Cultural Studies and Beyond: Fragments of Empire. London; New York: Routledge, 1995. Frühwald, Wolfgang, et al. Geisteswissenschaften Heute: Eine Denkschrift. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1991. Gray, Herman. “Is Cultural Studies Inated?” Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies. Eds. Cary Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar. New York: Routledge, 1996. 203–16. Grossberg, Lawrence. “Towards a Genealogy of Cultural Studies.” Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies. Eds. Cary Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar. New York: Routledge, 1996. 131–47. Jayne, Vicky. “Tertiary Sector Governance: Will a Private Secctor Model Work?” The Director May 2004: 20 –22. Johnson, Richard. “Edward Thompson, Eugene Genovese, and Socialist-Humanist History.” History Workshop Journal 6. Autumn (1978): 79–100. Lang, Eugene M. “Distinctly American: The Liberal Arts College.” Lash, Scott, and John Urry. Economies of Signs and Space. London; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1994. Menand, Louis. “The Marketplace of Ideas.” ACLS Occasional Paper 49 (2001). Morris, Meaghan. “A Question of Cultural Studies.” Back to Reality? Social Experience and Cultural Studies. Ed. Angela McRobbie. Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 1997. 36–57.

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——. “Humanities for Taxpayers: Some Problems.” New Literary History 36/1 (2005): 111–29. On the Future of Parochialism: Globalization, Young and Dangerous IV, and Cinema Studies in Tuen Mun.” Film History and National Cinema: Studies in Irish Film II. Ed. John Hill and Kevin Rockett. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005. 17–36. Morris, Meaghan, and Iain McCalman. “Public Culture.” Knowing Ourselves and Others: The Humanities in Australia into the 21st Century. Australian Research Council, 1998. 1–20. Nelson, Cary, and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, eds. Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1996. Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Steele, Tom. The Emergence of Cultural Studies: Adult Education, Cultural Politics, and the ‘English’ Question. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1997. Williams, Raymond, and Tony Pinkney. The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. London [ England]; New York: Verso, 1989.

CHAPTER THREE

OF RUINOUS AND WASTED IDYLLS: THE MODESTY OF A ONCE-AND-FUTURE LITERARY HISTORY Susan Ingram York University

A New History of German Literature was launched on February 28, 2005, in a celebration at the Goethe Institute in New York, with a panel discussion themed “The Challenge of German Literary History.” If that discussion, particularly as it was related online afterwards, is any indication, German literary history certainly has some challenges ahead, and the volume seems set to act as a lightning rod for ongoing debates about both what and how literary and cultural studies should and can be pursued in the global academy. Besides the panelists invited to participate in the panel discussion, all contributors to the volume—noted Germanist Andreas Huyssen, Dorothea von Mücke (one of the volume’s editors), Lindsay Waters (Executive Editor, Harvard U.P.) and Anthony Grafton (who was notably called “the alchemist of erudition” in the Chronicle of Higher Education a few years back—July 5, 2002: http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i43/43a01 201. htm)—also present at the Goethe Institute gathering was James Panero, an associate editor of the New Criterion, who later derided the volume on the literary magazine’s blog, Armavirumque (3.8.05), calling it: the new release from Harvard University Press that will do for the German language what Denis Hollier did for the French in his New History of French Literature, published fteen years ago by Harvard. And just what did ANHofFL do, you ask? In her November 1989 review in The New Criterion, Renee Winegarten wrote: ‘This book offers the apotheosis of the literary theorist. It consecrates the critical fashions of today that will be gone tomorrow’ (http://www.newcriterion.com/weblog/2005/03/germania-auf-wiedersehenia.html, accessed 1 August 2005).

I was originally hesitant to take A New History of German Literature as my focus here for a few reasons, not only because it would mean engaging at least initially with debates that seem to suffer from worse jetlag

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than I have over the past few years, but more importantly because it would mean doing the volume itself a great disservice. An analysis in which the new volume is contrasted to its predecessors and found to be an improvement in some respects and perhaps not others would be precisely the kind of history that the volume was designed to resist. But what are the alternatives? As editor-in-chief David Wellbery states in the volume’s introduction: To grasp the historical character of a literary text is, according to [the traditional] way of thinking, to see the individual case as typical of something else, and therefore as replaceable. . . . A major aim of [A New History of German Literature, on the other hand,] is to nd a mode of presentation that restores access to . . . [ literature’s singularity and contingency]. Walter Benjamin, whose ideas on history were an essential inspiration for this volume, stressed the importance to historical understanding of such momentary interruptions of the continuum of time, which he likened to a ‘tiger’s leap’ into the past (xvi).

So I reconsidered and decided to try to enact something of a tiger’s leap here and illuminate a mode of presentation that will hopefully reveal the singularity and contingency of Wellbery’s volume, and I will do so by rst drawing attention to the volume’s structuring principles and then showing how these principles translate into different pasts, presents and futures by comparing two recent lms, one based on Arthurian legend that begins “somewhere in the Balkans” and the other about global prostitution circuits that begins “somewhere in the former Soviet Union.” *

*

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To begin, then, with Wellbery’s volume. Not only does it offer a specic instance of humanities research “that dislocates the history/theory dichotomy, and recovers history within theory as a site of knowledge and as a practice of intellectual or institutional resistance” (the mandate of the gathering upon which this volume is based), but, as I became increasingly aware in putting together this paper, the volume’s shock, its theoretical presuppositions and connection with both history and jetlag, being here today and gone tomorrow, or the day after, can also help to illuminate the singularity and contingency, not to mention shock, of so many of our academic experiences. Certainly it throws light on key aspects of both my current position teaching European Studies in a Humanities division at the third largest university in Canada, as well as my previous position teaching in the Department of Comparative

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Literature at the University of Hong Kong, which by the time of publication may very well have been dissolved into a School of the Arts, together with the institution’s other existing Arts departments. In the light of my particular academic trajectory, what particularly jumped out at me in Wellbery’s introduction was the claim that “neither ‘history,’ nor ‘German,’ nor ‘literature’ means quite the same thing here as in the standard works” (xxi). Literature in particular has undergone the kind of sea-change that Hannah Arendt, quoting from The Tempest, refers to in her introduction to Illuminations, Harry Zohn’s original translations of Benjamin essays, which appeared in 1968 with Schocken Books: Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and the loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime was irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past, . . . that in the place of its authority, there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of ‘peace of mind’ (Arendt 38).

The selections in Wellbery’s collection are intended in this spirit of unsettling, particularly in unsettling traditional ideas about literature. The volume’s rst entry—about “magical formulae in Old High German [that] are recorded on an empty codex page” (1) and its last entry about W.G. Sebald’s last novel, Austerlitz (970)—are both quite uncontroversial examples that accord with the traditional understanding of literature (as high “lit tra cha”). In between, however, one nds entries that are considerably less so. Perhaps there are arguments for considering a 1782 “Proposal for a Magazine of Empirical Psychology” (409) as literature, or the record of a meeting in 1145 between an Armenian bishop and the Pope at the time about the merits of undertaking a second Crusade (44). Perhaps there is even a case to be made for approaching Benjamin’s mechanical reproduction essay, which is here discussed by Lindsay Waters under its new title “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (790), as literature—and the question of name-shifts and retranslation is, of course, not irrelevant here. But what is one to make of entries on Berlin’s twenty-rst-century Carnival of Cultures (965)? What about the 1916 opening of Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich (708)? What about a celebration on Whitsuntide in 1184 to mark the coming of age of Frederick Barbarossa’s sons (76)? What about the competition to design an “Extension of the Berlin Museum with the Jewish Museum Department” that Daniel Libeskind won in 1989 (952)? What about

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Goebbels’ selection of works for the “Entartete Kunst” (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich in 1937 (800)? What about the murder of Johann Joachim Winckelmann in Trieste in 1768 (376)? What about the 1921 American premiere of Robert Wiene’s Cabinet of Dr Caligari (718) or the 1935 triumph of Leni Riefenstahl’s will? The sea of literature here has quite denitively suffered a change into something rich and strange, namely into culture, and yet it is not a “Cultural History” or a “History of German Culture,” but A New History of German Literature that is on offer here. Why? For an answer one need look no further than two volumes published by Oxford University Press, the rst in 1995: German Cultural Studies: An Introduction, edited by Rob Burns, a Senior Lecturer in German Studies at University of Warwick at the time of publication, and described on OUP’s website as follows: Major changes have been taking place in the context of German Studies in both secondary and higher eduction [sic], with the focus shifting to a broader range of cultural forms. Based on the view that cultures are the products of class, place, gender and race, German Cultural Studies: An Introduction takes account of these changes and adopts an interdisciplinary approach in its wide-ranging study of German culture and society since 1871, emphasizing recent and contemporary developments. Chronological sections on Imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic chart the growth of modernisation and the culture industry in Germany, and examine the extent to which culture in any given period functions as an instrument of ideological manipulation or critical enlightenment. Throughout, the emphasis is on the interactions of culture, society and ideology, and the role of culture in both public and private consciousnesses. Copiously illustrated, and with guidance for further reading, the volume will be essential reading for anyone interested in modern and contemporary German society and its culture (italics added, http://www.oup.com/us/ catalog/general/subject/LiteratureEnglish/WorldLiterature/Germany/ ?view=usa&ci=019871503X, accessed 1 August 2005).

The volume’s readership is given as likely to consist of: “Undergraduate students (all levels) of German studies; anyone with a broad interest in modern and contemporary Germany, German culture and history and/or cultural studies. All students of German culture, language and literature; teachers/tutors of German, European Studies/sociology.” Seven years later, Oxford published a second, follow-up volume entitled Contemporary German Cultural Studies (2002) edited by Alison Phipps, Senior Lecturer in German, Glasgow University. The rationale for the volume is described on the publisher’s website as follows:

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As the study of German comes under the inuence of other disciplinary approaches, the notion of culture has evolved from one focused largely on the arts to an approach which understands culture as the way of life of a people or a period. This introductory book examines contemporary German culture not only in the context of its intellectual life—the media, the arts, political gures and events—but also in the context of the theories and methodologies of cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology (implying these are if not mutually exclusive, then separate theories and methodologies). Providing a critical assessment of the diversity of German culture and identity, Contemporary German Cultural Studies focuses on the contemporary period and at the same time considers the inuence of the past and forces such as globalization. The emphasis is on the interpretation and analysis of the varieties of German cultures—the processes, the practices and the performances. The book also explores intercultural issues, including the implications of studying German culture from an anglophone perspective (italics added, http://www.oup.com/us/ catalog/general/subject/LiteratureEnglish/WorldLiterature/Germany/ ?ci=0340764015&view=usa, accessed 1 August 2005).

One particularly notes the national and contemporary focus of both these volumes, something which is also true of their American cousin, published by the University of Michigan Press in 1997 in between the two Oxford volumes: A User’s Guide to German Cultural Studies under the editorship of Scott D. Denham, Irene Kacandes and Jonathan Petropoulos. Its blurb reads: The German-speaking world has spawned some of the most extreme contrasts between products of culture—the endlessly fascinating, if clichéd, Beethoven-Hitler dichotomy—and thus provokes compelling questions about culture and identity. A User’s Guide to German Cultural Studies is an invitation to explore the rapidly expanding scholarship in cultural studies within the German context. This collection brings together more than twenty-ve essays from topnotch scholars and astute cultural critics who examine diverse questions in both broad outlines and specic instances. A literary scholar investigates multiculturalism in German literature; a political scientist asks which past Germans live with after reunication; a historian studies the revival of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in 1829; a journalist wonders how we learn to stop hating the Germans (http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc. do?id=11133, accessed 1 August 2005).

One could also note in this regard the Institute for German Cultural Studies at Cornell, of which Peter Hohendahl is director; Berkeley’s pioneering German Cultural Studies program; the fact it is now possible to do an M.A. in German Cultural Studies at Warwick and Aston and in German Literature, Film and Cultural Studies at Sussex; and the

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inroads German Cultural Studies has made in Canada. At the 2001 CAUTG Annual Meeting at the Université Laval, there was a panel discussion entitled “German Cultural Studies: Toward an Effective Integration of Interdisciplinary Courses,” and follow-up syllabi are now available online: http://www.unbf.ca/arts/Culture_Lang/syllabi/. What does it mean to “do” German Cultural Studies? Judging from the offerings I’ve just enumerated, it means a great many things, and many of those who self-identify as Cultural Studies practitioners are no doubt itching to argue that much of what I have just listed is not Cultural Studies at all but rather Landeskunde or the anthropological, sociological or literary study of German culture. What’s important for my purposes here is that “What exactly German Cultural Studies is and what it can and should be?” is a battle Wellbery and his editorial team chose to avoid. Rather, in naming their volume A New History of German Literature, they are clearly placing themselves on the “Bildung” side of culture, that is, on the capital “K” as opposed to the small “c” side, which is why it is not so much ironic as unfortunate that much of the capital K “Bildung” crowd, the New Criterion types, tend to dismiss “theory” tout court, whether it is associated with Cultural Studies or this kind of Benjamin-inspired history of literature. Bildung is one of those words that is ferociously difcult to translate, and unfortunately it has not yet made its way into the English language, at least ofcially (cf. Assmann). Unlike “Schadenfreude” and “Bildungsroman,” it is not to be found in English-language reference material like the OED. Bildung is not simply education, as is evident in the slippage between the Council of Europe’s declaration on their English-language website of 2005 as the “European Year of Citizenship through Education” and the Austrian Ministry of Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur’s parallel announcement of it on their website as the “Europäisches Jahr der politischen Bildung,” the slogan of which is “Demokratie lernen und leben/Learning and living democracy.” A rened kind of education, Bildung is a linguistically, culturally and historically specic, and specically modern concept—in the rst instance about the creation of enlightened citizens, who have à la Kant overcome their self-inicted immaturity by becoming erudite and acquiring knowledge that provides what Bourdieu called cultural capital. Whether we like it or not, everyone involved in the project that this volume of collected essays represents is in one way or another in the Bildung business, but we are so in different ways that are worth attending to. Consider my current position and how it was advertised:

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The Division of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, York University invites applications for a tenure-track position at the Assistant Professor level in Modern European Culture. We welcome candidates with interdisciplinary scholarly and teaching expertise in nineteenth- or twentieth-century European culture. We seek a candidate with a completed PhD at the time of appointment, evidence of a vigorous research agenda, and promise of excellence in teaching. Other requirements include the ability to teach broad undergraduate courses in European culture from an interdisciplinary perspective in the rst- and second-year Foundations program and in upper level courses. The successful candidate will join the Program in European Studies within the interdisciplinary Division of Humanities. The successful candidate must have the potential to undertake graduate teaching and supervision. The ability to contribute to the work of the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies is desirable (italics added).

I responded to this ad perhaps rather immodestly, but honestly: “This position is of great interest to me as (Central) European Bildung has been the force motivating my academic trajectory.” And it turned out that the magic word, my “open sesame” to an academic future, was, indeed, Bildung. That is what I was hired to teach, teach in this case meaning to make accessible, interesting and relevant to students whose families have come to Toronto from everywhere. York has a much vaunted, and much deserved, reputation for diversity. In my Foundational “Dening Europe: An Introduction to European Studies” course, for example, when I encouraged students to nd sources for their nal research paper in languages they could read besides English, did they ever: from Swedish to Hebrew, Portuguese to Russian, and I know that I am hardly alone in being able to offer such a testimonial. The challenge that then arises is: what is one to teach for the most part hyphenated students, in my case in Toronto, who come from, or more often, whose parents have come from everywhere? Do they need to know Dante and de Camões? Will those texts help turn them into responsible citizens or well-behaved burghers? A complicating factor at York is that the European Studies program is housed in the thriving Canadian Centre for German and European Studies, which at this time seems to be characterized by the hegemony of Political Science, Economics and Business concerns, to have zero tolerance of popular culture as an academic pursuit and to believe “a scholar of German Cultural Studies” to be an oxymoron. What can German Cultural Studies as represented by the Oxford volumes offer in such an environment? Its tools can certainly explain the formation of Siemens’ and BMW’s CEO subjectivities, but because of the way

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especially its more radical proponents wear their politics on their sleeves, Cultural Studies, at least in the Anglo-American Birmingham tradition that is now associated with gatherings like the International Crossroads in Cultural Studies conferences, is a force more likely to burn bridges than build them. The Canadian most present in these circles is arguably Jody Berland, who is afliated with York’s graduate programs in Communication and Culture, Music, and Social and Political Thought, and not with the Centre of German and European Studies. Berland is editor of the widely and highly acclaimed Topia: The Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, which SSHRC, the Canadian body responsible for academic funding, decided this year to cease funding.1 What does this decision have to do with Bildung? Funding agencies have priorities that reect constituencies to which they must answer, and Bildung can be deduced to have been a factor in the SSHRC decision against Topia, given that SSHRC funding for Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, which publishes “real” academic work on the likes of Goethe and Günter Grass (to name but two of the topics in the February 2005 issue) and not uff on Buffy, remains secure. What I am attempting to do here is locate particular positions that will help chart a larger constellation and determine whether the Benjaminian historical understanding of Bildung that Wellbery’s volume represents has a better chance of producing pearls than being either seamlessly absorbed into or summarily expelled from the greater borg of the globalized managerial academy than either contemporary Cultural Studies, which the managers despise, or the Kantian aesthetic understanding of Bildung that led to high “lit tra cha” taking the disciplinary form it did in the modern Humboldtian university, which the managers admire and envy but also see as a luxury that can be cut in times of scal restraint. What can Bildung in the Benjaminian spirit do that contemporary Cultural Studies and Bildung in the spirit of Kantian aesthetics can’t? Nicely in the spirit of this volume, it can hyphenate, meaning that it

1 On March 17, 2005, Topia learned that its appeal of SSHRC’s decision to not recommend a grant under the 2004 triennial competition of the Aid to Research and Transfer Journals Program had been rejected. Their appeal letter to SSHRC as well as the response from SSHRC president Marc Renaud are available on their website (http://www.yorku.ca/topia/index2.html; http://www.yorku.ca/topia/docs/SSHRCDecision.pdf, accessed 1 August 2005).

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is the academic equivalent of Hong Kong, which Ackbar Abbas has described as: not as a ‘third space’ that can be located somewhere; not as a neither-nor space that is nowhere; not even as a mixed or in-between space, if by that we understand that the various elements that make it up are separable. Above all, hyphenation refers not to the conjunctures of ‘East’ and ‘West’, but to the disjunctures of colonialism and globalism (143).

These disjunctures work something like Benjamin’s dialectical images in which past and present are both present but only eetingly.2 These disjunctures, not of East and West but of colonialism and globalism, have led to “uneven cultural developments” and point to the need to recognize Hong Kong culture as a “postculture,” something of great relevance to the current indeterminacy of literary/cultural studies. A postculture, in Abbas’s understanding, is: a culture that has developed in a situation where the available models of culture no longer work. In such a situation, culture cannot wait or follow social change in order to represent it; it must anticipate the paradoxes of hyphenation. A postculture, therefore, is not postmodernist culture, or post-Marxist culture, or post-Cultural Revolution culture, or even postcolonial culture, insofar as each of these has a set of established themes and an alternative orthodoxy. In a postculture, on the other hand, culture itself is experienced as a eld of instabilities . . . (italics in original, 145).

As is the study of that eld, to which Benjamin’s historical understanding proves to have a kind of elective afnity in that it encourages scholars, like us, to recognize that the available models not only of culture but also of the academy no longer work and that we cannot wait and must anticipate by neither projecting or rejecting as much as recognizing, as Abbas notes, that “[o]ne of the most important implications of colonialism in the era of globalism is simply that there is no longer a space elsewhere” (146). Who understood better than Benjamin that “[t]his means that instead of thinking in terms of displacements, a movement somewhere else, it is important to think in terms of dislocation, which is the transformation of place” especially over time. He also understood

2 Bildung’s root is, after all, Bild (image). Bildung conceived in this way is not about cultural capital but about being able to recognize, as George Steiner put it, “correspondences between Wort und Bild, gesture and emblem. A semiology of translatability” (18).

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that “[s]uch transformations, even after they have taken place, are often indiscernible and hence challenge recognition” (146). That is why, as Fredric Jameson notes, “Benjamin took his snapshot of the nineteenthcentury arcade at the moment of its decay—and thereby developed a whole theory about history: that you could best understand the present from the standpoint of an immediate past whose fashions were already just a little out of date.”3 *

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I’d like to turn now in the second part of this paper to two lms which provide snapshots à la Benjamin of young women from the decaying margins of the Old World, and to show how reading them in terms of Benjaminian Bildung can recover differences in the origins of these young women and their (and our) hopes, dreams and nightmares. The 2003 My Name Is Modesty: A Modesty Blaise Adventure is a video-pic presented by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Scott Spiegel. It was produced pro forma and shot in 18 days in Bucharest so that Miramax could maintain rights to the source material: British author Peter O’Donnell’s popular novels and comic strips about “cult-fave heroine” Modesty Blaise (Leydon 42). The 2002 Lilya 4-ever is the work of a young Swedish director, Lukas Moodysson, whose rst feature lm, the 1998 Fucking Amal, was championed by Ingmar Bergman, who called it “a young master’s rst masterpiece” (French). It was distributed in Britain and North America, under the translated title Show Me Love even though the original title was in English. Lilya 4-ever is Moodysson’s third feature lm to receive international distribution, after Show Me Love and Together, and it was produced in nine weeks in the fall of 2001, with lming in Paldiski and Tallinn in Estonia and in Trollhatten, Sweden. Both My Name is Modesty and Lilya 4-ever open with retro-stylized credits and music one associates with youth before transporting us to unspecic imaginaries in keeping with the spirit of this volume: “somewhere in the Balkans” and “somewhere in the former Soviet Union.” In both lms, we encounter the ruins of a great society. In My Name is Modesty, they are wonderfully Hellenic, evoking the cradle of Western

3 Given such 2004 publications as Terry Eagleton’s After Theory and Life After Theory, a volume featuring interviews with Jacques Derrida, Toril Moi, Frank Kermode, and Christopher Norris, it would seem that “the moment of its decay” is our approach here vis-à-vis “theory” as well.

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civilization, but the presence of soldiers using them as an excuse to take a break and have a bite to eat reminds us at the same time of the more recent destruction in the region. These particular ruins confront viewers with an uncomfortable, difcult question: what will they look like tomorrow? Origin, as Benjamin reminds us in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (quoting Karl Kraus), is the goal of all philosophical and historical inquiries, but it “is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis” (45, quoted in Mali 166). The ruins with which My Name is Modesty opens draw attention to that process of swirling, which is why it seems appropriate to locate them not in Greece but in “the Balkans,” a place which signies a long convoluted history of ethnic conict. That soldiers are roaming among them not only calls into question the status of the ruins as a strictly aesthetic object, it also highlights their fragility. There is no mystery to the industrial urban ruins in Lilya 4-ever. We know only too well the eddies that brought about their becoming and that are now in the process of swallowing them and their unfortunate inhabitants. One reviewer summed it up with the “old joke about the difference between capitalism and communism—under capitalism it’s dog eat dog and under communism it’s the other way around. This could serve as the epigraph to Lilya 4-ever” (French). While hardly a strictly aesthetic object, the ruins of this anonymous former Soviet city—described by another reviewer as “an urban wasteland of ruined and abandoned buildings” (Brussat)—nevertheless shock, especially when, in the second part of the lm, Lilya rst in daylight looks out the window of the apartment in Sweden she’s been put up in, which the viewer is encouraged to believe is Malmo, and sees a cityscape very similar to the one she has left behind, underscoring the futility of her having left, the illusory nature of her escape, and nicely illustrating Abbas’s point that “in the era of globalism simply that there is no longer a space elsewhere.” These two young girls from marginal places and the dreams that keep them aoat emerge from subtly but substantially different kinds of historical eddies. Both Modesty and Lilya are orphans. Modesty loses all relations in the war and nds herself alone in a refugee camp. Lilya never had a father; he left before she was born “for Moscow,” as she tells her friend, young Volodya, and when “her mother leaves,

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apparently for the United States, with a man she has met through a dating agency—and refuses to take her with them” (Bradshaw), Lilya is left in the care of an aunt, who immediately takes over the apartment and forces Lilya to move into a smaller, more decrepit one left vacant by the death of its former aged inhabitant (Brussat). Alone in the world, both Modesty and Lilya nd one true friend, who gives their lives meaning and later dies. Lilya’s friend is 11-year-old Volodya, who hangs out on the playground in front of their housing estate because his father, as Volodya describes it to Lilya on more than one occasion, “goes crazy” and throws him out of their apartment. Lilya lets Volodya sleep on the couch of her down-sized, decrepit apartment, and they become inseparable until Lilya meets the young, dashing Andrei in a nightclub, who wins her trust by giving her a lift home, inviting her out on dates, buying her ice-cream and providing her with not only the promise of well-paid work in Sweden but, literally, a passport and an airline ticket out. Two forces shape Lilya’s and Volodya’s dreams, and the nightmare that is their life somewhere in the former Soviet Union: global pop culture and Christianity: Lilya identies with Britney Spears, who shares her birthday but was born four years before her, [while Volodya dreams] he’s Michael Jordan as he . . . tosses a crumpled tin can into a bedraggled basketball net. [ When a pack of stray youths passes by, he tries to catch their attention by asking if one of the group’s members is wearing ‘real’ Nikes. His idea of heaven is being able to play basketball all the time]. And a [feast] is a Big Mac and a Coke. . . . Lilya’s most cherished possession is a framed Victorian oleograph [a chromolithograph printed with oil paint on canvas in imitation of an oil painting] of a tall, female angel gently leading a little boy by the hand” (French).

Like McDonald’s, Britney Spears, Michael Jordan and Nikes, the oleograph is also associated with the dream of “America” and escape. Lilya carefully packs it in preparation to leave with her mother for the states, and then unpacks it when she’s left behind. This “sentimental icon” (French) “provokes discussions between [Lilya and Volodya] about an afterlife, and it leads to the appearance in Lilya’s dreams” in Sweden after she’s been forced into a life of prostitution, of Volodya, who has in the meantime, after Lilya’s departure for Sweden, committed suicide. In those dreams, Volodya appears as her angel, replete with large white, Wings of Desire wings (French). The cheap reproduction is Lilya’s only possession in Sweden besides her clothes, and when she dashes it

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against the wall in a t of despair towards the end of the lm, viewers understand that her end is also near. Modesty’s friend is not a young boy but “the Professor,” Lob, a wise old man who once taught History in Zagreb (one can hardly imagine anyone more learned), whom she helps to break out of the refugee camp. Like Lilya, Modesty’s dreams are shaped explicitly by a clearly recognizable myth, one that appears in the lm’s and the character’s very name: Modesty Blaise. However, for viewers without Lob’s Bildung who don’t catch the allusion or who miss the scene about whether Sir Thomas Malory’s fteenth-century Morte d’Arthur is a text worth dying for, the connection between Arthurian legend and Modesty’s name is later spelled out: Blaise was Merlin’s teacher, just as Lob is Modesty’s. He educates her in the literary and martial arts, and then is blown away when they are caught in mortar re in Algeria, leaving her to make her own way to Tangiers and conquer her own kingdom, a casino, which she eventually does, giving a lovely spin to the phrase “knights of the round table.” Myth, in Benjamin’s understanding of it, is the “origin” of everything beautiful and meaningful in the world. As Joseph Mali very capably expands upon: for Benjamin, myth was a category of absolute conceptual and historical primacy, the key to all further inquiries into natural and human affairs. The most notable interpretation of Benjamin’s work along these lines is Jürgen Habermas’s . . . characterization of Benjamin as a ‘redemptive’ (rettend ) rather than a ‘corrective’ (bewusstmachend ) critical theorist. According to Habermas, Benjamin believed that ‘the semantic potential from which human beings draw and with which they invest the world with meaning, permitting it to be experienced... is deposited in myth to begin with and must be released from it—but it cannot be expanded, just continually transformed (167).

In order to understand anything in the world, then, it is necessary to interpret it mythologically—to show, as Mali puts it, “how it emerged out of and against archaic anxieties, fears, wishes, and other delusions” (168). This is precisely what Lilya, unlike Modesty, is unable to do. The semantic potential in the myths available to Lilya does not provide her with any way out other than to jump off an overpass: When the movie begins, Lilya is running through featureless streets, bruised and bleeding, to the accompaniment of heavy, nihilistic rock music. Running from her fate? Rewinding to the beginning of her own story, we nd an averagely moody teenager not doing well at school. ‘A golden

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susan ingram future awaits you,’ says her teacher, handing back to Lilya a test paper and adding [at Lilya’s look of surprise]: ‘I was kidding’ (Bradshaw).

The inability to recognize irony often seems to accompany an inability to recognize different presents and to imagine different possible futures. It is made clear in the lm that Lilya has no idea where to go. In conversation with Volodya she reveals that she is not even sure where Sweden is, how far away it is, what kind of weather to expect there and what kind of clothes she should take. A high-school dropout without so much as a television set or radio, she is happy to rely on Andrei and to believe his promises of a better life in Sweden because she is unable to imagine or to realize any future for herself where she is. Once in Sweden, she runs away from the police, who would very likely have helped her, because she cannot imagine them to be any different than the police she has known in Russia. Benjamin feared that if “the streams of semantic energies” preserved in myth were to be lost to humanity, “the poetic faculty to interpret the world in terms of human needs would falter” (Mali). Lilya 4-ever would seem to be conrmation of his worst fears. Yet, the title suggests otherwise. “Lilya 4-ever” is what Lilya carves into a wooden bench outside her housing estate while being heckled by neighborhood punks. It is the only time in the lm that she is shown as being able to keep male aggression at bay. Moreover, as a work of art, Lilya 4-ever lives on, waiting for viewers to release the kernels of myth deposited in it in ways Lilya herself was unable to. *

*

*

Adorno insisted that: “the artwork’s recalcitrant, quasi-autistic relationship to the ‘tension’ permeating what is ‘external’ to it ought to be understood not as a defensive and escapist maneuver but, rather, as borne of the deeper awareness of history itself as a welter of chaotic, traumatizing forces” (Pfau 55). Both My Name is Modesty and Lilya 4-ever reveal such an awareness, which is an awareness of hyphenation; it radiates from their ruins to viewers with the necessary sensitivity and Benjaminian Bildung to recognize in how far and in what ways the experience of culture has and has not become Ackbar Abbas’s “postculture.” Those whose proclivities are for aesthetic Kantian Bildung would simply dismiss both lms as “pop culture”; such potential viewers are not likely to make it past the opening credits and, if they did, would likely view the lm through the lens of the great Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s

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masterpiece Idylls of the King, which ends with “that last weird battle in the west” (303) between Sir Modred and Arthur. Those interested in contemporary Cultural Studies, while admittedly much more likely to watch these lms, would at the same time be more likely to focus on different aspects of them than I have here: on the comic-book aspect of Modesty Blaise and how much like other raven-haired anime and computer-game heroines such as Lara Croft she is, while they would likely read Lilya together with Britney and the ubiquitous Buffy and see agency and resistance not in her carving her name into the bench but in her nal leap off the overpass, which is not only of faith but also of despair. To conclude, in releasing different shards of the past from these two lms, I hope to have shown how they can leap out at us and, also, how they give meaning to history’s cast-offs, which German literary history has become in the postculture of Hong Kong and is in the process of becoming in the global cultural imaginary. That is the spirit of A New History of German Literature and the challenge it presents us to dive into the seas of the past and discover pearls such as My Name is Modesty and Lilya 4-ever and the pearls that they in turn contain, pearls that will help keep us aoat through the no doubt challenging seas ahead.

References Abbas, Ackbar. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Arendt, Hannah, ed. “Introduction: Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940.” In: Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Shocken Books, 1968. 1–55. Assmann, Aleida. Arbeit am nationalen Gedächtnis: Eine kurze Geschichte der deutschen Bildungsidee. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1993. Bradshaw, Peter. “Lilya 4-ever.” The Guardian 25 April 2003. http://lm.guardian.co.uk/ Film_Page/0,4061,839244,00.html. Accessed 1 August 2005. Brussat, Frederic A. “Lilya 4-ever. Movie Review.” Spirituality and Health: The Soul/Body Connection. http://www.spiritualityhealth.com/newsh/items/ moviereview/item_5802. html. Accessed 1 August 2005. Burns, Rob, ed. German Cultural Studies: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Denham, Scott D., Irene Kacandes, and Jonathan Petropoulos, eds. A User’s Guide to German Cultural Studies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. French, Patrick. “Cold Comfort.” Review of Lilya 4-ever. The Observer April 27, 2003. http://lm.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Observer_Film_of_the_ week/0,4267,944261,00.html—top. Accessed 1 August 2005. Jameson, Fredric. “Future City.” New Left Review 21 (May–June 2003), http://www. newleftreview.net/NLR25503. shtml. Accessed 1 August 2005. Leydon, Joe. “My Name Is Modesty. (Movie Review).” Variety 397.3 (Dec. 6, 2004): 42.

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Lilya 4-ever. Dir. Lukas Moodysson, 2002. Mali, Joseph. “The Reconciliation of Myth: Benjamin’s Homage to Bachofen.” Journal of the History of Ideas 60.1 (1999): 165–87. My Name Is Modesty: A Modesty Blaise Adventure. Dir. Scott Spiegel, 2003. Pfau, Thomas. “Conjuring History: Lyric Cliché, Conservative Fantasy, and Traumatic Awakening in German Romanticism.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 102.1 (2003): 53–92. Phipps, Alison, ed. Contemporary German Cultural Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Steiner, George. “To Speak of Walter Benjamin.” In: Perception and Experience in Modernity, ed. Helga Geyer-Ryan. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2002. 13–23. Wellbery, David, ed.-in-chief. A New History of German Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005.

PART TWO

HYPENATED HISTORIES: SLAVIC STUDIES AND THE HISTORICAL MODE

What is unimaginable in Vienna appears possible in Dublin, Ireland. The ‘Celtic’ lettering style of the inscription seems sufcient to accommodate a mosque in a former church. Would that be ‘transferable’ to Austria?

CHAPTER FOUR

OF CRESCENTS AND ESSENCE, OR: WHY MIGRANTS’ HISTORY MATTERS TO THE QUESTION OF ‘CENTRAL EUROPEAN COLONIALISM’ Wladimir Fischer University of Vienna

This paper proposes a roller-coaster ride through Central European history and culture and beyond. It sets out from two observations on contemporary Central European culture to proceed via the postfascist condition in Austria and the differences in context between ethnic comedies in Germany and Britain to a discussion of the validity of the term Colonialism for Central Europe, proposing en passant a more sophisticated terminology. It closes with a project description on migrants’ history in Vienna around 1900. This is certainly a rather unusual format for an academic paper. However, having faced between the rst presentation of this paper in Edmonton and its publication the worst wave of xenophobia that has swept Europe for many years under the false pretence of weighing the freedom of speech against religious piety, there seem to be more important issues than sticking to traditional formats.

Scene 1 In early 2006, large ashy posters appeared on Vienna’s billboards with close-up portraits of two politicians confronting each other like duelists: the mayor of Vienna, Michael Häupl, and the then still new leader of the Freedom Party, Heinz-Christian Strache. The campaign was designed by the Freedom Party to suggest the shrinking right-wing minority party was able to play on the same level as the dominant Social Democrats, thus suggesting that all other political competitors were somehow marginal. The campaign also aimed at attacking the existing power conguration by playing on the xenophobic authoritarian emotional register. One particular poster showed the two politicians

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confronting each other against the backdrop of blurred images of a mosque and a church. The image of the mosque represented the rst such edice that was built in Vienna, and the only free-standing temple of the Islamic faith in Austria’s capital. The image of the Christian church of course showed Saint Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna’s medieval centre and most traditional symbol. The slogan read: DUEL for Vienna M. Haupl SPÖ For more immigration It’s your choice FPÖ VIENNA

HC Strache FPÖ For us Viennese

If one approached the posters more closely, it became clear that the crescent on top of the mosque’s cupola had been tampered with by the poster’s designers. The crescent’s outlines had been accentuated by the wobbly lines of a graphics program and the twin tips had been punctuated by large ugly dots making the whole thing look like some sort of doorknob drawn by a ve year old. If one stepped back again it became obvious why the designers had blown up the elegantly curved adornment of this modern mosque: from a distance, the Islamic character of the building would hardly have been recognizable if the crescent had not been highlighted and the message of the poster would not have been clear. This was characteristic of the Freedom Party’s arguments. They typically add spice to their home-grown repertoire of chauvinism by adopting issues from European and global islamophobic discourses, transferring them full-size to the Austrian situation and if the latter does not t, blowing it completely out of proportion. Thus the slogans Heimat instead of EU-diktat, Law & order instead of misuse of the right of asylum, Jobs instead of immigration, German instead of ‘no understend’ were enhanced by culturalist battle cries like Vienna mustn’t become Istanbul, Free women instead of obligatory hijab, and by equations of the 2005 Paris suburb riots with the situation in Vienna.1 This strategy produces global meanings charged with the predominant “Western” global discourses on “Islam”, but also hearkens back to local history by

1 “Heimat statt EU-Diktat, Recht & Ordnung statt Asylmissbrauch, Arbeit statt Zuwanderung, Deutsch statt ‘Nix versteh’n’. Wien darf nicht Istanbul werden. Freie Frauen statt Kopftuchzwang.” Note the untranslatable Pummerin statt Muezzin, referring to the largest bell in St. Stephen’s steeple, originally from the early 18th century, replaced after WWII by a copy.

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means of comparing the so-called war on terrorism with the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683 (Strache posed as the saviour of Vienna in front of a painting of Prince Eugene of Savoy). The imaginary Turkish (demographic) onslaught on the city has nothing to do with reality in Vienna. It has, however, everything to do with an essentialist discourse that constructs an exclusive image of the imaginary “real Viennese”. The essence constructed by the FPÖ’s imaginary crescents is ‘exclusion of the Other from public resources’. This technique of pumping up local phenomena to fit global discourses of exclusion is not limited to right-wing populism. Most importantly for the topic of this paper, however, this particular way of implicitly comparing oneself with Britain, France and the US has become stock material for Austrian discourses both of self-aggrandizement and compensation for lost imperial status in Europe, while at the same time safeguarding oneself against accusations of racism by referring to the general and global character of one’s argument. As I will argue in this paper, the reason why such discursive streams are of importance in the region maybe ought to be sought in the fact that all Central European countries are either post-fascist or post-fascist and post-communist societies. Maybe Central European identity politics and politics of memory tend to resort to thinking oneself “into” AngloAmerican imaginaries because after Fascism and/or Communism, traditional ways of glorifying oneself and one’s country are blocked in Central Europe, and the imaginations of the most powerful empires of modern history are a convenient detour Central European chauvinists are more than happy to take. I will show in this paper how such ‘imperialism by proxy’ works and what alternative research strategies might be useful to make sense of it.

Scene 2 For several weeks in 2001/2002, on Thursday nights, viewers of Austrian state monopoly television ORF were able to follow a strange show: an Italian Austrian comedian with a bourgeois accent, Ciro de Luca, impersonated several characters in short prerecorded sketches between his studio routine of commenting—as ‘himself ’—on current newspaper headlines and joking about the former Soviet space station ‘MIR’ or the Austrian president. These characters had qualities that had been, until then, unfamiliar to Austrian TV consumers (who did

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not have cable TV): Heiner the Homo, a giggling hairdresser; Edemir, a kick-boxing Turk or Yugoslav (sic) with a name nonexistent in either language (but reminiscent of Edamer cheese), speaking with a made up Ausländer accent, the Italian pimp Fiocco de Luca and “the proud Austrian”, a rural Carinthian chauvinist in hunting outt—and last but not least Brahmburi Brahmanaswani, an ‘Indian’ man dressed in a jacket and towel, intended to suggest Indian costume, a dull parted haircut and cheap-looking round spectacles, speaking in a high-pitched voice about “Indians and Austrians” and squeakingly wishing everybody “long life, long life”—and to top it all off, Bramburi is lower Austrian dialect for ‘potato’. Wondering about the background of this show it soon became obvious that it owed much to the German ethnic comedy “Was guckst du?”,2 in which Turkish German Kaya Yanar impersonates a Gipsy fortuneteller with a turban, a Turkish bouncer wearing ‘bling bling’, a Turkish immigrant family of the rst generation in hijab and at cap, and . . . Ranjid, again an Indian man, presented as slightly retarded, who works as a taxi driver. Yanar pushed the Indian theme so far into the realm of stereotype as to perform unconvincingly clumsy Yoga exercises on an oriental rug wearing only a purple turban and loincloth. In both shows, a man of non-dominant ethnic background impersonated several stereotypical minority members of Germany and Austria . . . and an Indian. It is obvious why in a dull comedy in Germany laughter would be directed at Turks and Italians or in an Austrian ripoff why jokes should be made on the account of ‘Yugo-Turks’ and gay men, and if one is forced to add jokes about Austrians in order to fend off accusations of racism, why not pick on the Carinthians—who, of all provincial ‘denominations’ (an internal Other, so to speak) are second most often the butt of urban Austrian jokes after the Burgenlanders. But why did both comedians pick an Indian as a central character? Why isn’t it a Japanese or Chinese, who are usually the next best targets of ethnic slurs besides labor migrants? The answer seems to be simple: because the idea of the show was taken from Britain, where, after decolonization, Indian immigration introduced a whole new array of experiences for the white middle and working classes. South Asian immigration provided the islanders

2 “Was guckst du?” means “which program do you watch” but at the same time “don’t you look/stare at me”.

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with Indian cuisine as a new both exotic and cheap way of eating out. The Beatles borrowed their sitar licks from Indian music, and British middle-class young people and—subsequently—western middle-class youth internationally sought spiritual answers to their—not always necessarily—spiritual questions and quests with Indian gurus. A whole eld of middle-class consumption had been opened in the 60s and 70s and is now open also to central Europeans, who are able to buy “Indian” themed “colonial style” interior design in the department stores in Mödling, near Vienna, for instance. Consequently, German and Austrian ‘ethnic comedians’ have also appropriated ideas from identity politics TV shows that developed in the aftermath of postcolonial immigration in Britain, such as The Kumars at 42 or Da Ali G Show. What they did not adopt were the political and discursive struggles that have been connected to these media discourses. And this is recognizable in their shows. Yanar and de Luca did not even bother to adapt the ethnic groups they were directing their jokes at to the German and Austrian immigration context, where South Asians are a small minority (I will show later how contexts operate differently in Central Europe and the UK)—not to speak of the general spirit of the shows, which includes poorly concealed play with chauvinist and racist feelings among the audiences, offering them a pseudo-ironic channel of projection and an unpunishable way to act out in public. In contrast to the German and Austrian shows, the British models are not a disguise for racist jokes, although they were accused of a similar rationale. A quick comparison shows that what critics felt was the case in Ali G, really does happens in Was guckst du? and De Luca. In contrast to its continental copycats, Da Ali G Show, which seems to be the most important model to them, is a subtle play with blunt stereotypes opening up many different readings of the fact that a white Jewish man, Sacha Baron Cohen, pretends to be a black gangster rapper in expensive hip-hop clothes with the catchphrase “Is it cos’ I is black?”. The authors of the corresponding Wikipedia entry in English have collected some of the most important of those readings: Sacha Baron Cohen is not black himself, but because he portrays a character who purports misogyny, he has been accused by some of racism and of ridiculing black street culture. The West End premiere of Ali G Indahouse was met with anti-racist demonstrators protesting outside. However, others have suggested that the implication that black street culture is not a legitimate subject for parody is itself racist. . . .

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wladimir fischer Many still believe that the Ali G character is a parody of Muslim South Asian youths, particularly Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, from London who listen and follow the Gangsta Rap lifestyle. . . . Others perhaps namely in the US, may see Ali G in the sense of an Eminem type cultural appropriator, or blatantly as a wigger3 caricature. . . . Ali G can also be seen as a commentary on the adoption of American black street culture by both non-Americans and non-blacks. Because Baron Cohen is a middle-class, Cambridge University-educated Jewish actor portraying a suburban, presumably middle-class Briton of undetermined extraction who is, in turn, styling himself on American street life, the show maintains a certain Victor/Victoria quality. To many critics, Ali G is not satirising black urban culture, but those non-blacks and non-urbanites who appropriate it. (Ali G. Accessed 3.21.2006)

That Da Ali G Show is about multiple layers of self-irony is perhaps most obvious in quotes like “That’s an awfully sexist way to be talkin’ about dem bitches!” or “There has been enough sadness since the terrible events of 7–11” taken from interviews with important public gures ranging from Newt Gingrich to Tony Benn. The chauvinist talk is usually a vehicle to divert it towards majority discourses, or at least to offer such an interpretation. This is most palpable with another of Cohen’s characters, the Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev who presents a Kazakh TV show about the British, that has been put into movie format recently as ‘Borat’. The fake Kazakh title screen displays Cyrillic characters that would in Harvard transliteration read ishtshkfeyppshvu eshtshikshefsht, i.e. nonsense. Borat regularly extracts from majority ethnicity British interviewees the most revealing enunciations by pretending to be, as an exotic Other, always ruder than and/or inferior to them: Borat: If I work here, can I work in a room with a light? Employer: Yeah. Everyone gets to work in a room with a light. Borat: Great success! Borat: In U.S. and A. they treat horses like we in Kazakhstan treat our women. They feed them two times a day. They have them sleep on

3 “A Wigger (alternatives: Wigga, Whigger ) is a stereotype of a Caucasian person who emulates phrases, mannerisms, and fashion commonly and stereotypically associated with Black, or hip-hop cultures. The stereotype of the wigger usually involves a young Caucasian person who generally knows little about their own background, or the culture they are appropriating, with the exception of the music, style, and slang associated with that culture, attributes generally understood as not fully representing any culture. The term is a portmanteau combining the words ‘white nigger’, or ‘wannabe nigger,’ and is thus generally considered offensive. It has historically been used in a derogatory manner, though a recent minority has begun to use it as a self-identifer.” (http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Wigger)

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straw in a small box. And for entertainment, they make them jump over fences while being whipped. (Memorable Quotes from ‘Da Ali G Show’.http://www.imdb.com/ title/tt0367274/quotes>. Accessed March 21, 2006)

The basic difference between Cohen and Yanar/de Luca is that Cohen never steps out of the Ali G or Borat character to become ‘himself ’ and to comment from a “real” standpoint, as the two German speakers do. Thus, in the two rip-offs, there is a hegemonic position of speaking while Cohen always remains ambivalent and open to multiple interpretations. In other words, Da Ali G Show is based on a postmodern kind of humor while Yanar and de Luca behave as if the culture wars (and entire other debates) of the 1980s had not taken place. Perhaps this is because postmodern concepts have not really entered popular culture in Central Europe or maybe because migrants, minorities and women have not yet exerted enough pressure on the discourses in this part of the world—or both. I will argue in this paper (in the section Desperately Looking for the Post-colonial Intellectuals) that there are many differences between Britain and Central Europe that would deserve different treatment both by comedians and by academics (and I will leave it to the imagination of the reader to discern what the difference between an academic and a comedian might be)—I will also describe some of the most important of those differences, mainly connected to colonialism, WWI and fascism, and then conclude that the only real parallel in my paper between Britain and Central Europe is post-WWII migration.

Adapt or Adopt? Postcolonial Thinking and Postfascism I have set both these scenes at the beginning of a paper on the history of migrants in Vienna because the strategies of adaptation in these media discourses grabbed my attention as they reminded me of what is going on around me in Austrian academic discourses, and in other Central European ones. I am not writing this in order to prescribe the ‘right’ way of adapting theories that were developed in different contexts (and I am speaking mainly about Postcolonial Theory), but because I have had to grapple with these questions a great deal in recent years and have made research decisions based precisely on such considerations—research that I will present in the second part of this paper.

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In the Austrian academic context, much as in German and Austrian comedy, sometimes it seems as if feminist and postmodern critique had never existed. Like the comedians mentioned above—and here I come to the rst point central to this paper—there is a belief among my fellow Central European academics that one can simply adopt postcolonial ‘studies’ like one slips into a glove, without reecting on the contexts or implications of the different situation in one’s own environment, nor on the academic tradition a given theory comes from, nor on one’s own position in the whole process. Worst of all, such erudition takes on the stance of the omniscient German cabaret person instead of a subtler strategy with more twists and autoreferentiality (the cabaret person standing here for an academia haunted by the spectre of Kantian categorizations). Sometimes it seems justied to call such scholarship Neocolonial Studies instead of postcolonial; or perhaps academic appropriation or scholarly ‘wiggerism’. For the purposes of this paper, I will call this kind of scholarship ‘adaptation of Postcolonial Studies’ because it is a selfgiven name and nicely illustrates the crudeness of the arguments. But there are also tendencies in the Austrian academy between history and culture that are similar to tendencies in the wider German and Austrian cultural discourses addressed at the beginning by the inated crescent. These academic discourses function irrespective of the social context they are embedded in, and are unwilling to engage with lived experiences.4 Instead they adhere to outdated prescriptive and essentialist constructs combined with global imagery deemed ‘contemporary’ and ‘hot’, all quickly to be abandoned if it turns out not to work any more. In semiotic terms they produce signiers without a signied—there is no mental concept to be represented by the signier. What remains are implied references to all too well-known concepts, from Germanistik to Deutscher Idealismus. Meanwhile, the semiotic process works mainly on a different level: that of academic self-promotion. What these discourses have in common is that they blindly take over deliberate set pieces from English-speaking discourses for the sake of an (allegedly) more powerful and more successful position in discursive struggles, and a better starting position, be it in the media, in politics or on the academic job market. Some want to capitalize on successful niche products (Was guckst du? De Luca), thereby reversing the subtle play with hegemonic discursive staple

4

See the three volumes Müller-Funk, Plener & Ruthner, Feichtinger, Prutsch, and & Csáky and Hárs et al.

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images, making it into a perdious alibi for oppressive and exclusionary discourses with self-exculpating side-effects for the (German white middle class male) audiences. Others want to jump on the bandwagon of forceful and obviously oppressive and exclusionary discourses (inated crescents). Both discursive tendencies are methodological metaphors for what I am criticizing and at the same time they are part of the context of my work (see below), as this work happens exactly in a context where racist discourses are ubiquitous and where cultural appropriation seems to be the main principle of success addressing young urban audiences. This means that I am using such phenomena as the de Luca show to illustrate what is going on in Austrian literary and historical scholarship while I am understanding them simultaneously as phenomena of the cultural production that has the most inuence on the lives of people living in Austria, therefore also of migrants. Moreover, I will use these phenomena to illustrate my own academic project, a history of migrants from Southeastern Habsburg provinces, as I will elaborate in the second part of this paper, which is again closely connected to discourses of identity politics in Central Europe. Both niche exploitation and hitching free rides on hegemonic discourses seem to be inuenced by the postfascist condition of Central European discourses. Since the defeat of Fascism, the old chauvinist self-images of nations have been more or less discredited in Central Europe. At the same time, the Central European nation-states had ‘achieved’ what ethno-nationalists had always dreamed of: ethnically pure territories. But now that labor migrants have been coming to capitalist countries for 40 years and migration has become possible from ever-more-remote places, and now that nation-states appear to be endangered by the political effects of globalization, this ‘achievement’ of ‘ethnic purity’ is considered in hegemonic discourse to be the natural state of the nation that has to be preserved. That is what postfascism is about: not to be able to live up to traditional nationalism despite living in an ethically cleansed territory. The answer has been, after the breakdown of the Communist states, to think oneself into the imagery of actual imperial powers without revising the claim to a perceived normality of ethnic ‘purity’ (i.e. without thinking about diversity, without accepting the status of an immigration society). After all, to narrow it down again to the Austrian case, the last time it was really ‘big’ was in the 18th century—the ‘great century’ according to traditional Austrian historiography (cf. Vocelka 11–22)—or, from another perspective, when it was part of the Third Reich.

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It is from this perspective that I perceive recent debates about the adaptability of post-colonial thinking to Central European contexts. As interesting as the idea to compare late 19th century empires may be, the debate has revealed that there is also a certain danger in using post-colonial approaches (or rather to use “Postcolonial Studies” as a label): it can also be used to open clandestine discursive paths to the imperial past for nostalgic tours to vanished imperial, and now also colonial, grandeur, while avoiding the stale whiff of worn-out conservative Lodenmantel-style habits of retrospective Austrian self-aggrandizement. Perhaps this is where the point of the short craze about K.u.k. postcolonial was buried: the wish to become, once again, a glistening metropolis in the heart of Europe, to be able to compete with the mightiest powers of the world, with England, France and even the US. Such fantasies t very neatly with the ones unleashed after 1989 about re-establishing old links in the realm of the former Habsburg monarchy and to create a new ‘centre’ for all of Europe—in Austria, of course.5 Frantz Fanon once argued that without colonialism, there would have been no Europe (81). From this perspective, it is most obvious why considering colonialism as one part of Austria’s tradition is not necessarily a means of self-criticism but can also function as a rhetorical strategy to underline Austria’s importance as an historical European Great Power and to make it competitive again in the “New Europe”, emphasizing its signicance by hacking a path into “global” discourses on colonialism. “Die Anwendung der Postcolonial Studies auf Zentraleuropa” Sometimes the category of determinedness in the German language is most revealing. When the very careful language usage of postcolonial theory is translated into a headline like ‘The Application of Postcolonial Studies to Central Europe’, one is alerted as to what is going on in German-speaking discourses.6 The best example to illustrate both the chances and the pitfalls of Central European scholars engaging with postcolonial theory was a debate that was publicized in scholarly web-

5 Time has revealed that much of those aspirations have been overtaken by the Czech and Hungarian, which are in many aspects more attractive than Vienna, but still investments are mainly owing from Austria to the North, East and South and not the other way round. 6 The quote was taken from Feichtinger 2003.

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resources on Central European issues.7 During the short and heated debate the most important points already mentioned here were tackled in detail.8 Therefore I will only briey revisit the most important arguments, to give an overview of the issues at stake and will nally add those points which have not been discussed yet, examining both the validity of the term colonial for Central European history and of the post-colonial label for the study of this history (see Colonialism in Central Europe? ). One of my most serious criticisms is connected to what I termed in the beginning of this paper as “blindly” taking over set pieces from English-speaking discourses, which means that elements both of the critical theory (niche product) and the hegemonic discourse (Colonial imagery) were borrowed in ignorance of the conditions of societal and cultural production in the society/culture in which the original discourses were formulated. This means that for instance the struggles around post-colonial immigration to Britain, which were the actual context of the advent of post-colonial theory, are usually not acknowledged in “the application of Postcolonial Studies to Central Europe”.9 Hence it is obvious why such an application cannot come to adequate conclusions concerning the historical conditions of Central European societies (see below). Obviously such ‘blindness’ is in the worst case combined with ignorance of the cultures allegedly hegemonized by German culture in the Habsburg monarchy: for example, ignorance of the Slavic literatures. As Slavic literature scholar Stefan Simonek remarks (1), ignorance of research on those literatures and cultures only adds to this blindness. Uninformed scholarship tends, instead of breaking up the traditional hierarchic cultural modes of exchange, to perpetuate the image of the “East” as an exotic and wild Other and thus to duplicate colonialist discourse instead of deconstructing it, consequently taking notice of Slavic cultures only as mute objects instead of as speaking subjects. (ibid.)10 In the words of cultural historian Markus Reisenleitner,

7 The starting point was Ruthner 2002. The debate consisted of two critiques and a response by the original author, which received another critique: Reisenleitner 2002, Simonek, Ruthner, “K.u.K. ‘Kolonialismus’” and Reisenleitner 2003. The latest and so far the last publication on the topic of the debate is Ruthner 2006. 8 More reading on the topic is contained in Müller-Funk, Plener & Ruthner and in Feichtinger, Prutsch & Csáky. 9 This unifying and very telling formula was used in Feichtinger, Prutsch, and Csáky. 10 Simonek adds that culturally uninformed scholarship “means in last consequence an intellectual colonization of the Wild East—making this ‘silent territory’ talk is

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such scholarship “promotes, intentionally or unintentionally, the same re-centralization and hegemony of knowledge production that it sets out to criticize”. (2002) The question is for historian Heidemarie Uhl, whether the very “dichotomous pattern of a hierarchic difference between hegemonic elite culture and ‘colonized’ ethnicities or nationalities . . . generates the notion of an homogenous ‘Other’.” (3) The belief in the transferability of theory out of context leads to a methodology which is a crude synthesis of the large and diverse body of postcolonial writing and redundantly re-imports already widely discussed problems of postcolonial studies. As Reisenleitner noted, it is “inherently problematic . . . to synthesize such a wide and varied body of work as the writings of, e.g., Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, into a single theoretical framework in order to ‘apply’ it to a different geographical frame of reference”. What is desirable therefore is to develop theory “in relation to the interest and context of the scholar or the academic project”. Appropriate theory should therefore be informed by “comparable academic investigations as well as a high degree of self-reexivity.” The re-importation of problems that have already been thoroughly discussed over the last two decades, due to the articially homogenized body of readings, include: “postcolonial theory’s alleged blind spots in regard to questions of class and gender, its privileging of literature over other forms of cultural production, its aestheticization of resistance, its reliance on literary canons, and its own hegemonic position within the (Western, English-speaking) academy.” Not recognizing these problems would lead to a repetition of the debate instead of exploring new grounds. (2002) As already mentioned, there is a tendency in postcolonial theory adaptations in Central Europe to ignore one of the crucial demands of the academic movement one is borrowing from, namely to critically reect upon one’s own interests and upon the context of one’s own academic project.11 An academic project placing itself in the framework of postcolonial studies should critique its own status within the academy and within vectors of cultural, linguistic and academic hegemony in Europe and thus try to avoid to promote “the same re-

therefore the aim. There is no option that the colonized could possibly have something to say themselves. What else could be the reason that there has not even been made an attempt at testing the theoretical models of Slavic studies ( Jurij Lotman’s Cultural Semiotics for instance) for their applicability?” (ibid.) 11 As one of the best known examples take Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ‘Outside in The Teaching Machine’ (1993).

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centralization and hegemony of knowledge production that it sets out to criticize.” (ibid.) Most “applications of post-colonial studies to central Europe” miss the actual point of post-colonial theory, namely the question “how to retrieve the suppressed, marginalized or silenced voices of the oppressed in precisely the culture that oppresses them” as Reisenleitner observes (2003). Instead of such deconstructing projects, we often encounter attempts at re-constructing exactly the oppressive cultural phenomena of Austrian glances at the Other, caught in the maelstrom of Imagologie, a theoretically conservative academic project in Germany, and not in the intellectual vein of Orientalism, mainly because such attempts lter out the Foucauldian basis of Said’s writings.12 Colonialism in Central Europe? This is not to say that there were no concepts or theories from post-colonial debates that are worth adopting for Central European history (an attempt to do that is part of my own research project described below under A Street-Level History). There are, in fact, enough silenced voices worth retrieving from hegemonic discourses in Central Europe, not only among the ethnic/national boundaries of exclusion (which did produce much silence, the burgeoning discourses of suppressed ‘small nations’ notwithstanding, for instance in the Jewish, the Roma or the Aromunian cases) but also and maybe more importantly along the boundaries of gender and class. There are, however, some important considerations to be made in order to meaningfully adopt those concepts and to adapt them to the Central European context—after such a process of adaptation it might not be fruitful any more to call the result ‘post-colonial’, but rather informed, inter alia, by post-colonial theory. One wonders whether the component ‘colonial/ism’ in post-colonial is not more disabling than explanatory in the analysis of Central European cultural, socio-economic and political phenomena before WWI. While the accusatory thrust of the term might be attractive in a rhetorical move designed to challenge the self-glorifying historiographies

12 The approach of Imagologie does not criticize alterity, but rather attempts at positively describing, and constructing laws of, intercultural perception. Cf. for instance Dyserink & Syndram. The critique of the skipping of ‘Foucault’ from ‘Orientalism’ is to be found in Reisenleitner 2003.

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of Central Europe, it also obscures the fact that the politics and economy and hence also the cultural formulations of ‘transnational’ domination were different in central from those of western Europe. What further complicates matters is that colonialism itself is a polysemic term. There are diverse denitions of colonialism in a political-economic sense and colonialism in a culturally-discursive sense. Consequently, the aforementioned differences between western and central Europe are in turn unevenly distributed between several meanings of “colonialism”—the central European situation varied in different terms for instance in the cultural eld than in the economic one. Neither of these differences resonates with the ‘application of post-colonial studies to central Europe’. While its proponents spoke initially of a paradigm shift, the argument now is concentrated on the cultural sphere of what is perceived as colonialism, while leaving decisions about the economic and political spheres to “the historians”.13 This approach is not productive at all. As there is no doubt that any serious literary or cultural history must engage with the societal context of culture, I will lay out the interconnectedness of the three elds. I will also propose a more differentiated terminology. The most important difference for this paper is located in the cultural sphere, but is by denition connected to economy and politics: Most of the cultures that would gure in an “Austro-Hungarian colonialism” concept as colonized developed their own colonizing discourses very early on. This is true for Hungarian, Czech, Serbian, Croatian and Romanian discourses etc. alike. This means that the term colonialism in many instances is transferred to situations where it is simply inappropriate: the Habsburg Empire, to put it in a nutshell, was neither a colonial power in the politico-economic sense in which Britain and France were, nor can the cultures that were deemed peripheral in Habsburg discourses be easily called colonized, as they had themselves been co-opted by colonialist discourses since the late 18th century just as German discourses in the Monarchy were riding on the bandwagon of British and French colonialism. Thus, what is termed Habsburg colonialism (in the cultural eld) should rather be called ‘colonialism by proxy’. The economic and political aspects would more aptly be described as imperialist, set in a colonial context. What follows is a short

13

Cf. Ruthner 2006, 257.

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review of the arguments against the use of ‘Colonialism’ for central and southeastern Europe in each eld. At rst glance, there seem to be many similarities between central European power-relations between Austria and Hungary or Bohemia on one and the transoceanic power relations of France and England on the other side. The Hungarian half of the Monarchy was a dependent market and a destination for ‘Austrian’ investment. As György Ránki reminds us, in the middle of the nineteenth century, most of Hungarian mining “was in Austrian hands” and “large banking houses were established by groups of Austrian nanciers” (57f.). The situation in Bohemia was comparable. Taxation was also unfavorable toward the Hungarian side and the centre of economic power was certainly Vienna, especially as it was the nancial and corporate headquarters. Vienna was also the political center, with the parliament of Cisleithania located there as well as the bearer of the Austrian and the Hungarian crown. Culturally, a closer connection of the dynasty with ‘German culture’ was equally undeniable as the advantages of German-language mass communication and education became manifest from the 18th century onwards—and were in turn co-opted and supported by the dynasty and backed by the economic rewards of the large German-language cultural market. Also the innumerable bows of the sovereign after 1848 towards non-German cultures and elites could not disguise the fact that the system brought into force by the cannons of Radetzky and Windischgrätz was stacked heavily in favour of the German-speaking bourgeoisie. Nonetheless, the term colonialism is inappropriate here in all of its senses. a) Economic:14 In an economic sense, the equation of the Habsburg empire with the colonial powers France and Britain does not hold up because the Habsburg Empire was struggling to catch up with France and Britain, but failed. As a late-developing industrial power, Austria-Hungary was faced with more advanced German competition, especially after 1866 (attempts to exploit the economies of the subject lands can be seen as a move to counter that competition). Moreover, the economic situation described briey above was typical only for the second half of the 19th century. Austria played only a marginal role in

14

I am heavily indebted to Govind Rao (York University) for his invaluable input to these sections, which immensely proted from our discussion.

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the direct exploitation of the colonial markets15 and it was not able in the 18th century to establish imperialist terms of trade with its eastern provinces. Therefore neither the comparison with the Russian empire nor Lenin’s argument concerning an inner colony work in the Habsburg case. (Vocelka 67) Of course, Austria did commercially dominate the regions it controlled; for instance, the majority of imports to Hungary came from the Austrian side. Yet to stop there and to uncritically use Austria as one part in a colonial relationship would mean to ignore the fact that the bourgeoisie that proted from such exports cannot be identied with a certain ethnic or regional entity. There were other developing national bourgeois cultures; the Hungarian bourgeoisie was gaining strength as an economic force. To say that it was dominated by a German bourgeoisie would be missing the point. The social order still in force provided that the most powerful strata of society were inextricably intertwined in the network of the ancien régime elites. The developing national bourgeoisies were co-opted by the high gentry, and both operated monarchy-wide. If the subject lands were ruled by an alien power centered in a far-away capital to which tribute accumulated, the whole argument centers on the legitimacy of the ‘multinational’ regime and on alien-ness. This leads to the political sphere, to which we will turn shortly, after an excursion what the right perspective is in which to compare histories. Before we continue this discussion, and before I propose an argument regarding the validity of adaptations of the post-colonial label, we should pay some attention to the aftermath of Empire, as this is the starting point for all post-colonial theoretical ‘models’ in the rst place. When Britain lost its colonies after WWII, the new post-colonial power conguration came into force, and former imperial subjects moved to Britain as migrants, putting the colony at the heart of the former empire, a cultural crisis known as the postcolonial moment. English and postcolonial identities were ‘haunted’ by imperial legacies.16 (Gikandi 129–39) Much in contrast to that, after the demise of the Habsburg Empire, migration ows were directed outside Austria—Czechs and others went to more promising places in their “homelands” and in the particular case of

15 For instance, trade in the Habsburg Empire proted from overseas merchant bases in the 18th century. See Vocelka 70f. 16 Postcolonial theories were one answer to this. They were also closely related to postcolonial migration, because it was migration that brought the theorists to be into the academic centers from which to speak; it also placed the postcolonial question inside the discourses to speak to from those central positions.

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Czechoslovakia, they migrated to an economically much stronger place. Austria became a rural backwater, a poor house, while Czechoslovakia prospered. There is no point in comparing defeated, provincialized Austria and its administrational ‘hydrocephalus’ Vienna after WWI with the victorious Britain that emerged from WWII with a stricken but still vital capital, London. If there is a comparison, it is between post-colonial migration in western Europe and post-fascist migration in Central Europe, both from the 1960s onwards.17 b) Political: First and foremost, the Habsburg dynasty had acquired dominance in the lands it controlled by legal and—by the standards of the time—legitimate means, not on the battleeld or by means of mercantilism (with the late exception of Bosnia; concerning CroatiaSlavonia and the formerly Ottoman Hungarian territories Austria’s ruling house could rightfully refer to older titles). Thus the peoples under the Habsburgs were theoretically under their own sovereign and what turned out problematic ca. 300 years after 1526, was a sovereign not matching the ethnicity of the subject peoples, which was of course the case in many European countries at the time. For example, French was the dominant language in the Romanov Court; the bloodlines of the British Crown were German; the Dutch Royals spoke an archaic dialect (‘Court Dutch’) that was as much like German as it was like ordinary Dutch. This brings us back to the question of alien-ness. The ethno-linguistic identity of the ruling classes became a central issue only during the 19th century18 with the national movements dening civil society in ethno-national terms and the bourgeoisies following this trend. Berend and Ránki explained this kind of socially motivated nationalism with the relative economic underdevelopment of the region (1979). Thus, the problem of Habsburg rule in the non-German territories was not one of aliens invading other territories but one of the society or societies of the Monarchy growing ever more alienated from the

17 This is a thesis I am not able to prove yet: The migration routes were quite similar to the channels through which Italian and Croatian workforce had been brought to the Reich during Fascism—it ts the picture that Turkish laborers were hired in the late 1960ies only after these already tested trails had been re-explored. Sensenig argues in a similar manner, describing the Austrian Ausländer-policy through three political systems (363–86). 18 What made this different to Early Modern ethnic conict has been lain out in Fischer et al. which was a collective effort together with Karl Heinz and Vlasta Valeš, in a project conducted by Markus Reisenleitner and Karl Vocelka.

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multi-ethnic ancien régime.19 The economic, political and cultural centrality of Vienna should not lead to a fatal argument that equates economic and power relations with competition between bourgeoisies, and which subsequently leads to an equation of bourgeoisies with nations with cultures with languages—as happened (not only) in Stalinist thinking from the 1930s onwards. The Colonialism comparison on the political level is especially awed because the royal-imperial state did not impede the development of political entities in as devastating a way as the classic transoceanic colonial empires did—for example, in North and South America and the Caribbean, the European powers were able to militarily dominate the original inhabitants and in many places wiped out the native peoples, replacing them with ‘white settler societies’, while Habsburg expansion in Central Europe was rst and foremost a classical case of the politics of consolidating territorial rule on dynastic principles, and not of replacing populations. As the worst Habsburg examples one could cite the disempowerment of the Bohemian estates in the early 17th, and the division of Poland in the 18th century.20 These policies, however, never led to genocide or even an erasure of the political elites, but rather to their forced diversication and assimilation.21 British colonialism was, in other areas of the globe, such as the rest of Africa, India, China, and the rest of Asia, a military and commercial system, which forced unequal exchange on the peoples of those lands. This was a very different outcome than in the Habsburg case. But also in contrast to the British colonies in Africa, India and China, the lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were integrated under the government of the Crown in a manner unlike that of the colonial policy of ‘Indirect Rule’. It is impossible to prove that one special region or

19 Let us not forget in this context that Rudolf II. had his court in Prague, not in Vienna. 20 Serbian, respectively Yugoslav, and Romanian nationalists, backed by their emerging national states neighboring the Monarchy, claimed in the late 19th century that the Habsburg State was holding their compatriots “hostages”. In historical perspective however, Serbian and Romanian, and also Croatian, elites had around 1800 welcomed Austrian expansion in the Balkans as liberation from the Ottoman “yoke.” The change of interests came with the ascension of Serbia and Romania to the role of regional players during the 19th century. 21 See e.g. Schimert for the Hungarian nobility and van Horn Melton for Bohemia and Austria.

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nation in the Habsburg Empire was militarily dominated by another. The boundaries of suppression and domination were even more crossed than in the French and British cases. To give just one example, the fact that in 1849, Croatian troops under general Jelaoim besieged Vienna and crushed the revolution in the ‘German’ imperial capital did not mean that Croatia dominated Austria. The only example of military domination of a territory in modern Habsburg history is Bosnia-Hercegovina, which is too singular to be considered a pattern. To the contrary, this example underlines what has been said about Habsburg imperial policy: in Bosnia-Hercegovina the same laws as in other Austrian lands were subsequently introduced—this is a status that was granted in British colonialism only to territories where the native population had been numerically overwhelmed by settlers, like in Canada and Australia. By contrast, German settlement in Bosnia-Hercegovina played only a symbolical role (although it of course aroused the opposition of the local elites),22 while the province was granted a parliament in 1910. Furthermore, the force of the so-called national renaissance or ‘rebirth’ movements in the late 18th through the early 20th century is ample evidence that regional elites had preserved enough resources to organize their respective policies. Since the Napoleonic wars, the Habsburg imperial strategy to create Austrian dynastic patriotism had been a delicate balancing act, as ethnic nationalism and bourgeois selfconsciousness were already on the horizon. After the 1848 revolution, the Habsburg elites took refuge in granting and sponsoring controlled ethnic patriotisms under the supra-national imperial umbrella, the socalled policy of recognition (Uhl). British and French colonialisms, by contrast, had crushed comparable forces, and concessions to the imagery of the local elites were made strictly at the local level. In the Habsburg Monarchy however, Hungarian and Bohemian gentry like the Kinskys, the Pálffys and Esterházys erected their palais around the Hofburg, the emperor’s palace in Vienna, from the 17th century onwards, and in the late 19th century Bohemian and Hungarian and even Serbian and Romanian notables held seats in the upper house of parliament just opposite that palace. The strength vis-à-vis the ‘Habsburg central’ that ethnic national elites had acquired during the 19th century became obvious between August and December of 1914. In the early phase of WWI, Serbian

22

Cf. Malcolm 142f.

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troops repelled the Austro-Hungarian onslaught thrice and without German help the Royal Imperial (königlich und kaiserlich) army’s progress in the Balkans would have come to an early end. This would have been unthinkable in British or French colonial history before WWII. The Serbian military had in the run-up received massive support from Russia and France. Austria-Hungary was an example of Empire without Colonialism. The example of Bosnia illustrates that this empire did until the end aspire to an imperialist policy but not to colonialism. To speak of colonialism in the economic and/or political sense certainly obscures more than it explains. Nevertheless, colonialism must be seen as a major economic and ideological context of Habsburg history, as Vocelka points out. Colonial examples did inspire Habsburg rulers; Austria-Hungary was involved in the expanding world market; colonial commodities did have, through overseas trade, an impact on the Austro-Hungarian economy and on everyday consumption; and the imagination of exotic cultures was in Austria and Hungary enticed e.g. by Chinese examples as early as in Maria Theresa’s days. (68–79) In other words, the Habsburg Monarchy was co-opted by the Colonial projects of the (other) European great powers. This is the reason why I would propose to speak of Continental Imperialism paired with Cultural Colonialism ‘by proxy’. c) Cultural: In a more fundamental way than political hegemony, cultural hegemony in Central Europe was radically different from Western European colonialism. In the cultural sense, or rather, in a reductive cultural sense, ‘colonialism’ can easily be attributed to any cultural phenomena that render others into a subjugated position by attributing to them both danger and harmlessness, fear and nostalgia, in an essentialist way. In that sense, colonialism is hardly to be distinguished e.g. from antifeminism or homophobia. The question is whether such a deliberate denition is reasonable or whether cultural phenomena should not be seen as embedded in the context of political and economic oppression and exploitation. Only if read in the social and political context does gender essentialism become something that cuts across Empire and Colonialism. Only in the socio-political context do cultural practices become meaningful and vice versa. Furthermore, discourses of social exclusion intersected and intersect with discourses of Empire and gender. The differences between, for example, amateur-anthropological descriptions of Balkan shepherds and of Alpine herdsmen were a

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matter of degree and so were the differences between modes of access by such mountain dwellers to political and economic resources in the respective structures. In both cases the gendering of the mountainous imagery would be similar. The reason is that the social boundaries that are constructed are stronger in these discourses than the ethnic ones, and the reason again for this predominance of the social is that there is one component missing—race. Race was the most forceful discursive leverage producing exclusion in 19th century colonialism. This instrument however was generally not, in the Balkans or other areas of the region, applied to hegemonize (fairly) white South Slavs (who might after all also be heroic, not unlike their Alpine cousins) but directed towards ‘the Jew’ (who was interestingly excluded from the whiteness concept) and, to a lesser degree, ‘the Gypsy’. But even such a reduced concept of cultural colonialism does not work for hegemonic discourses in central Europe. As Simonek implies, one can hardly state that literary voices of the non-dominant cultures of the Habsburg Monarchy were confronted with the kind of colonization that was the case with literatures in the realm of British and French colonialism (1), because their voices had been loud and clear since the late 18th century, only that large German audiences did not recognize them as speaking because of their own linguistic decit (which seems to be a tradition still alive in Austria and Germany and also in Germanistik departments). It should however be noted that publications for instance of South Slav illuminées were announced in German journals as early as in 1785.23 For similar reasons Reisenleitner questions, in reference to an earlier suggestion, whether the method of invoking the self-consolidating other in Spivak’s sense is indeed necessary in the case of a tradition where the other speaks back (2003): There can be no doubt that even the most marginalized and oppressed ethnicities in the Habsburg monarchy had access to relatively good printing and publishing resources, but this does not imply that they were not subaltern, or that the concept of subalternity cannot be fruitful in considering the situation there; it does imply, however, that the concept of voice has to be even more rened than it has already been in the context of India and the Subaltern Studies Group. (2002)

In 1805, Serbia embarked on the road to sovereignty from the Ottomans (it was the rst Balkan country to do so) and hence received Russian

23

“Rezension von ‘Zchiwotj i Prikljutscheniga’ und ‘Sowjeti’ ”.

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support. In the 19th century, this sort of support translated into armies, canons, bombs. By the early 19th century at the latest, all the peoples dominated by the Habsburg Empire, or rather their elites, had developed their own literatures, their own standard languages and their own press to a modern standard, they had developed their own brands of European (arrogant) self-esteem, maybe awed by the stigma of the late-comer but subalternity was certainly not simply a phenomenon of German-speaking colonialists vis-à-vis Slavic-Hungarian-RomanianAlbanian-Romanès speaking subjects. These peoples were, from the elite perspective, not people without history; they were in-between, in the ‘worst’ case peuples sans Renaissance, but they had developed their own historiographies beginning with the late 18th century. Also the working classes had by 1900 achieved a relatively high level of organization and entered the discursive arenas of central Europe. Those who did remain without history were those who can justiably be termed subaltern in this context: although narod (the people) was declared the central actor of every narrative of central European and Balkan discourses in the 19th and also the 20th century, and although, as has to be noted, Balkan folk culture practices have received remarkable scholarly attention, preserving some of the most interesting monuments of 19th century peasant cultures, there are only few histories from below (of the oppressed) for the region and even fewer that would deal with those who had not attained the dialogic level of utterance, and who therefore had no voice. It was the venerated narod who actually was subaltern. On the other hand, the region has, as has been said above about Austria-Hungary, been involved in colonial and imperial trajectories, which makes it indispensable to consult literature on colonialism to understand the hegemonic fantasies that have been virulent in the region, as well as imperial economic and political aspirations. As I have said before, central European discourses and economies have, if they weren’t colonial ones themselves, been co-opted by Colonialism. (Cultural) Colonialism ‘by proxy’ Although the Habsburg Empire was not a Colonial power, the better-off classes from Prague to Sarajevo enjoyed consuming colonial products, Kolonialwaren. In a sense, the middle classes from the 19th century onwards had inherited this practice from the 18th-century nobility. And consumption of colonial goods was astonishingly high already in the late 1700s: half a kilo of tobacco per capita in what is now Austria (Vocelka 79). Colonial commodities such as tea, chocolate, cocoa,

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pepper, etc., but also coffee (which in Austria is of course connected to the anecdote about the Ottoman siege being the point when coffee was introduced to Vienna) were a symbol of success in overseas trade, epitomized by the blackamoor, the stereotypical image of black servants in oriental adornments. The ‘moor’ was used in heraldics as part of gentlemen’s coats of arms but also in the logos of trading companies. Still remembered is the Meinl-Mohr in the logo of Austrian former supermarket chain Julius Meinl, introduced in 1924.24 The logo was part of Austrian urban imagery and household commodities until very recently. Such practices rendered the Austrian consumer into the position of the colonizer, the slave trader, the Bwana (a semantic misconception popularized by Tarzan-author Edgar Rice Burroughs). Since the 18th century, this way of consumption has been paired with the ideology of the rational superiority of enlightened subjects, usually white and ‘European’. Africans were portrayed as primitives without agency. Serbian Enlightenment author Dositej Obradovim wrote in 1783, in a vein similar to Immanuel Kant, that the peoples of Africa lie in “eternal darkness and irrationality”25 (Life and Adventures of Dimitrije Obradovin, 211). Thus, although the Africans were not ruled by the Austrian crown and the tea prices and production were not controlled by Austrian companies, central Europeans managed to secure their share of colonial imaginary and consumption. The implicit concept of whiteness underlies self-conceptions here as anywhere in Europe. First and foremost, the concept of whiteness was meant to exclude those from Europe, or the part of Europe one had secured for oneself, who were different, who were not ‘in the present’. This is what some have labeled ‘internal Colonialism’ in the cultural sense in allusion to the politico-economic term coined by Vladimir Lenin. European ethno-cultural hierarchies were constructed for example in 1821 in the Gemeinnütziger Hauskalender für das österreichische Kaiserthum, printed in Vienna and subtitled ‘Museum for Natural Miracles, National Curiosities, Customs and Folk Festivities’. In the

24 The company Julius Meinl still uses this logo. It threatened a scholarly publication on racism with a lawsuit because the editors were using a version of the Meinl blackamoor on the cover of the book. Meinl’s attorneys argued that the usage of the image of an African showed the company’s Weltoffenheit (cosmopolitanism), because, among other arguments, the face of the moor resembled Baroque images of putti, i.e. gures of pudgy babies (http://www.unrast-verlag.de/unrast,2,22,5.html). 25 Obradovim was aspiring a prominent role of the Serbian elites inside the Habsburg Empire at that time, exhorting Emperor Josef II. to conquer the Balkans for the Balkan Christians. Cf. Fischer 2007. On Kant’s racism cf. Smidt.

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chapter ‘National Characteristics’, besides an entry on the ‘Wealth and Culture of the upper Austrians’, we nd an entry on ‘The Gypsies in the Austrian Empire’. They were depicted as utterly backward—and only those who were settled were treated in a positive way, while the nomadic Rom were described as “thievish omnivores” and “their women” as “the most lthy human insects”. The Hauskalender added that “Columbus will have found the Americans during his discovery of this continent hardly as disgustingly wild”. This is a typical example of how central European colonialism ‘by proxy’ was infused with Colonialism proper and that hierarchies in Central Europe were put into a colonial context very early on. The trajectory that connects central European and other colonialisms is whiteness. Seeing themselves as Whites or rather, applying the racial category to others but not to themselves, central Europeans were able to basically imagine themselves into any colonial narrative that was not explicitly dened in ethno-linguistic terms. In narratives, white central Europeans could travel the same ways as the powerful British and Frenchmen and use black local porters as their servants. More easily, one could always turn to the American frontier imaginary as so many central Europeans had taken part in that enterprise. Slaying ‘redskins’ thus entered the childhood imaginary of any boy in central Europe and of most girls as well—on the other hand, a certain distance was always preserved in a romantic vein of sympathy for the noble savage, most inuentially expressed in Karl May’s Winnetou novels. Consuming the narratives of colonialism has since the 18th century been a way of imagining oneself in the colonizing position, be it for instance German and Austrian readers of the Tarzan comics26 or Serbian readers of the Robinson Crusoe novel—again Obradovim was involved here as he called for a translation of the book into Serbian in 1783 to educate his fellow-countrymen. Thus, the colonialisms that have been described as Central European, also in the discursive sense, were secondary ones. That is, only in the socio-economic and political context can a cultural utterance like Obradovim’s be productively interpreted. To return to the adaptation discussion from the beginning of this paper: to describe colonialism in

26 The popular novel by Burroughs was not as successful in Central Europe as Hal Foster’s (and in the non-Communist parts Joe Kubert’s) comic strips or the Johnny Weissmueller movies.

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scholarly terms is not necessarily a post-colonial approach. To draw a picture of colonialism without retrieving oppressed if subaltern voices in the oppressing discourses might be an approach after colonialism and about colonialism, but it misses the point of post-colonial theory. Desperately Looking for the Post-colonial Intellectuals At this point I want to pose a question that seems not to have been asked in this debate yet: the question whether it is at all possible to develop a post-colonial approach in a context, where, although maybe some kind of colonialism existed, there certainly has not been a post-colonial moment. This also involves the question of how the socio-cultural ‘base’ that has borne the post-colonial project in the UK, the US, and in different terms in France, might reincarnate itself in a theoretical attempt in Central Europe inspired by that movement (and as we have seen, many such attempts do not even bother to do so). The particular point of my argument is not to proceed from the (perceived) colonial periods in the histories of empires, but from the period of their dissolution. As the disbanding of the imperial status of Austria and Germany was very different from France and Britain, the comparison has to include both the post-WWI situation and the post-fascist situation, when the rest of east, central and southeastern Europe was nally released from the hegemonic grip of the Axis powers—not incidentally simultaneously with decolonization. The post-colonial moment in Britain was both due to decolonization and migration. The post-colonial debate, also that about theory, was a formulation of actual social, political and cultural struggles of migrants in the UK and North America in/to academic discourses, resulting there in struggles for academic resources. Such a ‘post-colonial moment’ never occurred in Central European discourses. There was the breakdown of the Habsburg Empire in 1918 with the subsequent formation of several national states—but as I have already shown, this process happened not only half a century before decolonization, but it was a basically different process altogether, resulting in what had formerly been perceived as the Center becoming a relatively weak ruralized state, with the former perceived peripheries ending up on the side of the victorious Allied Forces, some of them economically much stronger than Austria. The post-WWI quarrels inside the new states were not limited to the former dependent “peoples”, but Austria in particular was torn apart by a latent civil war that nally resulted in

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the Fascist coup d’état of 1933. Austria regained a central status in an imperial project only after the Anschluss in 1938 when it joined in the German Nazi war machinery that subjugated large parts of Europe for several years. Any critical academic approach that lays claims to a spirit like the post-colonial one has to confront exactly this entire historical process. This is the very point where the problem of the missing ‘base’ for a post-colonial academic movement in central Europe is buried: for decades after WWI, central European states were ‘cleansed’ or in a process of ‘cleansing’ from the multinational remnants of the imperial days. Especially the Jews were considered the last obstacle to ethnic purity. The process was nalized by the Nazis in an industrialized mass murder thus far unimaginable.27 After WWII, states developed in central Europe that were secluded in an unprecedented way and peopled with ethnically homogenized populations, isolated even more by an “East-West” border that could literally not be crossed any more. In such a situation, where should post-colonial intellectuals come from? There were no “Others” inside these homogenized states to develop a “post-” critique (the Others of the 50s and 60s were queers, women and the young only, and it was of course from there that the regime would be challenged in the late 60s, in reverse order—in Austria, intellectuals from the Carinthian Slovenian minority added to the critical mass in the 70s). A limited critique based in cultures or societies that had been oppressed by Austrian/Habsburg ‘Colonialism’ on the communist side of the ‘Iron Curtain’ did exist, however closely entangled in the justication of the current Communist regime, and therefore partly consisting in crude equations of class struggle, colonial relations and the Cold War, in the tradition of economic nationalism. For the same reason it was not exactly a favorite topic of dissidents and other nonmajority intellectuals. As it was rooted in Marxist-Leninist theory, its

27 A point that might be comparable to a decolonization problem were the Czechs and Jews after the First World War in Austria, who were strong enough as groups to form political parties that won seats in one election to the city parliament, and thus represented a periphery within the center. It could be interesting to look at the process in which the Czechs were nearly completely assimilated in the subsequent decades with questions borrowed from postcolonial theory. Whether the Shoah of the Austrian Jews is an apt topic for such an approach seems highly dubitable.

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expiry date in this form passed in 1989.28 This is not to dismiss the academic tradition of economic and social history of the Communist era entirely—it has brought about important insights, collected for the English reader in such impressive volumes as the one by Komlos. After all, authors like Juri Krizek had in the 1960s described the Habsburg Monarchy as imperialist. On the western side of the iron curtain the mass labour migration waves of the 60s and 70s did change the socio-cultural situation dramatically—a phenomenon post-fascist Germany and Austria had in common with the de-colonizing empires. That is the only parallel between Britain and Central Europe that really holds: post-WWII migration. However, in the case of Austria and Germany, this migration worked also along the channels of the WWII Fremdarbeiter-programs and is thus a post-fascist phenomenon. This particular post-fascist kind of labor migration29 provided that only specic migrants could reach German and Austrian soil, those who t the requirements of industry and politics: the so-called Gastarbeiter (guest workers). These requirements were low to medium technical skills, bodily health and political non-activity. Thus, central European ‘post-colonial intellectuals’ were still not in sight. Instead, the protagonists of protest against Imperialism and also against the post-fascist condition and the exploitation of the Gastarbeiter have been predominantly male white non-migrant Germans or Austrians (e.g., the muck-raking German journalist Günther Wallraff ). If there is anyone who can speak from a position similar to that of post-colonial intellectuals in the ‘West’, these would be high-prole Turkish and ex-Yugoslav, Vietnamese or Portuguese, etc., scholars in Germany and Austria.30 Sadly, neither country is famous for welcoming academic stars with a migrant background. Interestingly, the

28 Cf. for Kerekes for Hungarian examples before and after 1989. This article illustrates that, as Reisenleitner noted, it would be worthwhile to revisit Marxist contributions from this realm (2002). 29 Another point yet to be proven: Colonialism knows a certain responsibility for its subjects. Fascist imperialism is only interested in exploiting hegemonized territories and populations. Post-fascist migration policy wanted to get rid of the labor migrants after they had done their replacement jobs in Germany and Austria. Postcolonial migration policy provided for settlement and granted the former colonial countries and their cultures a certain status. 30 If one takes British, French and North American postcolonial intellectuals as a point of comparison, the hypothetic Central European counterparts would of course not have a labor migrant background but a similar ethnic background as important non-elite migrant groups.

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self-representation of migrants of the 40 -year-old labor migration tradition has in fact changed in the meantime and with new migrations in the 90s and new political mobilizations against racism, there is a thriving scene of theoretically informed migrant activists who are indeed engaging in academic discourses.31 These, however, have arrived in neither the History nor the German Studies departments, nor in the publicly more visible positions of germanophone academia. Those who are currently discussing the “application of post-colonial studies” are not exactly in the academic limelight in the German-speaking world either, but still—the exclusively German cast of characters in this drama is symptomatic. The near-monopoly of scholars whose family names end in -er is obsolete and oppressive: we need more -im’s, -ova’s and -oklu’s. In the post-communist countries of Central Europe the debate was opened when the new power relations took shape in the early 1990s. Both post-colonial theory and the Marxist-Leninist colonialism theorems were now adopted, the latter void of their ideological pedigree, both in nationalist and in anti-nationalist contexts.32 Between both contexts there was space for volatile mixtures of central European ethnic nationalism and set pieces from ‘Post-colonial Studies’. Also on this side of the ‘curtain’, most intellectuals in formerly Habsburg lands (the ‘colonies’) have been for the last hundred years involved in unifying majority ethnicity discourses in their respective countries, a situation that was cemented by the Stalinist regimes. As critics of (Habsburg) ‘colonialism’ were not, say Bosnians in Slovenia, Roma in Hungary or Albanians in Serbia, the result was at times a dichotomous picture of one’s people’s oppression in the past (and in the present for some). This idea to construct a ‘postcolonial’ image of the Habsburg Monarchy as a retrospective projection of the actual situation into the past—rich German Austria ‘colonizing’ its southern and eastern neighbors—was seductive to some intellectuals of the respective majority discourses in 31 This scene has a mouth piece in the monthly Jungle World. Publications from Austria include for example Raunig ed. 32 Cf. Kerekes. For example, the issue was adopted by the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug on July 11, 2000, a year after NATO air raids on Yugoslavia, equating the Habsburg expansion to Bosnia-Hercegevina with the German fascist occupation of Yugoslavia and alleged neo-colonial goals of the USA in the Balkans. http://www.serbianunity.net/ news/tanjug/b110700_s.html#P13 On the other hand, scholarly books such as the seminal Imagining the Balkans by Maria Todorova, were informed by postcolonial theory, while also literates, such as David Albahari in Sneini povek, included intertextual links to postcolonial literature.

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ethnically homogenized nation-states on both sides of the vanished ‘Iron Curtain’—hence the static picture of a dichotomous colonial relationship between homogeneous national bodies. The more ambivalent and twisted arguments to be expected from minority perspectives were therefore not positioned in the foreground. The only moment comparable to the historical post-colonial one that is at the same time linked to former Habsburg lands was when Balkan intellectuals, after the breakdown of communism and during the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, began emigrating to other European countries and North America, entering arrangements similar to post-colonial ones. Brain drain and war refugees created a critical potential, but on a greater scale and with a higher prole in North America than in central Europe. It is telling then that the boldest statements about a post-colonial ‘paradigm shift’ did not come from this direction but again from German majority intellectuals. To sum it up, representatives of this trend are neither migrants, nor is their situation one of specic in-between-ness. The typical post-colonial academic event in Central Europe is a gathering of scholars from the majority ethnicities of several central European countries, poorly disguised by the presence of a “keynote speaker” from India in order to cater to ‘post-colonial’ appetites. Postfascist instead of Postcolonial Studies? The above is not to say that there was no critical academic movement that engaged with the historical legacies of German and Austrian Imperialisms, Hegemony, Fascism, state violence and exploitation. What has been absent is a post-colonial movement—quite logically as there was no post-colonial condition (although as we have seen, post1960s migrations might have had a larger impact on academia). The critique of systemic violence in the history of the society that paid for the university where it was formulated, focused of course on the post-Auschwitz revision of German and Austrian history as this was the most pressing legacy of the past. It was borne in the majority by non-Jewish intellectuals, but with a vanguard of persons from families with Jewish and/or other histories of persecution and victimization, pushing forward the generation of those who were trying to deal with their ‘own’ guilt/their parents’ guilt regarding the National Socialist murder system. This ‘post-fascist moment’ happened in Austria as late as the 1980s, ironically simultaneously with the rise of right-wing

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populism.33 Critical historical research into the roots and articulations of Fascism, however, had already commenced in the 1970s. From this perspective, of course, the 19th century appeared as a period when the course was set for anti-Semitic genocide in the “age of extremes” (Hobsbawm). Any post-colonial approach to central European histories and cultures has to ask itself whether it wants to abandon such critical thinking and transcend guilt via comparisons of colonial imageries to reach a status among colonial and victorious powers,34 or whether it still wants to face the historical fact of the Holocaust, to face the “homegrown Central European specters”, instead of articially importing some from Anglo-American discourses. Any attempt at adopting post-colonial debates to central European discourses must take such considerations of historical adequacy and of socio-cultural and political context into consideration as a minimum condition. Migrants and migrations are central in any such approach.

A Street Level History of Diversity35 Images of Austrian history, more specically images of Viennese history, if they include migrants and migration in their narratives at all, usually portray an unproblematic relationship. If conicts are described, the protagonists are elite members, speaking for their compatriots who remain in the shadow of historiography. This is because history is being written for members of the dominant groups in Austrian society today. How can history be ‘democratized’ by re-writing history for non-dominant migrants today without buying into the tradition of 33 The Waldheim-affair of 1986 and the Gedenkjahr (memorial year) 1988 marked a period of public debate about the fascist past of unprecedented openness, creating a productive climate for academic research. The affair also necessitated the rst Austrian Historikerkommission to investigate into the involvement of the Austrian president in the Nazi killing machine (and more or less rehabilitating him). In Western Germany Vergangenheitsbewältigung had commenced more than ten years before. 34 In his latest publication, Ruthner explicitly compares the number of Austrian soldiers deployed in the Bosnian expedition with the US contingent in the Iraq war (2006, 260). One might wonder why he does not take for instance the Nazi Wehrmacht force-level during the occupation of Norway as a foil of comparison, or the quantity of the Russian contingent in the Chechen wars. 35 This part of my paper is based on a presentation given at the international conference “Räume und Grenzen in der Österreichisch-Ungarischen Monarchie 1867 bis 1914” at Collegium Hungaricum, Vienna, January 19th–21st 2006, to be published as Fischer 2007.

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unproblematic or exclusionary history oriented towards elite power aspirations? The majority of present-day migrants in Vienna are from the former Yugoslavia (mostly from the Serbian Republic, but there is a considerable number of Albanians, Muslims and Croats). Historical migration from the same regions, however, was only a small part of migration to Vienna and it was radically different in terms of social composition and of predominant ‘sending’ regions. There are two ways for migrants to become visible in hegemonic centralized discourses: by consciously drawing attention to oneself or as objects of elite discourses, either in the text production of administration or public communication. Only a small minority managed to voice their views in the rst way; the majority has left traces in the texture of the city as monitored subjects only. The second option of becoming visible again privileges elite migrants or to put it the other way round, marginalized and oppressed migrants leave their mark/trace on the records only when they come into conict with the law. This second way of leaving traces is however the only one that allows us to make non-elite migrants visible. I decided to use the second kind of trace as research material most intensively because of the heuristic framework of my research on migrants from the southeastern regions of the Habsburg Monarchy to Vienna around 1900. This framework could be described as a striving for democratizing history. Historians need sources, i.e. we are dependent on historical transmission. But as elites everywhere are the ones who are in control of historical transmission (a task the historical guild was created for in the 19th century), the historiography of non-dominant groups and non-elites had, as is generally known, to switch to other sources. ‘History from below’ (Geschichte von unten), the most famous of these historiographic movements, has been around since the late 60s, and has also taken rm root in Vienna.36 The sources such “everyday” historiography uses classically are documents of the machinery that controls and administers the lower classes, like police les and those of social authorities. However, the problem of sources is twofold, particularly in Viennese history: rst, many important sources have been destroyed. The Ministry of Justice in Vienna, including the archives, was

36 This movement is also known or overlapping with Alltagsgeschichte (History of the Every-day). Cf. Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt, Lüdtke and Heer & Ullrich. For Viennese examples see Ehalt.

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torched during a workers’ demonstration in 1927 on one hand, and the Socialist archives were conscated by the Austrofascists after the coup d’état in 1933 on the other. Class struggle in Austria has destroyed its own history so to say, or rather it has destroyed its sources. Second, to add to this, in contrast to Paris and London there is no tradition of describing the lower classes that would be comparable. Although Vienna was internationally known around 1900 as a slum city (Pieri), this image is not reected in dominant and central texts and therefore is not part of our dominant projection of memory into the past. Authors like Hugo von Hoffmannsthal could only guess about miserable and proletarian Vienna, outside the temple of art (Schorske, 14f.), and it consequently wanders around like a ghost among the monuments of the n de siècle. In many cases it is the prostitute’s chamber where the protagonists of literature meet the “other” (Musner/Maderthaner) Vienna, a typical intermingling of the notions of gender, class and mass culture so aptly described as part of the ‘great divide’ by Andreas Huyssen (47–61). That is the reason why my approach to migrants in Vienna around 1900 is reminiscent of an archeological investigation rather than of a socio-historical study: it is not the vase that I will retrieve, but its imprint in the cesspool of history, or merely of the vase’s shards’ in most of the cases. And, after all, life is much more complex than ceramic vessels. Hence the two modes in which non-hegemonic migrants transmit knowledge about them or their past, knowingly or not—my only chance to tell this story—is precarious: the imprints are weak ones, so to say and deliberate ‘legacies’ are scarce. An additional question concerns the inuence of transmission modes on the kind of knowledge that is produced by the mode of source production:37 virtually all sources were produced from a hegemonic perspective; therefore, there is in many cases only the merest hint of migrants’ personal agency in the sources. Therefore, any strategy designed to increase visibility must rely mainly on sources of the second kind, non-self-determined hegemonic sources, which unfortunately, as was mentioned already, have been largely destroyed. My research method is, as it is informed by the theories discussed in the rst part of my paper, to (at least partially) deconstruct the over-

37 The circumstances under which a source was produced are of crucial importance. This is illustrated ex via negativa by Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie, who in his “microhistory” of Montaillou failed to take into account the difference between sources that were produced under the threat of torture and, for instance, correspondence between local nobles.

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powering hegemonic discourses of memory by making the oppressed, if subaltern, visible in the discourses of the centre themselves, not by renarrating the hegemonic perspectives of the elites but by reconstructing the positions migrants took on at specic moments of time in specic places. To stick to the archeology metaphor, I am brushing the residues of hegemonic historical tradition from the fragments of migrants’ presences. This is conscious ‘memory politics’, a kind of deconstructivist identity politics. I am making my cognitive interest so explicit in order not to tumble into the pitfalls of the historiography I am criticizing myself, because as a historian I belong to a guild, whose profession it is to produce memory, to create knowledge about the past. What’s New? Localization and Visibility! The research surplus of my enterprise is not new insights into the social history of migration (or the other sub-elds I am touching on). The surplus mainly consists in a localization and denomination of the already known—I do not present new insight for instance into the housing conditions in Vienna around 1900, but I do offer fresh knowledge about who was living when, where and under which conditions: this is also a conscious strategy of memory politics. Arguing for a democratization of history by making visible the marginalized in hegemonic discourses, instead of novelty or astonishing results, instead of the “research breakthrough”, a value becomes the guiding idea of research: justice. I will pick some of the main foci of this history for presentation in this paper: the uniqueness of historical individuals, the experience of history in actual places, the role of networks in integrating migrants and the importance of cultural history. When the goal is to make migrants visible, especially marginalized ones, this means we must gure out their corporeal presence at actual places, or in other words, localize them. People move, places do not. This is what makes the latter so attractive for the identity politics of people who are in motion (but also for the “settled” who are trying to dene their own spaces as immobile).38 Such corporeal presence is best documented in highly disciplining spaces as in the case of cadet Marius Margetich,

38 The strategy of making visible has been a hallmark of the Lesbian and Gay movement. See the catalogue of a recent exhibition on Gays and Lesbians in 20th century Vienna (Brunner et al.).

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who was discharged from the Infantry Cadet School because he was found guilty of having used the skittle alley in the infantry barracks as a place for sex with “a female” (eine Weibsperson). What limiting spatial organization means also comes to light when we have a closer look inside a Viennese Zinshaus (tenement), such as the one in Adamsgasse 9, where around 1897 the seamstress Anna Maria Rosenberg (1877), from Pola in Istria, lived together with her brothers, Franz Carl, a bookbinder’s aid (1875) and the retail-trainee Rudolf Wilhelm (1879) in the same apartment.39 In the context of contemporary Viennese housing conditions, which were extremely tense at the time, this occupancy was relatively generous, as three persons per unit was 1.98 persons under average ( John, 6)—only that they were brothers and sisters, and thus private space must have been more restricted than in a situation of marital cohabitation. Places are equally important in my next main focus, which is integration in the widest sense, including the St. Sava church. In this temple people of the Eastern Orthodox confession could have their sacraments certied. This was crucial because such clerical records were the basic legal documents about one’s civil status, equivalent to present-day birth and marriage certicates (religious communities retained ‘civil’ registry functions in imperial Austria and later, until the Anschluss). The St. Sava church was used mainly by Serbs and Ruthenian orthodox Bukovinians, two communities that seem to have been in a symbiotic yet separate situation on several grounds (Austrian religious jurisdiction, a common Slavic linguistic link, and traditional contacts in the Bukovina region). What does a place like this mean for a community, for individuals and for their networks? Turning from the agency of individuals to that of groups of persons, I am trying to be especially cautious. It is always dicey to insinuate the intentions and interests of groups of people and it is especially questionable in this particular case, given the character of the sources. What they allow us to retrace are relations between people rather than individual biographies. Such relations might be of a familial or professional nature or due to membership in a society. The quality of such networks—which is the key notion here—is, however, hardly ever describable. In the case of networks that are voluntary in a manner of speaking, such as societies, unions etc., at least some sort of intention to 39 Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv, Konskriptionsamt, Sign. 41770, B37/1, III. Bezirk Heimatscheinprotokolle 1892–99, S. 8, 22.4.1897, Prot. Nr. 181–83.

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integrate can be assumed.40 It should be kept in mind, however, that such integration may also be ambivalent or contradictory. This was the case for instance with nationalist societies that pursued the integration of members among their own ranks as an integration into a larger exclusive ethno-national project, but simultaneously practiced integration into the multinational overarching state, the Monarchy—even if this was a mere strategic decision, it made a difference for the lives of society members. When the life worlds of individual agents are included in the depiction, it grows even more contradictory as in the example of Jovan Skerlim (1877–1914), member of both nationalist and social-democrat circles, a literary critic and historian who simultaneously pursued several editorial projects designed to ‘raise’ Serbian national awareness and who had a “transnational” marriage in Vienna.41 Once more it turns out that contradictions and ambivalences should be the main focus of academic research rather than dispelling or “clarifying” them. If we take another example, the Czech Orthodox Society, we can retrace how a network of Bohemian craftsmen developed, designed primarily to take on a religious identity which was (and is) highly unusual among Czechs. Again, we can only speculate about their motives. What is certain is that members of this network were connected through god-parenthood between masters and apprentices and that on the basis of their (new) confession members also had interesting connections to other orthodox persons via the St. Sava church.42 Another focus of my work is to understand the individual persons who are present in the archival material as personalities, in accordance with the strategic decisions laid out above, regardless of whether they were celebrities or ‘ordinary’ people. This approach includes making an individual’s agency a central category of the interpretation of archival sources and in the historical depiction, while always reecting whether those ranges were as limited as we would have supposed before studying the sources, or vice versa whether the scopes were as large as we had

40 It should be noted here, that the notion of ‘community’ should be equally problematized as that of ‘integration’. Cf. Vogl. 41 Such Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen is a contradiction only in evolutionist ideology; beyond such powerful narratives simultaneity of purported subsequent ‘epochs’ goes without saying. 42 Several members of this community left their traces in the already cited MatrikenZweitschriften.

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thought. These agencies are not primarily about political inuence or inuence on media discourses. Although I am using the term also in this sense, I am primarily concerned with the chances and limits of exercizing control and direction over one’s own life. This also means that we cannot forget the singularity of each acting person, just as every historical moment we are considering is, as Foucault reminds us, always unique. In civil status documents I have encountered impressive examples—of course fragmented—of lived lives: On August 12, 1895 the 28-year-old Maria Stella Philomena Redthammer from Nürnberg, Catholic, illegitimate child of the ballet dancer Antonia, was accepted, at her own request and demand, considering the fact that she has declared on oath to have taken on the Orthodox faith from her marriage with Peter Schwarz in Soa in Bulgaria [whom she had divorced in the meantime], for which however no written document exists . . . sub conditione seu reservatione in the bosom of the Orthodox Greek-Oriental church.43

On this occasion, a conrmation, Maria, who was a “singer at the établissement Ronacher” had the orthodox priest Eugen Kozak conrm her status as daughter of the likewise unmarried artist Gregor Zscholli. We know about another family, the Böhms, that the parents, Jacob and Maria Böhm, born Pachner, who were both of the Israelite denomination, had their daughter baptized according to the Eastern Orthodox rite in the same church as Maria Redthammer. She received the carefully mixed name Rosalie Milica. The reasons for this ‘intergenerational conversion’ are unknown—we can surmise, whether it was for example about opportunity/-ism regarding “society” or about a private compromise between the parents and/or maybe their families. All we know about Jacob Böhm is that he was a “tradesman from Divišan in Bohemia”.44 What I can safely claim on the basis of the archival material is thus that also in the past, also before World War I, individuals were not necessarily contained by the boundaries of hegemonic discourses. They were or were not contained by such boundaries not only by

43 Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv, Matriken-Zweitschriften Kirche zum Hlg. Sava, Geburtsmatriken 12.8.1895. 44 Op. cit. 15.2.1896.

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means of mixed marriage or by public declaration of their illegitimate birth status, but in many more constellations, among others, as the latter example demonstrates, in marriages, where the children were of another denomination both from that of their parents and from that of the dominant culture—which pressure did they give in to? Or was it their choice? My research on the history of southeastern migrants does not ‘merely’ cater to social history. The role of the symbolic sphere is much too important for me to omit claiming that my research is cultural history. To give an example, migration history usually describes the spatial movements of living human beings. From a cultural historical standpoint and even more from the standpoint of anthropological history (as historical anthropology should rather be labeled, as Habermas and Minkmar argue), the migrations of the dead are also of interest. For a cultural anthropologist it should go without saying that the way in which the living treat the dead tells a great deal about the culture of the living. Therefore I am also reecting on migrants’ itineraries after their death and on the surrounding circumstances. Apparently, the dead remained, in contrast to current practice, where they had died. The majority of those who died in Vienna were buried at the Zentralfriedhof. Some, however, were interred at other places. For instance, the copper-smith Efrem Neschitz from Likodra in Serbia, who died December 15, 1893 of an anal tumor, was transferred from Vienna to Belgrade on December 12.45 The mobility of the dead, thanks to the railway system, changed dramtically at the end of the 19th century. Even earlier (since the 18th century), strict sanitation rules had been in force, regulating how the dead were to be transported. The reorganization was swift, as it was the law. Thus, for instance, on July 19, 1876 a telegram announced the passage of the remains of duchess Marie Obrenovitch from Würzburg, in the German Reich, via the border checkpoint Passau, through Austria to Ia‘i, in Romania, on the following day.46 We do not know whether the development of the means of transport increased the mobility of the dead. There are reasonable doubts

45 Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv, Matriken-Zweitschriften Kirche zum Hlg. Sava, Sterbematriken, Prot. Nr. 3, 17.11.1901. 46 Telegram 19.7.1876, Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, AVA, MdI/AR, 36/8 Leichentransporte 1870 –1899, Kart. 1155, Fasz. 607 N-R.

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whether it did for the living. The examples illustrate that the transfer was a privilege limited to better-off migrants, a class-specic phenomenon. Also more intense social symbolism and attention to such transfers were reserved to the elites: the prominent Serbian scholar Vuk Karadhim, who spent most of his life in Vienna, was exhumed in 1897 on the initiative of nationalist intellectuals at St. Marx cemetery and transferred to Belgrade. The police expected “ ‘demonstrations of a political nature’ ” along the route of the train with the “earthly remains of the venerable Serbian writer” on October 12, 1897—which, however, did not take place.47 At the exhumation ceremony at St. Marx cemetery in Vienna no less a dignitary than mayor Dr. Karl Lueger held a speech and emphasized how proud the City of Vienna was to have sheltered such a grand scholar and how happy the city was that he was now allowed to return home.48 Nationalizing the dead appeared to be attractive from the blood & soil perspective of German as well as Serbian nationalists.49 What Lueger did not mention, by the way, is that Vuk’s wife Wilhelmine, a German in Lueger’s logic, had already been transferred to ‘Serbian soil’ three years earlier. All the worse for Lueger, another intermingling of ethnic bodies with ‘alien’ earth had already taken place. Possibly it was actually her reburial that had set Karadhim’s body in motion. Such street level history is time-consuming. At the moment, this historian is still walking in the city and knocking on doors, reading the nameplates.

Works Cited Archival Sources Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv, Matriken-Zweitschriften der Kirche des Hl. Sava. Signature Pi 31349. Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv, Konskriptionsamt, Sign. 41770, B37/1, III. Bezirk Heimatscheinprotokolle 1892–99. Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, AVA, MdI/AR, 36/8 Leichentransporte 1870 –1899, Kart. 1155.

47 Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, AVA, MdI/AR, 36/8 Leichentransporte 1870 –1899, Kart. 1155 A–Z, Prot. Nr. 24273–’97, 31.7.1897. 48 See also Sandim. 49 On Lueger’s antisemitism and nationalist chauvinism cf. Boyer, Price and Schorske and the recent Austrian theses Moser and Zisser. Lueger/Geehrer offer original sources.

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Literature “[Rezension von ‘Zchiwotj i Prikljutscheniga’ und ‘Sowjeti’].” Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung [Supplemente] 1.12 (1785): 55f. Berend, Iván T., and György Ránki. “Economic factors in nationalism: A case study of Hungary at the turn of the twentieth century.” Underdevelopment and economic growth. Studies in Hungarian social and economic history. Eds. Iván Berend and György Ránki. Budapest: Akad. Kiadó, 1979. 80 –96. Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt, ed. Alltagskultur, Subjektivität und Geschichte. Zur Theorie und Praxis von Alltagsgeschichte. Münster, 1994. Boyer, John W. “Karl Lueger and the Viennese Jews.” Yearbook. The Leo Baeck Institute 26 (1981): 125–44. Brunner, Andreas, et al., eds. Geheimsache: Leben. Schwule und Lesben im Wien des 20. Jahrhunderts. Katalog der Ausstellung Wien, Neustifthalle 26.10.2005–8.1.2006. Wien: Löcker, 2005. Dyserink, Hugo, and Karl Ulrich Syndram, eds. Europa und das nationale Selbstverständnis. Imagologische Probleme in der Literatur, Kunst und Kultur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts. Bonn: Bouvier, 1988. Ehalt, Hubert Christian. Geschichte von unten. Methoden und Projekte einer Geschichte des Alltags. Kulturstudien 1. Wien: Böhlau, 1984. Fanon, Frantz. The wretched of the earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. Repr. ed. Harmondsworth u.a.: Penguin Books, 1970. Feichtinger, Johannes, Ursula Prutsch, and Moritz Csáky, eds. Habsburg postcolonial. Machtstrukturen und kollektives Gedächtnis. Innsbruck e.a., 2003. Feichtinger, Johannes. “Die Habsburgermonarchie. Ein Ort der inneren Kolonisierung?” Newsletter Moderne 6.1 (2003): 29f. Fischer, Wladimir, et al. “Sprache als Handlung und Träger sozialer Identität.” Symposien 1996: Ästhetik und Ideologie, Aneignung und Sinngebung, Abgrenzung und Ausblick. Dokumentation Grenzenloses Österreich 5. Wien: Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft und Verkehr, 1997. 191–202. Fischer, Wladimir. “Von Einschusslöchern und Gesäßabdrücken. Wie MigrantInnen Spuren im hegemonialen Diskurs hinterließen.” Räume und Grenzen in der Österreichisch-Ungarischen Monarchie 1867–1914. Eds. Wladimir Fischer, et al. Kultur, Herrschaft, Differenz 11. Tübingen; Basel: Francke, 2007. Foucault, Michel. The archeology of knowledge. London, 1972. Gemeinnütziger Hauskalender für das österreichische Kaiserthum, vorzüglich für Freunde des Vaterlandes, oder Geschäfts= Unterhaltungs= und Lesebuch. Wien: Strauß, 1821, 81–83 Gikandi, Simon. Maps of Englishness: writing identity in the culture of colonialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Habermas, Rebekka, and Nils Minkmar. “Einleitung.” Das Schwein des Häuptlings. Sechs Aufsätze zur historischen Anthropologie. Eds. Rebekka Habermas and Peter Burke. Berlin: Wagenbach, 1992. 7–20. Hárs, Endre, et al., eds. Zentren, Peripherien und kollektive Identitäten in Österreich-Ungarn. Tübingen; Basel: Francke, 2006. Heer, Hannes, and Volker Ullrich. Geschichte entdecken. Erfahrungen und Projekte der neuen Geschichtsbewegung. Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1985. Hobsbawm, Eric J. Age of extremes. The short twentieth century 1914–1991. 9 ed. London: Joseph, 1995. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986. John, Michael. Hausherrenmacht und Mieterelend. Wohnverhältnisse und Wohnerfahrung der Unterschichten in Wien 1890 –1923. Österreichische Texte zur Gesellschaftskritik 14. Wien: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1982. Kerekes, Amália. “Kolonialismusdebatte in Ungarn und Fredric Jamesons Theorie über die nationalen Allegorien der Dritten Welt”. Kakanien Revisited (2002).

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Available: http://www.kakanien.ac.at/beitr/theorie/AKerekes1.pdf. Last accessed: April 6, 2006. Komlos, John. Economic development in the Habsburg monarchy in the nineteenth century. Essays. East European monographs 128. Boulder: Columbia University Press, 1983. Kopitar, Jernej. “Serbische Literatur. I. Sjeni Dositeja Obradovima und Oda mojemu prijatelju Mahailu Vitkovimu.” Wiener Allgemeine Literaturzeitung (1813): 784. Krizek, Juri. Die wirtschaftlichen Züge des österreichisch-ungarischen Imperialismus in der Vorkriegszeit 1900 –1914. Prag, 1963. Lüdtke, Alf, ed. Alltagsgeschichte. Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen. Frankfurt/M.; New York: Campus, 1989. Lueger, Karl, ed. by Richard S. Geehr. “I decide who is a Jew!” the papers of Dr. Karl Lueger. Washington, D.C.: Univ. Press of America, 1982. ——. “Govor na groblju Sv. Marka.” Spomenica o prenosu praha Vuka Stef. Karadiina iz Bepa u Beograd 1897. Ed. Andra Gavrilovim. Srpska kraljevska akademija. Posebna izdanja 9. Beograd: U štampariji kraljevine Srbije, 1898. 38f. Maderthaner, Wolfgang, and Lutz Musner. Die Anarchie der Vorstadt. Das andere Wien um 1900. Frankfurt/M.: Campus Verlag, 1999. Malcolm, Noel. Bosnia. A Short History. London: Macmillan, 1994. Moser, Friedrich. “Populismus bei Karl Lueger.” Univ. Dipl.-Arb. Paris-Lodron Universität Salzburg, 1997. Pieri, Michael. “Shining light in poverty’s bleak corner; Star’s publisher laid open the slums of Toronto. Then, as now, children were the main victims.” Toronto Star Oct 29, 2005: A.27 Price, Jamie Bryan. The creation of a worldview. The inuences of a n-de-siecle Vienna and Karl Lueger on Adolf Hitler. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2003. Ránki, György. “On the Economic Development of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.” Economic development in the Habsburg monarchy in the nineteenth century. Essays. Ed. John Komlos. East European Monographs 128. Boulder: Columbia University Press, 1983. Raunig, Gerald. Transversal. Kunst und Globalisierungskritik. Republicart 1. Wien: Turia + Kant, 2003. Reisenleitner, Markus. “Central European Culture in Search of a Theory, or: the Lure of ‘Post/colonial Studies’.” Spaces of Identity 2.2, (2002). ——. “Slashing postcolonial studies, or: why this debate still bothers me. A response to Clemens Ruthner’s “K.u.K. ‘Kolonialismus’ als Befund, Bendlichkeit und Metapher” (K & K ‘Colonialism’ as report, structure of feeling and metaphor)”. Spaces of Identity 3.2 (2003). Last accessed. “[ Rezension von ‘Zchiwotj i Prikljutscheniga’ und ‘Sowjeti’ ].” Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung [Supplemente] 1.12 (1785): 55f. Ruthner, Clemens. “K.u.k. (post-) colonial? Prolegomena zu einer neuen Sichtweise Österreich-Ungarns in den Kulturwissenschaften.” Kakanien revisited. Das Fremde und das Eigene (in) der österreichisch-ungarischen Monarchie. Eds. Wolfgang Müller-Funk, Peter Plener and Clemens Ruthner. Tübingen: Francke, 2002. 93–103. Republished in http://www.kakanien.ac.at/beitr/theorie/CRuth-ner1.pdf, 2005. Sandim, Aleksandar. “Dve zvezde sjajne—dva groba svetla.” Spomenica o prenosu praha Vuka Stef. Karadiina iz Bepa u Beograd 1897. Ed. Andra Gavrilovim. Srpska kraljevska akademija. Posebna izdanja 9. Beograd: U štampariji kraljevine Srbije, 1898. 282–85. Schimert, Peter George. “The Hungarian Nobility in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Northern, Central and Eastern Europe. Ed. Hamish M. Scott. London; New York, 1995. 144–82. Schorske, Carl E. Fin-de-siècle Vienna. Politics and culture. New York: Vintage Books, 1981. Sensenig, Eugene. Reichsfremde, Staatsfremde und Drittausländer. Immigration und Einwanderungspolitik in Österreich: Ludwig-Boltzmann-Institut für Gesellschafts- und Kulturgeschichte, Salzburg, 1998.

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Simonek, Stefan. “Mit Clemens Ruthner unterwegs im Wilden Osten, eine Replik. newsletter Moderne. 4.2, 2001, 30 –1. Republished http://www.kakanien.ac.at/ rez/SSimonek1.pdf) Smidt, Wolbert G.C. Afrika im Schatten der Aufklärung. Das Afrikabild bei Immanuel Kant und Johann Gottfried Herder. Kritische Humanforschung; Bd. 3: Interdisziplinäre Studien. Bonn: Holos-Verlag, 1999. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Outside in The Teaching Machine. New York; London, 1993. The Life and Adventures of Dimitrije Obradovin. Ed. George Rapall Noyes. Vol. 39. University of California Publications in Modern Philology. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953. Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. New York; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Uhl, Heidemarie. “Zwischen ‘habsburgischem Mythos’ und (Post-) Kolonialismus. Zentraleuropa als Paradigma für Identitätskonstruktionen in der (Post-)Moderne.” Newsletter Moderne 5.1 (2002): 2–5. Van Horn Melton, James. “The Nobility in the Bohemian and Austrian Lands, 1620 – 1780.” The European Nobilities in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Vol. 2: Northern, Central and Eastern Europe. Ed. H.M. Scott. London; New York: Longman, 1995. 110 –43. Vogl, Joseph. Gemeinschaften. Positionen zu einer Philosophie des Politischen. Edition Suhrkamp N.F. 881. 1 ed. Frankfurt/M. Zisser, Bernd. “Dr. Karl Lueger—ein früher österreichischer Populist.” Univ.-Dipl. Arb. Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, 2004.

CHAPTER FIVE

ROBINSON CRUSOES, PROSTITUTES, HEROES? CONSTRUCTING THE ‘UKRAINIAN LABOUR EMIGRANT’ IN UKRAINE Natalia Khanenko Friesen University of Saskatchewan

“Every year, seven million Ukrainians leave Ukraine in search of work abroad.” Such was the ofcial resolution adopted by the 14th All Ukrainian Congress of Narodnyi Rukh (People’s Movement) in March 2004 as signed by its Head, now the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Borys Tarasiuk.1 Though not necessarily a careful representation of the real scope of current mass labour migration from Ukraine, by 2004 this statistic has been routinely recycled in politicians’ speeches, newspaper articles, and peoples’ conversations. Should we read these gures as suggesting that the Ukrainian labour force (those between sixteen and sixty years old) of approximately 21.29 million people2 (out of fortyseven million inhabitants) will entirely disappear within three years if the trend continues? Of course, this stark assertion on the state of labour migration from Ukraine has been contested by others. Specialists—academics and policy makers—speak of two to seven million Ukrainian nationals working legally or illegally abroad in any given year. The realists (mostly among the academics and policy analysts) tend to settle on two or three million (Malynovska 2004a, 2004b; Sushko n.d.), while pessimists opt for more dramatic claims. Though the original surge in Ukrainians’ departures abroad is an outcome of the collapse of socialism, a massive exodus of Ukrainians in search of labour began in the mid 1990s. Labour migrants’ destinations ranged from close neighbours to distant states, from former 1 “On economic policy of a current government and its outcomes—poverty, unemployment and destitution of the Ukrainian nation.” March 24, 2004. http://www.nru. org.ua/about/documents/?id=33 2 http://www.gesource.ac.uk/worldguide/html/1051_economic.html

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socialist countries to countries of the European Union, Middle East, North America and beyond. Today, the most conservative estimates point to one million Ukrainian nationals working in Russia, up to three hundred thousand in Poland, two hundred thousand in Italy and Czech Republic, a hundred and fteen thousand in Portugal, one hundred thousand in Spain, thirty-ve thousand in Turkey, and twenty thousand in the USA (Malynovska 2004a:14). In Ukraine, public debate on the ongoing mass labour out-migration, its meanings and outcomes began to emerge roughly in 2001–02.3 By 2004, the National Parliamentary Library of Ukraine listed at least 109 Ukrainian and Russian language academic and governmental publications, monographs, sociological survey reports, and analyses of legislative aspects of this phenomenon.4 On the internet, trying case variations of the word zarobitchan/y/stvo, produces, in the order listed, about 4,990 + 3,350 + 320 references, with trudova/oi mihratsiia/ii and trudovi mihranty (labour migration and labour migrants) combinations adding another 1,210 + 774 + 1,390 hits to the picture. Much has been written on different gender-related experiences of human trafcking and deteriorating institutions of marriage and parenthood which fail to withstand the pressures of separation and long-distance communication. New publications are regularly added to the existing bibliographies.5 The list is not exhaustive since this discussion on labour migration, like the phenomenon itself, is still gaining momentum. Undeniably, within the last four to ve years the phenomenon of labour migration has been given much attention in Ukraine. Yet the multi-layered and dynamic discourse generated by this attention and the dramatic impact which this discourse is having on Ukrainian society, the state, politics, and self-identity remain largely unexamined. Indeed, it is not just the phenomenon itself that affects society. The way this phenomenon is discussed and represented in numerous public narra-

3 See also the materials on the round table “The economic migration from Ukraine: the reasons and outcomes,” organized by the Institute for the Study of Diaspora (Kyiv, April 2003) summarized the original debate on the issue (Instytut Doslidzhen’ Diaspory 2003). Also, see Shul’ha (2001). 4 Among them are those by Malynovska including 2004a and 2004b, Prybytkova (2002, 2003), Hnybidenko (2001). 5 For the discussion on labour migration and family relations see Ternopil NonGovernmental Youth Organization Share Warmth (2003), Ternopil Regional Centre for the Employment (2002).

constructing the ‘ukrainian labour emigrant’ in ukraine 105 tives has an important impact on Ukrainians as well. Labour migration discourse, with its own discursive principles, techniques and themes, reorganizes Ukrainians’ understandings of their country, their awareness of the world order and their perceptions of Ukraine’s position within various social and political hierarchies. This discourse also constructs an unique imagery of the zarobitchan-yn/ka, a national agent that is nowhere to be seen in Ukraine. The intensity and continuity of this debate points to an important current in the ongoing revisions of Ukraine’s own historical narrative—a narrative in which accounting for the post-socialist transformations of Ukrainian society is inevitable. Journalists and popular historians are already placing zarobitchanstvo in the chronology of historical misfortunes of Ukraine as yet another genocide, or ethnocide of the people of Ukraine.6 We also hear politicians echoing this vision. For example, as early as 1994, Narodnyi Rukh listed “migration policy, aimed at a continuous diminishment of absolute and relative numbers of Ukrainians in the population of Ukraine,” along with forced collectivization, articial famine, deportations of Crimean Tatars and the Chernobyl tragedy, as the main crimes of the Soviet regime against the Ukrainian nation.7 In this paper, I would like to revisit this ourishing discourse which by now has grown into a unique sociocultural and political phenomenon of its own. Instead of outlining what and when various analysts, both from the academic and policy making circles, contributed to this new meta-theme of the Ukrainian national narrative (this has yet to be attempted as well), I would like to concentrate on how and to what purpose various kinds of labour migration discourse in Ukraine ‘handle’ and appropriate the gure of the labour migrant. The gure of zarobitchan-yn/ka today appears to be manipulated by a variety of cultural, political, and commercial powers within Ukrainian society and beyond, each for their own political and commercial goals. Each of these discourses, now readily available to the general public, continually projects on the public its own interpretations of

6 “Ukraina bez Ukraintsiv: tolerantnyj henotsyd abo politkoretknyj etnotsyd.” Narodnyi Ohliadach. 24.05.2004. 7 “Z prohramy narodnoho rukhu Ukrainy: Natsional’ni vidnosyny v Ukraini v 20 st. (From the Program of the People’s Movement: National Relations in Ukraine in the 20th century).” Collection of Documents and Materials. Kyiv: 1994, 513:514. Cited in Malynovska (2004a: 18).

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zarobitchan-yn/ka.8 As a result, within the last three to four years, the gure of the zarobitchan-yn/ka has been transformed with the help of this debate into one of the most ambivalent protagonists of the contemporary Ukrainian historical narrative. How did this discourse develop? The vernacular, and regionally contained, discourse on labour migration has been part of a local scene in Western Ukraine since the mass economic exodus of the rural population from Western Ukrainian lands to South and North America in the later 19th century. Rohatynskyj (1972) and idem (2003) has discussed, each in a different context, the long term continuity of zarobitchanstvo tradition in local economies of many western Ukrainian communities. Zarobitchanstvo supported communities, constructed specic zarobitchanstvo lifestyles, and fed local imaginations of the world outside of these communities. This phenomenon was somewhat transformed under Soviet rule. Long-term migration gave room to seasonal labour. In the1980s, when the Soviets loosened up the rules for emigration based on family reunion, another round of departures abroad of kinfolk and neighbours began in these regions. Zarobitchanstvo discourse revived. Family stories about divided kinship, the problems and dilemmas facing new international migrants and the pros and cons of working abroad grew up within communities and family networks throughout the Western Ukrainian regions (Shostak 2003). The growing number of these family stories in the early 1990s contributed to the birth of a new kind of folklore, with its distinct narratives of the labour migrant—an absentee household member, a father or a mother—who ventured into far lands in search of cash for their households, families, and the children they had left behind. This new lore is recreated at the intersection of both traditional and modern imaginations of the world, as well as in traditional and modern discursive practices applied to the locals’ discussions of these experiences of separation, labour migration, and local integration into the global economy. My own ethnographic research in the long-distance family networks and long-term separation of kin as practiced in rural Western Ukraine conrms the existence of a unique body of local lore which deals with the matters of kin absence and presence, families’ split

8 This discourse also offers different perspectives on gendered experiences of labour migration. For the purposes of this paper (and due to the lack of space) I will not be addressing these differences here.

constructing the ‘ukrainian labour emigrant’ in ukraine 107 between ‘here’ and ‘there,’ and absentee kinfolks’ nancial contribution to local economies (Shostak 2002). By the late 1990s, these original circuits of personal stories expanded as out-migration reached unusually large proportions. Local media picked up the matter. Stories on laboring abroad began appearing in Ternopil, Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and Chernivtsi media, often in the form of personal correspondence sent by the migrants and the returnees’ personal reections. For example, between 1995 and mid-2003 (the time when I researched this question), Ekspress, Postup and Lvivs’ka Hazeta, all reputable Lviv-based newspapers, published various personal recollections, diaries, family correspondence, and other impressionistic reections on the meanings and experiences of migrants abroad. More analytical publications came later, roughly after 2000. Such extended media attention endowed the experiences of illegal migration, originally seen as clandestine, with a profound sense of legitimacy. Since then vernacular and media narratives of labour migration began to be augmented by growing academic, and subsequently political discussions on its scope, dynamics, meanings and outcomes for Ukraine, its economy, politics, demography, and culture. The debate reached both central and eastern Ukraine, resulting in conferences, seminars, policy recommendations, as well as parliamentary and governmental resolutions.9 How and with what purpose did these various kinds of discourses concerning labour migration in Ukraine ‘handle’ the gure of a labour migrant her/himself ? Whether she or he is seen as a benecial investor in or as a betrayer of the nation, as an active agent of her own fate or as a (fallen) victim to global trafcking and the cause of Ukraine’s economic deterioration, or even as a prostitute who has to be erased from the nation’s memory, depends on who is doing the talking, and when and where this talk is taking place. On one hand, we observe the construction of the positive image of an active economic subject of her homeland, and thus, a welcome member in the Ukrainian nation, albeit literally absent from its terrain. Such imagery was rst promoted in western Ukrainian regional media and later in central Ukrainian outlets. Regional investigators in western Ukraine spoke of the monetary value of the zarobitchan-yn/ka’s

9 For example, the IATR Centre in Sumy in 2002 held an academic methodological seminar entitled “Labour Migration in Ukraine: methods of research and the use of contemporary informational technologies, led by Iryna Prybytkova.

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absence, pronouncing labour migrants to be the largest investors in the regional and later in the national economies. In 2004, the Director of Ternopil Oblast Employment Ofce reported to the regional Press Reform Club that labour migrants from Ternopil oblast annually send home 100 million USD (2002).10 Chernivtsi and Uzhhorod-based research echoes the same statistics for their regions as well. In Bukovyna, the regional banks reported a surplus of 3 million USD in 2002, since they bought 9 million USD from the population and sold only 6 million USD back.11 The national statistics also point to the large-scale currency injections that Ukraine receives annually from its ‘sons and daughters in absentia’ working sometimes legally but mostly illegally abroad. The labour migrants, according to some sources, earn 400 million USD monthly and most of it is transferred back to Ukraine.12 Many claim that if it were not for the migrants’ regular remittances, the local economies would long ago have collapsed.13 Much has been said about the additional ostensibly positive effects of labouring abroad, such as exposure to western economic and cultural practices, which supposedly emancipate Ukrainian migrants—who upon their return home would apply newly gained western entrepreneurial skills in local economies. In other words, we can see how in such kinds of discussions, the labour migrant is further endowed with presumably positive qualities, which are, again presumably, going to be helpful for the growing democracy and recovering economy of Ukraine. On the other hand, the same investigators and commentators talk about the decreasing labour force. Those 7–15% of employable age working abroad are seen as an ‘economic loss’. Encoded linguistically in negative terms, the idea of loss is further promoted in popular commentary. In various internet chat-rooms and forums, zarobitchany are routinely blamed by some of their compatriots for ceding to escapism, abandoning their homeland in difcult times, and betraying the nation.14

10

http://ternopil.cure.org.ua/dbm.php/archive/2004–09–07_78 http://www.ria.ua/view.php?id=3316 12 Cited from http://free.ngo.pl/nslowo/puls_ukrajiny/ukr_trudovi_mihranty.htm. Similar data is regularly reported from the ofce of the Ombudswoman of Ukraine Nina Karpachova. 13 http://www.ria.ua/view.php?id=3316 14 “Ukrainian (female) slaves: a criminal issue or the matter of worldview? Ukrains’ki rabyni: problema kryminaly chy svitohliadu?” (online forum topic, domivka.forums. May 5, 2004). 11

constructing the ‘ukrainian labour emigrant’ in ukraine 109 International and local NGOs, which have publicly fought trafcking in women since the early 1990s, claim that up to four hundred thousand Ukrainian women are trafcked annually into sex and domestic slave industries worldwide. They have understandably portrayed these women as victims of the global sex and slave industry. This victimization and objectication of the trafcked female lured to the West is projected on rather receptive minds, for in Ukraine the sense of national victimhood has been long cultivated by post-Soviet Ukrainian popular culture and popular historians. In many ways this sensitivity underlines post-Soviet Ukrainian citizens’ understandings of themselves and their nation.15 Thus, we are clearly dealing with an imagined migrant who is essentially victimized, oppressed and stripped of personal agency, whose fate depends on external circumstances but not his/her own will. Newspapers and web publications’ titles reveal dramatically this kind of narrativization. The following titles were used between 2000 and 2004 in papers I closely researched (Ekspres, Vysokyj Zamok, and L’vivs’ka Hazeta) as well as in other publications I looked at: 2000 Eternal Robinson Crusoes: Every unemployed Ukrainian is a potential illegal alien16

(Sept. 26, 2000, Den’)

2001 Emigration’s Passive Betrayal Pasyvna zrada emihratsii

(Sept. 25, 2001, Polityka i Kul’tura)

2002 Died in slavery Pomer na panshchyni

(No. 30(135), July 2002, Rabota)

15 In some instances, the zarobitchan-yn/ka’s sense of agency, and especially that of a female labour migrant, has also been understood in overly simplistic terms by various interpreters. Female labour migrants have been claimed to be themselves responsible for any misfortune that happened to them since they chose their own path on their own will. Representing the political establishment of his time, former president Kuchma went even further. In 2002, while on his visit to Italy, one of the main host-countries of this mass labour migration, during an interview with the Italian media, the president found himself on a slippery path, commenting on the Ukrainian women illegally working in Italy as whores who didn’t want to work in Ukraine. http://www.yabluko.org.ua/yabl-cgi/view.cgi?golos/105431230104; http://www.samvydav.net/index.php?lang=u&material_id=65303&theme_id=3412&page=material 16 The translation of this and the following titles are mine (N.S.).

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2003 People for Cheap // the Migration Flood // Livestock Liudy za beztsin’ // Mihratsijna povin’ z Ukrainy // Zhyvyj Tovar Labour Migration smothers Ukraine Trudova mihratsiia dushyt’ Ukrainu 2004 By Sweat and Blood Potom i krov’iu,

(Feb 6–12, 2003, Postup) (April 2, 2003, Vysokyi Zamok)

( Jan 22, 2004, L’vivs’ka Hazeta)

The Price of Dignity Tsina hidnosti

(April 1, 2004, Halychyna)

Ukrainian (female) slaves: a criminal issue or the matter of worldview? Ukrains’ki rabyni: problema kryminaly chy svitohliadu?

(online forum topic, domivka. forums. May 5, 2004)

Ukraine without Ukrainians: A tolerated genocide or politically correct ethnocide? Ukraina bez ukraintsiv: tolerantyj henotsyd abo politkoretknyj etnotsyd?

(May 24, 2004, Narodnyi Ohliadach)

Money did not bring happiness Hroshi ne prynesly shchastia.

(online forum topic, hhtp://ukraine. cz, Sept. 2, 2004)

2005 Wait for your Penelope, Odysseus: Labour Migration Ruins Ukrainian Families Chekaj Odyseiu svoiu Penelopu: zarobitchanstvo ruynuie ukrains’ki sim’i

(March 26, 2005, Ukraina Moloda)

The regional divide has also been observable in Ukraine’s debate on labour migration, with western Ukrainians being generally sympathetic towards their own folk, and eastern Ukrainians being more hostile towards zakhidniaky migrants, the ‘westerners’. This divide owes much to the resurgence during the 2004 presidential election campaign of

constructing the ‘ukrainian labour emigrant’ in ukraine 111 counter-propaganda on labour migration in the east of the country, endorsed by the pro-governmental camp.17 Interestingly, there is also a linguistic twist to how the regional difference in perceptions and interpretations of the gure of zarobitchanyn/ka is played out in various corners of the country. The Ukrainian word zarobitchan-yn/ka in western Ukraine is not perceived as a synonym to things and acts Ukrainian; after all, in the Ukrainian-speaking regions of Galicia, Bukovyna, and Volyn’ it is just an indigenous word with a rather xed meaning. Zarobitchan-yn/ka is someone who earns money away from home. In many Russian-language media discussions on current labour migration from Ukraine, the same Ukrainian word zarobitchan-yn/ka is used without being translated into the Russian language. The Russian language does not offer a direct equivalent of the word zarobitchan-yn/ka.18 Consequently, in southern and eastern Ukraine, where the local population is often Russian-speaking, such linguistic borrowing feeds local imaginings of zarobitchanstvo of the 1990s as being an ethnic-only, that is Ukrainian-only phenomenon. This view would be further promoted throughout the Orange months of 2004 and 2005 in eastern Ukraine, where the trope zarobitchanyn/ka frequently was used in a derogative sense in vernacular contexts, similarly to how the tropes zakhidniaky i zapadyntsi (both meaning ‘westerners’) are used to describe western Ukrainians. A major streamlining of these various perspectives, which at rst glance may appear just a loose array of voices and opinions, began in 2002–2004. It was in 2001–02, with the parliamentary elections of 2002 approaching, that politicians discovered for the rst time the huge gap in their western electorate. Between 12 and 20% of voters in various regions of western Ukraine alone were claimed to be abroad.19 A national debate on zarobitchan-yn/ka as voters began. While the Ukrainian government continued to be reactive rather than pro-active in its efforts to regulate mass labour migration and negotiate its legalization in the countries of destination (Malynovska 2004a: 23), the opposition launched a new campaign. Their campaign 17 “Politicheskaia botanika ili eto sladkoie slovo apel’sin.” http://zadonbass.org/analytics/message.html?id=8537 (24 December 2004). 18 One can question here to what degree the absence of the Russian linguistic equivalent to the word zarobitchanstvo represents overall lower participation of the Russian ethnic population throughout history in major labour migration ows which differ from population ows related to colonial expansion. 19 http://www.jar.ukrbiz.net/prtext.ukrbiz?prnum=6793

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was directed at legalization of labour migrants in Europe, and at implementing electoral reform at home to allow absent citizens to vote while abroad. Yushchenko’s trip to Portugal in 2002 to negotiate this matter with Portugal’s Prime Minister was one step in the political negotiation of this matter. Narodnyj Rukh’s claim in 2004 that seven million Ukrainians leave the country in search of work annually, a careless misinterpretation of an already inated but widely recited statistic on the extent of labour migration, is a good example of discursive battles for the hearts and minds of Ukrainian voters.20 As Keryk has pointed out, the topic of zarobitchanstvo resurfaced during the election campaign of 2004. Both political camps (Yanukovych and Yushchenko) missed no opportunity to capitalize yet again on the phenomenon of labour migration and its protagonists, those absent abroad. Having realized the danger of not gaining all the votes in Galicia and Transcarpathia, since by 2004 between 7.9 and 13.57% of those electorates were labouring abroad,21 the opposition continued to attack Kuchma’s regime and government for ignoring this issue. The Yanukovych camp, on the other end, prior to the presidential elections, was concerned with the potential vote fraud in western regions of the country, suspecting that the families of the migrants would use the absentees’ internal passports to boost the opposition vote. Thus, in 2002–2004, both political camps, pro-governmental and oppositional, in their debates with each other and with the government, and in appeals to their electorates, opened up a whole new chapter in the Ukraine’s discourse on labour migration and ultimately, on Ukrainian nationhood. This debate about zarobitchany (non)participation in the parliamentary elections of 2002 and later in the presidential elections of 2004 has assigned this absentee from the Ukrainian national scene a completely new meaning. Once seen as mere victims of macroeconomic processes, then recognized as absent agents of regional economies, the labour migrants were now coming home, metaphorically speaking, as active political subjects of their nation. Since the out-migration is not 20 It in this discursive environment that Kuchma’s offensive comments on Ukrainian women abroad, while largely unpublicized in Ukraine, provoked outrage amongst ordinary Ukrainians. Few shared Kuchma’s views on labour migration. Some accused Kuchma publicly, in the form of an open letter to the president, of being himself ‘an international pimp’ responsible for the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian women into the West. See footnote 15. 21 http://www.jar.ukrbiz.net/prtext.ukrbiz?prnum=6793

constructing the ‘ukrainian labour emigrant’ in ukraine 113 likely to end soon, and competition for political power in Ukraine is far from over—the 2006 parliamentary elections are still ahead of us—, the debate about zarobitchany is not likely to die soon. One can also speculate that this talk will soon begin to bear on how the Ukrainian nation will be imagined by Ukrainians in the near future. To this idea I will return later. Another important dimension of the labour migration discourse began to appear recently—a dimension which allows us to talk about all these different discussions and debates as a discourse, in a truly Foucauldian sense of this term. Various local conceptions, stories, and social practices related to labour migration began to ll popular culture, the arts, literature, theater, and cinematography with new themes and imagery. This is another important route along which the absent and highly ambivalent gure of zarobitchan-yn/ka comes home. Ukraine’s writers and playwrights—the producers of ctive worlds and, thus, contributors to modernity’s social practices of imagination—began to address and directly explore the phenomenon of zarobitchanstvo in their work. In 2003, the Lviv-based National Drama Theater staged a contemporary play by Nadia Kovalyk on today’s female labour migrants in Italy, who constitute about 80% of all Ukrainian migrants in that country.22 “Naples: City of Cinderellas” not only has a suggestive name but perpetuates in its narrative existing Ukrainian stereotypes and cultural expectations about labour migrants’ agency, ultimately reducing Ukrainian women migrants to modern Cinderellas, women who search for an Italian prince to rescue them from the misery of being illegally trapped as servants in Italian households. The play was successfully performed across Ukraine to full audiences and much applause, despite its reductionist message (Bovkun 2003). Another story about zarobitchansto was recently screened in Ukraine. Though Prosta Vidpovid’ (‘Simple Answer’) is not a ction but a documentary movie on zarobitchanstvo, the lm successfully raises important questions about the role, the destiny, and the fate of zarobitchan-yn/ka in today’s Ukraine and today’s Europe. The literary eld also offers numerous examples. The title of a novel by Orest Berezovskyj I picked up last summer in Ternopi’s bookstore, 22 According to a survey conducted in March 2003 by the Western Ukrainian Centre “Women Prospects” among Ukrainian workers in Italy. See “Ukrainian middle class is growing in Italy.” ForUm. March 30, 2003, http://ukr.for-ua.com/ analit/2003/03/27/105951.html

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Internaimychka: dochka chy paserbnytsia Evropy? (‘An (international) hired hand: the daughter or stepdaughter of Europe?’), brings to mind once a cinematographic sensation of the late 1980s, then still a Soviet feature lm by Pietr Todorovsky Interdevochka (1989). The movie followed the private and ‘professional’ life of a young Soviet girl, a nurse by day and a prostitute by night, who dreamed of and eventually succeeded at escaping the drudgery of Soviet life by marrying a Westerner. The movie attempted to instruct its Soviet viewers that achieving such goals would not be a guarantee one could nd peace of mind far away from one’s homeland, for the main protagonist remains quite unhappy in her posh new Western environment. Internaimychka advocates for a very similar homeland loyalty. In addition, interdevochka is a trope that suggests that the girl’s character is immoral—the prex ‘inter’ hints here at ‘changing hands’. The Ukrainian word internaimychka produces a potentially similar effect on the reader. The word naimychka, a hired hand in someone else’s family, is somewhat derogatory in the Ukrainian cultural context. To use inter-naimychka to describe a female labour migrant is to cast a shadow of immorality on her. The novel is also an exploration of failed family relations between the illegal female migrant in Italy, her husband, and their two children, all left behind. The story of a wife’s long-term absence is pieced together through chronologically arranged (ctive) letters exchanged by the spouses over the years. Though the rhetoric employed in the book reveals its author’s rather traditional understanding of women’s rights and roles, the novel serves as another good example of how Ukraine’s contemporary public culture constructs its heroines, projecting ostensibly private stereotypes of labour migration onto the public and, thus, the Ukrainian nation, whose children, as in case of Internaimychka, betrayed her for the ctive kinship link with Europe. But the most convincing evidence for the idea that the zarobitchanyn/ka has established her/himself rmly in the public consciousness as an ambivalent if not a deviant gure is how the subject of labour migration and of zarobitchan-yn/ka is dealt with in masova literatura, or the “literature for the masses,” and more specically, in the genre of the detective novel, which is highly popular in Ukraine. With the collapse of the Soviet system, this genre, often seen by the critics as a short-lived kind of literature feeding the anxieties of the day, is indeed an amazing mirror through which one can observe numerous reections of these anxieties. While the popularity of any quickly crafted detective novel is typically of limited duration, the popularity of this literature

constructing the ‘ukrainian labour emigrant’ in ukraine 115 produced for mass consumption has been increasing. Publishing companies specializing in this kind of literature are usually commercially successful and turn to detective novels to capitalize on and at the same time contribute to post-Soviet practices of imagination. The precarious experiences of labour migrants and the conditions of their existence abroad are recreated in these narratives as intriguing social and often criminal backgrounds against which the sundry actions of the main characters take place. If they are the leading characters in the novels, they are either the victims of multifarious post-Soviet maa clans ghting for control of illegal labour markets, or the villains who participate in these maa networks themselves, as in the novel The Masters of Bohemia (Demchenko 2003). More commonly though, the theme of ‘ours abroad’ is just an environment, a setting in which the plots unfold. The mistress of the Russian detective novel, Alexandra Marinina, has lled her recent novels, widely read all over the former Soviet bloc, with very much the same backdrop, making all her Petrovkabased investigators act as Interpol agents (2004). Ukrainian pop singer Iryna Karpa uses zarobitchanstvo as a part of the setting for her new popular action-packed detective novel Froid by plakav (‘Freud would have cried’) (2004). On the one hand, the casual omnipresence of zarobitchanstvo in this everyday literature for mass consumption reects the casual omnipresence of this phenomenon in the lives of today’s Ukrainians, either on the horizon or at the core. On the other hand, these stories continuously feed people’s stereotypes and imaginations on the subject of labour migrants and their ambivalent status in Ukrainian society. Ultimately, the casualness of these references and their repetitiveness speak about an important shift in public knowledge and conceptions of labour migration taking place within the last four to ve years. Each of these voices within the zarobitchanstvo discourse—vernacular, media, academic/analytical, political, and literary/artistic, as well as regionally dened Galician, eastern Ukrainian, and pan-Ukrainian—handles the issue of zarobitchanstvo and the labour migrant in its own way and for its own purposes, making this gure irreducible in Ukraine’s contemporary national narrative. The zarobitchan-yn/ka in these representations is the gure of absence. S/he is absent from her/his family, local community, and homeland. S/he is partially absent from the ofcial narratives on labour migration. Illegal migrants are difcult to count and consequently, the analysts constantly come up with lower numbers of migrants than there

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are in reality. Thus, s/he is semi-absent from Ukraine’s ofcial statistics. Until recently s/he has not been legally ‘present’ in the countries of their work; in the majority of cases their presence there has not been legalized. But is s/he truly absent from her/his nation, as it might well appear? As discussed above, the migrants’ absence began to be dramatically felt on the national level in Ukraine after 2001/02. Their absence was translated into a profound discursive presence. At each discursive level—rst journalists picked the stories from vernacular circuits, then the analysts followed the journalists’ stories with their research into the phenomenon and so on—we observe and experience the increasing pronunciation of migrants’ metaphoric presence, asserted each time with even greater authority. Of course, their presence in Ukraine was not only discursive. Migrants’ nancial injections into the local and national economies brought them back home as active agents in the Ukrainian economy. Since they were a lost electorate, the politicians did not let them go either, transforming them in their speeches into political subjects responsible for Ukraine’s future. How would this narrative ambivalence of absence/presence affect the future incorporation of zarobitchanstvo into Ukrainian historical narratives and of zarobitchany into the Ukrainian nation? Discourse, Foucault said, not only describes phenomena, it constitutes them. It forms our sense of reality and does so within the limits of its own discursive constraints (Foucault 1977: 199). Discourse is constituted by a set of sanctioned statements which have some authoritative force. Subsequently these statements have a profound inuence on the way the individuals act and think. The more they are commented upon by others the more authority they exercise and the more we see these discourses as having validity and worth (Mills 1997: 67). For example, in Ukrainian-Canadian discourse there has been an established practice to refer to another group of Ukrainian labour migrants—who arrived in North America some hundred and forty years ago—as victims of economic and political repression, with no means, no education, and no possibility of advancing themselves in their homelands. This vision of a poor and oppressed peasant in a long sheepskin coat constituted an important aspect, if not a founding one, of Ukrainian-Canadian myths of origin. It took almost a hundred years before a critical voice (that of John Paul Himka) attempted to revisit this thesis of an impoverished and uneducated peasant immigrant and to offer a different view on the ‘founding fathers’ of the UkrainianCanadian community. These immigrants, Himka claimed, were not

constructing the ‘ukrainian labour emigrant’ in ukraine 117 the poorest and the most marginal back in their home villages (1988). Still, the myth of immigrant success achieved despite the most humble origins is so strong and prevalent that many more academics and members of the diaspora community would have to contest this narrative before a more humane and less ideologically rigid interpretation of the founding generation might take root in the diaspora consciousness of Ukrainian Canadians. Similarly, in twenty or thirty years, among the descendants of today’s migrants, will current labour migration be constructed in terms similar to previous Ukrainian-Canadian versions? New Ukrainian diasporas would need to rely on their own story of origin and today’s understandings of zarobitchan-yn/ka have all the potential to constitute the core of these diasporas’ future mythologies. And as for the migrants themselves, will they remain silent and victimized second-class alien Others in their new homelands as they are often perceived to be? I don’t think so. Many women in the Ukrainian community of Rome, Italy, who I have talked with during my recent eldtrip to Rome (2004) have developed a profound sense of agency while abroad, not without the support of the Ukrainian Catholic clerical community there. They, like Lida Dukas, current co-editor of the recently launched Ukrainian Italian magazine Do Svitla, and many others in Europe and beyond, have already begun their own organizational work, not unlike the work done by previous Ukrainian migrants throughout the last century. And how will future narratives of the Ukrainian nation incorporate the story of modern zarobitchany? Will this story be transformed into a phase of a post-Soviet Ukrainian national narrative, which is continuously being constructed in terms of oppression and repression? Will discourse on zarobitchanstvo become another chapter in the history of Ukraine’s suffering or will it be a story of Ukraine’s expansion in the world? Given the proportions of the social phenomenon itself, the discursive formulas in which previous national losses were described (famine of 1933—up to seven million Ukrainian peasants starved to death; second World War—up to eight million Ukrainian civilians killed), and current discursive tendencies such as the deliberate ination of statistics, it is not surprising that zarobitchanstvo is currently being constructed as yet another Ukrainian genocide.23

23 “Ukraina bez Ukraintsiv: tolerantnyj henotsyd abo politkoretknyj etnotsyd.” Narodnyi Ohliadach. 24.05.2004.

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Now, let me turn to the idea of the Ukrainian nation. It is not a novel thing to say that in the modern political context, with the changing order of the world, the nation-states though still ofcial subjects of world politics have already begun to lose their hold over many globalized political, economic, and social processes. We call this globalization and we know it ‘moves’ populations across the globe, affecting the very idea of membership in nation-states. The Ukrainians gone west (or east for this matter), even according to the most conservative estimates, constitute millions. How soon will they cease to be seen in Ukraine as a part of the Ukrainian nation? In 2006, Ukraine will once again hold parliamentary elections. Will the current government succeed in establishing and securing new voting procedures for its subjects abroad? Will Ukrainians abroad be allowed to vote, like those six million Mexicans outside of Mexico who since 1996 are allowed to vote in Mexican elections and who, thus, directly participate in the political life of their homeland?24 If today’s zarobitchany were allowed to do the same, should they not automatically be considered members of the Ukrainian nation? Many Ukrainians will never return to Ukraine and they are the ones who will soon constitute a new diaspora for Ukraine. Will those remaining in Ukraine develop a similar kind of apprehension towards this new diaspora as they developed towards the existing North American Ukrainian diaspora? Would they welcome these absentees’ active participation in Ukraine’s internal affairs—at least for the time being? In Ukraine, will we see discussions on the historical fate of the Ukrainian nation reinscribing this migration as another loss, genocide, and national tragedy? Or, in recognition of the ongoing transnationalization and deterritorialization of economic, cultural and political spaces, will the future Ukrainian nation see zarobitchanstvo as its own way of expanding beyond its national borders (something that it refuses to do now, by rejecting, thus far, the self-assumed right of the diaspora to interfere in national matters of the Ukrainian state)? In any case, it seems that some upgrading of the Ukrainian historical narrative and of Ukrainians’ sense of nationhood has begun to take place in Ukraine, both from above and from below. And the gure of zarobitchan-yn/ka, whether absent or present, along with current zarobitchanstvo discourse, are instrumental parts of this change.

24

“A world of Exiles,” The Ecomomist. January 4, 2003. 41–43.

constructing the ‘ukrainian labour emigrant’ in ukraine 119 References cited Berezovs’kyj, Orest. 2004. Internaimychka: Dochka chy Paserbnytsia Evropy? Ternopil’: Pidruchnykyt i Posibnyky. Bovkun, I. 2003. “U Zhytomyr pryvezly . . . Popeliushok.” news.ztown.info/town/culture/n4167.html Demchenko, Yevhen. 2003. Hospodari Bohemii (The Masters of Bohemia). Kyiv: Dzherela. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. By Bouchard, D.F. and trans. Bouchard D.F. and Sherry S. Blackwell: Oxford. Himka, John-Paul. 1988. “Cultural Life in the Awakening Village in Western Ukraine.” Continuity and Change: the Cultural Life of Alberta’s First Ukrainians. (ed. by Manoly Lupul). Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies: Edmonton. 10 –23. Hnybidenko, I. 2001. “Problemy trudovoii mihratsii v Ukraiini ta iikh vyrishennia (The Problem of Labour Migration in Ukraine and Its Solution,” Ekonomika Ukraiiny. 4: 19–22. Instytut Doslidzhen’ Diaspory. 2003. Ekonomichna emihratsiia z Ukraiiny: prychyny i naslidky. Kyiv: Geoprint. Karpa, Irena. 2004. Froyd by plakav. Folio: Lviv (?). Keryk, Myroslava. 2004. “Labour Migrant: Our Savior or Betrayer? Ukrainian discussions concerning labour migration.” www.migrationonline.cz. September. Malynovska, Olena. 2004a. “International Migration in contemporary Ukraine: trends and policy.” Global Migration Perspectives (a publication by Global Commission on International Migration). No. 4 (October), 28 pp. Malynovska, Olena. 2004b. “International Labour Migration from the Ukraine: The Last Ten Years.” New Waves” Migration from Eastern to Southern Europe. Metropolis, Portugal: Lisbon. 11–22. Marinina, Aleksandra. 2004. Svetlyi lik smerti. Moskva: EKSMO. Mills, Sarah. 1997. Discourse. Routledge: London and New York. Prybytkova, Iryna. 2003. “Trudovi mihranty v sotsial’niy ierarkhii ukrains’koho suspil’stva (Labour migrants in the social hierarchy of the Ukrainian society).” Sotsiolohiia: teoriia, metody, marketing. 1: 109–124. ——. 2002. “Trudovi mihranty v sotsial’niy ierarkhii ukrains’koho suspil’stva (Labour migrants in the social hierarchy of the Ukrainian society).” Sotsiolohiia: teoriia, metody, marketing. 4: 156–167. Rohatynskyj, P. 1972. “Zarobitchanska i politychna emihracia z Butchachyny (Labour and Political Migration from Buchach Region).” The City of Butchach and Its Region: A Historical and Memoiristical Collection, vol. XXVII. New York: Shevchenko Scientic Society. Rohatynskyj, Marta. 2003. “Individual Agency, the Trafc in Women and Layered Hegemonies in Ukraine.” Canadian Woman Studies. Vol. 22, Nos. 3–4: 160 –165. Shostak, Natalia. 2003. “On Diasporic Tourism, Homecoming and Making the Other: Canada-Ukraine Trajectories” Ports of Call: Cultural Transfer between North America and Central Europe. Ed. by Susan Ingram, and Markus Reisenleitner. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Pp. 121–54. ——. 2002 “On Local Readings of Overseas Kin: Visions from Ukraine.” Reverberations: Representations of Modernity, Tradition and Cultural Value in-between Central Europe and North America. Ed. by Susan Ingram, Markus Reisenleitner, and Cornelia Szabo-Knotik. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002. 201–222. Shul’ha, Mykola. 2001. “Mihratsiia z Ukrainy.” Ukrains’kyi Rehional’nyi Visnyk. 21: 10 –11.

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Sushko, Oleksandr. No date. “Movement of People, Human Trafcking and Labor Migration in EU-Ukraine Relations.” www.batory.org.pl/ftp/program/forum/ eu_ukraine/migration _and_ trafcking.pdf Ternopil Regional Centre for the Employment. 2002. Trudova Mihratsiia Naselennia Ternopil’s’koi Oblasti: kil’kisnyj ta heohrachnyj aspekty (Labour Migration of the Population form Ternopil Region: quantitative and geographic aspects). Ternopil. Ternopil Non-Governmental Youth Organization Share Warmth. 2003. Teenagers without parental care due to the parents work abroad: Who they are? Sociological Research. http://ternopil.iatp.org.ua/teplo/research.htm

CHAPTER SIX

THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE AND POPULAR CULTURE IN DZIGA VERTOV’S “MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA” Andriy Zayarnyuk Monash University

Introduction This paper will work through the uneasy relationship between “theory” and “history” with the help of a very famous movie, which for quite some time, since its rediscovery in the West in the 1970s, has been an object of lm critics’ attention and analysis. Thus it is also an attempt to bridge history with Cultural Studies.1 The movie in question is Dziga Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera”. In the case of theory and history there is always a question of how exactly the relationships between the two are conceptualized and correspondingly a theoretical history practiced. The simplest and most criticized way is the “application” of the one to the other, taking theory’s concepts or models to organize historical material or taking history as a system of knowledge helping to contextualize a theoretical issue, which is often reduced to the re-creation of the supposedly historical “background.” I’ll try to use history not as a system of knowledge which helps to reconstruct the context understood as historical background against which this movie appeared—this approach has been used by lm critics many times, including in Dziga Vertov’s case (the most recent example is Robert Graham’s taking Sheila Fitzpatrick’s account of Soviet cultural revolution and “measuring” of movie against it). Instead I would like to use history as a method, something different from the language employed used in gurative discourses and, as Hayden White has shown us, ultimately coming down to four tropes exhausting the historian’s

1 I am thinking about convergence between history and Cultural Studies along the lines suggested in Christina Lutter and Markus Reisenleitner, “Introducing History (in)to Cultural Studies: Some Remarks on the German-Speaking Context,” Cultural Studies, No. 16(5), 2002, 613.

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repertoire.2 The method I have in mind is something preceding the deployment of poetic tropes—a basic operation that allows for the establishment of either metaphorical, or metonymical, or synechdochal, or ironic relationships between objects. One of the possible ways to conceptualize this historical method is to see it as mimesis, the establishment of resemblances between things, which not until later are encoded as being in a certain relationship. This mimesis is something Benjamin dened as the “human gift of seeing resemblances.”3 Such mimesis seems to be the basic procedure to follow even in anti-methods that oppose conventional history like the genealogical method proposed by Michel Foucault.4 Besides theoretical history, another hyphenated concept I am concerned with here is social history. In the case of the latter, one of the more important problems it is facing right now seems to be its inability to deal with complex texts, a problem that forced some of its more prominent practitioners like Gareth Stedman Jones to switch to something very like the old intellectual history. The method of social history is denitely intertwined with its ideology and institutional setting but also with a certain kind of evidence with unprivileged, usually incoherent, scraps, bits and pieces of archival material and seemingly incompatible with the works speaking the language, shaping it, being the language themselves. In the case of the “Man with the Movie Camera,” a work of art created with the help of a unique means of cinematography had offered and not resorting to the conventional repertoire of older art forms like literature and especially theater, social history or any history for that matter seems to be utterly irrelevant. What would happen if the historical method was applied to a text created in a culture that was grounded in experimentation with language? Early Soviet cinema saw itself as a language and Dziga Vertov was not an exception in holding this view.5

2

Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 31–35. 3 Benjamin, “On Mimetic Faculty,” in Walter Benjamin, Reections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (Edited and with an Introduction by Peter Demetz) (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 333. 4 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 154. 5 In Annete Michelson’s words “ ‘The Man with the Movie Camera’ is, among other things, a massive testimonial to this concern, sharing hyperbolizing the use of

dziga vertov’s “man with a movie camera”

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On the other hand, I believe that Vertov’s project and that of social history have much in common. While most critics speak about Vertov’s “decoding” of social reality, he himself was claiming to document it. In his own words: “we simply believe that the main job in cinematography is recording documents, and facts, of life and historical processes.”6 That is where his concept of “life caught unawares” (vrasplokh) comes in, along with his insistence that true cinema is based on “unplayed” lms. In his idea of a documentary, recording and reproduction were valued more than instruction.7 Taking the camera to the streets was not discarding ideological commitment or the construction/deconstruction of social reality—Vertov acknowledged that both had a place in his work. He argued for “proceeding from the material to the lm-object (and not from the lm-object to the material)…”8 because he believed that his movies also included a research component. Instead of working from a preexisting conception of the event or of the topic, he tried to discern resemblances. As Diane Waldman claims, in Vertov’s view montage and camera experiments were not just art, but also a means of cognition, they “were considered not as ‘tricks’ but as normal methods, legitimate research tools.”9 He was fascinated with archival footage. As his brother recalls: Vertov wrote in his diaries that he would have liked to have created lms based totally upon documentary footage. Having gone through the archives, he acquired the skill and the desire to work solely with documentary footage. He used found archival footage, probably shot by cameramen at the front, or footage that had been preserved in the archive for long periods of time . . . I still remember this lm, and I recall with great pleasure each frame of the civil war, shot by cameramen chosen at random and used without regard for chronology, but for the expressiveness which lay within each frame. Even though that expressiveness

metaphor, simile, synecdoche, rhyming images, parataxis—and incurring, above all, the reproach of grammatical inconsistency, one might better term a strategic use of anacolutha.” Annete Michelson, “ ‘The Man with the Movie Camera’: From Magician to Epistemologist,” Art Forum, v. 10, No. 7 ( June 1972), 66–7. 6 nà ÀÜ¿Á¿-¾±ÀÜ¿Á¿ Áƹ±¶½, Æ¿ ¿Á¾¿³¾¿¶ µ¶ˏ¿ ³ »¹¾¶½±Â¿´Ü±Ä¹¹—á¿ Ĺ»Á±Å¹Ûµ¿»Ã½¶¾Â¿³, ı»Â¿³, Ĺ»Á±Å¹Û·¹¸¾¹, ¹Á¿ܹƶÁ»¹ÝÀܿŶÁÁ¿³. Dziga Vertov, “Iz istorii kinokov” (1929) in his Stat’i/Dnevniki/Zamysly (Moscow, 1966), 120. 7 Paula Rabinowitz, “Wreckage upon Wreckage: History, Documentary and the Ruins of Memory,” History and Theory, v. 32, No. 2 (May 1993), 137. 8 Dziga Vertov, “The Factory of Facts and Other Writings,” (transl. by Kevin O’Brian), October, v. 7, Soviet Revolutionary Culture (Winter, 1978), 110. 9 Diane Waldman, “Critical Theory and Film: Adorno and ‘The Culture Industry’ Revisited,” New German Critique, No. 12 (Autumn, 1977), 47.

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andriy zayarnyuk was primitive, since the shooting had been very standard, it had been extracted from the facts. They were found facts . . .10

In his only article on the movie Vertov himself says: “Meanwhile, the lm is only the sum of the facts recorded on lm, or, if you like, not merely the sum, but also the product, a ‘higher mathematics’ of facts. Each item or each factor is a separate little document.”11 This is one of the earliest statements questioning the distinction between “facts” recorded and narrative based on these facts as one between “what really happened” and its interpretation. I take Vertov’s statement as a legitimization of what I am about to do—looking not at the “lmthing” but at the material, these separate little documents, believing that what counts in Vertov’s work is not only the general impression, but also the separate bricks.

Nadpisi Dziga Vertov starts his most famous lm with a provocative statement—“lm without intertitles” or bez nadpisei in the original’s Russian. The statement was part of the larger declaration about the “creation of a truly international absolute language of cinema on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theater and literature.” No conventional signiers were supposed to be used and the visual archive had to speak for itself. In Russian nadpis’ retains the meaning it had before the invention of the lm, meaning any inscription. This ambiguity of meanings reinforces the provocative nature of Vertov’s statement, since there are inscriptions in the lm, if not on the lm. Avoiding inscriptions on the footage does not mean avoiding inscriptions in the organization of everyday life which is lmed. If we look closely at the lm, we see that it is packed with inscriptions. They strike our eye in shots of shop windows, newspapers, mines, state ofces and movie studios; they appear on posters, ships, streetcars, cigarette boxes, sewing machines and elevators.

10 Mikhail Kaufman, “An Interview with Mikhail Kaufman,” October, v. 11, Essays in Honor of Jay Leyda, (Winter, 1979), 61. 11 Dziga Vertov, “Chelovek’s kinoapparatom” (1928) in his Stat’i/Dnevniki/Zamysly, 109.

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Some of these inscriptions have already been analyzed. Vlada Petrim noticed that there are inscription-credits explaining the movie’s purpose, crediting Dziga Vertov, his brother Mikhail Kaufman and his wife Elizaveta Svilova, although the latter’s contribution is underestimated and some other people who took part in the movie-production are not mentioned at all. In his analysis, Petrim notices inscription-posters, which are supposed to interact with the movie’s ideology. In particular he mentions movie posters advertising the commercial German lms “Awakening of a Woman” and “Green Manuela or Where They Trade in Bodies and Souls,”—popular movies which Vertov associates, with the culture of NEPmen, decadent and divorced from real life, with the bourgeois taste for the juicy, scripted and staged, against which his own movie is represented as an alternative.12 There is also another ideological motif Petrim notices—a political joke with the Lenin workers’ club, in which, according to his view, only a few workers were present.13 In general, Petrim emphasizes Vertov’s avant-gardism and revolutionary fervor, as well as his readiness to struggle to represent a new life with the help of new media, while traditional means of representation, inscriptions, manifest their hollowness. This argument is pushed even further by the most recent book on Vertov—one by Graham Roberts. Despite claiming that “it is important to watch out for text contained in the lm’s images. Signs in particular give the lm a sense of anchorage,”14 Roberts does not delve into their analysis. He cites examples of signs like “keep it clean” only to reinforce his main thesis about the ideological message of the lm and his own portrayal of Vertov as the “Man of Steel of Soviet Cinema,” believing that in the movie we see the division of society into “healthy” and “unhealthy” parts, juxtaposing socialist workers and sportsmen to NEP women, with their make-up and idle lifestyle, order against disorder, machinery against handiwork, efciency against inefciency and so on. I do not believe that Vertov’s portrayal of Soviet life can be divorced from the ideology he had professed, but I also believe that there is more

12 Vlada Petrim, Constructivism in Film: The Man with the Movie Camera: A Cinematic Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 1987), 86–87. 13 Ibid., 108. 14 Graham Roberts, The Man with a Movie Camera (London-New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2000), 47.

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than ideology in Vertov’s analysis of Soviet society in the 1920s. Written signs that appear in the movie are but one example of this.

Languages First of all I was struck by the fact that Vertov’s critics and interpreters did not seem to notice the very obvious fact that the inscriptions in the movie are not in the same language. If we group these inscriptions according to the language used we may provisionally come up with the three more or less obvious categories: Foreign-language (using Latin script) and pointing outside of the Soviet Union Russian-language Ukrainian-language Let us start with the numerically smallest group—the one including foreign inscriptions. Usually these appear on imported objects containing mechanisms: elevators, sewing machines, typewriter, the lenses of the camera itself, even a bottle-opener. This is not surprising if we take into account the technological backwardness of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and the importation precisely of high-tech machinery. Some of these are inherited from the equally “backward” (in terms of technology) Russian Empire. Interestingly, foreign language signs also appear in the beer hall, perhaps pointing to the more open and cosmopolitan character of this kind of public space in the Soviet Union of the 1920s. Usually messages of shots showing beer and the beer hall are interpreted as directed against alcohol consumption and certain kinds of bourgeois leisure. It must be noted however, that in the 1920s beer was quite often seen as a healthy substitute for moonshine, and thus benecial to both consumer and state.15 The public in the beer hall appears to be not a bourgeois public, like one lmed on the beach, as spectators during sport events, or in the privacy of their apartments, but a diverse one, including bohemian and working class patrons.

15 Victor Margolin, “Constructivism and the Modern Poster,” Art Journal, v. 44, No. 1, The Poster (Spring, 1984), 29.

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With Russian and Ukrainian inscriptions the situation is more complex. 1929, the year of the movie’s release was also the beginning of the Stalinist “great breakthrough”—the rst ve-year plan, the mass collectivization of agriculture, the development of heavy industry, the end of the NEP, and the end of the policy of Ukrainization (ukraïnizatsiia). Ukrainization was part of the Soviet policy of nativization, aimed at correcting wrongs inicted by the Russian Empire and securing space for national sentiments in the Soviet framework. No analysis of the movie’s ideology even tries to analyze the movie’s map of Ukrainization, although for the contemporaries the issue was of great signicance. Moreover, the movie itself was made amidst the struggles around the language and status of the subjects of the Soviet Federation. The movie was produced by VUFKU, the All-Ukrainian Photo and Cinema Administration, the second largest Soviet cinema-producing trust, competing with other trusts for the audience, lmmakers and state resources. In mid-October 1927, discussing the shortcoming of Sovkino (the central Soviet movie studio), Mayakovsky made bitter references to this competition which clearly divided the Soviet audience into national segments: Take this very moment, for example, when in Ukraine they don’t show pictures made by Sovkino—but they have just now signed an agreement to show them. We should be sorry for the Ukraine (Applause) “Mr. Lloyd’s Trip” will now travel even further. Of course, the Ukraine evens accounts—VUFKU sends us “Taras Trasilo”.16

Vertov himself used the rivalry between VUFKU and Sovkino: he enjoyed, inside of VUFKU, special status as a director poached by VUFKU from Sovkino.17 It is very probable that VUFKU, at the time directed by the Ukrainian futurists, was the only studio in the Soviet Union where an experiment like Vertov’s movie was possible.18 In Vertov’s only article on “Man with a Movie Camera” we see references to the heated debates around the movie in Kharkiv and

16 Jay Leyda, Kino. A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (New York: Collier Books, 1960), 229. 17 Roberts, The Man with a Movie Camera, 32. 18 This has been suggested in Bohdan Y. Nebesio, review of Vlada Petrim, Constructivism in Film: The Man with the Movie Camera. A Cinematic Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Slavic Review, v. 54, No. 3 (Autumn, 1995), 748.

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Kyiv, not in Moscow.19 And one of Vertov’s articles was published in New Generation, a Kharkiv-based journal of Ukrainian futurists in Ukrainian. But this paper does not attempt to “claim” Vertov or his movie for Ukrainian culture. I believe that Vertov saw himself as an international artist and explicitly dened the Man with the Movie Camera as an attempt to develop an international language of cinema, although this does not mean that he was not paying attention to the national and language controversies around him. The city depicted in the movie is a collective image constructed from the footage taken largely in Kyiv, Odesa and Moscow. There is some additional footage as well. Geographically it comes from Donbass (part of the footage later used in “Enthusiasm. Symphony of Donbass”, Vertov’s rst sound lm), and from Ukrainian provincial towns. You can denitely see that some inscriptions are in Russian because they are taken in Moscow, and some in Ukrainian because they are taken in Ukraine. But the presence of Russian inscriptions cannot be explained by simply the Russian footage from Moscow. A city from Vertov’s movie is not a combination of concrete cities. He envisions the urban setting as heterogeneous linguistically, as a Ukrainian city was in the 1920s. The footage was taken during the high peak of Ukrainization. The Ukrainization “by decree” that took place in 1923–25 was replaced in 1925–26 by the “true” Ukrainization orchestrated by Lazar’ Kaganovich. Language policy stated that “Ukrainian was to be the exclusive language of the public sphere . . . All public announcements, all signs, all ofcial stamps and blanks were to be exclusively in Ukrainian.”20 This latter question, of visual signs and of the language dominating the public space was considered to be of foremost importance. A prominent Ukrainian communist ofcial, in response to an attack on Ukrainization in 1926, said: Take the question of signs and posters, which seems to be a petty anecdotal question. It is really an extremely serious question. . . . You say that Petliura also repainted signs and now we are doing the same thing. That’s absolutely right. Like Petliura we are repainting signs, but this doesn’t scare us . . . it is used to be that the peasant came to the city and thought he was in a foreign [chuzhoi] city. We need to create an environment

19 Dziga Vertov, “The Factory of Facts and Other Writings,” (transl. by Kevin O’Brian), October, v. 7, Soviet Revolutionary Culture (Winter, 1978), 127–8. 20 Terry Martin, The Afrmative Action Empire. Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Cornell University Press, 2001), 88.

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where the peasant gets used to seeing Ukrainian signs, announcements and posters.21

The policy of Ukrainization in the 1920s was neither unidirectional nor unidimensional. In Ukraine in the 1920s local political and intellectual forces opposing and backing ukraïnizatsiia were in near equilibrium.22 And the most problematic for total Ukrainization was precisely the urban setting. Terry Martin has helped us to understand the logic behind Ukrainization and showed that it stopped when it came to factories and ofces: “It was no surprise that a political controversy would center on the Ukrainization of the proletariat. This was the one Russian ‘urban island,’ to use Zatonskyi’s phrase, exempted from the April 1925 Ukrainization decrees. Moreover, this exemption was due to Stalin’s personal intervention.”23 The nal halt to Ukrainization came with Stalin’s revolution, namely the “great breakthrough” of 1928–29. Stalin associated Russian with the hard line, with the revolution from above, and with industry.24 Terry Matin’s summary of Ukrainization reads as follows: The goal of this project had been to create a total linguistic urban environment that would compel both Ukrainians and Russians to adopt Ukrainian as the language of public life in Ukraine. However, the two most important arenas where Ukrainian residents assimilated an urban identity, the factory and the ofce, remained dominated by the Russian language.25

Now if we go back to Vertov’s movie, the map of Ukrainization is denitely present. I suspect that the movie was at least partly intended to include such a map: Ukrainian dominates signs in the city’s public sphere, services sector, and light industry, while Russian dominates heavy industry, the military, strategic transportation, and so on. There is also a temporal dimension—many signs in Russian predate the Revolution, while those in Ukrainian are new and fresh. But if I thought that Vertov had only done this—provided an illustration to Terry Martin’s argument—I would not have written this paper about his lm. I believe that in the Man with the Movie Camera,

21 22 23 24 25

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

89. 77. 96. 269–272. 122.

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Vertov does something historians have failed to do in their analysis of Ukrainization. Pointing to the domains in which either one or the other language prevails, Vertov also shows their intersections, crossovers and co-existence thus providing a picture more complex than existing historical accounts of Ukrainization. Sequences of frames with the inscriptions in different languages create this effect, but there are also frames that include both languages. The drinking establishment in Kyiv is the rst example of this—we see Ukrainian and Russian as equal partners (Illustration 1). The impression of parity in the relationship between two languages is accentuated by symmetry in the allocation of Ukrainian and Russian signs in relation to the imagined central axis of the frame dividing the façade into two parts. But this symmetry is not one of juxtaposition—languages are not assigned just to one side of the frame but appear on both sides interchangeably. The goal of such an allocation seems to be turning this diner/bar/beer-hall into an establishment equally attractive to the speakers of both languages. Another example in which both languages appear is provided by the shots of a newspaper posted on a wall. The newspaper’s title itself is in Ukrainian—Fil’mar, but its content is in both Russian and in Ukrainian (Illustration 2). One would wonder how such a newspaper was classied in the statistics—as Ukrainian or Russian? The shot of the newspaper is especially interesting because it is connected with the environment in which Vertov’s lm was produced. The wall newspaper is at the movie studio, or, perhaps, for the team producing the movie. Its title can be translated as “Cinema-man.” Administered by the futurists, the Ukrainian cinema industry of the 1920s must have been open not only to artistic experimentation, but also to internationalism, which was part of their program.26 Vertov himself, being on the editorial board of the Ukrainian futurists’ journal Nova Generatsiia (“New Generation”) must have shared their ideas about languages’ interaction and relationship in Ukraine. In the case of the wall newspaper, we see conscious toleration for the simultaneous usage of Ukrainian and Russian. We have to note that Mykhail’ Semenko, the leader of the Ukrainian futurists and, 26 For the participation of Ukrainian futurists in the Ukrainian cinema industry in the 1920s and for their internationalism see Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj, Ukrainian Futurism, 1914–1930: A Historical and Critical Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, distributed by Harvard University Press, 1997).

dziga vertov’s “man with a movie camera”

Illustration 1.

Illustration 2.

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for a time in the 1920s, an administrator of the Ukrainian cinema, was, among other things, accused by the more established gures of Ukrainian literature of submission to Russian inuences and the use of Russian forms in his poetry.27 It is plausible to see this acceptance of the linguistically diverse public space and exploration of the possibilities offered by it (as exemplied by the wall newspaper) as the way in which the futurists’ declared internationalism was practiced. The last example of the condominium of Ukrainian and Russian in one frame is a sign that reads “father or leader of fascism”. This is a sign in which the languages intermix. The Ukrainian “i” is used here instead of “¹” because a Russian rule is applied to the Ukrainian spelling (this is a common mistake when someone switches to written Ukrainian from written Russian—it was quite common in the mid1990s as well). Did this mixed-language inscription enter the footage accidentally? I do not think so. From the very beginning, the lm signals that it “will focus on a close examination of even the most (apparently) unimportant details.”28 The sign itself is, perhaps, one of the rst examples of surzhyk, or the vernacular mixture of Ukrainian and Russian, to be lmed. Usually surzhyk is dened as an artifact of oral culture but it has been consciously used in Ukrainian literature since the end of the nineteenth century to portray a particular type of character or a particular type of utterance. In most cases it was used with negative connotations as an antipode of “correct” or “pure” language.29 Serhy Yekelchyk has demonstrated that it was used in written form effectively by Ostap Vyshnia in the late 1940s without the usual assignment to it of a lower value, or open ridicule.30 In the 1920s, however, Ostap Vyshnia was still making fun of surzhyk and it seems that the only member of the literati who took surzhyk seriously was Mykhail’ Semenko, the founder of Ukrainian futurism, who explored its poetic possibilities.31

27

Ibid., passim. Roberts, The Man with a Movie Camera, 48. 29 For the discussion of linguistic “purism” directed against surzhyk and the ideological side of this discussion see Laada M. Bilaniuk, The Politics of Language and Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine (Ph.D dissertation: University of Michigan, 1998). 30 Serhy Yekelchyk, “No Laughing Matter: State Regimentation of Ukrainian Humor and Satire under High Stalinism (1943–1953),” Canadian American Slavic Studies, v. 48, No. 1 (Spring, 2006), 79–100. 31 I would like to thank Nadiya Chushak for this observation. 28

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Illustration 3.

Illustration 4.

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In the movie, together with the articles on the wall newspaper, this is one of two legible cases of text handwritten by people and not produced by machines. There is also a case of people lling in forms in the registrar’s ofce, registering marriages and divorces—but we do not see the language, only numbers can be recognized. The sign “father of fascism” is linguistically hybrid and, properly speaking, belongs to neither Ukrainian nor Russian, and thus reects the prevalent language condition of Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s better than the historical and sociological descriptions which operate with categories of Russian and Ukrainian. We should remember that both Russian and Ukrainian were normative codied ctions being imposed upon the heteroglossia of the everyday language.

Popular The setting is a shooting range: on the surface, a setting dened by ideology, but also a classical locus of Soviet popular culture. The institution necessary to prepare citizens for the eventual defense of the socialist motherland was also a place of cheap entertainment, especially in the absence of casinos and gambling machines. It had a commercial lottery element to it, with cash prizes being won, bets made, and so on. Its physical location was usually an amusement park, sometimes a train or bus station, or collective farm markets, in short—a shadowy zone of not-too-orthodox Soviet behavior. Just like the hybrid sign, this form of popular culture did not arise on separate neutral ground—it existed inside of the folds of ideology without coinciding with it. The question then arises about Vertov’s relationship to the popular. Usually this relationship is described as the most problematic part of his lmmaking career. He is portrayed as a man experimenting with things inaccessible to average people, as a difcult avantgardist artist assimilable by other avant-garde artists but not by “the people”: “The underlying dilemma is fundamental to any radical cultural movement that, be it in 1968 France or 1917 Russia, attempts to justify simultaneously its relevance to the surrounding Proletarian Revolution and its ‘enlightened,’ non-Proletarian aesthetic tastes.”32

32 Gregory T. Taylor, “The Cognitive Instrument in the Service of Revolutionary Change”: Sergei Eisenstein, Annette Michelson, and the Avant-Garde’s Scholarly Aspiration,” Cinema Journal, v. 31, No. 4 (Summer, 1992), 47.

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It became a staple to see the movie as a glorication of production, machinery, mechanization, multiplication, Taylorism and so on. Aronowitz reads The Man with the Movie Camera as a lm for instruction, a lm of the machine age: “Vertov was the master of the revolutionary decade of Soviet cinema precisely because he internalized into his art the politics of industrialization, the massication of images, not presented as a ction, but represented as fact. It is the conscious subsumption of social life under the ethic and imperative of production that marks this lm and that made Vertov the supreme documentary lmmaker of the early years of the revolution.”33 The same kind of reasoning is seen in the descriptions of Vertov’s relationships with his audiences. Peter Kenez’s words about Vertov are an example of this: “He was blamed—with justice—for being primarily interested in artistic experimentation. . . . In the age of lms for the millions, Vertov had no role to play.”34 However, the relationship between the Soviet cinema of the 1920s and Stalinist cinema of the 1930s was not that simple. The 1930s were not exactly the age of the lms for millions. The 1930s witnessed a general decline in both domestic production and imports: The First Five Year Plan and the Cultural Revolution had a profoundly negative effect on Soviet cinema. Not only the immortals like Eisenstein were victims. Those directors who made the entertainment pictures that were truly for the masses were affected in equal measure, and the audiences that loved these lms suffered accordingly.35

Vertov’s attitude to “people” and the relationship between his work and potential viewers is also simplied in the above-cited generalizations. To prove Vertov’s disdain for a popular following, Kinoks’ Manifesto is often cited: We raise our protest against the collusion of the director as enchanter with the public submissive to enchantment. Only consciousness can ght the sway of magic. Only consciousness can form a man of rm opinion and solid conviction. We need conscious men, not an unconscious mass submissive to any passing suggestion.

33 Stanley Aronowitz, “Film: The Art Form of Late Capitalism,” Social Text, No. 1 (Winter, 1979), 119. 34 Peter Kenez, “The Cultural Revolution in Cinema,” Slavic Review, v. 47, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), 425. 35 Denise J. Youngblood, “The Fate of Soviet Popular Cinema during the Stalin Revolution,” Russian Review, v. 50 (April 1991), 162.

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andriy zayarnyuk Long live the class consciousness of healthy men with eyes and ears to see and hear with. Away with the perfumed veil of kisses, murder, doves and prestidigitation. Long live the class vision. Long live the cinema eye.36

Even from this manifesto we see that Vertov’s stance against staged lm does not entail discarding one’s viewers. It is just that he, like many other futurists, believed in the possibility of reeducating the masses. In the context of the Soviet cultural revolution taking place in the 1920s it seemed quite plausible that instead of assimilating decadent bourgeois mass culture, the masses could be taught to embrace a new art of the future. Ironically, those who accuse Vertov of elitism tend to follow in the footsteps of the Soviet court critics from the late 1920s and early 1930s. Vertov himself was very concerned with the popularity of his lms. In his texts from the 1920s we see a genuine belief that documentaries are a truly popular kind of cinema. Let us take as an example Vertov’s own experience with the rural audience while traveling with a movable projector in the countryside: The viewers, still unspoiled, do not understand the artices of theatricality. A ‘lady’ remains for them a lady, no matter what ‘peasant clothing’ you show her in. These viewers are seeing the movie screen for the rst or second time; they still do not understand the taste of lm-moonshine; and when, after the sugary actors of a lm-drama, real peasants appear on the screen, they all perk up and stare at the screen. A real tractor, of which they know only from hearsay, has gone over a few acres and plowed them in a few minutes, before the viewers’ very eyes. Conversations, shouts, questions. There’s not a word about the actors. On the screen are their own kind, real people. There isn’t a single false, theatrical movement to unmask the screen, to deprive it of the peasants’ condence.37

How about the much celebrated image of a magician that for the rst time appears in “Kino-Truth” and from there enters The Man with the Movie Camera? Everyone agrees that magician is a metaphor for cinematography. Some pointed out that the magician is also “a worker,

36 Annete Michelson, “ ‘The Man with the Movie Camera’: From Magician to Epistemologist,” Art Forum, v. 10, No. 7 ( June 1972), 66. 37 Dziga Vertov, “The Factory of Facts and Other Writings,” (transl. by Kevin O’Brian), October, v. 7, Soviet Revolutionary Culture (Winter, 1978), 114.

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someone who earns his bread by the creation of illusion. . . .”38 But the magician from the movie is denitely part of popular entertainment and operates in the setting of an entertainment park. To produce illusions you do not have to pretend, to stage: you can play with reality and real things just like both magicians and Vertov do. If we take a famous excerpt in which Vertov speaks against the staged movie or “kinodrama” we see that he identies himself with the audience, with the viewers despised by the makers of kinodrama: Kinodrama—is an opium for the people. Kinodrama and religion—are deadly weapons in the hands of the capitalists. The scenario—is a tale thought up for us [my emphasis] by literary people. . . . Down with the bourgeois tale-scenario! Hurrah for life as it is!39

The original text is even stronger than the above excerpt used by Jay Leyda. The manifesto against staged lm is in fact an ode to the quotidian, to everyday life and “simple” people: Kinodrama—is an opium for the people. Down with the immortal kings and queens of the screen. Long live ordinary people, lmed in life at their usual business. Down with the bourgeois tale-scenarios! Hurrah for life as it is! Kinodrama and religion—are deadly weapons in the hands of the capitalists. With the demonstration of our revolutionary routine we’ll knock weapons from the enemy hands. Contemporary art drama—is a vestige of the old world. This is an attempt to pour our revolutionary reality into bourgeois forms. Down with staging of the everyday: lm us unawares (vrasplokh), the way we are. Scenario—is a tale, made up by literati about us. We live our own lives and submit to no one’s tales.40

From this we see that Vertov does not equate the popular with the commercial and believes in the possibility of artistic lms that will become popular among the people whose lives they show. Connections between the Soviet avant-garde and the popular go beyond the question of a product’s popularity to the very heart of popular practices and their usage. I have already shown that hybrid 38 Annete Michelson, “ ‘The Man with the Movie Camera’: From Magician to Epistemologist,” Art Forum, v. 10, No. 7 ( June 1972), 66. 39 Jay Leyda, Kino. A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (New York: Collier Books, 1960), 200. 40 Dziga Vertov, “Vremennaia instruktsiia kruzhkam “Kinoglaza” (1926) in his Stat’i/Dnevniki/Zamysly, 96.

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language was one such popular practice explored by the futurists and Dziga Vertov. But there is also a visual link in the “father of fascism” sign. The “montage style” of Soviet lms from the 1920s was connected with the avant-garde in graphic arts.41 The sign from the shooting range, although drawn by some local amateur, resembles some of the constructivist posters. The link between the two is the tradition of cheap printed images that circulated among the lower classes of the Russian Empire. One of the most famous constructivist graphic artists, Alexander Rodchenko, drew intertitles for Vertov’s Kinopravda. He also worked in the Russian telegraph agency (ROSTA) set up in 1917 by the Bolsheviks for propaganda purposes. “The ROSTA poster artists intentionally used crude stenciled images and the dramatization of conicts to appeal visually to their largely illiterate or barely literate audiences.”42 Very often they drew on the lubok tradition—that of woodblock prints dating from the seventeenth century. ROSTA actually had a special lubok division for the production of revolutionary lubok. If we go back to the verbal, the rst part of the sign—bat’ko—also points to the vernacular tradition: this was a designation of peasant Civil War warlords in Ukraine, the most famous of them being the anarchist bat’ko Makhno.

Conclusions To sum up, I do not think that in Vertov’s lm that location of the hybrid vernacular in the domain of popular culture, where it nds space for articulation, is accidental. Pointing to it, Vertov corrects the descriptions and explanations of the language situation we nd in the works of historians studying normative visions, operating with national languages as actually existing units and neglecting the everyday—, the everyday on its own, and not as reected in state policies, party decisions and intellectuals’ projects.

41 David Bordwell, “The Idea of Montage in Soviet Art and Film,” Cinema Journal, v. 11, No. 2 (Spring, 1972), 9–17. 42 Victor Margolin, “Constructivism and the Modern Poster,” Art Journal, v. 44, No. 1, The Poster (Spring, 1984), 28.

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Paula Rabinowitz, discussing the relation between documentary and history, claims that “looking, then, is always a historical act.”43 This interpretation of Vertov’s work proves that he was rst and foremost a historian. Vertov is also a particular kind of historian. Vertov’s ideologically motivated factuality—“Filming facts. Sorting facts. Disseminating facts. Agitating with facts. Propaganda with facts. Fists made of facts”44 is in a way parallel to the radical agenda of the factuality of social history. Both look for minutiae, unprivileged events and details, and raise them to the status of facts. Both pay attention to the everyday, the insignicancies of which can in fact matter more than the Historical Facts of conventional history.

43 Paula Rabinowitz, “Wreckage upon Wreckage: History, Documentary and the Ruins of Memory,” History and Theory, v. 32, No. 2 (May 1993), 137. 44 Dziga Vertov, “The Factory of Facts and Other Writings,” (transl. by Kevin O’Brian), October, v. 7, Soviet Revolutionary Culture (Winter, 1978), 112.

CHAPTER SEVEN

INVERTED PERSPECTIVE AND SERBIAN PEASANTS: ANTIQUITIES AND THE BYZANTINE REVIVAL IN SERBIA Marko hivkovin University of Alberta

Introduction: How it all started? “It was in the early autumn of 1985 when by some Ostap-Benderesque diplomatic swindle a charlatan from Mexico came to Yugoslavia and proclaimed the mouth of river Neretva to be the location of the ancient Troy” wrote Svetlana Slapsak in her essay “How it all started.” She recounts how the domestic experts at the presentation the charlatan gave in a large Belgrade University auditorium “did their best not to say anything clearly critical and to suppress any intervention from the audience” (Slapsak 1994: 57). Sitting in the audience and unable to publicly intervene, Slapsak passed the time making fun of the presentation with her two friends until threatened with physical violence by those sitting near her who wanted them to shut up. She realized then that this was no longer a laughing matter: most of those present yearned to discover that they actually belong to an ancient and glorious lineage, repeating the European mythology of ancestors of Romans but older than Greeks, which is the essential ideological and state-building text of the myth of Trojans (Ibid. 58).

All of the essential elements of what was to come were present at this event, Slapsak claimed. Even before various Yugoslav nationalisms tore the country apart, this event showed a vague but strong need to dene a dangerous enemy. “Someone mysterious stole our ancient identity, and now we had a chance to denounce the culprit and get back what rightfully belongs to us. That mysterious enemy could only, in an autistic reversal, be those,” Slapsak says, “who wouldn’t accept the ravings of the Mexican charlatan” (Ibid. 58). This failure of qualied critics to do their critical duty, the result of a combination of cowardice and the “idea of the utility of lying for the collective,” was seen by Slapsak

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as one of the main causes of Serbia’s slide into nationalism and war. Finally, this event presaged how a yearning for a positive identity can become coopted into the “colonization of the past as a magical operation of colonizing the actual space” where the past serves as “a source of the right of the rst” (Ibid. 58). I have argued elsewhere (Zivkovic 1990, 1997) that the Serbian narratives of identity are at least partially oriented towards the ways Serbs are perceived by powerful others, that is to say, towards Serbia’s position in European and world-wide symbolic geographies. Czechs and Russians, for instance, inhabit different positions along the WestEast axis of the Enlightenment map of civilization (Wolff 1994), and this gives them different options when it comes to dealing with the stigma of being “Eastern.” Croats and Serbs, similarly, occupy different positions on the north-west/south-east gradient that characterizes the symbolic geography of the Balkans, and they have different options when it comes to dealing with the stigma of the Balkans. Having similar structural positions does not mean that the options will be the same, for each peripheral society has to deal with quite specic historical contingencies. Serbs, Greeks and Romanians, for instance, have different response options even though they share both the Balkan peripherality and Oriental taint. Drawing in part on Goffman’s analysis of stigma and strategies of dealing with a “spoilt identity,” I have described elsewhere (Zivkovic 1990, 1997) how Serbian responses to various stigmas in general vacillate between ‘ministrelization’ (reecting them back in exaggerated form) and various shades of ambivalent self-exoticization (as, for instance, in ‘magic realism’). In this paper I want to present some of the ways in which the Serbs have been re-imagining their past since the Mexican charlatan paid them a visit in 1985. For analytical purposes, I am going to distinguish between several concrete strategies of appropriating or rejecting different pasts that have been used in Serbian discourses on national identity in the past decade or so. In practice, these strategies come mixed in all conceivable ways, but I will, at least initially, treat them as separable ideal types. I will proceed by unpacking a series of “revelatory incidents” (see Fernandez 1986: xi) in which these ideal types of response come together in a particularly condensed and poignant way. The rst scene is a farmer’s market—the famous Kalenim pijaca—near where my parents live in the part of Belgrade called ™ubura.

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Sanskrit in the Farmer’s Market One June morning in 1995, trailing an empty two-wheeled cart behind, my mother and I walked uphill on the narrow street leading to the unnished giant edice of the St. Sava Church and entered the familiar maze of even narrower streets in ™ubura. Shabby little houses were interspersed with dilapidated villas, inner courtyards with the water tap in the middle, where ™uburians gather for coffee, gossip, even a haircut in the open. Gardens managed to be both neat and weedy. Like many other parts of Belgrade, ™ubura bears a Turkish name. The mosques and Turkish baths almost all disappeared from the city more than a century ago, together with other, visible (and easily removable) signs of Ottoman rule, but the names stayed and still carry that special, yet largely unacknowledged intimate aura of things Turkish. In the farmer’s market you may pretend to be the most highly polished urbanite but most likely you are just barely a generation removed from the peasant across the stall and that gives the market an egalitarian feel. Here one glimpses the barrel-chested, bearded gure of a wellknown National Opera baritone buying onions, over there an actress who sang gypsy songs in an Academy-Award-winning Gypsy lm of thirty years ago. The tenor is dressed in worn out, nondescript clothes, the actress in something cheaply garish. That morning we bumped into a an old acquaintance of my mother’s—a sculptor and the widow of a prominent literature critic. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “I am studying the stories Serbs tell themselves and others about themselves”, I gave my one-phrase answer. “Oh, everybody is studying us these days,” she said. “There was this American psychiatrist poking around who’s studying human aggression. But no matter how hard they try, they will never understand us. They can put us in a computer and still they won’t understand.” And then with a conspiratorial wink towards a fellow native: “Take for instance, our inat.” Oh, how well I knew this turn. Inat is supposed to be one of those ineffable essences of being a Serb, thus by denition untranslatable. We may bewail the foolishness of doing completely irrational, often selfdestructive things “just in spite” (as inat translates, actually quite well), but we also think of it as unfathomably noble and would like others to take it as such. Popping out of the fellow-native condante role, I took a stab with my little test:

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“It is a Turkish word.” “Oh no,” she said with the air of indulgent superiority as to a cub who has strayed, “many of those words we thought were from Turkish in fact come from Sanskrit.” “They might be Persian or Arabic in origin,” I persisted, “but they came through Turkish.” “No,” she would not budge, “you must surely know that Serbian is practically identical with Sanskrit, and besides, you would be well advised to look into the Hittites as well.” Several things were done in this exchange. An identity supposedly unfathomable to rational Westerners was encapsulated in a Turkish loan word. The Turkish Taint, which is a theme I have explored elsewhere but which is similar to what Greeks contend with, is rejected and instead an alternative and much more ancient heritage is afrmed, rst with Serbian’s supposed afnity with Sanskrit and then with Hittite descent.

Peasants and Byzantine Kings Another “revelatory incident,” this time from Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon—a veritable mine of highly illuminating vignettes— brings together another combination of identity options I want to address in this paper. Subscribing to an entrenched European attitude that sees civilization as decadent and barbarity as vital, Rebecca West consistently reverses the usual valences of Balkanist1 discourse. As she descends down the gradient of civilization in her travel through Yugoslavia, the essence of the Balkans becomes more pure, and that vitality she is questing for increases. For her, Serbia is positioned somewhere between the 1 Maria Todorova has persuasively argued that “the Balkans have served as a repository of negative characteristics against which a positive and self-congratulatory image of the “European” and the “West” has been constructed” (Todorova 1997: 188). What distinguishes the discourse of Balkanism from that of Orientalism, she argues, is that the former does not show the redeeming valences of the latter: however denigrated the Orient might have been, it was always also seen as possessing a resplendent civilization of its own, and being in certain ways even superior to the Occident; the Balkans were nothing but Europe’s “alter ego, the dark side within” with no redeeming characteristics whatsoever.

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decadence of the West and pristine Balkan purity of Macedonia. For all its exposure to “poisons of the nineteenth century,” however, the European degeneration that threatens Belgrade is “still a long way from consummation.” Belgrade hotels might emulate those in London or Paris, but in “none of those great cities,” writes West, have I seen hotel doors slowly swing open to admit, unhurried and at ease, a peasant holding a black lamb in his arms . . . His suit was in the Western fashion, but he wore also a sheepskin jacket, a round black cap, and leather sandals with upturned toes . . . (West 1969: 483; italics mine)

Western clothes and the three major diacritics of Serbian peasant identity—gunjce, subara and opanak—are nally complemented with the third essential element in this pregnant passage: the peasant with the black lamb, West writes, “stood still as a Byzantine king in a fresco” (ibid. 483). Indeed, I will argue, the Serbian sense of identity signicantly revolves around the various ways these three large themes—Byzantine heritage as a claim to a High Culture, gunjce and opanak as egalitarian peasant Volksgeist, and more or less well-tting Western clothes as uneasy membership in Western civilization—are seen to complement or contradict each other. My mother’s acquaintance in the farmer’s market, however, in her retreat from identity tainted by Turkishness didn’t claim Byzantine, but Sanskritic or Hittite roots. Let me then rst explore that more ancient connection before embarking on Serbian problems with their Byzantine legacy.

Serbs . . . The Most Ancient People There is a mantra every schoolboy in Yugoslavia could repeat in his sleep: “Slavs came to the Balkan Peninsula in the 6th and 7th centuries.” I was hardly aware that there were alternative theories until 1990 when a man I met at a party told me the story of a Serbian woman who despite all odds defended a controversial dissertation at Sorbonne in the 1960s, and of a powerful conspiracy of silence that prevented the publication of her manuscript. It was only later that I learned that the book in question was Serbs . . . the Most Ancient People (Srbi . . . narod najstariji) by Olga Lukovim-Pjanovim, which was indeed published that same year

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(1990) in Belgrade, and instantly became a bestseller. It was followed by a deluge of magazine articles, serialized digests in the dailies and weeklies, as well as entire books. If the “Mexican charlatan” (see http://www.homer.com.mx/R.S.P./ RSP.html) was the rst to provoke a vague yearning for ancient identity in 1985, the publication of Serbs . . . the Most Ancient People in 1990 was a fulllment of that yearning. The theories about ancient Serbian origins offered in this hefty two-volume work were not new. Olga LukovimPjanovim was actually revamping the work of a group of 19th-century Romantic Slavophiles. A Montenegrin writer, Drafko eoekim, offers a compendium of practically all of these theories in his book “Sorabi” (Sorabs) published by a private Belgrade publisher in 1994. I will try to summarize the main tenets of this odd mixture although a summary may impose a misleading semblance of order and logic on the kind of free-associating that characterizes the whole genre. According to most of these theories, the ancient homeland of Serbs or Sorabs was in India. From India they migrated around 4,500 years B.C. to Mesopotamia where they took part in the building of the Tower of Babel. Some stayed but the majority migrated further to Africa, where they ruled Egypt for some time. Two more waves of migration from India dispersed ancient Serbs throughout Asia from China to Urals, and from the Caspian Sea to Siberia or Sirbiria or Sirbidia, that is to say, Serbia. Migrations to Europe followed, centuries before Christ, and the historical map Scekic provides shows how these migrations covered a great deal of Central, East, and South-East Europe with Serb states. The evidence for such claims is sought in writings of Herodotus, Strabo, Tacitus, Pliny and, Ptolemy who supposedly documented the existence of ancient Serbs and their states all over the world of classical antiquity. The theories that see Serbs everywhere, however, most often overlook the fact that these classical historians and geographers were talking about Sarmatians and Scythians, Venets and Getae, Thracians and Dacians, Etruscans and Trojans, Illyrians and Pelazgians, and not Serbs. When this potentially damaging discrepancy is noted, the following explanation is offered. For one, says eoekim, the foreigners couldn’t pronounce the word Srb so, often for nefarious purposes, they distorted it beyond recognition. “Fortunately,” he writes, “these [false] attributions usually cannot mislead the erudite and objective searchers after the autochtonous Slavic origins. Even if doubt does appear, they can rely on the deeply rooted Serbian memory of their own most ancient existence and name. This precious evidence is preserved by the Serbian

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language—the primordial words, names, myths, wise sayings, traditions, legends and poetry” (eoekim 1994: 75). “Linguistic” evidence is central to this genre and it is mostly toponyms combined with fantastic etymologies that provide the main “proofs” of Serbian ancient origin. The Serbian language as it is spoken today, this literature claims, is the closest to the proto-Indo-European among existing European languages.2 Serbs lived in India since times immemorial as attested by various place names, and they were most likely the precursors of Vedic poets, as attested by the mention of names like Sribinda in the most ancient Rg-Vedas. Srbinda, of course, corresponds to the modern Serbian, SRBENDA.3 “SRBINDA is not the only ancient Serbian word in the VEDAS,” writes eoekim referring to unnamed Slavic Sanskritologists of repute, “Our native tongue has preserved more than three thousand words from the times of the most ancient Vedic hymns, and these words have changed neither their form nor their meaning to this very day” (eoekim 1994: 103). My mother’s acquaintance in the farmer’s market used this theory to bypass the uncomfortable Turkish taint and claim a more ancient and more noble lineage. For all their nebulous quality, there is a systematicity to these theories if we analyze them as a series of moves to “out-ancient” all the competitors. If Illyrians are actually Serbs, then Albanian claims to be descendants of Illyrians and thus predate Serbs in the territories they now inhabit is invalidated. If the Pelazgians were actually a Serbian tribe, then Serbs can out-ancient the Greeks who claim to be the direct descendants of ancient Hellenes; similarly with Etruscans and Venets in respect to Rome and Venice, and Dacians with respect to Romanians. It is interesting also that this literature makes a strong move to establish

2

Olga Lukovic-Pjanovic says, as quoted in Scekic (1994: 99): “The Serbian language, according to all the documents and evidence gathered up till now, more than all other languages we have been able to compare it with, seems to be a language undiscovered by Westerners showing not only linguistic continuity starting from the ancient Vedic, or even the pre-Vedic period, but also continuity with both the Vedic tradition and Vedic spiritual treasures almost in their totality.” 3 Srbenda is augmentative of Srbin (a Serb), and in the usage established, according to eoekim (1925: 169–170) in the mid-19th century, it denotes someone who is thoroughly and uncompromisingly devoted to everything Serbian, an “autochtonous, raw Serb without a trace of anything foreign” (eoekim 1925: 167). To this day, “srbenda” carries the connotations of rusticity, simplicity and “traditional” partriarchal values—the opposite of high culture polish and cosmopolitan sophistication. This equation of a mythological being from the Vedas with the romanticized rusticity of the Serbian variant of the noble savage is especially piquant.

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Serbian pre-eminence in respect to Slavs, by arguing that all the Slavs were originally Serbs. One can easily see the politics of this move which reverses the intra-Slavic hierarchy, especially the older brother claim of Russians. If all the Slavs were originally Serbs, than Russians too are our “younger brothers.” This whole literature rests on a fundamental conspiracy theory. The enemy is the Nordic or Berlin-Viennese School of History—a powerful cabal bent on suppressing the ndings of what is often called the Serbian Autochtonistic School. While the Autochtonistic School claims that the Serbs are the authochtonous inhabitants of the Balkans, the Danubian Basin and even wider areas in Europe and Asia since times immemorial, the Nordic School pushes the theory that we all learned in school as Holy Writ, namely, that Serbs came to the Balkans only in the 7th century. To claim pre-Vedic India as homeland and the status of proto-Aryans, is of course, quite sufcient to out-ancient all these powerful historic deniers of Serbian antiquity. There is, however, another theory that puts the origins of Serbs even further back into pre-history. In the late sixties (1965–68) archaeological excavations on the banks of Danube near the Djerdap straits led by Dragoslav Srejovim exposed the culture that came to be known as Lepenski Vir which dated back to about 6,000 B.C. Remains of buildings, tombs evidencing strange burial rituals, sophisticated stone, bone and horn weapons and various jewelry were found, making it one of the most important Mesolithic nds in Europe. Most striking were the monumental sandstone gurines (probably of deities and demons) with their characteristic downturned mouths and sh-like eyes. The oldest Lepenski Vir sites belonged to hunter-sher-gatherers. Later dwellings built over the same site and elsewhere in Eastern Serbia (middle Danubian region) belonged to early Neolithic agriculturalists and pastoralists (5,000 –4,500 B.C.) of what is called the Staroevo culture. For Srejovim, these archaeological discoveries suggested the possibility that the impetus for the great cultural take-off did not have to come to Europe from the Near East but that one of its possible originating points was the authochtonous culture of Lepenski Vir.4 The leap that Srejovim never made, however,

4

“Lepenski Vir is proof that the Mesolithic is not the ‘dark age’ of European prehistory but only a prolonged period of gestation and that the rst great advance of European culture in the Post-Glacial period was not fertilized by outside inuences

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was, predictably, easily made by searchers after Serbian immemorial antiquity. Lepenski Vir culture was patriarchal, it venerated re, the hearth and the dead. The pagan Serbian religion, as reconstructed by the noted historian of religion, Veselin najkanovim, was also centered around an ancestor cult. This is enough for eoekim and others like him to conclude that “the cradle of the Slavs is in the Danubian Basin, and that “the Serbs, since their embryonic stage inhabited they same ground they inhabit now.” Lepenski Vir reveals the truth, he says, “the truth about ourselves, that has been attacked by Germans, the Vatican and the Turks for centuries” (eoekim 1994: 112). eoekim does notice, uncharacteristically for this genre, that there is a logical inconsistency between the Mesolithic Danubian and pre-Vedic Indian origin of the Serbs. He resolves it in a footnote. The discovery of Lepenski Vir, he says, “suggested another theory according to which the Sorabs, or the ancient Serbs, originated not in India but in the Danubian region, from which they then migrated to India, taking their culture with them and bringing it to fruition with Vedic religious hymns and the Laws of Manu” (ibid. 112).

Serbian Archaeology’s Response to Theories of Serb Antiquity How did ofcial Serbian archaeology respond to all of these theories of Serbian antiquity? I knew that it tended to focus on either prehistory or the Roman presence on present-day Serbian territory rather than the Slavic or Serbian past. In July of 1996, I had the honor of spending two days with Professor Dragoslav Srejovim at the Gamzigrad excavation site in Eastern Serbia.5 As a discoverer of both Lepenski Vir and the late Roman era Imperial palaces in Gamzigrad and

but arose spontaneously, from the awakening of the long-concealed energies of the Danubian culture of the Late Paleolithic. This is a signicant fact. It shows that Europe did not have to borrow from the Near East in order to rise above the past and nd the strength for a creative future. Lepenski Vir is a proof that achievement took place in Europe independently. Its unexpected revelation and its exceptional features prove that our knowledge is still limited” (Srejovim 1972: 15). 5 He was seriously ill from lung cancer and he died only three months later at the age of 65, so it was my last chance to talk to a man who was not only the dean of Serbian archaeology and a world famous archaeologist, but a cultural institution in his own right.

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earkamen, Srejovim was the premier authority on these traditional foci of Serbian archaeology. “Serbs have this megalomaniac trait,” Srejovim told me, “the Piedmont complex, which makes them play patrons to their unwilling neighbors. So, as long as everything is ne, the Serbs don’t think they have anything to prove to anybody about their greatness. That is one of the reasons, he said, why Serbian archaeology neglected the period from the settling of Slavs in the Balkans to their Christianization (VI–X century), and why we have so little data about that period of our past: When this last (nationalist) euphoria started it was too late to make up for the lost time. There were no real specialists in this area. Then there appeared that assistant professor who took it over and he claimed that he found Slavs as early as the Roman period . . . At that moment this kind of research was lucrative but it was done unprofessionally, to say the least, and was often quite bizarre (sumanuto). There is an example, for instance, of that guy who presented himself as an expert on Etruscans (Svetislav Bilbija) and who bragged that he had deciphered their inscriptions by using Cyrillic?! and Olga Lukovic-Pjanovim (in her book Serbs . . . the Most Ancient People) cites him totally uncritically. Now it’s reversed again into the other extreme and now anything that smells of Serbs (in archaeology or history) is suspicious and made odious by the previous period’s excesses (parenthesis mine).

Even though it was not his specialty, Srejovim told me he’d like to see more research on our national past, even if it is fueled by nationalist motives. More facts will be accumulated, and in time, after the nationalistic excesses blow over, the data will remain, on which a solid edice of reliable knowledge could be painstakingly built. Srejovim took a public stance against all kinds of crackpot theories in the 1990s calling them “euphoric delusions of lunatics,” and “totally fraudulent claims about Serbian prehistory” in a 1994 interview (Vreme of Aug. 8, 1994). “Instead of endeavoring to make our people feel truly proud,” he said in that interview, “knowing what great things were created on the territory of Serbia, the great spiritual creations of various populations and peoples, and instead of that being the pride and hope of the citizens of Serbia, it is in some people’s interest to build our hope on deceptions and to confound us with lies.” “The books by various painters and amateurs who claim that the Serbs are the most ancient people do not worry me,” Srejovim said, “but it is terrible if a scientist joins such mindless and uncontrolled behavior. This is then to be severely condemned.” I assume that at least one of

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the scientists Srejovim was talking about was Djordje Jankovim—that same “assistant professor” who “took over” Slavic archaeology and did “unprofessional” but lucrative research in Republika Srpska.6 I learned more about Jankovim from one of his colleagues from the Belgrade University Archaeology department with whom I talked in July of 1995, exactly a year before my pilgrimage to Gamzigrad. Jankovim’s colleague was particularly incensed at him and “those like him” precisely because he thought that Serbian archaeology has always been unusually free of nationalistic bias. Since its beginnings in the 1840s, Serbian archaeology focused on pre-history and non-Serbian themes, he said. This is in contrast to practically all our neighbors whose archaeology is thoroughly imbued by the national element— Romanians, Bulgarians, even Hungarians, not to mention Greeks and Macedonians. His thesis, to which he laid copyright claims, was that one of the possible explanations for this state of affairs is the fact that in Serbia there are well-preserved monasteries with frescoes. “Frescoes are political statements. The way the rulers are depicted in them signies a lot and sends a denitive message,” he said, “just like television does today. This, alongside with coins with the ruler’s image was what presented the ruler to the illiterate people. Therefore, he said, “there isn’t much pressure on archaeology in Serbia to dig out the history of the nation. Croats, for instance, had to dig out artifacts that pointed to their kings.” In a word, he insisted that Serbian archaeology, from its inception, was almost completely free of the obsession with the nation, that this is a big advantage over practically all our neighbors where this is not the case, and that we should preserve that advantage so that we can look the world in the eye.

6

Jankovim claimed that Serbs used to burn their dead and then expose the bones above the ground. Such sites were recognizable as small tombs ( gromile) and through their diffusion, the spread of Serbs could be inferred for the period between 7th and 9th century for which there are practically no written sources on Serbs on the Balkans. I am not qualied to judge the validity of such claims, nor are the details important in the context of this paper. Jankovim’s colleague claimed that the evidence was “weak or nonexistent, but because there are practically no traces of Slavs in this region from 7–9 centuries, it is possible to hypothesize all kinds of things and nobody can disprove them.”

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Milin of Mapva, the “Mad Painter”: Peasants and the Inverted Perspective As a scientist and scholar, Srejovim said that he worried more about people with scientic credentials promoting “euphoric delusions” than about, as he put it, “various painters and amateurs who claim that the Serbs are the most ancient people.” It was quite obvious which painter Srejovim meant—the self-proclaimed “mad painter,” Milim of Maova who since the early 1960s made a career out of Salvador Dali-like eccentricity and extravagant public boasting.7 In the late eighties and particularly early nineties, he became one of the main disseminators of the various theories of Serbs as the most ancient people. For years he was taken as an amusing eccentric whose excesses were indulged as artistic liberties, and whose outspoken Serbian nationalism, being packaged as ravings of a “mad painter,” was more or less tolerated even by Tito. Then in the mid-1980s, when the genres began to blur (as evidenced by Slapfak’s analysis of the Mexican charlatan episode), it was suddenly not entirely clear whether Milim was just an “eccentric artist,” or whether he was “for real.” When he was commissioned to paint the walls of the Orthodox church in Vohdovac (part of Belgrade), there was a public outcry. Orthodoxy has very strict rules about who can paint churches and a very strict canon of how to do it, and by even the most relaxed criteria, allowing Milim to paint the walls of a church in his eccentric surrealist style was blasphemous.8 In 1991, another Serbian cultural institution broke its tacit gate-keeping rules. Milim was the rst living Serbian painter to have a retrospective exhibition in the National Museum.9 This was an occasion for a long interview in Duga (No. 463, 23 Nov. 1991) in which Milim managed to present practically all the tenets of the “Serbs as the Most Ancient People”

7 The string of “honoric” he gives himself can give a good taste of his eccentricity. He calls himself, Milim, the General of Lepenski Vir, the Knight of Machva, the skeleton of Radovan, the Heliocentric, the grandson of Pantelija, the Serbian barbarogenius, the ancestor of Serb vampire wayside tombstones (krajputafa), the one who periodically rises from the grave and opposes mathematics. 8 A certain level of spiritual purity, including vows of chastity comparable to that of monks is demanded from the painters, and the rules of representing religious themes and personages have been passed down for centuries without much change (see Florensky 1996). 9 At that time, however, the ofcial Serbian Orthodox Church did not show its support by sending representatives to the grand opening. Only an excommunicated priest, garko Gavrilovim, was present.

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theories prompted by the seemingly serious questions of the interviewer (Ljiljana Habjanovim Djurovim). In March of 1995, Milim had another exhibition, this time in the Belgrade Ethnographic Museum, pompously titled: “My Farewell to Alberti’s False, Narrowing Renaissance Perspective.” This event showed what I call the “Byzantine revival” in Serbia of the 1990s in a very “graphic” way. Moreover, it is a particularly striking example of how the tokens of the Byzantine Great Tradition get mixed with the emblems of the Little Tradition10 of Serbian peasant culture. The opening was announced by the sound of church bells, the choir sang an Orthodox liturgical song, and the central theme of the exhibit was the “inverted perspective” of Byzantine religious art.11 On the other hand, the event was taking place in the Ethnographic Museum—a typical Central European temple of the Romantic Volksgeist , amid relics of peasant life. Here is how the art critic Djordje Kadijevim reconciled the two elements in his speech: Milim of Maova found a model of a similar understanding of space, often identical to the Byzantine one, in the treasure house of our ethnographic heritage, in our folk art. This folklore element deeply infuses Milim’s artistic imagination . . . In the creations of these folk artists, so close and dear to Milim of Maova, there is not a trace of Latin, Renaissance understanding of space. Those anonymous creators of masterpieces sheltered under the roof of the Ethnographic Museum were under the inuence of our Church art, they revered frescoes on the wall of Nemanjim’s monasteries, were awed by the carvings on their iconostases. By returning to the “Orthodox” Byzantine “expanding” perspective he encountered in their creations, Milim of Maova returns in a symbolic way to the roots of our national art tradition.

10 “The great tradition, according to Robert Redeld, “is cultivated in schools or temples; the little tradition works itself out and keeps itself going in the lives of the unlettered in their village communities. The tradition of the philosopher, theologian, and literary man is a tradition consciously cultivated and handed down; that of the little people is for the most part taken for granted and not submitted to much scrutiny or considered renement and improvement” (Redeld 1989: 42). I have borrowed these terms from Redeld as a useful shorthand while aware of the their problematic nature. 11 The museum was completely packed for the opening, and Milic staged one of his typical performances. He read his long “Manifesto” dressed rst all in black—to symbolize the evil Western “narrowing” perspective to which he was saying farewell, and later all in white to show his conversion to the Byzantine “inverted” or expanding perspective.

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Here again, we encounter the image of illiterate peasants staring in awe at the frescoes of medieval Serbian monasteries. We will return to this key image after an excursion through some other manifestations of the “Byzantine Revival” in 1990s Serbia.

The Eurasian Internationale or the Byzantine Commonwealth In July 1994, as a part of its Summer Festival BELEF, Belgrade hosted a “Gathering of the Cultures of Spiritually Kindred, Eastern Orthodox Peoples” (Sabor kultura duhovno bliskih, istoonohrifmanskih naroda) attended by representatives from Armenia, Bulgaria, Greece, Georgia, South and North Ossetia, Crimean Republic, Cyprus, Nagorno Karabakh, Republika Srpska, Republika Srpska Krajina, Rumania, Russia, Ukraine and Bielorus. The Gathering was accompanied by musical performances and art exhibitions, but the central event was a roundtable discussion on the “Eastern Orthodox World and the Challenges of the New World Order.” Dispargingly or admiringly, the Gathering was variously labeled in the Belgrade press as The Eurasian Internationale, or The Byzantine Commonwealth. It was opened by the then vice-president of Yugoslav federal government, geljko Simim and attended by a number of prominent Serbian intellectuals (linguist Pavle Ivim, historians Milorad Ekmedhim, and Veselin Djuretim, writer Dobrica ™osim, our “mad painter” Milim of Maova, etc.),12 but its real grey eminence was Dragof Kalajim, a painter, art critic, essayist, publisher and editor of the popular Duga. Tall, handsome and dandyish, Kalajim was lling a small niche in Belgrade cultural life in the 1970s and 1980s with his diatribes against modern art and all kinds of Western decadence. Full of obscure, hermetic references and the kind of erudition that dazzles the half-educated, he combined the views of the Western elitist right (appropriating the likes of Julius Evola, Ortega y Gasset and Ernest Jünger), and of the

12 A panegyrical review of the round table that appeared in Duga, titled: “The Third Way of the Orthodox” lists “forty three Ph.D.s, over twenty university professors, ve theologians, seven philosophers, a dozen reputable writers, two military strategy experts, a number of well known economists, one president of a republic, two foreign ministers, ve high ranking diplomats, seven academicians, a number of directors of strategic studies institutes . . . coming from and area extending from Boka Kotorska Bay (on Montenegrin coast) to the Bering Sea and Kamchatka, from Severnaya Zemlya to Cyprus.”

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Russian “Euroasianists” (like P. Savitsky, Valentin Rasputin, Aleksander Dugin and Igor Shafarevich). His essays and books were a compendium of conspiracy theories in which Freemasonry, the Tri-Lateral Commission, the Vatican and most importantly the “usurers’ international” (lihvarska internacionala) led by the “high priests of supra-national capital,” (hreci nad-nacionalnog kapitala) helped by the fth column of domestic “mondialists” and “deracinated, decadent cosmopolitans” try to undermine the “spiritual vertical” of the Serbian and other Orthodox cultures of the Byzantine Commonwealth. Like many previously marginal phenomena, Kalajim and his little coterie suddenly gained in public prominence with the general blurring of criteria that started in the late 1980s and was in full swing in the early 1990s. They formed “The New Serbian Right” (Nova srpska desnica) and started publishing a glossy journal “Our Ideas” (Nafe ideje). The phrase that perhaps best characterizes the agenda of the ‘Eurasian Internationale’ is “the third way.” In the words of one of the participants, Natalia Narochnitskaya: In the Orthodox world the awareness has ripened of the necessity to formulate and undertake what A.I. Solzhenytsin called “the third way” of the Orthodox. More than anybody else we have personally experienced the evil and degeneration of communism. Thank God, there’s no return to it. We shouldn’t however, repeat the tragic mistakes of the equally degenerate Western liberalism and its corresponding economy (in his writings Dragos Kalajic illuminated that better and with greater tenacity than I could). That does not mean that we shouldn’t take over the good elements, the positive experiences of both sides. In that way we will nd crystallized before us a “cross-like order.” The Horizontal [axis] will be made of the undoubtedly positive heritage of the left: social justice, social concern, equal starting positions for all . . . The Vertical will be embodied in the spiritual-ethical and god-aspiring hierarchy of the classical European right, in the aristocracy of spirit and virtues . . .

These appeals to hierarchy and the aristocracy of the spirit could nd hardly any resonance with anything in Serbian history and experience relevant to the present situation, and in their extreme misalignment with arguably the core Serbian sentiment of egalitarianism13 they often

13 The solution to the puzzle of why this small group that proclaimed itself “rightist” and openly aligned itself with racist and Fascist ideologies was not only tolerated but actively promoted by the nominally “left” regime of the Socialist Party of Serbia in the early 1990s lies in one important tenet they both shared—anti-liberalism and anti-capitalism.

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bordered on the comic. What did resonate well with the Serbian public at that time and acted as a salve for the spoilt identity of a pariah people (at least on the international stage at that time) was disparagement of the West combined with the afrmation of one’s own cultural or “spiritual” superiority. Tracing that cultural superiority back to the Byzantine heritage, however, poses a number of problems. One of them is whether there is any justication in claiming continuity between modern Serbian culture and that particular Great Tradition. I am not qualied to present a comprehensive history of Byzantine inuences on Serbian culture that alone could provide a full answer. Yet in what follows I will endeavor to show a few glimpses of what that heritage could represent to present-day people in Serbia through a few vignettes.

Continuity or Discontinuity: The Spiritual Academy in Studenica Monastery A recently deceased Serbian poet, Ivan Lalim, hailed in a Politika article of 27 April 1996 as “A Poet of Serbian Byzantium,” says in his poem “Rafka”: Stars over Rafka are not like other stars: Short fuse, the powder wet, the ash unclear, The Big Cart14 in blood and mud mired, And the hills werewolshly red at dawn— Then why does the angel agree to pause On the wall of the new church, to light this place By dubious glory marked? .................................

In Lalim’s poetry, the critic Aleksandar Jovanovim writes in that article, “Byzantium is truly an open, polysemic symbol and could be understood in a multiplicity of ways: as a homeland and extended memory of a culture, as a search for the cultural and civilizational identity, and as a dream of continuity which tells us that there was little continuity in actuality.” In July of 1996 I visited the Studenica monastery some 200 kilometers south of Belgrade. It was built by Grand Prince Stefan Nemanja

14 The local term for the constellation of the Big Dipper is “Velika kola”, which translates as Big Cart, or Great Wagon (cf. British usage, The Wain).

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(1113–1199), the ruler of the Serbian state of Rafka (of the eponymous poem by Lalim) and the founder of the Serbian Nemanjimi dynasty.15 At the time of my visit, Studenica was hosting the “Spiritual Academy,” a kind of Summer camp for Orthodox liturgical singing led by the Academician Dimitrije Stefanovim, a great authority on Serbian medieval church music. For eight days, young people, already members of various amateur choirs from Serbia, assembled there to learn the art of complex liturgical singing. I arrived the day before the last and attended the evening talk given by Dimitrije Stefanovim in the large refectory. Rather than lecturing, Stefanovim was showing slides of Serbian monasteries, of frescoes, and medieval manuscripts and improvising around them. With enormous erudition and contagious enthusiasm he was weaving a fascinating web of associations spanning centuries of Serbian history. He would for instance, go from a particular manuscript to the monastery in which it is kept to a famous fresco in that monastery to the holy relics of a saint kept there and then launch into the story of how these relics were carried from one monastery to another over the centuries of exile and return prompted by the ebbs and ows of conquering empires. He recounted an experience he and his students had before an icon brought to Szentendre (Sent Andreja) in Hungary by the largest such wave of migration from Ottoman-occupied Serbia—the great migration under the Patriarch Arsenije narnojevim in 17th century. “When we looked at that icon,” Stefanovim said, “and when we tried to analyze it, we understood how that art, painting and music, and text and the liturgy, how all of that is assembled together and of a piece so that it could not be set apart.” It was that coherent unity that I glimpsed emerge from Stefanovim’s thick web of associations linking monasteries, frescoes and manuscripts, migrating relics and icons, architecture, music and liturgy—the unity of what used to be the Byzantine-derived Great Tradition of Orthodoxy in the Serbian lands.

15 Nemanja’s youngest son, Rastko, who adopted the name Sava after becoming a monk, established the independent Serbian Church and became its rst archbishop. Under the inuence of Sava, Nemanja took monastic orders in Studenica, when he assumed the name Simeon, and then retired to Chilandar Monastery on Mt. Athos. After he died in Chilandar, Sava brought his relics to Studenica where their cult still thrives. Simeon was canonized as St. Simeon Myrobliptos (Sv. Simeon Mirotooivi). Due to its special connection to the sanctied Nemanjim dynasty and St. Sava, the founder of Serbian Church, the Studenica monastery always held a special place in the hierarchy of Serbian monasteries. Its central Church of the Virgin is an architectural masterpiece and its frescoes among the most beautiful on the territory of Serbia.

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As he was showing his slides, Stefanovim would quiz the audience about what this fresco depicted, or where that icon was kept, or what was the most famous three-word expression in this manuscript? In itself, this quiz format was nothing extraordinary, but the way Stefanovim framed these questions was quite distinctive. Over and over again he would plead: “I am asking only for that minimum that everyone should know . . . You have to know this, I mean, you don’t have to, but you should, you really should. I repeat, this is ours, we are a part of this, and please, don’t let it be that we cannot recognize these, as they say, at the rst glance . . .” All Greeks know these things, he said, “since early childhood, so to say.” Stefanovim’s tone of an exasperated educator who nevertheless cannot blame his wards for what he considers criminal ignorance reminded me vividly of the tone our instructors at Jewish summer camp used as they tried to instill some elementary knowledge of Judaism in totally assimilated Jewish children—their “you should at least know what Hanukah is,” is the exact equivalent of Stefanovim’s anguished pleas. In both cases, a handful of experts were trying to re-instill at least the rudiments of a Great Tradition into younger generations who had completely lost touch with it. At some point, Stefanovim showed a slide of an old manuscript. Who is the youngest here? he shouted, “quick, quick, give me the youngest, let the youngest, what is it, 16, anyone 16, 17, come over quick, don’t be afraid.” While the search for the youngest present was going on, Stefanovim boomed: “Children, the issue here is whether we have any continuity and whether we are able to read something that was written in the 14th century. “Finally a 17-year-old girl came before the screen and with some help from Stefanovim, she managed to decipher the line: “Hvalite jego psaltiri i gusli” (Praise Him psalteries and gusle). “Therefore,” Stefanovim concluded, “we can more or less say that the alphabet (azbuka) has in essence remained . . .”16 “Only ten minutes ago,” he said, “the monks nished the evening liturgy (bdenie) ending it with those very same lines which are sung to this day.”

16 A relative from Israel related a similar demonstration to me in 1988, at the site of a stone inscription at least 2500 old. When he toured Israel some years before, the guide seated the group in front of that inscription and took about 15 minutes to instruct all these speakers of modern Hebrew how to read it—thus demonstrating the continuity spanning thousands of years.

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Yes, Studenica monks were singing the same lines as they did in the fourteenth century and a high school student could be made to decipher a fourteenth-century text, but it was obvious that save for a few experts like Stefanovim who made it their lifelong calling, the majority of the younger generations in Serbia did not have access to what could be called a Great Byzantine Tradition, at least not in the way their Greek counterparts do—instilled in them from early childhood as a matter of general education. But this discontinuity was not just a matter of Communism suppressing religious education for half a century. The rift between the Great Tradition symbolized by Byzantine-style frescoes in Serbian monasteries and the Little Tradition symbolized by illiterate peasants staring at them through the centuries of Ottoman rule has a much longer history. After the fall of the medieval Serbian states and effective elimination of the local aristocracy, the Orthodox clergy remained the only bearer of the High Byzantine-derived culture. The question of how much exactly was preserved and to what extent the Orthodox Church managed to keep alive some of that heritage for the illiterate rayah in the intervening centuries is a question that demands detailed historical investigation. What is more relevant here is that the two Traditions did emerge as distinctly congured ideological positions in the nineteenth century and that due to particular political and ideological circumstances they came to a head-on clash known as “The War for Serbian Language and Orthography.” In that ‘war’ the illiterate peasants, led by the language reformer Vuk Karadhim won a total victory over the custodians of the Byzantine-derived High Culture—the conservative clergy and educated Serbian “higher classes” from Austrian Vojvodina and Slavonia. Even though the victory for one side was total, the arguments of the vanquished periodically resurfaced in the form of laments over the broken continuity with the only High Culture to which Serbs could legitimately aspire. Before going to the most recent echoes of that battle, let me rst sketch out what the war was about and who the main protagonists were.

Vuk’s War for the Serbian Language and Orthography After taking part in the First Serbian Uprising in 1804, Vuk Karadhim found himself in Vienna in 1813 as a protégé of Jernej Kopitar—the powerful censor for all Slavic, Romanian, Greek, and Albanian books

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published in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A student of Schlegel, von Humboldt, and Herder, Kopitar was a “notoriously zealous advocate of “national” languages, and believed that Slavic movements inside Austria would eventually fulll his dream of Austria being a Slavic nation-state” (Greer 1997).17 The point of origin for such a language was to be in the speech of the “folk,” and in a world that resonated strongly with to the ideas of Herder and Grimm, Vuk was a heaven-sent prodigy—a speaker of a pristine vernacular, and imbued with precisely the kind of oral epic poetry and folk tale tradition that was all the craze in Europe of that time. It was then Vuk’s own speech that became the “the ideal, authoritative, pure standard of Serbian speech and hence the Serbian language” (Ibid.) The main opponents of Vuk’s radical language standardization projects were the Austrian Serbs who were the only representatives of Serbian literate culture. Greer outlines three alternatives that existed at that time: The most radically “Orthodox” approach to the Serbian language would be one in which the existing written tradition would continue, undisturbed by and separate from any Serbian speech whatsoever. This camp, which controlled all Serbian presses until Vuk’s debut, in effect advocated a strong linguistic tie to the traditions of Orthodox Christianity. A moderate reformist view of standardization, advocated by the majority of productive Serbian writers of the time, would keep much of the abstract lexicon of Church Slavic, while attempting to replace most of the everyday written language with material based upon speech. Finally, Vuk’s idea of Serbian had no place whatsoever for literary tradition or the authority of literary production. The current written language, viewed as corrupt and unwieldy, was to die out in favor of one based exclusively on speech.

Language and orthography were an important political issue for Austrian Serbs. To stubbornly preserve the hybrid language and Church orthography, marked by heavy Russian inuence, thus became a traditional national policy of the Austrian Serbs as a bulwark against the threat Austro-Hungarian expansionism posed for Serbian national and religious identity within the Empire. On the other hand, Vuk’s radical project was at least initially in alignment with Kopitar’s national lan17 The Serbian language “was one of the so-to-speak “test cases” for the concept of “national language,” and Kopitar’s implementation of the idea through Vuk Karadhim,” as Charles Greer argues, “is a better example of national language creation than any other in Europe” (Ibid.).

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guage policies whose explicit aim was precisely to make Vienna, not Moscow, the centre of Slavdom. The Serbian Orthodox clergy could thus attack Vuk’s reform as an Austrian Catholic plot to undermine the Serbian Church and thus the Serbian national cause in Austria (see Selimovim 1970: 82–3; 95–97 and Skerlim 1925: 260). The political context surrounding this ‘language war’ became irrelevant in time, but the direction Serbian literature as well as cultural life in general took was decisively set by the fact that it was Vuk’s alternative that won the day. As history is written by the winners, Vuk’s opponents are now remembered as little more than simpletons destined to oblivion. Yet, as the great Bosnian writer Mefa Selimovim put it in his For and Against Vuk, some of their arguments were not without merit and kept reappearing in different guises, especially at times when “something important was changing in our orientations” (Selimovim 1970: 105). One of the arguments was that Vuk’s “language of peasants and herders” lacked the abstract vocabulary, the means for expressing subtle, inner, psychological states, or matters spiritual that transcend everyday pragmatic reality—all already existing in Church Slavonic or the hybrid literary language based on it. The inuential critic Jovan Skerlim raised this issue at the turn of the century by reporting the following dialogue that took place between Vuk and the other pillar of Serbian culture, the Montenegrin Archbishop and poet of the “Mountain Wreath,” Petar Petrovim Njegof: —Verily, Mr. Vuk, the archbishop said, this language of ours is very impoverished. It doesn’t have the word for “idea” or for “era,” and so many other concepts. Master, Vuk replied, if the people (narod) could nd a name for each part, each tiny piece, each screw and bolt on the cart, they could have found the names for these concepts as well, had there been a need for them. When they are needed, the people will nd them (Skerlim 1925: 272).

The last chapter of Selimovim’s For and Against Vuk is devoted to Gavril Stefan Venclovim—a Serbian monk who lived in South Hungary at the end of 17th century and whose poetry was completely forgotten until a young scholar edited and published his manuscripts in 1966. Selimovim stands in awe before the “wondrous” Venclovim. Here was a language full of vernacular vitality yet able to express the inner, the subtle, the transcendent. Is it possible that a poetic Serbian language imbued with such marvelous expressive potential already existed more than two centuries ago?” Selimovim asks. “The missing link has been found,

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the continuity has been reestablished,” he exults, but we are confused, for it is too late. Serbian literature did not ow from this obscure and forgotten monk. He disappeared without leaving a trace, and after him, starting in the mid-18th century, owing to Russian inuence “a strange, static, supposedly panslavic language incomprehensible to the ordinary people starts to dominate,” resulting in a serious stagnation in culture, in language, and in literature, in a great step back in comparison to Venclovim. That Slavic Esperanto had no chance, and the national uprising had to put its liquidation on its list of priorities. Thus everything had to start from the beginning, from the eternal popular basis, from popular songs and fables, from hard laborer’s speech (Selimovim 1970: 153–4).

Between the Byzantine Commonwealth, the Myth of Kosovo and the UN Vuk was resurrected yet again in the mid-1980s in Serbia, and that “resurrection” could be seen as yet another point “where it all started.” “The power elite took its rst steps towards instrumentalizing popular tradition for political uses at the bi-centennial celebration of Vuk Karadhim’s birth (in 1987).” a Belgrade ethnologist suggested. “Vuk Karadhim, the man who formed most key symbols of Serbdom, himself became one of its symbols, and the pomp with which he was celebrated symbolized a change of attitude towards the Serbian nation and tradition” (Naumovim 1994: 103)18 Vuk’s image was used as an emblem to signal (or feign) an ideological change—from Communism to a fuzzily dened Serbian nationalism. Both the regime which pre-emptied the Serbian nationalist-populist position and the opposition parties which were striving to regain that position by outdoing Milofevim tended to indiscriminately mix together a whole array of decontextualized emblems of Serbian identity. Thus mixed with Vuk, and those emblems of Serbdom associated with him, the public space became glutted in the 1990s by images taken from what was strictly speaking the Byzantine-derived Great Tradition. The White Angel (the most famous

18 It took another three years, however, and rm establishment of Milofevim in power, before the turn was completed: when new elementary school readers were published in the Summer of 1990, instead of Tito, it was Vuk Karadhim who peered out from the rst page.

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Serbian fresco from Milefeva monastery), for instance, was spreading its wings everywhere—behind prison bars on a poster protesting UN sanctions, in Tourist Agencies’ windows and on the ceramic-point pens imported from Korea!19 The argument which sharply opposes Vuk’s Romantic populist legacy to the Byzantine-derived High Culture, however, resurfaced again very forcefully in the recent round of acrimonious literary polemics initiated by the Belgrade writer Svetislav Basara.20 Basara was by no means the rst to take Vuk to task as directly responsible for the backwardlooking cultural isolationism based on an idealization of the peasantry and disdain for the “decadent West” (truli zapad). At the turn of the century, Jovan Skerlim leveled the same accusation against Vuk and contrasted him with the Enlightenment rationalism and cosmopolitanism of Vuk’s older contemporary, Dositej Obradovim. Basara’s case is interesting, however, because the utopia that emerges from his criticism of Vuk is not the rationalist Enlightenment one, but the utopia of unbroken continuity with Byzantium. As Belgrade ethnologist Ivan nolovim (1996) presented it in his brilliant analysis, Basara’s argument runs as follows: If a language has weak expressive potential, if it is imprecise, crude, and full of loan words, such as Serbian language has been after Vuk’s reforms, then the nation speaking it is condemned to endure at the margins of history. That language, peasant, pragmatic, concrete, vulgar, and earthy made “Serbian thinking” hopelessly mundane and provincial. Because Vuk profaned the language, Serbs cannot reach God. Another road, however, could have been taken—the imperial, sacred, Byzantine one—had not Vuk forcibly separated the Serbian language from the linguistic treasure house of the older literature. Basara’s argument, based on so-called “sacral” or “mystical” geopolitics,” nolovim says, “developed in the ranks of the European extreme

19 Such eclecticism could be seen not only as a sign of confusion (or of the spuriousness of such instrumentalization of tradition), but also as a marketing strategy designed to reach as many different constituencies as possible (by broadcasting on a wide band). 20 Basara saw himself as leading a cultural crusade against the Serbian literary establishment and its “godfather,” Dobrica ™osim, on behalf of the new generation of “postmodernist” writers. The polemic offers a good example of Serbian cultural ideology cleavages but as is usual in this genre, it relies heavily on the readers being able to decipher veiled insinuations based on their connoisseurship (minute knowledge) of the Serbian literary scene.

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right, which arrived on our shores owing to a group of authors gathered around the journal Our Ideas (Nage ideje).” Basara is against the aggressive Serbian nationalism because that nationalism is too folksy and vulgar. “Serbian culture and politics, founded on folklore and folk myth making,” nolovim summarizes Basara’s argument, “should give way to a sacral order founded on the myths of the medieval Serbian elite, Slavic being and Byzantine civilization. In other words, Basara is rejecting rightist populism in the name of rightist elitism” (ibid.). Those, who like Basara, are disappointed by the return to the epic Kosovo,” nolovim concludes his analysis, “are recommending a return to Byzantium. Nobody, including Basara, suggests a return to the United Nations, but many, and he is among them, rather expect that, as of tomorrow, Serbia will again gain membership in the alternative international organization of the spiritually gigantic and spiritually kindred nations called, as we all know, the Byzantine Commonwealth.

Conclusion: Vagaries of Imagined (or Invented) Continuity When people in the peripheries engage in inventing continuities, the desirable pasts they create are usually not entirely imagined. What will be selected is usually a period or an aspect of actual history that is seen to serve a number of purposes—from staking territorial claims to mending a spoilt identity. If that identity is seen by signicant others as corrupted by a long Turkish rule, for instance, then recourse can be had to emphasizing some kind of a Golden Age predating the Ottomans. While Greeks and Romanians have the option of claiming continuity with ancient Hellenes and Romans, respectively, the Serbs have no ancestor that the West would accept as its own illustrious predecessor. The only pre-Ottoman Golden Age that Serbs can claim with some justication is their Medieval Byzantine-derived High Culture. The problem is that even though monuments of that culture were well preserved, the continuity was not. The illiterate rayah could view in awe some of the nest Byzantine art in existence on the walls of their monasteries through centuries of Ottoman rule, but they were not inheritors of the full splendor of that Great Tradition. The other problem is that if the Serbs want to claim that they are heirs of that culture in order to escape their spoilt identity, they have to undertake an additional operation. As in the eyes of the West, the Byzantine civilization is denigrated as Oriental, despotic, petried and in any

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case inferior, and as the adjective ‘Byzantine’ came to connote a world of devious, crooked, innitely dense webs of intrigue, the Byzantine heritage has to be re-valued. It has to be shown that it was superior, not inferior to the civilization of the West with its roots in the Italian Renaissance. This move is very graphically exhibited by Milim’s embrace of the “Inverted perspective.” At the crudest level of pure buffoonery, his “Manifesto” was actually invoking a much subtler argument of Father Pavel Florensky—a Russian theologian, Orthodox priest, mathematician, scientist and art critic who perished in Siberia in 1937—who in his “Inverted perspective”21 and “Iconostasis.”22 opposes the Orthodox metaphysics of the icon to Renaissance and Protestant religious art, concluding that the latter are spiritually inferior. Another option is to skip the Byzantine ancestry entirely and look for continuity with something much older. In Serbia, this takes the form of often quite fantastic escapes into pre-Vedic India or even Mesolithic cultures. To claim Indo-European roots as a lineage conferring prestige today feels anachronistic in addition to being fantastic. The reason is probably that these theories were rst formed in the 19th century in opposition to German scholarship which was at the time obsessed with Indo-European philology and Aryan roots. The theories claiming the Lepenski Vir or Staroevo culture as proto-Serbian, on the other hand, are more recent and were probably encouraged in part by the iconic prominence of Lepenski Vir gurines. Oriented as much to domestic discourses as towards signicant others, the varied cultural lineages Serbs have been claiming since the “Mexican charlatan” discovered Troy in Herzegovina in 1985 often came mixed together in ways defying logic. The “mad” painter Milim is perhaps the most extravagant but certainly not the only example. In the Serbian pantheon of glorious ancestors, the Lepenski Vir gurines often rub shoulders with Byzantine White Angels and the long mustache of Vuk Karadhim.

21 An essay written in 1919 for the Commission for the preservation of art and antiquities of the Sergiei’s Church of the Trinity and presented in 1920 at a meeting of the Byzantine Section of the Moscow Institute for the Historical-Artistic Researches and Museology attached to the Russian Academy of the History of Material Culture. 22 Written in 1922, the essay was translated into English for the rst time in 1996 (Florensky 1996).

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nolovim, Ivan. 1996. Sozercanje. Naga Borba. Fernandez, James W. 1986. Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Florensky, Pavel. 1996. Iconostasis. Translated by Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Greer, Charles. 1997. Vuk Karadzic on How to Make a Language: Representing language conict, Serbia, 1818. Unpublished manuscript, Linguistics Department, U of California, Berkeley. Naumovim, Slobodan. 1994. Upotreba tradicije: politioka tranzicija i promena odnosa prema nacionalnim vrednostima u Srbiji 1987–1990. In Kulture u tranziciji, edited by M. Profim-Dvornim. Beograd: Plato. Redeld, Robert. 1989. The Little Community and Peasant Society and Culture, Midway Reprint. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. eoekim, Drafko. 1994. Sorabi: istoriopis, Saborna sfera; 3. Beograd—Podgorica: Sfairos—Timor. Selimovi, Mefa. 1970. Za i protiv Vuka. Sarajevo: Svjetlost. Skerlim, Jovan. 1925. Omladina i njena knjiievnost (1848–1871): izupavanja o nacionalnom i knjiievnom romantizmu kod Srba. Novo ispravljeno izdanje u redakciji Vladimira ™orovima. Beograd: Izdavacka knjizara Napredak. Slapfak, Svetlana. 1994. Ogledi o bezbriinosti, Apatridi. Beograd: Radio B 92. Srejovim, Dragoslav. 1972. Europe’s First Monumental Sculpture: New Discoveries at Lepenski Vir. Translated from the Serbo-Croat by Lovett F. Edwards. New York: Stein and Day. Todorova, Maria. 1997. Imagining the Balkans. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. West, Rebecca. 1969. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books. Wolff, Larry. 1994. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press. givkovim, Marko. 1990. Representing the Balkans: Symbolic Geography of the SouthEastern Margins of Europe. Unpublished manuscript, Anthropology Department, The University of Chicago. ——. 1997. We are Gypsy People Cursed by Fate: Dealing with Balkan Stigma in Serbia and Croatia. Paper read at The Second Conference of the Association for Balkan Anthropology (ABA), September 4–7, 1997, at Bucharest, Romania.

CHAPTER EIGHT

SPECTACLES OF PAIN: SUSAN SONTAG AND RUSSIAN WORLD WAR II PHOTOGRAPHY Elena Siemens University of Alberta

Described by one reviewer as a “coruscating sermon,” Susan Sontag’s controversial 2003 book Regarding the Pain of Others, her last published work, points an accusatory nger at more or less everyone involved in the production and reception of images of suffering.1 Having reevaluated her earlier convictions, she questions a number of core ideas expressed in her pioneering 1977 study On Photography. Sontag now objects to the “highly inuential analysis’ by such theorists as Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard, who argue that “each thing has to be turned into a spectacle to be real—that is, interesting—to us,” and that “war, like everything else that appears real, is médiatique.”2 She says she is no longer sure that after their “repeated exposure,” images “become less real,” and that “our culture of spectacle neutralizes the moral force of photographs of atrocities’ (105). In the book’s compelling conclusion, Sontag declares that to “speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism” and that there are millions of people who “do not have the luxury of patronizing reality” (110 –11). In answering Sontag’s call to arms, this essay discusses an “unprecedented” exhibit of war photography staged in Moscow in commemoration of the 55th anniversary of the end of World War II.3 Entitled Posviashchenie (Dedication), it included for the rst time ever a large international component and encouraged the Russian audience to view the Great Patriotic War as part of World

1 John Leonard, “Regarding the Pain of Others: Sontag Changes Lenses,” http:// www.wnbc.com/bookreview/2076077/detail.html. 2 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2003, 109–10. All subsequent citations to this book appear in parenthesis in the text. 3 Lyuba Pronina, “Faces and paths of the war: the Moscow House of Photography opens the Photo Biennial—2000,” The Russia Journal (13–14 May 2000), 7.

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War II, rather than as a separate, primarily national undertaking, as it was billed in the Soviet era. The show’s other distinctive trait, also contributing to reevaluating the legacy of World War II, was that it featured explicit images of injury and death, many of them gathered from private collections and state archives, including the former KGB archives, and previously unknown to Russian viewers. The show took place at the centrally located Maly Manezh exhibition hall, a recently renovated venue that originally housed Moscow’s rst electric station and subsequently served as a garage where the Kremlin ofcials parked their oversized cars. As described by the Itogi magazine reviewer Fedor Romer, the exhibit’s main attraction was its striking layout designed by artist Sergei Mironenko, formerly a member of the rebellious Soviet-era underground art group Mukhamor (The Toadstool). Romer goes on to say that as they leave the show, viewers most likely would remember various war-related props (such as fragments of rusted rail, parachute belts, and soil) used by the designer to decorate the interior, rather than individual black-and-white photographs lining

Maly Manezh exhibition hall, site of the Dedication show. Photo by the author.

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the walls.4 The exhibit’s unusual design, comments Romer, “pacies” the viewer and “transforms the historical drama into a spectacle.”5 This review supports Sontag’s observation that museums and art galleries fail to “guarantee referential conditions” in which to look at pictures of suffering and “be fully responsive to them” (120). Sontag argues that once they are hung on walls, even “the most solemn or heartrending” photographs become art and begin to “partake of the fate of all wall-hung or oor supported art displayed in public spaces,” that is they turn into “stations along a—usually accompanied—stroll” (121). She points out that the museum’s evolution “has gone far toward expanding this ambiance of distraction” and that the museum transformed into “a vast educational institution-cum-emporium, one of whose functions is the exhibition of art” (121). To illustrate this trend, she cites the use of “replicated environments” at, among other places, the Imperial War Museum of London, where an installation entitled The Blitz Experience recreates “conditions during the German bombing of London in 1940, including the simulation of an air raid as experienced in an underground shelter” (121). The unsettling questions raised in Sontag’s departing volume strike at the heart of the Moscow exhibit as well. In what follows, I will examine the work of two prominent artists represented at the Dedication show, Dmitry Baltermants and Yevgeny Khaldei, who produced some of the most celebrated images of World War II. More specically, I will analyze Baltermants’ photograph entitled Gore (Grief ), a panoramic shot capturing a Nazi atrocity in Crimea, and compare this well-known image to Khaldei’s radically different photograph of a collective suicide of a Nazi family in Vienna, a picture derived from the artist’s family archive, where it remained hidden from view for many decades. The essay will discuss the attitude to images of war sufferings in both the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, and consider whether, in the specic case of Russia, museum exhibits picturing such images fail, or, on the contrary, succeed in providing favourable “referential conditions” for viewing them.

4 5

Fedor Romer, “Khudozhestvennyi dnevnik,” Itogi (16 May 2000), 72. Ibid.

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elena siemens “Making Suffering Loom Larger”

One of Russia’s most celebrated photography artists, Dmitry Baltermants produced a number of iconic images of World War II, including the famous Ataka (Attack), a photograph reproduced in the ofcial poster for the Dedication exhibit. Shot in the winter of 1941 when Hitler’s army was approaching the outskirts of Moscow, it depicts Soviet soldiers with bayonets storming over a trench that shelters the photographer and another infantryman. In spite of its “propaganda purpose,” comments Mario Cutajar, Attack is a “wonderfully conceived” image reminiscent of the great Aleksandr Rodchenko in that its “overall effect is at once cinematic and epic.”6 Cutajar points out as well that its “quality of epic,” described by critics as “the hallmark of Soviet war photography,” connes this photograph “to that historical past which antedates the un-epic conicts in Vietnam and Afghanistan.”7 In tracing the history of war photography, Sontag writes that until World War I, “combat itself was beyond the camera’s ken,” and that when and if they conveyed the terror, the mostly anonymous images dating from 1914 to 1918 generally did so “in the epic mode, and were usually depictions of an aftermath: corpse-strewn or lunar landscapes left by trench warfare; gutted French villages the war had passed through” (20). The rst war to be covered in the modern sense, reports Sontag, was the Spanish Civil War, when photographs “could be taken in the thick of battle, military censorship permitting, and civilian victims and exhausted, begrimed soldiers studied up close” (21). The next turning point was Vietnam, “the rst to be witnessed day after day by television cameras,” a war that “introduced the home front to a new intimacy with death and destruction” (21). Given that images of war suffering “are so widely disseminated now,” writes Sontag, “it it easy to forget that, historically, photographers have offered mostly positive images of the warrior’s trade, and of the satisfaction of starting a war or continuing to ght one” (47–48). She points out that if “governments had their way, war photography, like much of war poetry, would drum up support for soldiers’ sacrices (48). This was certainly true of the Soviet World War II photography, as

6 Mario Cutajar, “Dmitri Baltermants,” http://mariotexts.tripod.com/articles/baltermants.htm. 7 Ibid.

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illustrated amply by Baltermants’ Attack. In the Soviet Union, where the situation was further aggravated by the ruling artistic doctrine of Socialist Realism, photographers were expected to capture the war with pathos and optimism. Depicting death, especially that of a Soviet soldier, was strictly prohibited and led to serious repercussions. If “any of his photographs had a dead Soviet soldier in it,” reports one Russian war photographer, “it would have meant an immediate ‘death sentence’ for him.”8 In Russia, as was the case in the West, pictures of atrocities were the only category of war images in which the representation of death was “more transparent” and “less controlled.”9 Baltermants’ photograph Grief that explicitly pictures the dead provides a good illustration of this. One of his best known and frequently exhibited images, it belongs to the artist’s 1942 cycle of photographs that documents a Nazi atrocity near Kerch in Crimea, where more than 176,000 people were killed. It is signicant that while portraying numerous corpses, the image still possesses the “quality of epic” found in the Attack photograph. Rather than focusing on the dead, Baltermants foregrounds the gure of an elderly woman, who is weeping in agony over the bodies of the deceased. The photograph’s other protagonist, arguably its main hero, is the ominous cloud-covered sky that engulfs everyone captured in the picture, both the dead and the living, including the grieving old woman in the foreground. With its poetic dark sky that, according to some reports, was a darkroom addition, Baltermants’ Grief is reminiscent of Viktor Vasnetsov’s 1880 painting After the Battle of Prince Igor Svyatoslavovich with the Polovtsy. Borrowing its subject from the twelfth-century epic The Igor Tale, this classic of Russian art depicts a vast battleeld littered with bodies of fallen warriors, with birds of prey circling over them, and a bloody moon rising in the dark sky. Critics have pointed out that Vasnetsov “dampens the tragedy of the event by infusing the canvas with an epic spirit and singing the bravery of the Russian men who perished for their native land.”10 As described by Dmitri V. Sarabianov, the

8 Lucian Perkins, “Russian Photojournalism Today,” http://www.digitaljournalist. org/issue9909/perkins.htm. 9 Caroline Brothers, War and Photography: A Cultural History, London: Routledge 1997, 175. 10 Liubov Zakharenkova, “Painting of the Second Half of the 19th Century,” in Masterpieces of Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow: The State Tretyakov Gallery 1994, 95.

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artist “deliberately distances himself from the specic fact,” and instead approaches the fact as epic, in which “objects, aspects of landscape and gures all serve as particular poetic symbols, and, accordingly differ from their real-life counterparts.”11 Baltermants’ photograph appears to pursue a similar strategy, as is evident not only from its highly symbolic composition, but also from its equally symbolic caption that, contrary to conventions of photography, lists no factual information, save the year when it was taken. As pointed out by Sontag, in painting it is commonplace that “a gory battlescape could be beautiful—in the sublime or awesome or tragic register of the beautiful” (75). By contrast, photography that “bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible is much criticised if it seems ‘aesthetic’; that is too much like art” (76). Because it is able to document, as well as “create works of visual art,” photography has been scrutinized with regard to “what photographers ought and ought not to do” (76). To illustrate this, Sontag refers to the campaign against Sabastiao Salgado, the author of the photographic project “Migrations: Humanity in Transition,” who received criticism for “producing spectacular, beautifully composed big pictures that are said to be ‘cinematic’” (78). Salgado was also criticized for “the highly commercialized situations in which his work was typically exhibited. However, argues Sontag, the problem resides in Salgado’s pictures themselves, specically in their “focus on the powerlessness,” and that “the powerless are not named in the captions” (79). “Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it,” argues Sontag, produces ambiguous results (79). She writes that while “all politics, like all history, is concrete,” images that conceive their subject on this grand scale in effect diminish compassion and make it abstract (79). This argument equally applies to Baltermants’ Grief that, like Salgado’s “Migrations,” refrains from naming “the powerless.” In the case of Baltermants’ photograph, the viewer also can barely discern the faces of the anonymous victims. In this respect, Grief takes a step further in making “suffering loom larger” than even Vasnetsov’s folklore-inspired painting. Although he draws their portratis from his imagination and in some instances embellishes their appearance, Vasnetsov nevertheless leaves the dead clearly visible, which in turn supplies his work with a greater degree of concreteness.

11 Dmitri V. Sarabianov, Russian Art: From Neoclassicism to the Avant-Garde: 1880 –1917, New York: Harry N. Abrams 1990, 157.

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“Assault on the Sensibility” Unlike Baltermants’ Grief, Evgeny Khaldei’s image of a collective suicide of a Nazi family in Vienna contradicts more or less all of the conventions that governed the representation of war in the Soviet Union. The photograph is also radically different from most of Khaldei’s own images that received ofcial approval, including his famous photograph of Soviet soldiers raising the ag of victory over the Reichstag in Berlin in May of 1945, one of the best known images of World War II. Devoid of the celebrated “quality of epic” characteristic of the ofcial Soviet war photography, the Vienna shot aims to capture the concrete, rather than the abstract, and, to use Sontag’s expression, leaves out “the trappings of the spectacular.” In analysing different approaches to the representation of war sufferings, Sontag distinguishes Goya’s early nineteenth century print series The Disasters of War that depicts the atrocities by Napoleon’s army during its invasion of Spain in 1808. Sontag writes that “Goya’s art, like Dostoevsky’s, seems a turning point in the history of moral feelings and of sorrow,” and that it introduces “a new standard for responsiveness to suffering” (44–45). In Goya’s prints that “move the viewer close to the horror,” war is no longer a spectacle, but instead “an assault on the sensibility of the viewer” (45). Specically, his landscape is never more than “an atmosphere, a darkness, barely sketched in” (44). Nor does the series narrate a continuing story; instead each image ‘stands independent of others.” Moreover, rather than serving as an invitation to look, Goya’s disturbing captions, such as “Esto es malo” (This is bad), “badger” the viewer (45). In the Russian tradition, the artist who comes closest to Goya is Vasily Vereshchagin, the author most famously of the 1872 striking painting Apotheosis of War that depicts a giant pyramid of skulls against the backdrop of an abandoned desert town. A prolic artist, Vereshchagin was “a kind of war correspondent, moving from one theatre of war to the next, only occasionally renting a studio in Munich or Paris for a couple of years in order to escape the reproach of Russian generals who accused him of distorting events.”12 When discussing his work, critics have emphasized Vereshchagin’s interest in recording “the most extreme situations and bloodiest episodes,” as well as his unusual “nearphotographic technique” that, in the opinion of some art historians, 12

Ibid., 147.

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was “ill-suited to the intended universal symbolism” of such works as Apotheosis.13 Shipka-Sheinevo: General Skobelev at Shipka (1878–79), one of Vereshchagin’s most controversial paintings, documents an historical episode from the Russian-Turkish war of 1877–78. Although it is ostensibly dedicated to the victory of Russians led by General Mikhail Skobelev, the picture foregrounds a snowy battleeld covered with contorted bodies of the dead. For their part, the victorious Russian soldiers and their jubilant General occupy the faraway background, where they are barely visible. In contrast to Vasnetsov’s After Prince Igor’s Battle and Baltermants’ Grief, Vereshchagin’s painting delivers a highly ambiguous message. Rather than glorifying the Russians and their victory, Vereshchagin exposes the horror of war and the barbarism of the victors. In this respect, Shipka-Sheinevo is more akin to Khaldei’s disturbing Vienna photograph that too leaves the viewer feeling ambivalent with regard to its message. One of the most troubling images featured at the Dedication exhibit, Khaldei’s photograph depicts a harrowing scene of the suicide of a Nazi ofcer and his family (gure 3). The picture portrays the bodies of three people, a woman and her two children. The head of the family, who, according to an eyewitness account, shot his wife and children before shooting himself, remains outside of the frame. Unlike Baltermants’ Greif, Khaldei’s image captures the distorted faces of the dead in full view. The only face the viewer cannot see clearly is that of the young daughter, who is stretched on a bench with her face partially hidden. As Khaldei learned from a Russian guard whom he met at the scene of the crime, the girl was shot last. According to the guard’s report, the girl was terried and cried, and the father “laid her down on the bench and shot her, too.”14 The setting of Khaldei’s image is fractured and mundane, rather than epic. In this respect, the photograph also differs signicantly from Baltermants’ panoramic shot that depicts a vast eld with an enormous dark sky above it. For his part, Khaldei portrays a secluded corner of a park that, as the viewer learns from the caption, is located near the Parliament building in Vienna. The impressive Parliament building constructed in the style of the neoclassical architecture is not included

13 14

Ibid., 148. Quoted in Von Moskau Nach Berlin: Jewgeni Chaldei, Berlin: Parthas 1999, 149.

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in the picture, and this too contributes to stripping the image of “the trappings of the spectacular.” Furthermore, rather than using a symbolic title characteristic of the epic photography, Khaldei provides strictly factual information. The photograph’s entire caption reads as follows: “Shepilov in a park near the Parliament: Collective suicide of a Nazi family: Vienna, 1945.” The most distinctive and unsettling aspect of Khaldei’s photograph is that it portrays the suffering of the enemy. The onlookers, a group of Russian ofcers led by Political Commissar Shepilov and General Sakhvataev, appear to be shaken by their unexpected discovery. As reported by Khaldei, upon observing the tragic scene, the general said, “I’ve seen a lot on the way from Stalingrad, but I’ve never seen a tragedy like this one.”15 The photograph sharply divides the living and the dead, and there is an element of theatricality, or staging, in this. However, the theatricality here is quite different from that found in Baltermants’ Grief. With its gure of the old grief-stricken woman depicted in the foreground, Baltermants’ composition gives viewers a clear set of instructions as to how to respond to the event recorded in the photograph. Khaldei’s image, on the contrary, communicates no such certainty, but instead leaves the viewer feeling perplexed. The composition of Khaldei’s shot is reminiscent of Vereshchagin’s painting Shipka-Sheinevo that also divides the living and the dead. The important difference between the two works is that Vereshchagin places the living in the left corner, while the dead are pictured in the foreground and on the right. By contrast, in Khaldei’s photograph the position of the two groups is reversed. This distinction relates to a long-standing convention governing the representation of the good and evil in Russian art that dates to the era of icon painting. Particularly signicant in this regard are the Last Judgment icons that in spite of their “compositional complexity,” feature a rather precise “topography.”16 In following the Byzantine model, the Russian depictions of the Last Judgment consistently position the righteous men to the right of God, whose gure is represented in the centre and towards the top. For their part, sinners usually appear in the bottom and to the left.

15

Ibid. L.A. Berezhnaia, “ ‘Odesnuiu’ i ‘Oshuiuiu’: Russkie i russinskie pravoslavnye ikony ‘strashnogo suda’ na rubezhe epokh,” in Chelovek mezhdu Tsarstvom i Imperiei, Moskva: Institut Cheloveka RAN 2003, 454–85. 16

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As testied by Vereshchagin’s Shipka-Sheinevo, this convention continued to govern the work of Russian artists of many successive generations. Paradoxically, it persisted in the atheist Soviet Union as well, as is evident from Aleksandr Deyneka’s 1942 powerful canvas The Defense of Sevastopol, another classic of Russian war painting. While employing radically modern strategies of representation, reminiscent of the Soviet poster art, Deyneka structures his work according to the rules of Russian religious art. In his picture, the Soviet marines that represent the good appear to the right of the implied gure of God, while the Nazi soldiers are placed to the left, in the space that icons traditionally reserve for the forces of evil. Equally signicant in this respect is that, as pointed out by critics, in Deyneka’s painting the Russians wear white, while the Germans appear in dark uniforms. In following the conventions of old Russian art, Deyneka uses contrasting colours to communicate his main message that “justice and the good must conquer the evil.”17 Unlike painting, photography aims to provide a truthful record of reality, which may explain why Khaldei’s image leaves the reversed position of the two groups intact. However, as pointed out by Sontag, the photograph can never be “simply a transparency of something that happened” (46). “To photograph,” writes Sontag, “is to frame, and to frame is to exclude” (46). Khaldei’s own body of work contains one famous image in which the documentary quality of photography is compromised even further. As was recently revealed, his celebrated Reichstag photograph underwent a considerable retouching. Upon noticing that in the original picture one of the ag-raisers had two watches, Soviet censors ordered that the extra watch be scraped off the photo, as it implied that the heroic soldiers “had obviously been pillaging.”18 Moreover, the banner depicted in the shot was one of several similar banners that Khaldei himself brought from Moscow “for hanging in strategic places.”19 Sontag, who compares Khaldei’s image to Joe Rosenthal’s equally awed 1945 photograph of American soldiers raising a ag in Iwo Jima, says that many iconic war images were staged, and that only

17 G.V. Diatleva, K.A. Liakhova, Mastera Istoricheskoi Zhivopisi, Moskva: “Veche” 2001, 306. 18 Tatyana Tolstaya, “History in Photographs,” in Pushkin’s Children: Writings on Russia and Russians, Boston: Mariner Books 2003, 205. 19 Ibid.

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“starting with the Vietnam War can we be virtually certain that none of the best-known photographs were set-ups” (57). Given that this was a rather common practice in his day, it is unclear why Khaldei did not reconstruct his Vienna photograph so as to place the Russians in the good corner. One reason for this might be that, as his own account indicates, he saw the Vienna image as forensic evidence, rather than a work of art intended for public display. He writes that the rst thing that the guard he encountered at the scene of the crime told him was that the Nazi himself “did it,” and “not the Russians.”20 Khaldei reports that he took several pictures of the scene, capturing it “in every detail,” which suggests that his primary objective was to gather evidence testifying to the exact nature of the crime.

“What a Society Chooses to Think About” As Sontag points out, “collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating” (86). She says that well-known photographs constitute “part of what a society chooses to think about, or declares that it has chosen to think about” (85). Until recently, Russia’s “collective memory” relied primarily on images like Baltermants’ Grief, while virtually excluding less “spectacular” photographs such as Khaldei’s Vienna shot. In discussing the perception of war in the Soviet era, Vladimir Paperny reports that in the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution war was looked upon as inevitable and welcome, but that the mature Soviet culture regarded it as “the worst crime against humanity.”21 The difference between the two cultures, writes Paperny, was merely that in the early years the objective was “rst to destroy everything, and then begin constructing anew,” whereas the later period “simply combined the two initiatives into one.”22 Paperny argues that while seeing it as inevitable, the Soviet culture never “aestheticised the war,” as was the case with Fascism. He goes on to quote Walter Benjamin, who states that Fascism “expects war to supply the artistic gratication of a sense perception that has been changed by technology,” and that this is “evidently the consummation

20 21 22

Quoted in Von Moskau, 149. Vladimir Paperny, Kultura ‘Dva,’ Ann Arbor: Ardis 1985, 247. Ibid., 248.

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of “l’art pour l’art’.”23 In Russian culture, writes Paperny, nowhere do we nd such perception of destruction as “an aesthetic pleasure of the rst order.”24 Instead, starting with The Igor Tale, through Tosltoi’s War and Peace, and ending with the Soviet-era war classics, such as Aleksandr Fadeev’s The Rout and The Young Guard, Russian art consistently has depicted war as tragedy. The heroic pathos and hightenned emotions present in Russian depictions of war, comments Paperny, do not contain “a single drop” of the “aesthetic pleasure” described by Benjamin.25 Curiously, this attitude was also characteristic of the Russian Futurism that, unlike its Italian counterpart, “condemned war, and employed all available artistic weapons to ght it.”26 As reported by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Russia’s foremost Futurist, when he and Marinetti met in Paris in 1913, the two of them “had nothing to talk about.”27 A similarly hostile encounter took place between Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Slavador Dali in the 1960s, when Yevtushenko abruptly left a dinner party in protest to Dali’s comment that Hitler was “the greatest Surrealist artist.”28 Paperny argues that to be able to view destruction as “an aesthetic pleasure,” a culture must distinguish between life and art, but that in Russia the boundary between the two realms was never delineated as precisely as was the case in Western Europe. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian culture found itself at the crossroads. As described by author Viktor Erofeev, Russian literature of the last quarter of the 20th century was ruled by “the power of evil.”29 Unlike in the 1970s, an era that introduced “unprecedented doubts,” when they questioned the “new man” and “man as such,” Russian writers now doubted “everything without any exceptions.”30 As time went on, writes Erofeev, their skepticism continued to grow, and Russian literature that once “smelled of wild owers and hay,” began to emanate a “new odor—the stench.”31 At this juncture, the psycho-

23 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reections, New York: Schocken Books 1969, 242. 24 Ibid. 25 Paperny, Kultura, 249. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Viktor Erofeev, Russkie tsvety zla, Moskva: “Podkova” 1997, 7. 30 Ibid., 13. 31 Ibid., 14.

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logical prose gave way to the psychopathological one, as is evidenced from the work of the younger generation of Russian writers, who tend to regard pathology and horror as either a literary device, or means of entertaining the reader. The young generation of Russian authors, writes Erofeev, shows little interest in the “former political confrontations” and tends to depict the old idols as “pop-heroes from comics.”32 The same is true not only of literature, but the visual arts as well. A good illustration of this is Konstantin Zvezdochetov’s playful portrait of Aleksander Pushkin, Russia’s national poet, whom he depicts wearing a bright poncho. In another canvas by Zvezdochetov, Marshal Kutuzov, who defeated Napoleon in 1812, wears a toga, also painted in bold red and yellow stripes. Both pictures place their respective models against a schematic background that resembles a star-lled sky, with Pushkin and Kutuzov representing the brightest of all stars. Best described as caricatures, Zvezdochetov’s portraits radically undermine the iconic status of Russia’s two “brightest stars,” as well as poking fun at Russian culture as a whole. A signicantly more grave work by Leonid Sokhransky, Zvezdochetov’s fellow member of the Chistye Prudy (Clear Ponds) group, addresses the subject of war and its perception in Russia. Entitled Vechnost’ Mifa (Eternal Myth), Sokhransky’s installation alludes to Russian war memorials, and in particular the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the Aleksandrovsky Gardens near the Kremlin walls. One of Russia’s most sacred sites, this memorial consists of several tombs, each containing earth from a Russian city that endured great losses during World War II. The memorial’s central component is a granite plinth topped with a bronze helmet and a bronze Soviet banner. By contrast, Sokhransky’s installation employs neither bronze, nor granite, but instead is comprised of an ordinary chair with a military coat thrown over it. Under the chair rests a pair of army boots and a crude wooden club. Placed on a block of styrofoam that serves as its impromptu pedestal, this makeshift assemblage encourages the viewer to reconsider the notion of war and ways in which we commemorate the dead. When compared to Russia’s more recent wars, World War II is still perceived with veneration. First celebrated in 1945 “when crowds spontaneously gathered in city centers and workplaces to share the news of Germany’s unconditional surrender,” Victory Day remains an impor-

32

Ibid., 29.

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tant holiday and continues to attract large numbers of participants.33 However, as demonstrated by such works as Sokhransky’s Eternal Myth, the attitude to World War II underwent considerable changes as well. “Modern art is about irony and conceptualism,” declared Konstantin Batynkov, a prominent artist and member of the Mitki collective, in connection with the 2005 Victory Day exhibition of contemporary art at the Krokin Gallery in Moscow.34 “We are totally spoiled,” said Batynkov, “we can’t talk in simple language about serious things, unfortunately.”35 The exhibition’s curator Alexander Petrovichev, who had difculty persuading artists to take part in the show, also admitted that today Russian art is largely “inward-looking,” and that the “theme of victory doesn’t exist as such.”36

“When They Hang on Walls” In the post-Soviet Moscow, exhibits of World War II photography often constitute part of large, commercially driven art shows. This was also the case with the Dedication exhibit that took place in conjunction with the 2000 Moscow Photo Biennial, a high-prole venture that included numerous other shows, whose subjects ranged from portraits of international celebrities to street crime. Interestingly, the pictures of celebrities by Annie Leibovitz, a US photographer famous for her portraits of Hollywood stars, were displayed at the Manezh Central Exhibition Hall, a considerably more prominent venue than its younger sibling the Maly Manezh gallery, the site of the Dedication exhibit. “Space reserved for being serious,” writes Sontag, “is hard to come by in a modern society, whose chief model of a public space is the mega-store (which may also be an airport or a museum)” (119). With the collapse of the Soviet Union, most Russian museums and art galleries have also lost their status as ‘serious’ spaces. A case in point is the historical Manezh Central Exhibiton Hall that in the Soviet period dominated the vast expanse of Manezh Square. Following its post-Soviet reconstruction, the square has become the site of the Okhotny Ryad

33

Kathleen E. Smith, Mythmaking in the New Russia: Politics and Memory during the Yeltsin Era, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2002, 85. 34 Anna Malpas, “Modern Monuments,” http://context.themoscowtimes.com/ story/141826. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid.

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underground shopping mall designed by the prolic Zurab Tsereteli. In addition to designing the mall, Tsereteli populated the square with numerous statues representing characters from Russian fairy tales. Placed in the midst of this architectural extravaganza, the Manezh also underwent a substantial renovation that followed its recent re rumored to be masterminded by a conspiracy wishing to add several levels of parking space under the old exhibition hall constructed in the era before the invention of the automobile. As Sontag comments, “there seems no way to guarantee contemplative or inhibiting space for anything now” (121). Fedor Romer makes a similar point when he writes that with its striking design and clever props the Dedication exhibit has transformed “the historical drama into a spectacle.” In this respect, the Moscow exhibit differed considerably from the 2005 Berlin show entitled Der Krieg Und Seine Folgen, a more conservative undertaking that made an effort to take things “seriously.” Like Dedication, it included samples of World War II memorabilia, but in Berlin the memorabilia was authentic and displayed in a traditional manner, with most of it encased in glass displays. By contrast, the parachute belts and pieces of rusted rail used by the Russian designer Sergei Mironenko were of unknown origins. Moreover, Mironenko attached his props directly to photographs, a strategy that encouraged the viewer to consider the relationship between the “real” and the “artifact.” Mironenko’s provocative use of props contributed to defamiliarizing the perception of World War II, especially as portrayed by Baltermants’ Grief and other overexposed images. However, the designer’s strategy was less successful with photographs like Khaldei’s Vienna shot that, because they contradicted the ofcial take on war, were virtually unknown to the Russian viewer. As depicted by the ofcially approved Soviet photography, the takeover of Berlin by the Russian troops was conducted with great concern for local residents, who saw the Russians as humane liberators and greeted their arrival with enthusiasm. Khaldei’s cheerful pictures, such as Soup Kitchen and The First Postwar Newspaper, both taken in Berlin in May of 1945, serve as good examples of this. His photograph from May 2, 1945, another positive image of Berlin’s liberation, depicts a group of German women, who “had probably come out of a bunker and were going home.”37 When he

37

Quoted in Von Moskau, 152.

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asked them why they were laughing, reports Khaldei, the women replied that “they were happy that the Russians had come to Berlin.”38 In enumerating various atrocities from around the world, Sontag’s book also makes mention of “the rape of some one hundred and thirty thousand women and girls (ten thousand of whom committed suicide) by victorious Soviet soldiers unleashed by their commanding ofcers in Berlin in 1945” (85). It is safe to say that even today most Russians feel shocked when confronted with evidence of the darker side of the liberation of Berlin, as well as that of other cities. Although he took it with an aim to document the exact nature of the crime, Khaldei’s Vienna photograph, perhaps in spite of the photographer’s own intentions, also testies to the sufferings that went along with the victorious liberation. Derived from Khaldei’s family archive, this rarely exhibited picture does not require any defamiliarization. In this instance, the show’s innovative design and use of props detracts from the viewer’s experience, rather than contributing to it. Romer has a point when he writes that Mironenko’s design “pacies’ the viewer, and in so doing transforms “the historical drama into a spectacle.” However, this transformation, precisely because it “pacies” them, allows Russians to regard images depicting “the pain of others” in a more objective manner. Throughout her book, Sontag repeatedly points out that the memory of war, “like all memory, is mostly local,” and that different nations remember wars and atrocities differently (35). In the specic case of Russia, a country that sacriced millions to World War II, and where until recently few people were aware of the Soviet liberation’s darker side, a museum environment might actually succeed, rather than fail, in providing favourable “referential conditions” in which to look at images of enemy sufferings. Because it allows the Russian viewers to perceive those sufferings at a remove, that is as works of art, and not only as historical documents, a museum or an art gallery serves as a site of reconciliation, perhaps the one and only space where emotions do not run as high and where images like Khaldei’s Vienna photograph can at long last receive their due consideration.

38

Ibid.

Entrance to the Dedication show with the poster of “Attack” by Dmitry Baltermants. Photo by the author.

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CHAPTER NINE

IMAGINING A SOVIET NATION: CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF THE UKRAINIAN PAST AT THE TWILIGHT OF THE STALIN ERA1 Serhy Yekelchyk University of Victoria

In June 1951 hundreds of Ukrainian writers, actors, musicians, and artists arrived in Moscow for a dekada (ten-day festival) of Ukrainian art. This grandiose exhibition of the Ukrainian republic’s cultural achievements appeared to be a huge success and was crowned by the decoration of 669 Ukrainians with various orders, medals, and honorary artistic titles. The premier Soviet newspaper, Pravda, provided extensive, enthusiastic coverage of the festival.2 The ambassadors of Ukrainian culture left Moscow in high spirits, sending telegraphed expressions of gratitude to Stalin, the party, and the government. On 2 July, however, Pravda unexpectedly red a devastating ideological salvo at the Ukrainians in the form of the editorial “Against Ideological Distortions in Literature.” Unsigned, but engineered by Stalin himself, this long article was ostensibly devoted to just one “distortion,” Volodymyr Sosiura’s short poem “Love Ukraine” (1944), which had appeared in Russian translation in 1951. Pravda accused the poem, written during the patriotic fervor of World War II, of glorifying “a primordial Ukraine, Ukraine in general,” rather than Soviet Ukraine. In an aside, cryptic reference was made to other serious shortcomings in the work of the Ukrainian Communist Party’s Central Committee.3

1 Parts of this paper are derived from my book, Stalin’s Empire of Memory: RussianUkrainian Relations in the Soviet Historical Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), pp. 6–7, 10 –11, 69, 81–83, 129–37, 142–47, and 150 –53. These fragments are reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher, the University of Toronto Press. 2 See Pravda, 14–27 June 1951. 3 Pravda, 2 July 1951, 2. On Stalin’s personal involvement, see D.T. Shepilov, “Vospominaniia,” Voprosy istorii, no. 6 (1998): 43–44.

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Within days of Pravda’s publication, Ukrainian authorities launched a campaign of ideological purication in the republic, complete with condemnations of “nationalist deviations” in all areas and genres of creative activity.4 While the editorial dealt only with a single poem’s failure to stress love for Soviet socialism, the Ukrainian leaders discerned a larger ideological signicance between the lines. The republic’s ideologues interpreted the vague critique from the Kremlin according to what they perceived as the main threat to Soviet Ukrainian identity—a “harmful obsession” with the national past and concomitant insufciency in the portrayal of historical ties with Russia. On 2 August the Ukrainian First Secretary, Leonid Melnikov, reported to Stalin’s deputy for party affairs, Georgii Malenkov, that the Ukrainian intelligentsia, “in their creative and scholarly work, often idealize the past.” He assured Moscow that his subordinates would instruct local intellectuals to portray Ukraine as “an inseparable part of our great Fatherland.” Writing to Stalin on 14 August, Malenkov expressed his regret that the Ukrainian leaders overlooked “attempts to portray the historical process in Ukraine as separate from the history of the peoples of the USSR.”5 Generally, the ideological conferences held in the republic concentrated on what was considered to be an inappropriate infatuation with the national past. *

*

*

Modern students of nationalism have little patience with older scholars who see nations as organic entities with unique, objective characteristics. Ever since Karl Deutsch, it has not been possible to analyze nationbuilding without emphasizing the role of print media; over time, Eric Hobsbawm’s and Benedict Anderson’s once revisionist notions of modern nations as “invented” and “imagined” rallied overwhelming support in the profession.6 Ernest Gellner contributed an inuential proposal;

4 Recent Ukrainian research properly contextualizes this episode as a prologue to a wider ideological purge in Ukraine. See Volodymyr Baran, Ukraina 1950–1960 -kh rr.: Evoliutsiia totalitarnoi systemy (Lviv: Instytut ukrainoznavstva im. I. Krypiakevych NANU, 1996), pp. 60 –65. However, the campaign’s signicance for Soviet Ukrainian identity remains unexplored. 5 Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsialno-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI), 17/133/ 311, fols. 38–39 (2 August); Tsentralnyi derzhavnyi arkhiv vyshchykh orhaniv vlady i upravlinnia Ukrainy (TsDAHO), 1/24/785, fols. 61–67 (14 August). 6 See Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1953; 1966); Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991).

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although national high culture is a recent invention, nationalists always insist on its primordial character and folk roots.7 Taken to the extreme, the idea of a nation as a “discursive construct” ignores the historically specic character of the nation-building process as well as the need for historical myths that resonate with the current needs and inherited perceptions of the nation’s potential members. Without rejecting the nation’s “discursivity,” in this paper I suggest that nations are always imagined through the concrete social and cultural practices of their given societies. States and intellectuals do not have a free hand to invent or manipulate national traditions and memories because, as Arjuna Appadurai noted back in 1981, history is not “a limitless and plastic symbolic resource”.8 The continuous veneration of the glorious Cossack past in Ukraine since the seventeenth century only conrms that national myths can have deep historical roots and a long tradition of collective remembrance before they are mobilized in the modern process of identity construction. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectuals thus had limited cultural space for their social engineering: they were evoking narratives, objects, and images that were already associated with certain notions or emotions. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, when the Soviet Union accomplished the transition from an unqualied condemnation of tsarist colonialism to an increasing identication with the Russian imperial past, the Stalinist reinstatement of the “nation” as a subject of history resulted in the rehabilitation of both Imperial Russian and Ukrainian national patrimony. By the late 1940s, the local bureaucrats and cultural gures worked out a revised and acceptable version of the Ukrainian national past that emphasized historical ties to Russia. Yet, with reied ethnicity as a principal category of Soviet political taxonomy, historical narratives of the post-war period remained in essence “national histories” disguised by the supercial rhetoric of class and amalgamated into the imperial grand story. The notion of the Russian-Ukrainian friendship inescapably involved the constant afrmation of the Ukrainians’ ethnic difference. In addition, the production of ofcial discourse on the past did not lend itself to total regimentation: republic-level ideologues constantly adjusted the Kremlin’s guidelines to local realities, intellectuals

7 8

Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). A. Appadurai, “The Past as a Scarce Resource,” Man 16 (1981): 201–19.

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often deviated from the prescribed course, and audiences could read differently even the most impeccable cultural product. The last point is central to this article. Even if granted a free hand in their manipulations of historical narratives, modern nation-builders still have difculty enforcing their interpretations outside the public domain. Prasenjit Duara suggests that “[n]ationalism is rarely the nationalism of the nation, but rather marks the site where different representations of the nation contest and negotiate with each other”.9 Stalinist ideologues could, at a price of considerable effort, impose uniformity on public representations of the past—but not on individual readings of those representations.

Narrating the Nation The Zhdanovshchina, the post-war cultural purication campaign of 1946–48, which takes its name from the Kremlin’s leading ideologue, Andrei Zhdanov, is usually understood as a reassertion of the party’s ideological control over culture in order to purge literature and the arts of western inuences and “apolitical subjects.” While intellectuals in Moscow and Leningrad did indeed experience the campaign as a crusade against liberalism and heterodoxy, Russian national mythology was rarely attacked. The Ukrainian Zhdanovshchina, however, from its very beginnings targeted “nationalism,” particularly in the portrayal of the past.10 Soviet ideologues were generally suspicious of non-Russians’ identication with their own past rather than with the Soviet present and with Russian imperial history. The rst major postwar Ukrainian historical novel, Petro Panch’s The Zaporozhians (1946), was an epic narrative set in seventeenth-century Ukraine. With the advent of the Zhdanovshchina, the work soon came under critical re for “idealizing” the Cossacks. Panch allegedly did not stress the tension between rich and poor Cossacks sufciently; instead, he portrayed the wealthy Cossack Veryha positively and had one of the

9 Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 8. 10 See Serhy Yekelchyk, “Celebrating the Soviet Present: The Zhdanovshchina Campaign in Ukrainian Literature and the Arts,” in Donald J. Raleigh, ed., Provincial Landscapes: Local Dimensions of Soviet Power, 1917–1953 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), pp. 255–75.

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characters, the noble Buzhynsky, utter the incriminating words: “Cossacks have always fought for Ukraine, for our faith, for freedom!”11 During an ideological conference in 1947, Panch took the oor to repent his errors and promise a “party novel” about the Cossack period. The writer quoted two letters of support received from his readers after The Zaporozhians had been criticized in the press. One reader regretted that the witch-hunt would prevent Panch from writing interesting works. Another, a twenty-two-year-old disabled veteran, advised the writer not to bow before the ideological pressure: “The novels they would like you to write would be of low artistic quality and would nd sympathetic readers only in a certain historical period and exclusively among a small group of people.” Up to this point, Panch had seemed to be defending himself with evidence of his readers’ support, yet the embattled writer suddenly shouted: “Together with my critics, I will slap these ‘sympathizers’ in the face!”12 In September 1947 the Ukrainian leaders Lazar Kaganovich and Nikita Khrushchev met with a group of 105 leading Ukrainian writers, who discussed the “nationalist mistakes” of Panch and others and pledged loyalty to the party cause. Most speakers strongly condemned “harmful nostalgia for the past,” but the well-known novelist Natan Rybak, who had just completed the rst part of an ideologically sound historical novel about Ukraine’s incorporation into Russia, decided to test the waters. Phrasing his defense of the historical genre to resonate with the ofcial anti-nationalist rhetoric, he said: “I do not know who could have a stake in the disappearance of historical novels . . . We Soviet writers should not abandon a topic of such importance as our people’s history [ i.e., leave it for the émigré nationalists].” Rybak also mentioned that he had discussed the idea for his latest novel with Khrushchev as early as 1940 and that the party leader had given him some helpful advice. Kaganovich and Khrushchev, however, made no comments in response, leaving the writer in uncertainty.13 Novels about wartime heroism, industrial reconstruction, and the revival of agriculture came to constitute the bulk of Ukrainian literary production. In 1947 the young writer Oles Honchar received the Stalin

11 See Literaturna hazeta, 17 April 1947, 2. Compare the original publication: Petro Panch, Zaporozhtsi (Kiev: Radianskyi pysmennyk, 1946). Ostap Buzhinsky’s phrase is on p. 23. 12 TsDAHO, 1/23/4512, fols. 260 –68. 13 Ibid., 1/23/4511, fols. 41–43.

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Prize, Second Class, for part 1 of his war trilogy, The Standard-Bearers. The following year, the same award went to him for part 2 of the work, while Ivan Riabokliach received the Stalin Prize, Third Class, for a short novel about post-war collective farms, A Golden Thousand. Rybak’s bulky historical novel, The Pereiaslav Council, was actually published, rst in a literary journal and then in late 1948 separately, in due time earning the writer the Stalin Prize, Second Class.14 Rybak’s case established a precedent: as long as they celebrated Ukraine’s eternal friendship with Russia, Ukrainian historical novels were welcome. Although one could hardly nd a more timely historical topic than the 1654 Pereiaslav Council, the press welcomed Rybak’s novel rather reservedly. In August 1947 Literaturna hazeta reacted with approval, albeit without enthusiasm, to the publication of select chapters of the novel in a journal. When a book edition appeared in late 1948 in a relatively modest print run of 20,000 copies, the same newspaper noted the publication but did not run a book review for several months.15 The novel presents an epic picture of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, ending with the Pereiaslav Treaty of 1654. Although Rybak combined several narrative lines featuring main characters from various social strata, all developing the theme of Russian-Ukrainian friendship, his main emphasis was clearly the deeds of the Cossack leader, Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Like many other positive historical characters in Stalinist literature, Rybak’s Khmelnytsky appears as an ideal ruler imbued with traits similar to those of Stalin. The hetman is an omnipresent and omnipotent father of the people who governs his state with an iron hand: Only a short time has passed, but he had accomplished much, and he had the right to credit himself with having done so. The entire country was now divided into regiments and colonels elected in each regiment. He had often had to suggest who should be elected, but these suggestions had been necessary. He had had to dismiss those independent in thought [iaki myslyly svoieumno] and slow in action, he had had to threaten some and exile others to the Crimea, ordering them to stay there until he recalled them. Yet others he had removed in such a way that nobody knew what happened to them, and if anyone happened to mention them

14 Literaturna hazeta, 8 April 1948, 1; 14 April 49, 1–2 (Honchar and Riabokliach); 6 December 1948, 3 (Pereiaslav Council published); 9 March 1950, 1 (Stalin Prize). 15 Ibid., 7 August 1947, 2; 6 December 1948, 3.

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in conversation, Lavryn Kapusta [the head of the secret police] could only shrug his shoulders non-committally.16

Rybak’s Khmelnytsky is not a feudal lord; like the Stalin of postwar propaganda, he stands above all social strata, wisely guiding the Ukrainian nation in its entirety towards union with Muscovy, while at the same time expressing care and concern for the common people in periodic cleansings of the upper classes. More important, Rybak struck a ne balance between national history and class history by representing the union with Russia as benecial to both the Ukrainian nation as a whole and the Ukrainian toiling masses in particular. When his vision so dictated, he did not hesitate to radically rewrite events. The critics hailed Rybak’s treatment of the controversial Colonel Bohun, who had neither attended the Pereiaslav Council nor taken an oath to the tsar. In his Fighters for Freedom, the pre-revolutionary nationalist novelist Adrian Kashchenko had portrayed Bohun as an opponent of the union with Russia. In Bohun, the early Soviet Ukrainian writer Oleksandr Sokolovsky had depicted the colonel as a true representative of the toiling masses and the enemy of the feudal lord Khmelnytsky. In his 1938 play Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Oleksandr Korniichuk had chosen not to mention Bohun at all in his description of the Pereiaslav Council and the subsequent events. Rybak was the rst writer to claim that Bohun had, in fact, always supported Khmelnytsky and had even taken an oath to the tsar.17 The rst indication of the novel’s ofcial acceptance came from Liubomyr Dmyterko, the secretary of the Writers’ Union, in his report to the writers’ congress in December 1949. After praising new novels on Soviet topics, he added: “Together with the works on contemporary subjects—and I repeat, there are dozens of them—Natar Rybak’s weighty historical novel, The Pereiaslav Council, stands at the vanguard of Soviet Ukrainian prose.” Dmyterko went on to approve of the topic and the style, as well as to read aloud extensively from the book’s description of the Pereiaslav Council.18

16 Natan Rybak, Pereiaslavska rada (Kiev: Derzhavne vydavnytstvo khudozhnoi literatury, 1949), p. 45. 17 On different writers’ portrayals of Bohun, see Mykola Syrotiuk, Ukrainskyi radianskyi istorychnyi roman (Kiev: Vydavnytstvo AN URSR, 1962), pp. 295–99. 18 L. Dmyterko, “Ukrainska radianska literatura pislia postanovy TsK VKP(b) pro zhurnaly ‘Zvezda’ i “Leningrad,’ ” Bilshovyk Ukrainy, no. 1 (1949): 74–75.

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The plots of two historical plays, both completed in 1949, mark new limits for what was permissible and warranted ofcial approval. Leonid Smiliansky’s drama Sahaidachny attempted to recast this earlyseventeenth-century Cossack leader as a promoter of union with Russia. However, it was no mean task. Although Sahaidachny had sent a friendly embassy to the tsar in 1619 or 1620, he had also participated in the Polish army’s march on Moscow in the previous year. The Ukrainian Central Committee’s expert felt that even passing references to the war with Russia were inappropriate and that the entire last scene, in which Sahaidachny dies with the words “Bells, bells” on his lips, was ambiguous: “Is he referring to the bells greeting the Cossack envoy in Moscow or to the bells sounding the alarm when Sahaidachny together with the Polish prince invaded Russian territory?”19 In contrast, Liubomyr Dmyterko’s Together Forever passed the censors with ying colors. The play depicts events in Ukraine after Khmelnytsky’s death (1657), when Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky attempted to break with Muscovy. Dmyterko discredits Vyhovsky and his followers, who are cast as lacking mass support and who are opposed in the play by pro-Russian Cossack leaders. First published in June 1949, the play immediately earned good reviews, and the Sumy Drama Company staged it as early as November 1949. When Kharkiv’s Shevchenko Theater, Ukraine’s leading drama company during the post-war decade, rst performed Together Forever in February 1950, the press hailed the premiere as a success of national signicance.20 However, Dmyterko’s play had a short theatrical run. Staged by practically all Ukrainian companies in 1950, by 1952 it was no longer being produced in Kiev, Kharkiv, or Lviv. Contemporary theater critics attributed the quick decline of interest in the play to its low artistic quality, namely, its lack of developed and vivid positive characters.21 In early 1952 Ukrainian functionaries and writers were already thinking about the preparation of new literary works to celebrate the tercentenary of the Pereiaslav Treaty. A conference at a major publishing house, Radianskyi pysmennyk, called upon litterateurs to compose new paeans to the “age-old friendship” with Russia. The Writers’ Union

19

TsDAHO, 1/30/1416, fol. 8. Radianske mystetstvo, 13 July 1949, 2 (review); 12 November 1949, 3 (Sumy); 1 March 1950, 3 (Kharkiv). 21 Radianske mystetstvo, 30 July 1952, 3. 20

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proposed that the leading poets be mobilized to create a monumental collective ode to said friendship.22 Too much should not be attributed to such “planning,” since the two major historical novels published in 1953–54 had been in preparation long before the authorities issued an appeal for them. The topicality of Pereiaslav enabled two authors to revive Cossack glory as a major component of Soviet Ukrainian identity. Petro Panch revised his 1946 novel, The Zaporozhians, adding two more parts and publishing the resulting bulky volume under the title Ukraine Was Humming. Only later did Ukrainian ideologues notice that Panch “had not properly eliminated” the mistakes for which the party had denounced The Zaporozhians in 1947.23 The publication of volume 2 of Rybak’s The Pereiaslav Council was the major event in Ukrainian literary life in 1953. Contemporary critics agreed that the sequel was artistically superior to the original, even though Rybak had further developed elements of adventure, intrigue, and espionage not considered proper in a serious historical novel.24 The tercentenary celebrations marked the culmination of the historical genre’s rehabilitation. As the best novel embodying the new ofcial version of the past, The Pereislav Council was elevated to the near-sacred status of a work that authorities exhorted the populace to “study” (not unlike the Communist Manifesto or the Short Course of party history). Between January and May 1954 all Ukrainian provinces reported the organization of public readings, readers’ conferences, study workshops, and amateur dramatizations of the novel. In Stanyslaviv province alone, more than a hundred readers’ conferences took place. The village of Vovkovyi in Rivne province, where a readers’ conference with 190 participants was preceded by a lecture, “The Pereiaslav Council and Its Historical Importance,” and followed by the screening of the 1941 lm Bohdan Khmelnytsky, could serve as a typical example.25 The Pereiaslav Council went through several editions during 1953–54, including a luxurious Ukrainian two-volume set with color illustrations

22

Literaturna hazeta, 24 April 1952, 3 (conference); TsDAHO, 1/30/3597, fol. 71 (poem). 23 Literaturna Ukraina, 24 December 1953, 3 (excerpts from Ukraine Was Humming); Petro Panch, Homonila Ukraina (Kiev: Derzhlitvydav, 1954); XVIII zizd Komunistychnoi partii Ukrainy 23–26 bereznia 1954 r.: Materialy zizdu (Kiev: Politvydav Ukrainy, 1954), p. 157 (insufcient revisions). 24 Tsentralnyi derzhavnyi arkhiv-muzei literatury i mystetstva Ukrainy (TsDAMLM), 590/1/204, fol. 3 and Literaturna hazeta, 12 November 1953, 3–4. 25 TsDAHO, 1/30/3681, fols. 113 (Stanyslaviv province) and 124 (Vovkovyi).

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by A. Riznychenko. Three Moscow publishers planned to issue a Russian translation of the novel in 1954, causing the Central Committee of the party to intervene and decide that the jubilee edition would be printed by Goslitizdat. As if all these propaganda were not enough, Ukrainian radio broadcast readings of the novel, chapter by chapter, and dramatized selected fragments in a kind of historical soap opera.26 Following in Rybak’s footsteps, many other writers speedily produced novels about the Ukrainian, mostly Cossack, past that emphasized Russian help and the Ukrainians’ age-old desire to unite with their Russian brethren. These works included Ivan Le’s Sworn Brothers, Iakiv Kachura’s Ivan Bohun, Vasyl Kucher’s Ustym Karmaliuk, and Iurii Mushketyk’s Semen Palii.27 The Ukrainian writers had so successfully recovered from the ofcial purge of the historical genre in 1946–47 that in May 1954 Moscow’s Institute of World Literature convened a special conference on the Ukrainian historical novel. At the Third Congress of the Ukrainian Writers’ Union in October 1954 nobody felt it necessary to defend the historical genre. Mykola Bazhan, head of the organization, praised the recent works of Rybak, Panch, Le, and others as Soviet Ukrainian prose’s most notable accomplishments, declaring: “The important role of contemporary subjects for the successful development of Socialist Realism in literature does not at all diminish the signicance of historical subjects.”28 Despite the party’s ideological supervision, writers were still able to mount a subtle but effective defense of the historical genre. Regimenting the public’s perception of their books was beyond even the Communist Party’s capabilities. The numerous letters from readers, which can be found in Natan Rybak’s personal archive, allow an insight into how the post-war public pereceived his novel. Reactions varied from a sentiment expressed in an anonymous note, which claimed that reading the epic narrative of the Cossacks’ heroic deeds and resulting incorporation into Russia “left a sense of both elevated pride and burning bitterness in the heart,” to lengthy tirades that seemed to conrm the novel’s desired 26 Natan Rybak, Pereiaslavska rada (Kiev: Derzhlitvydav, 1953), 2 vols.; Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii (RGANI), 5/17/454, fol. 1 (Moscow publishers); TsDAHO, 1/30/3631, fols. 4 and 8; Literaturna hazeta, 6 May 1954, 3 (radio). 27 Conveniently grouped together in a report to Moscow in RGANI, 5/17/454, fol. 11. 28 RGANI, 5/17/402, fol. 78 and Literaturna hazeta, 22 May 1954, 4 (conference); TsDAMLM, 590/1/199, fols. 23–24 and Literaturna hazeta, 28 October 1954, 2 (congress).

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educational impact. Petro Zhytnyk, from the village of Mykolaivka of Nekhvoroshcha district in Poltava province, wrote to Rybak on 27 February 1952: The history of Ukraine and, in particular, the life and activities of the great statesman Bohdan Khmelnytsky have been of interest to me since childhood. Under the inuence of Kulish’s Black Council, I had formed wrong conceptions about Ukrainian history and Hetman Khmelnytsky’s role, and I was not able to free myself from those ideas for a long time. Much later, in 1943, having read O. Korniichuk’s play Bohdan Khmelnytsky, watched the lm of the same name, and having read your novel The Pereiaslav Council for the rst time in 1949, I nally understood with profundity the age of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, his services in liberating Ukraine from foreign oppression and uniting it with Russia. These wonderful works allowed me, a common citizen, to see the great truth!29

Ideologically correct as it is, the letter reveals that this reader was not interested in the notions of the friendship of people, class struggle, and the fraternal aid of the Russian elder brother so dear to Soviet ideologues’ hearts and sown so abundantly throughout the novel. Instead, Zhytnyk understood the great hero Khmelnytsky as a historical agent who had liberated Ukraine and brought it to its benecial union with Muscovy. Other Ukrainian readers also perceived The Pereiaslav Council as simply a work glorifying their nation’s heroic past, as if the “friendship of peoples” paradigm never existed. Ivan Burlaka, from the village of Erazmivka in Oleksandrivka district in Kirovohrad province, wrote to Rybak in December 1950: “Khmelnytsky, the Cossack leader and the liberator of all Ukrainian people, is shown so forcefully. It is a truly patriotic book that explains the state-building aims and humane ideals of the heroic Ukrainian people’s national liberational movement.”30 Most striking is the number of letters Rybak received from ethnic Ukrainians living in other Soviet republics. All his correspondents from Kuban, Sverdlovsk province, and Georgia wrote of their Ukrainian or even Cossack roots with pride and complained about the difculties in obtaining Ukrainian historical novels in Russia. Dmytro Krykun in Kuban informed the writer that the local bookstore had sold out its allotment of The Pereiaslav Council in a week. Krykun considered himself

29 30

TsDAMLM, 687/1/47, fols. 23 overleaf (anonymous note) and 29 (Zhytnyk). Ibid., fols. 11–12.

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lucky to have procured a book in a second-hand shop; although only volume 1 was available, at least it was in Ukrainian.31 Having read the rst volume in Russian translation, Colonel Hryhorii Bludenko, who was stationed in Bukhta Olga in the Primore region in the Russian Far east, wrote to Rybak in May 1951: “I am sure that your Pereiaslav Council reads much better in Ukrainian. I am serving here on the Pacic Ocean among many other Ukrainians who do not want to ever forget their people, their language, and their glorious ancestors, such as Bohdan Khmelnytsky.”32 The readers could apparently interpret selectively even the most ideologically correct historical novel, overlooking its descriptions of class struggle and friendship with Russia and reading it instead as a fascinating account of their ancestors’ glorious past. Imbibing a Ukrainian historical novel did not always mean swallowing wholesale a text ideologically sweetened with the right measures of class and national history, both modied by the doctrine of Russian guidance. For many, reading such a work was a heady act of discovering or reafrming their national identity.

Painting the Friendship In late 1946, as the Ukrainian press unveiled a campaign against historical topics, Radianske mystetstvo, the newspaper of the republic’s Committee (Ministry) for the Arts, focused on uncovering the “unhealthy glorication of the past” in contemporary paintings. Art critics denounced the artist Ivan Shulha for expressing in his canvas The Zaporozhians’ Song “morbid nostalgia for the past.” Hryhorii Svitlytsky’s painting Native Land, depicting a young woman in traditional peasant dress against the background of a beautiful country landscape, prompted them to ask, “What does it have in common with our Soviet Ukraine?” Mykhailo Derehus’s series The Khmelnytsky Uprising was pronounced “clearly unnished,” but not because of its morbid nostalgia for the Cossack period—the artist “did not pay appropriate attention” to the Pereiaslav

31 Ibid., fols. 7, 9–9 overleaf, 20 –20 overleaf, 21 overleaf, 37–38 (Krykun), 54 overleaf. 32 Ibid., fol. 18.

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Council and the historic union with Russia.33 Like they did in literature, the ideologues targeted works identifying with a “separate” Ukrainian national past, while those engaging with a past common for Ukrainians and Russian were still welcome. The Ninth Exhibition of Ukrainian Art (November 1947) demonstrated a turn towards representations of Russian-Ukrainian friendship. While no picture celebrating an “exclusive” Ukrainian past made it into the exhibition, Hryhorii Melikhov presented a large painting, Young Taras Shevchenko Visiting the Artist K.P. Briullov (2.89 m × 2.95 m). The canvas portrayed a young peasant lad—the future Ukrainian national bard and professional artist, Taras Shevchenko (1814–61)—gazing admiringly at the great Russian painter, who would become his teacher at the Imperial Academy of Arts. Artistically accomplished as it appeared at the time, the work also served as a perfect illustration of the myth of the Ukrainian “younger brother” being taught and guided by the Russian “elder brother.” As the head of the Union of Ukrainian Soviet Artists, Oleksandr Pashchenko, announced, “Melikhov’s canvas is a serious blow to the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists, who sought to isolate Ukrainian culture from the wholesome inuence of Russian culture.” The painting won the Stalin Prize, Third Class, thus proving that not all non-Russian historical works were doomed under the Zhdanovshchina.34 In fact, Melikhov’s work was such a coup on the all-Union artistic scene that in 1950 the famous Tretiakov Gallery pressured the Museum of Ukrainian Art in Kiev to give up this painting in exchange for a less valuable canvas from the Moscow art gallery’s collection. Kievans managed to defend their property rights with help from the Ukrainian party’s Central Committee.35 Other artists emulated Melikhov and portrayed Russian historical gures tutoring their Ukrainian contemporaries or, at least, visiting Ukraine. Notable among works on this topic were the following paintings: M. Dobronravov’s Peter the First in Lviv (1947). H. Svitlytsky’s The Composer P.I. Tchaikovsky in Ukraine (1947), K. Trokhymenko’s Gorky Reading Shevchenko to the Peasants (1949), M. Khaertinov’s After the Battle 33 Radianske mystetstvo, 17 September 1946, 4 (Shulha); 22 October 1946, 1 (Svitlytsky and Derehus). 34 TsDAHO, 1/30/2426, fol. 73 (Pashchenko); O. Pashchenko, ed., IX ukrainskaia khudozhestvennaia vystavka: Katalog (Kiev: Mystetstvo, 1948), pp. 27, 32, and 36; Radianske mystetstvo, 12 November 1947, 3 (exhibition); Literaturna hazeta, 22 April 1948, 1 (Stalin Prize). 35 TsDAHO, 1/30/2041, fols. 36–38.

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at Poltava (1950), V. Puteiko’s Maxim Gorky and Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky on the Island of Capri (1951), P. Parkhet’s The Assault on Khadzhibei (1953), V. Zabashta’s P.I. Tchaikovksy and M.V. Lysenko (1953), and F. Shostak’s The Printer Ivan Fedorov in Lviv (1954). Graphic artists and sculptors also produced numerous works on the topic of Russian-Ukrainian friendship, such as O. Kulchytska’s lithograph Ivan Fedorov among the Townspeople of Lviv (1949), M. Vronsky’s sculpture T.H. Shevchenko and N.G. Chernyshevskii (1954), and S. Besedin’s drawings Pushkin in Ukraine, T.H. Shevchenko among Progressive Russian Cultural Figures, and P.I. Tchaikovsky Visiting M.V. Lysenko (all 1954).36 While stressing Ukraine’s historical connection to Russia, artists shied away from portrayals of their nation’s “separate” past. Until 1954, when S. Adamovych displayed his canvas Prince Danylo of Halych at the Tercentenary Exhibition, no painter dared to work on the history of the Galician-Volhynian Principality. Adamovych himself came under harsh criticism. Depicting the thirteenth-century prince on the battleeld after his victory over the Teutonic knights, his painting did not develop the theme of Russian-Ukrainian friendship and was soon dismissed in the press as “pointless” (bezzmistovne).37 The rehabilitation of Cossack glory as a legitimate topic also proved difcult. After the critics condemned Mykhailo Derehus’s series on the Khmelnytsky Uprising (1946), the artist concentrated on illustrating historical novels, including Gogol’s Taras Bulba and Rybak’s The Pereiaslav Council. During the dekada of Ukrainian art in Moscow in June 1951, Derehus nally brought his Cossack heroes back into the mainstream of ofcial art with his large painting The Pereiaslav Council (on which he was assisted by S. Repin and V. Savenkov).38 Although mildly criticized for its lack of action and dramatic tension, the work’s timely subject probably protected Derehus during the ensuing purge of “nationalist errors” in Ukrainian culture.

36 Mykola Bazhan, ed., Istoriia ukrainskoho mystetstva (Kiev: URE, 1968), vol. 6, pp. 125–26; A. Dmytrenko, Ukrainskyi radianskyi zhyvopys (Kiev: Mystetstvo, 1966), pp. 80 and 88; H.M. Iukhymets, Ukrainske radianske mystetstvo 1941–1960 rokiv (Kiev: Mystetstvo, 1983), pp. 96, 112, and 140. 37 Literaturna hazeta, 17 June 1954, 4. 38 TsDAMLM, 196/1/26, fol. 19; “Za novye uspekhi izobrazitelnogo iskusstva Ukrainy,” Iskusstvo, no. 4 (1954): 7; Vystavka izobrazitelnogo iskusstva Ukrainskoi SSR: Zhivopis, skulptura, graka (Kiev: Mystetstvo, 1951), p. 17; M. Kholodkovskaia, “Introduction,” in Mikhail Gordeevich Deregus (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1954), pp. 19–22 and 30 –33.

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Later in 1951 young Mykhailo Khmelko, who had already earned two Stalin Prizes for paintings on Soviet topics, presented his monumental canvas Forever with Moscow, Forever with the Russian People. This large, magnicent painting portrayed Khmelnytsky and the Russian ambassador addressing a cheering crowd in front of the cathedral in Pereiaslav. Khmelko put the Cossack colonels, Muscovite boyars, and bishops in the foreground, including every detail of their decorative garments and gonfalons.39 However, the republic’s artistic community, apparently upset with the success of Khmelko’s decorative monumentalism during a time when lyrical and genre works on Ukrainian subjects were dismissed as untopical, used the language of class to attack the authorities’ favorite. When the painting was rst exhibited in Moscow, Ukrainian critics accused Khmelko of indulging in “excessive theatrical splendor.” Soon Lidiia Popova published a more damaging objection, namely, that the artist had ignored the “representatives of the common people.” During the artists’ conference in 1952, Serhii Hryhoriev lectured Khmelko that a historical painting “should depict not a farce or parade, but the drama of history.”40 In January 1953 the newspaper of the Artists’ Union, Radianske mystetstvo, went as far as publishing ironic verses critical of Khmelko: Rubies, steel, enamel, and cut glass; Satin, brocade, and a sledge with fretwork. This is all good, but one thing is unfortunate, That the people are in the background.41 The critic Valentyna Kuryltseva concluded that Khmelko had not studied history thoroughly enough.42 For lack of another magnicent depiction of the act of union, in 1953 the authorities adopted the unsophisticated Pereiaslav Council by Derehus, Repin, and Savenkov as the principal ofcial image of “reunication,” later to be reproduced on stamps, tapestries, and vases in massive numbers.43

39 The painting was rst displayed at the All-Union Artistic Exhibition in Moscow in December 1951 (Radianske mystetstvo, 26 December 1951, 1; 1 January 1952, 2). 40 Literaturna hazeta, 31 January 1952, 4 (“excessive splendor”); Radianske mystetstvo, 14 December 1952, 2 (Popova); TsDAMLM, 581/1/343, fol. 9 (Hryhoriev). 41 Radianske mystetstvo, 14 January 1953, 4. 42 Ibid., 25 March 1953, 3. 43 TsDAHO, 1/70/2247, fols. 93 and 140; TsDAMLM, 119/1/168, fol. 1; Literaturna hazeta, 7 January 1954, 1.

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Nevertheless, the critics’ sympathies went to three new, artistically superior works by young Ukrainian artists. Oleksandr Khmelnytsky’s dynamic Together Forever (1953) portrayed the robust and almost unruly Ukrainian and Russian masses rejoicing outside the cathedral in Pereiaslav. V. Zadorozhnyi’s unusual Bohdan Khmelnytsky Leaves His Son Tymish as a Hostage with the Crimean Khan (1954) depicted the human side of the hetman, and Mykhailo Kryvenko’s lyrical When the Cossack Went to War (1954) illustrated a folksong about a girl bidding farewell to a young Cossack.44 The gradual rehabilitation of the Cossacks as part of Ukrainian heritage led Derehus to rework one of his illustrations to Gogol’s Taras Bulba, the result being the painting Taras at the Head of the Army (1952). The graphic artist Oleksandr Danchenko produced a remarkable and highly acclaimed series of etchings with a title reminiscent of Derehus’s 1946 series, “The Ukrainian People’s War of Liberation (1648–1654).” The centerpiece of the series, The Feat of Three Hundred at Berestechko, gloried the heroism of the nation’s great ancestors with an enthusiasm unseen since the war years.45 In early 1954 the industrious Khmelko presented a new variant of his Forever with Moscow and, taking advantage of his position as the party-appointed chairman of the Artists’ Union, used the tercentenary celebrations to maneuver his monumental painting back into the ofcial canon. The changes were purely cosmetic: dressing some personages in dark clothes instead of gold-embroidered garments, making the colors less bright, and adding an old peasant bard in rags in the foreground. Although the revised painting was not praised as the denitive account of the council or nominated for any prizes, the authorities ensured that it was widely exhibited during the celebrations. In addition, Khmelko secured publication of the work on postcards, with a print run of 50,000.46 At the insistence of Central Committee functionaries, a color reproduction of the painting was included in the authoritative History of the Ukrainian SSR, over the objections of the distinguished artist Vasyl Kasiian, who punned that this canvas “had not received an appraisal warranting it a place in history [nor in the History].”47

44

TsDAMLM, 581/1/440, fols. 6–9; Radianske mystetstvo, 9 June 1954, 2. Iukhymets, Ukrainske radianske mystetstvo, 100; Bazhan, Istoriia ukrainskoho mystetstva, 6: 229–30. 46 TsDAHO, 1/30/3599, fols. 78–80; 1/30/3634, fol. 11; 1/30/3643, fol. 112. 47 Naukovyi arkhiv Instytutu istorii Ukrainy Natsionalnoi Akademii nauk Ukrainy (NAIIU), 1/50, fol. 21. 45

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Together with other contemporary historical paintings, Khmelko’s work was also displayed at a jubilee exhibition in the State Museum of Ukrainian Art in Kiev. The archives preserve the book of visitors’ comments from this exhibition, and, although some entries have been blackened with ink, the remaining remarks shed an interesting light on the popular reception of the historical genre. Hidden among numerous ideologically correct notes (many of them signed by ofcially organized groups of visitors, including schoolchildren and soldiers), one nds the unorthodox opinions of individual spectators. In particular, many visitors were disappointed with Khmelko, whose work, in the words of one, “looked better on the postcards.” Another anonymous observer noted: “The more I look at Khmelko, the more I like Velazquez.” The visitors Koptilov and Koptilova suggested: “Many paintings depicting Bohdan Khmelnytsky would have beneted if he had been dressed more modestly.” Another spectator, with an illegible signature, on the contrary, found Ie. Bilostotsky’s bust of the hetman scandalous because the facial features were not those of a great national hero: “Why, then, all these radio programs? A stupid expression and a weak-willed lower lip. The spirit of history is totally absent.” Several visitors singled out Kryvenko’s lyrical painting, When the Cossack Went to War, as a work into which the author had “put his heart.”48 Even more important than some visitors’ independent reading of historical images was the fact that this mammoth exhibition included frescoes from Kievan Rus’, icons from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Cossack portraits, Shevchenko’s historical drawings, as well as pre-revolutionary historical paintings that had previously been deemed ideologically harmful: Feodosii Krasytsky’s Guest from the Zaporozhian Host (1901; variants 1910 and 1916) and Oleksandr Myrashko’s The Funeral of the Chieftain (1900). By exhibiting these works together with numerous Soviet paintings on subjects from the Ukrainian past, particularly from the Cossack times, the authorities were de facto making an important acknowledgement. The display recognized the continuity of Ukraine’s cultural development through the ages, as well as the succession of artistic traditions in the portrayal of the national past. Embodied in pre-revolutionary historical paintings, Ukrainian national mythology

48 TsDAMLM, 665/1/169, fols. 16, 30 (Khmelko), 18 overleaf (Khmelnytsky’s clothing); 46 overleaf (Bilostotsky); 2, 7, and 19 (Kryvenko).

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was now implicitly, if selectively, accepted as Soviet Ukraine’s national heritage.

History at the Opera The genre of grand historical opera afforded a unique opportunity to combine Stalinism’s quest for monumentalism and traditionalism in the arts with the system’s regard for national history. Since the late 1930s authorities in both Moscow and Kiev favored the idea of producing a Ukrainian patriotic historical opera that would provide Soviet Ukrainians with a truly imposing representation of their heroic past. In May 1948 the prospect of going to Moscow for the dekada forced the Ukrainian functionaries to prioritize the writing of a Soviet Ukrainian historical opera. Signicantly, with the post-war cult of the “Russian elder brother” on the rise, the Ukrainian establishment preferred a new work celebrating union with Russia to yet another revival of Mykola Lysenko’s classic Taras Bulba (1892), in which Russian help and tutelage were not portrayed. In two months, the resourceful playwright Oleksandr Korniichuk produced a verse libretto of Bohdan Khmelnytsky co-authored with his wife, Wanda Wasilewska. The libretto was based on Korniichuk’s 1938 play but stressed the Ukrainians’ desire to unite with the Russians. In July the press reported that the composer Kost Dankevych was already hard at work on the score.49 Ukrainian ideologues turned the writing of Bohdan Khmelnytsky into an affair of state. As soon as the Odessan Dankevych had completed the score’s rst draft in January 1950, he telegraphed the news to the Ukrainian party’s Central Committee. As early as 15 February the newspapers announced that the score’s rst audition at the republic’s Committee for the Arts had been a success. By August Dankevych had delivered the nal version of the score.50 Bohdan turned out to be a grand historical opera, a work that had little in common with the conventions of twentieth-century western musical theater. Based on national motifs, it imitated the form and dramatic

49 RGALI, 962/11/558, fols. 17, 21, and 48 (decision to produce a historical opera); TsDAMLM, 435/1/297 (rst draft of the libretto); Radianske mystetstvo, 28 July 1948, 3 (Dankevych). 50 TsDAHO, 1/30/2041, fol. 1 (telegram); Radianske mystetstvo, 15 February 1950, 3 (rst audition); 23 August 1950, 3 (score ready).

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structure of nineteenth-century Russian and Western European operas. The plot developed against the background of the Cossack war with Poland, ending with the decision to ask the tsar for protection (but not the act of union itself ). Both Ukrainian newspapers and internal reviews characterized the Kiev premiere of Bohdan Khmelnytsky in January 1951 as a triumph.51 During the Moscow dekada of Ukrainian art in June 1951 the Kiev Opera Company performed Bohdan four times at the Bolshoi Theater with apparent success.52 Pravda, however, expressed reservations regarding this opera, which, in the newspaper’s opinion did not sufciently portray the Polish gentry as the enemy and did not have a single battle scene.53 At rst, this comment might appear as nothing more than an isolated low-key critique of an otherwise laudable work. Yet in the wake of Pravda’s editorial “Against Ideological Distortions in Literature” (2 July), all problems in Ukrainian culture suddenly acquired an ideological coloring. While the ideological offensive in Ukraine was just beginning, Pravda intervened again on 20 July with an equally long editorial, “On the Opera Bohdan Khmelnytsky.” Even then, the agship of the party press did not call the opera nationalistic, nor did it demand a better portrayal of the Russian “elder brother.” The editor praised the opera’s subject and music, as well as the singers’ performances, but also elaborated on several critical lacks: no proper depiction of the enemies, no suffering of the masses, no battles, and no more than one duet.54 Bewildered by the insignicance of these accusations, Ukrainian functionaries themselves broadened the critique of Bohdan, interpreting the pronouncements from Moscow to mean that the opera was guilty of insufciently glorifying the historical Russian-Ukrainian friendship.55 This indictment reected post-war Ukrainian ideologues’ obsession with the issues of national patrimony and national identity, a concern reinforced by numerous previous reprimands from the Kremlin. By January 1952 Korniichuk and Wasilewska had prepared a new libretto, but several exhaustive discussions of the text at the republic’s Writers’ Union, Academy of Sciences, Committee for the Arts, and 51 Radianske mystetstvo, 31 January 1951, 1; Literaturna hazeta, 8 February 1951, 3; RGALI, 962/2/2336, fol. 13; 962/3/2306, fol. 6. 52 TsDAHO, 1/30/2428, fols. 3–85. 53 Pravda, 16 June 1951, 1. 54 Ibid., 20 July 1951, 3–4. 55 Literaturna hazeta, 26 July 1951, 4; TsDAHO, 1/30/2424, fols. 13–14; 1/1/976, fols. 12, 18–20, and 227–29.

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Composers’ Union took months, each resulting in dozens of minor critical comments and further revisions. The new libretto contained a new act 1, scene 1 portraying the execution of Cossack rebels and the people’s suffering under the yoke of the Polish lords. Another addition, act 2, scene 2, showed the Polish gentry hatching their evil plans and Cossacks storming a Polish castle. Finally, the Russian Don Cossacks appeared on the scene, and a new act 4 depicted the Pereiaslav Council as the apotheosis of the Ukrainians’ historical association with the Russian people.56 Critical comments on the draft libretto in Ukraine reveal just how unanimously the republic’s ofcials and artistic elite had “developed” Moscow’s vague critique. The apparatus of the Ukrainian party’s Central Committee, in particular, demanded a more elaborate depiction of fraternal assistance from Russia (the librettists decided to show the arrival of a cart with Russian weapons). The ideologues also felt that in the opera, “the word ‘Ukraine’ was used too often.”57 Less subtly, other Ukrainian reviewers suggested changing the last words of the nal chorus from “Glory to Bohdan Khmelnytsky!” to “Glory to the Russian people!” which was duly implemented. Nevertheless, the Ukrainian Composers’ Union still demanded “a more powerful representation [of the Ukrainians’] striving to unite with the great Russian people.”58 As a result, work on Bohdan Khmelnytsky dragged on and the new version of the opera remained unnished at the time of Stalin’s death. Finally, mindful of the imminent tercentenary celebrations planned for early 1954, Ukrainian authorities began coordinating feverish efforts to stage Bohdan in time for the jubilee. On 27 September 1953 the Kiev Opera Company opened its new season with the new version of the opera, more pro-Russian than ever. A ood of reviews promptly announced that it was a “great achievement” of the Soviet Ukrainian musical theater.59 The subsequent lavish celebration of the 300th anniversary of the Pereiaslav Treaty cemented the opera’s place in the canon of Soviet Ukrainian culture. The Kharkiv, Odessa, and

56 TsDAMLM, 435/1/304, fols. 1–8; 435/1/305; TsDAHO, 1/30/2747; Tsentralnyi derzhavnyi arkhiv vyshchykh orhaniv vlady i upravlinnia Ukrainy (TsDAVOV), 4763/1/357, fols. 2–5 and 44. 57 TsDAMLM, 435/1/2012, fols. 5–6 and 8. 58 TsDAVOV, 4763/1/357, fol. 95 (concluding words); TsDAMLM, 435/1/1959, fol. 15 (Composers’ Union). 59 Radianske mystetstvo, 30 September 1953, 3; 14 October 1953, 3; Literaturna hazeta, 1 October 1953, 3; 29 October 1953, 2.

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Stalino (Donetsk) opera companies staged Bohdan—reportedly with phenomenal success—in the spring of 1954. In May the Kiev Opera went to Moscow for the dekada, where they presented Bohdan to great acclaim.60 Soviet television broadcast Bohdan live from the Bolshoi on 10 May. In his introductory comments, Dankevych claimed that the Kievans had come to the Bolshoi to express “their feelings of brotherly love and boundless gratitude” to the Russian people. The opera was also repeatedly broadcast in full on all-Union and Ukrainian radio and released on gramophone records. The festive tercentenary concert in Kiev included no fewer than three arias from Dankevych’s work. The composer himself became a People’s Artist of the Soviet Union.61 The lack of reliable sources makes it difcult to reconstruct historical opera’s inuence on contemporary national identity. Tens of thousands of Soviet Ukrainians attended performances of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, and millions heard the opera on radio. Yet no one carried out an independent poll of listeners in 1954 to determine just how they “read” this cultural product. In January 1954 the Paris correspondent of the Ukrainian émigré newspaper, Novyi shliakh (New Path, Toronto), was allegedly told by visitors from Soviet Ukraine: “One must buy tickets to the Kiev Opera three or four weeks in advance to attend Bohdan Khmelnytsky. The public enthusiastically applauds the excellent Ukrainian settings and costumes; Ukrainians serving in the military greet the Cossack banners loudly. And the whole house listens as if in trance to Bohdan’s boring aria on the need to ‘reunite’ [with Russia].”62 Although some Canadian informants deemed this passage important enough to report to the Soviet All-Slavic Committee, which oversaw contacts with foreign Slavs,63 no other source corroborates the émigré newspaper’s information. Reading both the Soviet archival documents and the press of the time, one might just as easily conclude that Bohdan was popular precisely because it embodied the idea of a union of Russians and Ukrainians.

60

RGANI, 5/17/402, fol. 71; TsDAHO, 1/24/3504, fol. 24; 1/30/3632, fols. 20 –22; TsDAVOV, 5116/4/15, fol. 44; 5116/4/19, fols. 1–2; 5116/4/20, fols. 1–7 and 25. 61 Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), 6903/26/39, TV programs and transcripts for 10 May (no pagination); RGANI, 5/17/402, fols. 76–77 (all-Union radio); TsDAHO, 1/30/3631, fol. 25 (Ukrainian radio); 1/30/3633, fols. 47–54 (gramophone disks); 1/30/3632, fols. 180 –86 (concert); Radianske mystetstvo, 17 November 1954, 4 (Dankevych). 62 Novyi shliakh, 15 January 1954, 4. 63 GARF, 6646/1/356, fols. 14–18.

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The archives, however, shed interesting new light on the extent of the opera’s popularity. The attendance records of the Kiev Opera for 1954 show that Bohdan was the public’s absolute favorite: the company performed it 36 times that season with a total of 52,768 tickets sold, that is, to an average audience of 1,466 people. In the same season, the company performed the “ofcial” Russian patriotic opera Ivan Susanin 8 times for a total of 6,950 listeners (an average of 869 at each performance), Boris Godunov 7 times for a total audience of 7,183 (an average of 1,026), and Carmen 9 times for a total audience of 9,894 (an average of 1,099).64 A general statistical survey of all Soviet opera companies in 1954 reveals that 7 theaters—Kiev and 6 other smaller provincial houses, all of them in Ukraine—staged 129 performances of Bohdan for a total of 136,123 spectators, an average of 1,055. No Russian classical opera enjoyed such an average attendance Union wide that year. Ivan Susanin, staged by all the largest opera houses, came close, with 15 theaters, 126 performances, and 128,276 patrons (1,018). Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades, and other classics lagged far behind. The opera most often performed on a Soviet subject, Iulii Meitus’s The Young Guard, incidentally also a work by a Ukrainian composer, scored 9–87–49,980 (574).65 These statistics are convincing: Bohdan enjoyed unprecedented popularity in Ukraine. How many listeners craved a Ukrainian patriotic opera and how many the authorities “organized” to listen to a new and topical musical work about Russian-Ukrainian friendship are open to discussion. But for all practical purposes, Bohdan did become the Ukrainian national historical opera in the 1950s. Whatever its intended propaganda message, the operatic synthesis of the representation of the nation’s past with grand spectacle and theatrical ritual lled an important niche among the cultural pillars of Ukrainian identity. While Bohdan’s content duly gloried the “elder brother,” the opera also exalted the heroic Cossack past and the homeland’s liberation from foreign oppression. Thus, Bohdan Khmelnytsky offered Ukrainian listeners the experience of identifying with their glorious ancestors. In an angry and touching letter to Khrushchev, the singer Mykhailo Hryshko, unhappy with critics’ comments about his “static” portrayal 64 RGALI, 2329/3/168, fol. 35 overleaf. A real rarity, Puccini’s Tosca, surpassed Bohdan’s record average attendance: 2,959 people showed up at a mere two performances of Tosca in Kiev. 65 Ibid., 2329/3/111, fols. 1–3.

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of Bohdan, expressed this sense of belonging to a historical community. Hryshko had read the scholarly books, chronicles, and historical novels on the subject, sometimes almost feeling as if he were meeting Khmelnytsky’s colonels on the street. The singer thought of himself as “a son of [ his] people, in whose veins runs the blood of ancestors who passed into eternity and dreamt of seeing their fatherland free and independent.”66 Similarly, the students of a small-town school wrote to Korniichuk in 1954 that his play (and libretto) Bohdan Khmelnytsky “teaches us to love and be proud of our people, who defended their independence in arduous struggle.”67 It was precisely the possibility of such a selective reading of non-Russian representations of the past that undermined the principal message encoded in the ofcial memory, that of the Russian-dominated “friendship.” *

*

*

Having completed an ideological purication campaign in late 1951, the Ukrainian leadership was satised with its efforts. From November 1951 to May 1952 no ideological decrees or major public statements indicated the party’s concern with any “nationalist deviations” in culture. Soon, however, the republic’s bosses discovered that Stalin himself remained suspicious of Ukraine’s ideological situation. In May 1952 First Secretary Melnikov disclosed to the members of the Ukrainian party’s Central Committee: “On 14 April Comrade Korotchenko and I were received by Comrade Stalin. In a conversation that lasted approximately four hours, Iosif Vissarionovich [Stalin] showed great interest in the state of Ukrainian industry, agriculture, and culture.” The Ukrainian party leader went on to report on Stalin’s approval of Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction, but he saved the bad news for the end: “Comrade Stalin was keenly interested in the state of ideological work in Ukraine and expressed the opinion that things were not going particularly satisfactorily in this eld [chto zeds delo u nas obstoit neblagopoluchno].”68 Melnikov did not specify whether Stalin had elaborated on the problems motivating his concern. Yet one is tempted to surmise that the omniscient “father of peoples” realized that his viceroys had failed

66

RGANI, 5/17/445, fols. 85–86. TsDAMLM, 435/1/1302, fols. 1–2. 68 TsDAHO, 1/24/1605, fols. 19 and 23. Demian Korotchenko at the time served as the chairman of Ukraine’s Council of Ministers. 67

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to fashion a Soviet Ukrainian culture completely separate from nonSoviet Ukrainian culture. Perhaps Stalin bemoaned the limits of the state’s ideological control over the production of historical works and the inuential role of local bureaucrats and intellectuals in shaping the sense of nationhood in his many nations. Perhaps he was also frustrated by the Ukrainian public’s apparent ability to “read” the much-edited cultural products selectively, interpreting them as narratives of their national past.

INDEX

Aoki, Doug 3 n. 2, 11 n. 10, 16 n. 13 Accountability vii, x–xi, 6–7, 9, 14, 20–21, 27 Administration 9, 26–27, 40, 91, 127 Alltagsgeschichte 91 n. 36 Archaeology, Serbian 149–150, 150 n. 6, 151 Automation x, 6, 13–15, 17–18, 18 n. 15 Basara, Svetislav 163, 163 n. 21, 164 Bildung x–xii, 4–5, 18–19, 23–24, 26, 28, 39, 48–50, 51 n. 2, 52, 55–56 Bildungsbürgertum 4–5 Bourgeoisies, national 76 Byzantine – frescoes 151, 153–154, 159 – legacy 145 – heritage 145, 153, 156, 159, 165 – revival 141, 153–154 – Great Tradition 153, 153 n. 11, 156–157, 159, 162, 164 – High Culture 145, 159, 163–164 – Commonwealth 154–155, 162, 164

Doctorat d’état 4 Documentary 113, 123, 135, 139, 176 Domination in Central Europe, specicities of 74 Education – corporatisation of 7 – graduate/graduate studies x, 4, 11–12, 14–17 – high school 4, 56, 159 – ‘humanistic’ 4 – managerial approach to 28, 37, 38, 50 – micromanagement of 8, 14 – prestige in 10–15 – reproduction in 3, 6, 28 – undergraduate ix–x, 10, 22–25, 34–35, 37, 39, 46, 49 Etruscans 146, 148, 150 Euroasianists 155 Eurocentrism 18 Europe, Central xi, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69–74, 77–78, 80–82, 84, 84 n. 26, 85–89 Everyday Life 35, 124, 137

Colonialism – ‘by proxy’ 74, 80, 82, 84 – Central Europe xi, 61, 71, 73–75, 84 – cultural 80–82 – economic 74–75, 80, 82–84 – political 12, 74, 78, 80, 82, 84 Colovic, Ivan 163–164 Constructivism (Soviet, poster) 138, 175 Cossacks 188–189, 194, 200, 204 Cultural Revolution (Soviet) 121, 135–136 Cultural Studies vii–viii, x–xi, xiii, 19–20, 22, 28–29, 30–39, 43, 46–51, 57, 121 Cultures x, 4, 18 n. 15, 45–47, 66 n. 3, 71, 74–76, 78, 80–82, 86, 87 n. 29, 90, 154–155, 165, 177

Film 47, 124–125, 128–130, 132, 135–138, 143, 193, 195 Film-thing 124 Florensky, Pavel 165 Foucault, Michel 7, 28, 73 n. 12, 96, 116, 122, 122 n. 4

Deconstruction 35, 123 Diaspora 104 n. 3, 117–118

Identity politics (Central Europe) 65, 69, 93

Habilitation 4 Habilitationsschrift 5 Historical Method 122 History – democratization of 93 – microhistorical approach viii, xi – visibility in 36–37, 92–93 Hittite 144–145 Holocaust 90 Humanities vii–xi, xiv, 3–6, 15, 18–22, 24–31, 34, 36, 38–39, 44, 49 63,

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Ideology x, xii–xiii, 23, 38, 46, 83, 95 n. 41, 122, 125–127, 134, 163 n. 21 Illyrians 146–148 Inverted perspective 141, 152–153, 165 Jameson, Frederic

6, 6 n. 4, 52

Kalajic, Dragos 154–155 Karadzic, Vuk 98, 159–160, 160 n. 18, 161–162, 162 n. 19, 163, 165 Khmelnytsky, Bohdan 190–192, 195–199, 201–207 Khrushchev, Nikita 189, 206 Kosovo 162, 164 Labor (labour) migration – discourse 88, 104–106, 106 n. 8, 107, 112–113, 115–118 – literature 113–115 Language (Politics of ) 121 Lepenski Vir 148–149, 149 n. 5, 165 M.A. 14 n. 3, 12, 16, 47 Milic of Macva 152–154 Migrants (Central Europe) xi, 61, 64, 67, 69, 76, 85, 87–93, 97–98, 103–104, 106–108, 109 n. 15, 110, 112–113, 115–117 Mimesis 122 Nation vii, 21, 69, 79, 89, 105, 107, 108–109, 112–114, 116–118, 151, 160, 162–163, 185, 187–188, 191 Nationalism xii–xiii, 69, 77, 79, 86, 88, 142, 152, 162, 164, 186, 188 Novels, historical 189–190, 193, 195, 198, 207 Operas, historical 202, 202 n. 49, 205–206 Orchideenfach 5 Orthodoxy, Orthodox xiii, 20, 51, 94–96, 134, 152, 152 n. 10, 153–154, 154 n. 13, 155, 157, 159–161, 165 – Church, Serbian 157 n. 16, 161 – metaphysics 165 – Eastern 94, 96, 154 – world 154–155 Other, the, in Central Europe 154

Paintings, historical 199, 201 Peasant 82, 116–117, 128–129, 136, 138, 143, 145, 153–154, 159, 161, 163, 196–197, 200 Pereiaslav Treaty 190, 192, 204 Ph.D. 3 n. 2, 4, 4 n. 3, 5, 11–12, 14, 16, 18 Popular culture 33, 49, 67, 109, 113, 121, 134, 138 Postcolonial – intellectuals in Central Europe, absence of 87 n. 30, 208 – moment in Central Europe, absence of 76, 85 Postcommunism, postcommunist 63, 88 Postfascism, postfascist 61, 67, 69, 89 Pravda, newspaper 185, 185 nn. 2–3, 186, 203, 203 n. 53 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 10, 37 Renaissance perspective 153 Russia 56, 80, 104, 134, 154, 169–170, 178, 182, 186–187, 189–192, 194–198, 202, 204–205 Sanskrit xii, 143–144 Shevchenko, Taras 192, 197–198, 201 Slavic Studies xi, 59, 72 n. 10, 132 n. 30 Social History (method) vii, 31, 34, 39, 87, 93, 97, 122–123, 139 Socialist Realism 171, 194 Sources, historical 91, 95, 205 Soviet Union 44, 52, 54, 126–127, 171, 173, 176, 178, 180, 187, 205 Srejovic, Dragoslav 148–152 Studenica monastery 156, 157 n. 16 Stefanovic, Dimitrije 157–159 Stalin, Joseph xiii, 129, 185 n. 3, 186, 189–191, 207–208 Stalinism 32, 202 Subalternity (in Central Europe) 81–82 Teaching – productivity 9–13, 15, 28, 31 Theory transfer (problems of ) 72 Troy, Trojan 141, 146, 165 Turkish – taint 144, 147 – loan words 144, 163

211

index Ukraine – contemporary 106, 114–115 – Western 106–107, 111 Ukrainians 103, 105, 110, 111–112, 112 n. 20, 113, 115, 118, 129, 185, 187, 194–197, 202, 204–205 Ukrainization 127–130 University vii–x, xiii–xiv, 4–12, 18, 18 n. 15, 19–28, 32–33, 36–37, 39, 43–47, 49–50, 66, 89, 141, 151, 154 n. 13

Vedas 147, 147 n. 4 Vienna xi, 22, 61–63, 65, 67, 70 n. 5, 75, 77–78, 78 n. 19, 79, 83, 90 n. 35, 91–93, 94 n. 38, 95, 97–98, 102, 159, 161, 169, 173–174, 176–177, 181–182 Volksgeist xii, 145, 153 West, Rebecca

144

Zhdanovshchina 188, 188 n. 10, 197