On the eve of International Mother Language Day, the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy held a roundtable debate, “Mythologizing the Origins of Ukrainians,” presided over by the well-known archeologist Leonid Zalizniak and organized on the initiative of the Viacheslav Lypynsky Center of Social and Humanitarian Studies (director Kyrylo Halushko).
Among the participants were such authoritative experts as Hryhorii Pivtorak, Corresponding Member of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences and professor at the Institute of Linguistics; Leonid Zalizniak and Vitalii Otroshchenko, professors at the Institute of Archeology; Serhii Seheda, professor at the Institute of Ethnology; Natalia Yakovenko, professor at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy; and many other scholars, public figures, and journalists with an interest in the origins of the Ukrainian people.
As indicated in the title, the roundtable focused on the alarming trend toward the dissemination of mythologized ideas of our people’s ethnogenesis rather than on the study of this problem, although several scholars did present their viewpoints on the matter. It is often claimed, contrary to archeological, historical, anthropological, and linguistic findings, that the bearers of the Trypillian Culture (5th-3rd millennia B.C.) were the ancestors of Ukrainians or even the “first Ukrainians”; that Ukrainians existed as a separate “Aryan” nation since the Indo-European family emerged; or that centuries before the Old Slavonic alphabet was invented, we already had our own well-developed written language in which the first Slavic monument, The Book of Veles, appeared.
These kinds of sensations, picked up and hyped by the mass media, always find fertile ground in the sincere patriotism of a people deprived of its own history. The exploitation of people’s patriotic feelings by amateur researchers or outright charlatans, and the politicization of the problem of Ukrainians’ ethnogenesis are creating an atmosphere of a morbid face-off and even psychosis, where academics and unbiased observers are dubbed “unpatriotic conservatives” and myth creators become “true patriots.”
The impression is that Ukrainian academia is unable to stem the tide of quasi-theories and the process of its own discrediting. Because of the incompetence of relevant government structures and their readiness to fall for tempting legends, the consequences of this onslaught have already been reflected in the official sphere, including the school curriculum, where the Book of Veles is treated as a written monument of the pre-Christian period, not a product of contemporary myth-making. This is a serious obstacle to national consolidation. It is also risible to European countries that long ago overcame the disease of trying to be the first in the history of world — or at least Slavic — civilization, because they have shed their inferiority complexes or imperialistic encroachments.
Instances of this malady have occurred in almost every European nation. In the first half of the 19th century the outstanding German linguist, Wilhelm von Humboldt, suggested incautiously that the intellectual development of a people depends on the morphological type of their language. According to this criterion, the Chinese, as bearers of a root language, are the most backward, while bearers of inflective languages, primarily Germans, are the most advanced. As a true scholar, Humboldt immediately grasped the incorrectness of this correlation and added some explanations to his theory, but it was too late. Life itself rejected this jingoistic theory: the outcome of World War Two and the Chinese economic miracle.
A less dangerous but equally emotional stir in Bohemia erupted when fake Manuscripts of Zelena Hora and Dvur Kralove were masterfully forged by the well-known Slavist, Vaclav Hanka, for the “noble” purpose of proving the leadership in the Slavic world of the Czechs and their written language. One’s attitude to these falsifications became a litmus test for defining Czechs’ patriotism in the second half of the 19th century and foreigners’ loyalty to them. Only the Herculean efforts of the prominent Czech linguistic historian Jan Gebauer, who was regarded at one time as a public enemy by his fellow Czechs, and the findings of other national and foreign Slavists helped to dispel this myth, which got the renowned Croatian scholar Vatroslav Jagic a very cold reception in Bohemia.
But the Czechs mustered enough courage to acknowledge the truth based on scholarly facts and find a dignified way out of the civil conflict, thus showing the Slavic and non-Slavic peoples an example of national harmony and rejection of illusions. The same applies to the revival of the Czech language. Meanwhile, the Romanians still flatter themselves that it was their forebears who founded Rome, without taking the trouble to make a word-building analysis that shows that the historical choronym ‘Romania’ derives from the name of the city Rome and not the other way around.
As for linguistic factors, they should be taken into account because they are material and can be easily verified. This is why myth-makers are irritated by the professional obstinacy of linguists and the general academic community, which, from the viewpoint of the bearers of these exalted ideas, is “nitpicking” at facts that the non- professional eye will not see. For instance, any linguistic expertise will show that the Book of Veles can in no way lay claim to being an authentic ancient Ukrainian monument because there is not even a single page without an obvious falsification.
According to NANU Corresponding Member Orest Tkachenko, this relatively small “pre-Christian book of the 5th-early 9th centuries” has as many as 439 Old Church Slavonic word units, including the name Veles, which is indicative of the Old Slavonic (ancient Bulgarian) language. The “manuscript” is replete with words from most of the contemporary Slavic languages, which, together with the stylized old Slavonic forms, form a kind of “pan-Slavic pidgin language” with an admixture of other linguistic nonsense.
The “monument” is also weak with respect to the authenticity of its content. For example, according to this book, the Slavs came to the Middle Dnipro lands from India — which runs counter to any existing theory of their primordial homeland — founding en route a number of cities in European Russia (the text uses the form ‘in Russia,’ although the choronym ‘Russia’ was first recorded in 15th-century written monuments). Only then did their leader Kyi build Indikyiv (this version of the name of Kyiv, younger than Russian cities founded earlier, has never been mentioned anywhere during the 1,500 years of its existence). The Slavs from India, according to The Book of Veles, were pagans, who were already prepared to embrace Orthodoxy, the only true Christian faith, while the Western Slavs (i.e., Catholics) practiced a “wrong” religion. It is of little importance that from the angle of the period ascribed to the “monument” the schism in Christianity took place only in the 11th-13th centuries, i.e., about 500 years “after” the book was written. The main thing is the idea and it is one that is worth any kind of falsification, for it calls upon all “Slavic streams to merge in the Russian Sea.” This is why linguists are standing in the way of the myth-makers, refusing to accept the importance of this idea and to confirm the authenticity of the “monument” with the results of a linguistic textual analysis. They all repeat after Dr. Tkachenko: “It follows from the language or, to be more exact, the mixture of words and the content of The Book of Veles that, at least in its present form, it is basically a great-state Russian, Eurasian, and Orthodox Christian tract, the central idea of which is the establishment of a pan- Slavic Orthodox Christian empire under the Russians’ leadership. And in order for this idea to be more palatable and simultaneously assume the nature of a sacred testament of the glorious Slav ancestors, it is disguised as an ‘old monument’ by means of a ‘pan-Slavonic language.’”
One has to be either utterly naive or completely blinded by wishful thinking to see the ‘tablets of the Ukrainian people’s existence’ in this slightly disguised political pamphlet of a great-power chauvinist. Rather, these are ‘tablets of non-existence’ (in terms of the state and perhaps the nation) for the Ukrainian and other Slav peoples except for the Russian one.” The voices of linguists may be falling on the deaf ears of those who will not listen, but why has Ukraine’s Ministry of Education and Science become the hostage of falsifiers, as have all schoolchildren who study this anti-scholarly linguistic miscellany, which is anachronistic with respect to the “antiquity” ascribed to the text? This is a question that would never arise in a civilized country.
(Conclusion in the next issue)
