"On the periphery" Katarzyna Kotyńska, Tomasz Zarycki

The tension between centre and periphery in the case of Galicia recurred constantly in the 20th century, starting with the tensions between Vienna and Lviv. For the land owners in Eastern Galicia, Lviv was unquestionably a centre, for the Austrian officials it was a place of exile to the most remote peripheries. The musty province was hence a cultural mecca. This tension is finally present in the project of Kyiv’s urbanisation, in the opposition between the Galician province and the Kyiv centre at the time of independent Ukraine.

Katarzyna Kotyńska: It seems to me that the myth of Galicia could be placed alongside the myth of the Borderlands (Kresy) – they both have an element of Orientalism. In the case of Galicia we have an interesting situation: we look at it as something remote, a periphery, but we also say: “We are Galicia because…”. The Borderlands are, I believe, deprived of this multi-layer reflection: the Borderlands do not talk about themselves and do not think about themselves; a look at them is always a look from “the outside”.

As a philologist, let me start by looking into a dictionary. This tells us that a periphery is, first of all, an external part, something remote from the centre, a part of something, an edge, an end; secondly, metaphorically: something of little importance, in the backstage, a trifle. Hence, we researchers of Galicia should feel privileged – not everyone can deal with trifles.

But let us return to the first element of the definition: peripheries are “a part of something that is located remotely from the centre”. In economic terms, when made in regard to Galicia this statement does not seem disputable. However, when we start talking about the values, culture and sense of identity, we will have to ask about the definition of the centre, as Galicia likes to think of itself as being the centre: maybe one that is in opposition to the real political “centre”, the centre of a real power, but the idea of the Galician Piedmont is something very characteristic of this vision.

A 19th-century conviction well known to Poles from their history stated that Galicia was the centre of the whole universe, a Galician Piedmont, at least in the cultural understanding, but also the sense of cultural and patriotic superiority have returned in the Ukrainian context. In the 1990s the Galician Ukrainianness became tantamount to “better” Ukrainianness, while it is said of one of the trains travelling between Kyiv and Lviv that people from Lviv take it to Ukrainise the capital of their young state. This descent from Lviv on the pan-Ukrainian “power parlours” was a result of a conviction, common among Ukrainian Galicians, that it was people from Lviv who had to build the state as in Kyiv there are no forces capable of managing such a task.

It is difficult to make a simple assessment of what the result of this conviction was; interesting, however, was the phenomenon itself. On the one hand, from the Galician Ukrainian point of view – meaning the one that takes Galicia as a model – the idea of a cultural and linguistic Ukrainisation of Kyiv made sense. However, this movement of the Lviv elite towards the capital, this never-ending corroding of ideas of what it means to be a Ukrainian, had another side to itself, as to a certain degree it was reinforcing the conviction of the uniqueness of the Galician experience. Such an attitude can be found, for example, in Yurii Andrukhovych’s essay titled “Small Intimate Urbanism:, in which the writer sharply contrasts the vision of Lviv as “his” world with Kyiv where “his” are at most some single islands around some specific people – while the rest is cold and unfriendly, and even the train changes into an unlikeable tin as it gets closer to this city. The “central” Kyiv is hence presented as a mental, cultural province, and “provincial” Galicia, located far from the official capital, as a “private centre”.

Let us go further. The periphery is somewhere outside, on the outskirts, in the borderlands. Thereby, lack of focus and transience are a natural state for a periphery. Even if in Galicia different cultures – in this case Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish – existed to a large degree separately, as parallel worlds, the myth of a multicultural Galicia is so deeply rooted in its perception that it cannot be ignored. This co-existence – even if separate – has some consequences for us today. Finally the peripheries are often in opposition to the centre. Galicia here is almost a model example of this positioning in opposition to the centre. From the Polish perspective this may not be so clear, but in the 20th century this tendency was noticeable in Ukrainian literature and culture, which underwent the consecutive stages of Galician fashion or was Galician in general. This opposition can be very creative and artistically fertile, but only when this feature of being a periphery does not turn into an ultimate goal for authors and intellectuals and they do not forget that the peripheries never exist just for themselves, but have to have a centre to be who they are.

This tension between centre and periphery in the case of Galicia recurred constantly in the 20th century, starting with the tensions between Vienna and Lviv. For the land owners in Eastern Galicia, Lviv was unquestionably a centre, for the Austrian officials it was a place of exile to the most remote peripheries, and for Ukrainian students it was also a centre, the closest possible and regarded as their own, even if in some periods it was easier for them to study in Krakow or Vienna. The musty province was hence a cultural mecca, and this duality returned, on many occasions, in literature. The tension is present in the project of Kyiv’s urbanisation, in the opposition between the Galician province and the Kyiv centre at the time of independent Ukraine.

But what happened between these two points in time? The Polish narrative on Lviv does not focus much on the city in the Soviet period. Even though this period formally existed, it is associated with the end of civilisation, a black hole in history, hence presumably Polish society feels no need to learn anything about it. Yet when we look at this period from a Ukrainian perspective – or even more broadly, a Soviet one – it turns out that the parochial Lviv on the Western outskirts of the Soviet empire was the centre of alternative culture, one that could be comparable to Vilnius. However, while in Vilnius it was mostly painters and artists who dominated artistic life, Lviv was more a centre of hippy culture. For the whole Soviet Union it was a place, almost a symbol, of freedom, where different alternative groups and counter-cultural activities could find their place.

Interestingly, in the 1990s, when Galicia again became the centre of a new culture, young writers and poets created a world there that existed in parallel to the official one. They did not enter into a conflict with the latter, but rather were “doing their own thing”, and the centre of this parallel literary life was not as much in Lviv – which was still of course very important – but in Ivano-Frankivsk. Suddenly at the turn of the 1990s, in the provincial – even by Galician standards – city of Ivano-Frankivsk, unusual things started to take place, there was an explosion of literary and cultural life, meetings were organised, and texts were published, which later infected the whole of Galicia.

In the context of the discussion of the never-ending corrosion of the two concepts of Ukrainianness – the Galician one and the one that could be “Little Russia”, whose apogee could, according to many commentators, have been seen during Euromaidan – one might wonder whether in the history of the Ukrainian culture there had ever been a real space for a meeting of people from “here” and “there”. Seemingly, we have to go back to the second half of the 1940s and move geographically somewhat further west – to the IDP camps on German territories. It was in one of them that the artistic group MUR (Mysteckij Ukrainskij Ruch, Ukrainian Artistic Movement) was founded, in which, some people claim, for the first time artists from both Ukraines started to co-operate. Obviously even earlier there had been attempts made on both sides not to lose contact and create common Ukrainian literature and culture; however, quite characteristically, these points of a real meeting, a real corrosion of concepts, was rather rare in the history of the Ukrainian culture. One may of course wonder about the result of this meeting that took place in the foreign lands for the local culture; however, what is of greater significance here is the question of what will be the result of the reformulation of the thinking about the Ukrainian identity that took place on the Maidan. It seems that for the first time in history, pan-Ukrainian civil society may be crystallised, finally giving Ukrainians a chance to move from demands to real activities. I am very curious to see what this will bring about.
Tomasz Zarycki: My great-grandfather fought in the First World War as a solider in the Russian Army, since before the war he had worked for an extended period of time in a Belgian steel factory in Donbas. Our whole family escaped from there to Poland in 1918. In the memories of my grandfather, also born near Donetsk, Donbas looks like an ideal world: a multicultural, cosmopolitan community full of Western factories, cinemas and newspapers. This was the world where modernity came from the West, without any intermediaries. This myth of Donbas that was cultivated by my grandfather is totally unreal today. Nowhere have I found such a vision of this region’s past. Once only, when visiting a family of Belgian industrialists, I came across a prominently displayed book of photographs illustrating the greatness of industry on these territories. This myth, partly justified, partly idealistic and avoiding the dark sides of the region’s history, and more broadly Russia’s industrialisation at the turn of the 20th century, shows us very well that there are many possible, although not necessarily recognised, myths about our own world. As a sociologist I am of the opinion that the whole of social reality can be understood as mythical. There is no one hard method to distinguish between truth and a myth, especially with regard to assigning specific features to different communities, countries, regions or cultures. Hence, the concept of a myth can be regarded as a way to diminish politically incorrect generalisations. However, we live in a social world where generalisations and summaries are unavoidable. We make simplifications and selections, and we remove elements from the context. For example we choose certain events, groups or individuals from one area and regard them as the essence of that area, time or process.

Historians, by engaging in reflection on myths, unwittingly enter into something that can be called political and ideological work. This translates into separating accepted generalisations, even when they are a little stretched but regarded as useful because of their message, from the ones that for various reasons we regard as difficult to accept. Let us take the example of the ongoing dispute in Poland over the legacy of the First Polish Republic. The question that keeps returning is whether it should be regarded as a treasure of positive values, a model of democracy and multiculturalism, or maybe the anti-modern burden of Polishness, one from which we cannot free ourselves. The French historian Daniel Beauvois said that Poles should finally set themselves free from the horrible myth of the First Polish Republic, which is a burden for them as even though it makes reference to facts, it only shows those that it regards as essential for this legacy. Beauvois’s position, even though justified, is to a large degree subjective and political. It diminishes our right to use this myth as a significant basis for the definition of Polish identity or in general a definition of a civic culture in Poland. In the same way we could question the myth of the French Revolution, stressing its dark sides, and draw from them the conclusion that creating a positive memory of this event is unjustified.

It seems to me that an important element of what we can call the myth of Galicia is its oriental aspect. The concept of orientalism, coined by Edward Said, means that the East is perceived as something worse, more dangerous and culturally determined and entails a multi-level depreciation of Easternness. In Said’s study the focus was on the Middle East, yet many researchers, including Larry Wolff, have pointed out that this very same issue of orientalism can be considered in the Western perspective on the broad concept of Eastern Europe. Wolff establishes a classical scheme of symbolic depreciation, which emerges in centre-periphery circumstances. The centre always treats the periphery from above, at times with contempt, at other times with indulgence. Quite often even the forms of acceptance and appreciation can be protectionist in nature. A typical example of the latter is culturalism, meaning defining areas in the peripheries in culture categories regarded as their main values, which is to compensate for the political and economic weaknesses of these territories. In the case of Central Europe, this orientalist mechanism has a gradual nature. The Hungarian sociologist Attila Melegh even wrote about an orientalist gradient, Jeremy Straughn referred to fractal orientalism, and Milica Bakić-Hayden to nesting orientalism – in other words a reproduction of orientalism on increasingly lower levels of spatial divisions, which leads to the perception of some urban districts as worse, because of their being Eastern. Here, Galicia is a good example of orientalism at the regional level. On the one hand, from Vienna’s perspective, it was a part of the periphery, which was, maybe not entirely, but to a large degree depreciated and perceived as something remote, worse and less attractive. Seemingly, however, in the Polish understanding of this concept today Galicia is something better than the East. Even today, what is seen as “stranger” than Galicia is the Kingdom of Poland (the so-called Kongresówka), which de facto means Russia, and which can be seen not only in commentaries on the electoral geography of the country, but also during some political manifestations – for example, the famous story of Jan Maria Rokita, who after Lech Wałęsa had lost the presidential election to Aleksander Kwaśniewski wanted to set up border posts at the former Austrian-Russian border. A similar tendency can be seen in Ukraine, where being Eastern, or more specifically being Russian – understood as worse – is something that one needs to escape from and is in opposition to the Ukrainian myth of Galicia. Today’s attractiveness of the Galician myth includes a significant element of a geopolitical configuration. The core of the world’s political and economic system, and especially Europe, is still to be found in Western Europe. The further away we go from this core, the larger the oriental gradient. There is no simple dependence on economic and political structures; however, symbolic production of depreciative images is indirectly linked with the geo-economic configuration of power in today’s Europe where, on the one hand, we have Germany or Austria, which are economically very strong countries, and at the same time attractive and rich in symbolic capital. These are the countries which have the ability to define what is modern, progressive and civilised. On the other hand, we have Russia, which has lost that power, even though we need to remember that Russia’s orientalism is not a permanent and incessant phenomenon.

In this context I would question the thesis that the oriental myth of Eastern Europe emerged during the Enlightenment period and since then it has been reproducing itself, that it is a faulty image of the Eastern part of the continent which continues to exist by the power of inertia. There have indeed been moments when this myth became significantly weaker and almost disappeared, which was usually related to the emergence of some strong political or economic creations on the eastern flank of Europe. The earliest period, when this orientalism did not exist, was that of the First Polish Republic, while the oriental myth as described by Wolff was the result of its failure and an element legitimising its conquest. After that, there was the Napoleonic period, the times when Russia had such great successes that its orientalism weakened. And finally, there was the economic boom in Russia at the turn of the 20th century, thanks to which – especially in the Kingdom of Poland (Kongresówka) – Russia’s attractiveness increased. Today, the accepted narrative is anti-Russian, and it was created by the intelligentsia. However, suffice it to read some authors from that time period, for example Marian Zdziechowski, who wrote an essay pointing to Russian influences on Polish thinking, the attractiveness of the Russian culture for Polish youth and the dangers that emerge from it. The Polish collective memory has almost denied that fact, which, I believe, relates to the catastrophe of the Russian Empire, and especially its economic system. Galicia, especially at the end of the 19th century, was developing at a much slower pace than the Kingdom of Poland (the population of Lviv or Krakow back then did not exceed one hundred thousand inhabitants, while Warsaw already had one million, and Łódź six hundred thousand). At that time the Kingdom of Poland was characterised by an accumulation of capital and dynamic economic development, something that the First World War put an end to as, together with the war, the most significant economic resources of the region had disappeared, while the political changes were followed by a complete destruction of memory of any positive aspects of economic development in important centres of the Russian partition. As a result, anything associated with Russia became unattractive again. Russia became popular once more at the time of the greater successes of the Soviet Union, but after 1968 the attractiveness of this state weakened and the idea of Central Europe returned. The greater popularity of the Galician myth in the 1980s was a result of the weakening power of the Eastern European projects and an increasing, one-sided dominance of the Western core over our part of Europe. In 2016 the University of Warsaw will celebrate the anniversary of its establishment by Tsar Alexander I, which may create an opportunity to start talking about the period of the Russian rule over this part of Poland. This rule had many interesting aspects, and not all of them were negative. Seemingly, however, there is no good political context now for such a discussion, and probably such an opportunity will not be taken to break the dark stereotype of the Kingdom of Congress.

A different oriental myth, which has much resemblance to the myth of Galicia, is that of the Borderlands (Kresy) – a myth of the superiority of the Polish civilisational mission. This myth has two faces: on the one hand it is criticised for being a form of Polish colonialism, orientalism, and Polish-centeredness. On the other hand, there are varieties of the Kresy myth that present it as a place that was inclusive, multicultural, and where Poland played a role of an intermediary, transferring Western culture to Eastern lands. As a side note, one may dare to ask the question as to whether the myth of the Polish Borderlands is being researched and deconstructed behind our Eastern border to an equal extent as the myth of the Austrian Galicia is under reflection in Poland. And if not, what is the reason for such differences?

Closing these remarks, I would like to point out that the current war in Ukraine is also about the future of Russia.

In this context, of significant importance is whether we will regard Russia’s negative features as its essence or will see it as a country that can change. Such would be a question about our myth of Russia. It is worth pointing out that if Russia ever changes its face into one that we regard as friendlier, then different narratives that are in opposition to it will lose their raison d’être. This will force significant changes in many of our national and regional myths. At the same time, today, even the thought that a different Russia could one day emerge and the fate and nature of this country not be determined solely by its history and culture seems to be quite a radical suggestion. I am of the opinion that, nonetheless, the assessment as to whether the potentially more optimistic vision of Russia’s future should be considered by us is to a large degree a political and subjective question, one that an academic cannot give a straightforward answer to. Thus, academics are left with pointing to the political contexts that are defining the framework of our debate, one in which Russia is perceived as culturally determined, immemorial, barbarian and threatening us with its spiritual influence, and this constitutes the raison d’être for a great number of our national and regional myths.

Translated from the Polish by Iwona Reichardt

Katarzyna Kotyńska – research associate at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, translator of Ukrainian literature, Ukrainianist, literary scholar. She is the winner of the Angelus Central European Literary Award for translating Oksana Zabuzhko's novel „The Museum of Abandoned Secrets” (2013). She published the book "Lviv: on reading the city anew" (2015).

Tomasz Zarycki – sociologist and social geographer, associate professor and director of the Institute for Social Studies at Warsaw University.