We live at a time when history is being rewritten and edited, when views on the past and its interpretations change. I mean not only the history of Ukraine or the late Soviet Union. The Day recently hosted Georges Niva, a French savant. When asked what he understood by a United Europe, Dr. Niva replied unexpectedly, “It’s when they start teaching history at all European schools, using one and the same textbook.” Indeed, this is how the history of Polish-Ukrainian relations is taught in the schools of both countries.
Historiographical problems are especially pressing now, considering that Ukrainian history has for centuries been written by outsiders and its past has unnoticeably been appropriated by someone else. Plus our historiography was for decades completely isolated from modern scholarly trends, bound to the Procrustean bed of the Marxist-Leninist school. And so every new original historical monograph turns into an important public event.
Without doubt, Natalia Yakovenko’s new book Paralelny Svit [Parallel World] (Krytyka Publishers, 2002, sponsored by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and International Renaissance Foundation) became such an event. The subheading is intriguing: “Studies of the History of Concepts and Ideas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” The author meant to study not the past of the people in general but of the individual of that period. Professor Yakovenko made an attempt to “overhear the individual voices” of our ancestors, particularly individuals belonging to the Ukrainian elite, aristocrats, and Cossacks. She has studied archives and explored libraries in a number of countries, reading between the lines. She studied her heroes’ actions and motivation, world outlooks, contemporary standards and taboos. A historian is known to be strongly tempted to interpret past life stories from modern point of views. Marc Bloc, the great French historian, wrote that it is foolish to take as absolute the criteria of one’s own times, generation, or party, and apply them, for example, to figures dating from the Roman Empire or Middle Ages. In fact, it would be dangerous and unscholarly, because this habit of passing judgment, as a rule, discourages one from trying to understand and explain. Prof. Yakovenko is of the same opinion: “It is only by ridding oneself of the virus of one’s own time that one can discover a parallel world, a different reality – in other words, live, controversial, and at times for us people of the present day very strange peculiarities of those times.”
Parallel World is a substantial monograph meant for experts, packed with facts, charts, quotes, references, etc. Simultaneously, it is certainly interesting for all those wishing to learn more about their past and gratefully accepting the historian’s invitation to travel in time. The reader will encounter old familiar figures, except that they are presented from an unexpected angle; watch human destinies cross and intertwine, something usually left out of the history books, and trace the roots of numerous modern superstitions. It is more exciting than a novel!
The books is voluminous (over 400 pages) and consists of several chapters. We will touch upon one of them, “Religious Conversions: A Look from Within.” Among other things, the author refutes the habitual conception of interfaith and religious confrontations in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth [Rzeczpospolita] of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries before the Counterreformation and Khmelnytsky revolution: “On the contrary, sources offer repeated examples of a perfectly peaceful coexistence among people professing different creeds, in both family circles and at the communal level; in fact, even in religious practices.”
Eloquent evidence is found mixed marriages that were standard practice among the Polish elite at the time. The author demonstrates that, in the case of a mixed marriage, the records would not even specify the religious affiliation of the young couple, meaning that it was of no special importance. Characteristically, the children in such families would be baptized in different churches, according to different rites; boys would be more often than not baptized same as their fathers, and girls as their mothers. Thus, all three sons of the Eastern Orthodox Prince Vasyl-Kostiantyn of Ostroh and Catholic Sophia Tarnowska were baptized in keeping with the Orthodox rite, while one daughter was baptized Catholic and the other Orthodox. Likewise, conversion was nothing out of the ordinary. Ukrainian aristocrats would adopt Catholicism and their Polish counterparts could covert back and forth. There were families “where Catholicism and Orthodoxy were intertwined.” And nor was it considered extravagant to attend other religious rites, especially in extreme conditions or in the absence of a temple of one’s confession. There is archival evidence of Catholic couples wed by Orthodox priests, Lutheran burgers baptized at a Catholic cathedral, or burials at “alien” cemeteries. Prince Jarema Wiszniowiecki was a converted Catholic, made into a Catholic fanatic by a nineteenth century historiographic at tradition, who instructed in his last will and testament to keep in good order his castle’s Orthodox church, the burial site of his Orthodox ancestors. The author cites numerous cases of using icons and other sacral objects belonging to different confessions. Thus, on the eve of the Battle of Berestechko (1651), the Polish army prayed before the “Greek” (i.e., Eastern Orthodox) miracle-working icon of the Mother of God of Chelm (Poland).
Important proof of toleration in the Ukrainian lands is the fact that “in addition to the Orthodox churches in the town of Ostroh, in the early seventeenth century, there was a functioning mosque, synagogue, Arian (anti- Trinitarian) meeting house, Calvinist and Catholic churches.”
With time the ethnic, social, and political situation became more complex in the Ukrainian lands; the epoch of tolerance came to an end. Gradually, religious openness became an alien concept for both Poles and Ukrainians, being transformed into mutual intolerance. Moreover, religion was increasingly identified with ethnic belonging, turning into what we know as a political factor. Its hangovers are felt today and the golden age of religious toleration has sunk into oblivion – except for books such as that written by Natalia Yakovenko.
