Making of Modern Ukraine, Lecture 2

The Genesis of Nations

Here the purpose is to investigate the origins of modern nations as such.  I review how nations characterize themselves and order the past. I try to make explicit the various forms of the politics of time involved, and how they influence how we see the present and future.  Then we shift to scholarly accounts of the origins of nations, which are usually connected to modernization in one form or another.  I note how key ideas of these theories themselves arose in a certain time and place, one in which the origin of Ukraine was being debated: the Habsburg monarchy in the late nineteenth century.  I try then to show how the emergence of Ukrainian national politics included various competing accounts of the Ukrainian past, and how these affected political choice and vision.  I close with the intriguing case of the Rudnyts'kyi family, one of the most important Ukrainian families, one of whose members can take a good deal of credit for the prevalence of the idea of the civic or political national in contemporary discourse.

The lecture can be found here on video or here and here as audio.

The assigned reading for this lecture was Rudnyts'kyi, "The Role of Ukraine in Modern History" in Rudnyts’yi, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History.

Terms:

Genesis

Innocence

Ivan Ilyin

Cycles: Berlin, Vico, Hegel

Kelles-Krauz, Austro-Marxists

Gellner 1983 Nations and Nationalism

Anderson 1983 Imagined Communities

Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983 Invention of Tradition

Drahomanov

Antonowycz

Hrushevs'kyi

Populism

Social history

Ethnicity

Ethnography/anthropology

Malinowski.

Lypyns'kyi

Dontsov

Khvylovyi

Rudnyts'kyi

Habsburg monarchy

Ivan (Kedryn), Mykhailo, Anton Rudnyts'kyi

Milena Rudnyts'ka

Ivan Rudnyts'kyi

Modernization

(Somewhere around here I got in trouble for wearing the same shirt to each lecture and had to go buy some new shirts.)