And understand what a miserable Asian you are

Panteleymon Kulish (1882)

Yes, Scythians, we! Yes, Asians, we,

With slanted and greedy eyes!

Aleksander Blok (1918)

It is not hard in Kyiv to find illustrations to the title of my essay[1]. For instance, those of us who found time to visit the cathedral of St. Sophia will have realised that this 11th century shrine, inlaid in its interior with Byzantine mosaics and Greek inscriptions, is on the outside almost totally covered with architectural embellishments in the manner of western Baroque. Another example:  if we open the last book by H. N. Lhvyn[2] about drawings printed in Ukraine  between the 16th and 18th centuries, we will find there a 1768 engraving from Pochayiv depicting St. Luke the Evangelist in the process of painting a portrait of the Holy Virgin Mary[3]. She is presented as a purely Byzantine icon; Luke, on the other hand, is seated in a western position, Baroque and dramatic. These two examples should suffice to demonstrate that between the 11th and 18th centuries in Ukrainian culture, at least within its artistic realm, influences from East and West succeeded and co-existed with each other.

At this point, however, a difficulty arises: Byzantium – or, if one prefers, Constantinople – lies not to the east but to the south, or indeed south-west of Kyiv. It would seem therefore that when referring to Byzantium’s influence on Ukraine we ought to be speaking not of the East but rather of a part of Mediterranean civilisation. Despite which, we feel instinctively that the East signifies Byzantium, while the West means Europe. Where does this conviction stem from?

The opposing concepts of ‘East’ and ‘West’ came into being a good few centuries before Ukraine entered the realm of civilisation. When it comes to literature, then – leaving aside Homer – we find them in Herodotus, tasked with describing the conflict between the Greeks (i.e. the West) and the Persians (the East). As administrative terms they became part of the consciousness of late antiquity with the division of the late Roman Empire into its eastern and western parts. The frontier between the two ran to the east of present-day – or rather, yesterday’s – Yugoslavia. Thus almost the entirety of former Yugoslavia once belonged to the West. The wedge driven into the Balkan Peninsula by Slavic invaders in the sixth century contributed  to  the feeling that the East and West were separated. The Church administration, organized on the same principles as the State, distinguished between the territorial entities of the Western Church and the Eastern ones, the latter being denominated ecclesiae orientales. This distinction did not imply anti-Eastern prejudice. On the contrary, among the early Mediterranean Christians the East was held in special esteem as the birthplace of the Saviour. All this was geographically understandable from the point of view of the power centres of the time: Constantinople (that is, the city of Byzantium) was indeed to the east of Ravenna, which was one of the capitals of the Western Empire, and of Rome, the seat of the principal Western Patriarchate. The division of the Churches which followed in the eleventh century, and even more so the attack on Byzantium by the Western crusaders in 1204, contributed to exacerbating the situation, since at that point the East began carrying negative connotations in the eyes of the Western Church, while the Byzantines, in turn, began to detest the Latin West.

The rebellion – some historians say usurpation – of Charlemagne and his coronation in the year 800 as the one who ‘ruled the Roman Empire’ –  incidentally, in that year he did not yet use the title of ‘Roman Emperor’!  – were anti-Byzantine acts which would lay the foundations for the creation of modern Europe. Perhaps for that reason we can find texts from the 10th century to the 15th which indicate that the Byzantines did not see their capital as part of Europe, although they knew perfectly well – since they read and even published the geographers of antiquity – that the border between Asia and Europe passed through the Bosphorus and the Don River . Therefore, when Vladimir’s Kyiv adopted Christianity it found itself in a cultural realm which in the eyes of the West was considered to be the East, while for its part it did not always think of itself as belonging to Europe. This point of view has survived to the present day. Even now, not only the inhabitants of Sofia, Belgrade, Bucharest or Istanbul, but also people living in Moscow or Kyiv travel ‘to Europe’, even though they will have learnt at school that Europe ends at the Urals and they are therefore Europeans in the geographical sense of the word. Ukraine’s contemporary drive ‘towards Europe’, represented by the writers Khvylovy and Zerov, can be seen as a reaction against an attitude with a long tradition. The same can be said of a statement which I read while staying in Kyiv in 1990, that the geographical centre of Europe is located in Subcarpathian Ukraine. Of course, this rejection of ‘the East’ is an expression of the attitude of the contemporary Eastern European educated classes, though  not of all of them, as shown by the two lines of Aleksander Blok quoted at the beginning of my article. At the level of Eastern European folklore, however, the concept of ‘the East’  has retained its positive associations, inherited from late paganism and then adopted by early Christianity: one should pray facing the East, the seat of the gods and later of God; while the West is the dwelling place of demons, and later of the devil.

While the concepts of ‘the East’ and ‘Europe’ need to be explained for the purposes of our topic, no such explanation is necessary for the concept of ‘the West’, since its geographical and cultural context are the same. Please forgive me if in this brief overview of the role of the West in Ukrainian culture I will not dwell on individual early events, such as the relations between Princess Olga and the Emperor Otto I in the 10th century or the travels of Princes Iziaslav and Yaropolk to Rome in the 11th, nor on the fact that in the 11th and 12th centuries marriages of members of the Kyiv dynasty with partners from Poland, Scandinavia, Hungary, Germany and France far outnumbered those with partners from Byzantium. I shall also pass over such facts as the western military campaigns and papal coronation (in 1253) of Prince Daniel Halicki, who – it is worth mentioning – was at the same time a vassal of the Golden Horde. I am omitting them since I wish to bring to your attention some more long-term phenomena, particularly in the domain of the history of culture.

From the perspective of a historian of culture, Western influence over some parts of Ukrainian territory began before 1340, intensified after 1569 and pervaded large swathes of Ukrainian lands up to 1793. If we take into account the influence of Polish elites on territories of Western and Right Bank Ukraine, this influence endured until 1918, or even 1939. Ukraine’s West in that period tended to be clothed in a Polish nobleman’s robes; the later influence of the Habsburgs was limited in time and geography, and its main cultural impact in the pivotal period of the end of the 16th and start of the 17th centuries consisted in the Polish variant of the Counter-Reformation. The Jesuits brought in Latin and new pedagogical methods, and the Orthodox took them on board. Even the new-found interest in Ancient Greek was merely a reaction against the inroads that Latin and the Latin way of life were making into Ukraine. One consequence of this was that the first half of the 17th century gave Ukrainian elites their first opportunity in history to have direct contact with sources of ancient history. This was because hardly anyone in Kievian Rus’ knew Greek. From a practical point of view, however, higher culture reached Ukrainians not through the medium of Latin and Greek, but through Polish. The result of the victorious campaign of that language was the emergence of a kind of Polish-Ukrainian jargon employed in writing, and perhaps speaking too, by local Orthodox and Greek Catholic elites in the 16th and 17th centuries.

This offensive from the West gave rise in part to adaptation, and in part to a hostile reaction by the threatened Ukrainian elites. The latter movement is generally termed as a renaissance of ‘Ruthenian’ faith. It found expression in polemical literature and the establishment of the Ostrogski[4] and Mohylan colleges, and in other schools emanating from those two institutions. The fight against an apparently invincible West was conducted in the name of the Greek faith in forebears, but essentially its means were the same as those to which the West owed its successes: Jesuit methods of schooling, Catholic teaching and Catholic literature.

It was thus the West, rather than the Greeks, that gave the majority of the Ukrainian elites the impetus and the means to defend Byzantine values. Such a defence of ‘one’s own’ East using a Western armoury was not an exceptional phenomenon in 16th and 17th century Europe. Similar mechanisms were in action along another frontier, drawn between Western and Byzantine culture. These territories were Greek-speaking, but had been overcome by Venice after 1204. The changes were particularly noticeable in Crete. While the island did not actually witness the creation of a Greek-Venetian dialect, it played host to something similar, namely the mass penetration of Venetian elements into the Greek language. Moreover, in the 16th and 17th centuries the Greek subjects of the Venetian empire also rejected a union of the churches and created their own literature – known as Cretan literature – but based on direct translations or borrowings from Venetian works, some of them indeed Jesuit ones.

The West’s offensive on Ukrainian territory was potentially a threat to national unity. It suggests a comparison with the Serbs and Croatians. In the case of those two nations, linguistic identity (roughly speaking) did not bring about national unity, since the two peoples were separated by frontiers and religion from the 11th century onwards. With Ukraine, three factors contributed to the preservation of its unity: first, the long period during which most Ukrainian lands remained under the rule of one, Polish-Lithuanian state; second, the relatively short time during which the same territory was ruled by several states (1772-1945); third, the absence of a total Catholisation of Western Ukrainian lands.

Despite the Western penetration of Ukrainian lands – which lasted for many centuries – in the eyes of the West the Ukrainians came to be seen as the East relatively soon, even before the first partition of Poland. This was not only because most Ukrainians professed ‘an Eastern faith’ and continued to accept the leadership of the Eastern patriarch up to the end of the 17th century (because finally the Uniates came under the aegis of the Western patriarch). Another reason was that the Polish-Lithuanian state (which as late as the 16th century was felt in the West to be part of the West), was from the mid-17th century and well into the 18th considered –with no justification, incidentally – to be somehow connected with the East. As it happens, this new perspective had its origins even earlier. A painting by Rubens provides an example: created in 1625 and now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, it is a depiction, based on Herodotus, of Tomyris, queen of the Scythian Massagetae in the 6th century BC in the environs of the Caspian Sea. In Rubens’s painting, the members of the queen’s entourage are dressed in the style of Polish noblemen. It was not only the orientalisation of the attire of Polish nobles and their Ukrainian counterparts that contributed to this reputation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the 18th century the Commonwealth’s Jews (many of them living in Ukrainian towns) also played a role, since their fox-fur caps and long kaftans aroused the disgust of enlightened observers in their short ruffles and white powdered wigs.

Events of the last half century have led at least one pessimistic Polish critic to aver that his country has undergone a cultural shift to the East, placing his compatriots, ‘Europeans despite everything’, squarely half way between Asia and Europe. It is to my regret that he also suggested that Asia begins on the eastern banks of the River Bug, i.e. on the present Polish-Ukrainian border[5].

It is not surprising, therefore, that the success attained by Yuriy of Drohobych[6] in Bologna – the only Ukrainian to become rector of one of the great Western universities – was possible in the 15th century, when Poland was unequivocally seen as part of the West. If we accept this perspective it will be easier to understand why in Ukrainian consciousness the year when part of Ukrainian territory unquestionably joined the West was 1772, when Galizien and Lodomerien ceased to be part of an orientalised Poland and were incorporated into the Habsburg empire.

As an introduction to the next part of my text I would like to cite an example from the year 1990. It may perhaps not be topical today, but it is still valid in a wider perspective. When in the Kyiv hotel ‘Moskva’ – please note the prestigious name – Aeroflot advertised flights on the route Kyiv-Aphiny-Kyiv, it was using the Russian, or initially Byzantine and modern Greek form of the name of the city of Pericles and Plato. If the modern-day Kievian also flies ‘v Aphiny’ rather than ‘v Ateny’ or indeed ‘to Ateny’, expressions which would denote a continuation of the Western traditions of the Mohylan College, he does so because his forebears fell victim to the counter-offensive of the Byzantine East. A counter-offensive dating back to 1650, though its subsequent progress varied in different periods and in different areas of Ukraine.

Here we once again encounter a difficulty. We saw at the start that the original influences of the Byzantine East arrived in Ukraine from the south, both from the capital itself, Byzantium, and via the byzantanised Balkans. It is thus worth pondering the fact that the second wave of Byzantine influence came from the north – in some measure from the tsarist rule of Muscovy, but later mainly from the Russian tsarist empire. Naturally, in the first phase of cultural relations between Muscovy and Russia on the one hand and Ukraine on the other, the North’s counter-offensive was preceded by a defence of the indigenous originality of a North of the Byzantine type. This went hand in hand with the skilful exploitation both of Ukrainian cultural achievements and of the services of members of Ukrainian educated classes. Let us recall the dispute which took place in the residence of the Moscow Patriarch with the hapless Lawrence Zizanius[7] in 1627; or the ‘purging’ of religious texts by the patriarch Nikon[8], allegedly based on Greek models, though in reality they were mainly Kievian; or the Moscow edition of the Anphologion of 1660, in which the Kievian texts appear with a different, local spelling; or, finally, the Moscow career of Ukrainian Hellenist scholars such as Epiphanius Slavinetsky[9].

That was the state of play until the last quarter of the 17th century. Shortly afterwards came a turning point. It is known to everybody. Neo-Byzantinism, mainstay of the culture of Moscow tsardom, lost – not without a rear-guard resistance both from learned guests from Greece and from immigrants and native scholars, such as Yevfimiy[10] from the Chudov monastery. Within 50 years the new Russian tsardom set about importing Western culture on an enormous scale and that was what instilled Western values in its Ukrainian possessions. Between 1730 and 1740 the Italian Rastrelli[11] and the German Gottfried Johann Schadel[12] constructed or projected buildings in Kyiv (the Great Bell Tower, the Church of St. Andrew). We should not forget, that they arrived in Kyiv not directly from Italy or Germany, but, in one way or another, from Petersburg.

Rastrelli’s case brings to mind one important feature of Ukraine’s cultural contacts with East and West alike. This is the lack of direct access to sources covering long periods of Ukraine’s history. Ukrainians imported their foreign cultural values through intermediaries. I mentioned earlier that Greek was barely known in Kievian Rus’ – its Byzantine literature came mainly from Bulgaria. As for the culture of the Counter-Reformation (sometimes imprecisely labelled as Renaissance and Baroque), this arrived in Ukraine principally from Poland. Classicism in architecture came via the Russian tsardom. Even when the neo-classical writers of the 20th century turned to the French Symbolist poets and parnassiens, it was not without some encouragement derived from the Russian poets of the period known as the silver age. Admittedly, such ‘derivative’ sourcing can be found elsewhere, with the Bulgarians: the Bulgarian Baroque and Rococo of that nation’s revival have some of their roots in the art of Ottoman Istanbul. Such parallels, however, offer scant consolation. The fact is that Ukrainian derivation pointed to a certain weakness.

It is not my intention here to deal with the ‘true’ East and its cultural coexistence with Ukraine: Kumans, Karakalpaks, their alliances with Ruthenian princes including the 1223 coalition before the battle of Kalka, their inter-marriages with Kievian princes or the Turkish inscription in St. Sophia cathedral. Nor will I address, when we move on to later times, the Turkic elements in the structure of the institution of the Zaporozhian Sich, or the Crimean Khanate and its Ukrainian population – the Khanate veered between being Ukraine’s ally and its enemy, even to the point of subjugating Ukrainian lands. Lastly, I do not intend to discuss the Ottoman Porte, which the Ukrainians sometimes ransacked, occasionally fought against as Poland’s auxiliary forces, and of which at other times they were vassals. This is not my field.

I will however risk one generalised supposition; that Ukraine’s early cultural contacts with the ‘true’ East have been either under-represented in our literary sources or ignored altogether. This is sometimes due to the non-literary level of these contacts and the sectarian bias of the sources. I will confine myself to two observations about this ‘true’ East. On the highest floor of the clumsily restored Golden Gate in Kyiv you could in 1990 see exhibits representing the armoury of the former Rus’. The visitor could easily deduce that the ‘true’ East supplied Rus’ with military technology. He could familiarise himself with such Turkic or Mongol names of weapons as kuyak, yushman, tegagliay and bachterech, finding there only one Slavic word, zerkalo, though even this word for ‘mirror’ was probably derived from an  Eastern word. Here again, as earlier in Byzantium, this ‘true’ East was mainly the south. A moment’s thought will suffice to ask where Bakhchisaray or Istanbul are located.

Generally speaking, we historians concentrated so much on the East-West axis, seminal to the development of Ukrainian culture today, that we paid less attention to the North-South axis. But as I have repeatedly said, that is the axis on which are aligned Muscovy, Byzantium and its heir, the Ottoman empire. The last of these three was on its own territory a defender of Orthodoxy against threats from the West. Cultural contacts with Orthodox centres located within the borders of the Ottoman empire took place along the North-South axis and here Ukraine was not only their beneficiary but also a place whose influence extended further down to the south.

The main players in these exchanges were, firstly: representatives of the post-Byzantine eastern Church; ecumenical and other patriarchs; bishops; and ordinary daskaloi (teachers). Predominantly Greek, they would stop over for some time in Ukraine, assisting  brotherhoods or Prince Ostrogski[13] in sustaining the Orthodox cause, supporting themselves by teaching, or just travelling through on their way to Moscow. Moscow had the power and the money, but in the oft-cited words of one of their number, the Syrian Paul of Aleppo, in Ukraine one could breathe freely. In second place, we need to mention the reciprocal exchanges between the Ukrainian-Belorusian expanse and the Balkan countries in the broader sense of that word: the Metropolitan of Kyiv Piotr Mohyla[14] supported printing presses in Moldavia and Wallachia, while in the 16th and 17th centuries we can trace the impact that Greeks, Bulgarians and Moldavians (in part at least educated in the West) had on Kievian hymnography.

In the other direction, early Kievian printed texts, including works by Symeon Polotsky[15], found their way to Serbia and Bulgaria. Eloquent testimony to this can be found in the substantial number of well-preserved early works now stored in the library of that national and religious Bulgarian sanctuary that it is the monastery at Rila. And lastly, in the 18th century Mykhailo Kozachynski[16], alumnus and then professor of the Kyiv Academy, lectured in Serbia and wrote on Serbian subjects.

I move on to closing remarks. A historian of culture describes what he finds; it is not his task to give advice. It is however possible to give advice under the cover of description, and I intend to give in to that temptation. Firstly, a historian of culture who has traversed far and wide the territories of the former Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires (I confine myself to empires which fell in the years 1917-1918) realises that the elites of nations which belonged to these three entities – naturally with the exception of the ruling ones – were condemned to cultural provincialism, not infrequently compensated for by exaggerated or even unjustified claims to originality in the cultural domain. Secondly, between the end of the 17th century and the first half of the 18th the Russians decided that it was more beneficial for them to turn to the West directly, bypassing Ukraine as an intermediary – an approach which undoubtedly bore fruit. The unprecedently rapid growth of Muscovite and then Russian culture from the rule of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich to the period of Alexander I during which Pushkin wrote his works can largely be explained by the first-hand contacts with the West. Among their 18th century peripatetic scholars the Russians include Lomonosov[17], who lectured at the university of Marburg, while the Ukrainians have Hryhorovych-Barsky[18], who taught on the island of Patmos.

In Ukraine under Soviet rule there was a conviction in the milieu which nurtured Khvylovy and Zerov that there was a need for first-hand contacts with the West; we all remember the project of eschewing the intermediation of the North. And we know the fate that befell that project in the 1930s. Today we are living in new circumstances and it is possible for the project to come to fruition as long as we approach the challenge calmly and without polemics. And today the expression ‘the West’ should be taken to mean the whole wide world. In this world our contemporary Hryhorovych-Barskys may not be deemed to be as worthy of the attention of such highly-placed figures as the ambassador of His Imperial Majesty to the Sublime Porte, who in Istanbul inundated Barsky with questions as to what he had seen during his peregrinations. Instead, however, there will be interest from compatriots dispersed around the world.

When we undertake the implementation of first-hand exchanges with the world at large, let us cast an eye over the Bulgarians and Serbs, incidentally two nations which are more ‘peasant’ than the Ukrainians. Their young elites begin their preparations by mastering several foreign languages, as the first step to studying in the West. But first and foremost,  Ukrainians must hurry to secure direct contacts at the appropriate level. Otherwise a ‘wide world’ which they will start absorbing quickly, without knowledge of languages, without travelling and making an effort, will consist of imitating jeans, man-bags on a strap, Pepsi Cola and rock bands.

*

This type of article – a brief overview – does not need a reading list. However, by way of example and contrast, I will mention two studies which bring us close to the matter in hand: Eduard Winter, Byzanz und Rom im Kampf um die Ukraine. 955–1939 (Leipzig 1942) (the author is particularly interested in questions of ecclesiastical organisation) and Ivan Lysiak-Rudnycki, Ukraine between East and West in the collection of papers by the same author: Essays in Modern Ukrainian History (Edmonton 1987), pp. 1–9 (the text was first published in 1963 and translated into Ukrainian in 1976 and Polish in 1988. The author focuses on the role of the West and both the Easts – nomadic and Byzantine – in shaping the Ukrainian  national character.) In addition, in numerous articles published in the monthly ‘Suchasnit’ ’ between 1963 and 1991 many authors (such as Yuri Lutsky,  Omelian Pritsak, Yuriy Shevelov, Vassil Stus and Yuriy Tarnavsky, to name the outstanding ones) concerned themselves – mainly in a normative manner – with Ukraine’s choice between an Eastern and Western orientation, with Byzantium tending to receive a low score and jeans and electric guitars occasionally a high one. See also Bohdan Strumiński’s article Suchasnist’ (1961-1991) in ‘Kultura’ no. 536 (May 1992), especially pages 128-131. To illustrate the difference in perspective with which our topic is viewed by contemporary Russian scholarship, I would cite: Rus mezhdu Vostokom i Zapadom: kultura i obshchestwo X–XVII v. (Zarubezhnye i sovetskiye issledovanija, czast’ I) [AN SSSR, Otdelenie Istorii (...)] (Moscow 1991).

Harvard University

Authorised translation by Andrzej Vincenz

Post-scriptum, June 1992:

The rapid and extraordinary changes which have recently occurred in Ukraine do not negate the validity of the issues discussed in this article. Such transformations tend to direct the attention of elites in the homeland and Ukrainians abroad towards the West and the future. That in itself is positive but entails the risk of foreshortening and distorting the historical perspective. The Byzantine heritage of both Orthodox and Greek Catholic Ukrainians coupled with later long-term events – the most recent being Russian cultural influence over the majority of Ukrainian lands – may take a back seat in the heady atmosphere of current transformations, but their influence will not disappear overnight.

Ihor Szevchenko (1922–2009) – Ukrainian and American historian and philologist, specialising in Byzantine culture, literature and art.; in 1973–1989 deputy director and then director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute; from 1977, co-editor of the periodical ‘Harvard Ukrainian Studies’.

[‘Kultura’ 1992, no. 12]