The following interview with Sante Graciotti, an outstanding Slavist of world renown, is another installment in The Day’s interview series with Ukrainists from Europe and the rest of the world. Professor Graciotti is a philologist, a historian of Slavic literatures, a foreign member of Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences since 1991, as well as a member of the Academies of Sciences in Poland and Croatia and Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. He is also an honorary doctor in universities of Warsaw, Krak w, Wroc aw, and other cities. Professor Graciotti is an honorary president of Adam Mickiewicz Society and the Italian Association for Ukrainian studies. He received a golden medal for achivements in the development of social sciences from the Czech Republic’s Academy of Sciences, a Vatroslav Jagi reward from the Philological Association of Croatia and the Croatian Slavistic Committe, and other distinctions from Italy, Poland, and Bulgaria.
Graciotti graduated from the Sacro Cuore Catholic University of Milan, majoring in modern philology in La Sapienza University in Rome under the supervision of Giovanni Maver, one of the founders of Slavic studies in Italy. Graciotti worked as a professor and the head of the Slavic Philology Department in the Catholic University of Milan (1965–1972), where he founded one of the best Slavic libraries in Italy. He later worked as a professor of La Sapienza University in Rome (1972–1996). Headed by Graciotti, the Slavic Studies Department at this university turned into the largest center of Slavic studies in Italy and Europe: almost all Slavic languages and cultures are presented there. Graciotti worked with the Giorgio Cini Foundation (Venice) as the head of the Institute “Venice and the East” and was responsible for ties with countries of Central and Eastern Europe (1963–2002). Professor Graciotti became one of the founders of the Italian Association of Slavists and headed it between 1969 and 1979.
He was a vice-president of UNESCO’s International Association for the Study and Dissemination of Slavic Cultures and the International Slavistic Committee. Since 1970 Graciotti worked as an editor in chief of the scientific magazine Ricerche Slavistiche (Slavic Research, Rome) and is also on the editorial staff of several Slavic periodicals.
Graciotti made a great contribution to Slavic Studies in Italy and entire Europe with his research and organizational activities. He encouraged intensive cooperation and dialogue between the countries of Eastern and Western Europe, promoted numerous academic meetings and symposiums, which resulted, among other things, in various books edited by Graciotti himself and published by the Giorgio Cini Foundation.
Graciotti’s scholarly interests include Polish literature from the Renaissance until the Enlightenment and Croatian, Polish, Russian, and Czech medieval literatures. Graciotti did research on nearly all Slavic and also Hungarian and Romanian literatures.
Relying on comparative studies, Graciotti put forward the concept of continuous cultural interrelations between Western and Eastern Europe, Slavic culture as an integral part of the spiritual legacy of the European civilization, with special emphasis on the role religious factors played in cultural interaction. Graciotti’s research is marked by extensive philological erudition, grand perspective on things, and, at the same time, punctual contextualization and an interdisciplinary approach. Graciotti is one of the last representatives of the great European school of philology, which approached the study of languages, literatures, texts, history, and the history of ideas in Europe from the comparative perspective.
Graciotti’s personal research and initiatives are a major contribution to world Slavic studies in that they offer a reinterpretation of the role Ukraine and Ukrainian culture play in the development of Europe.
In a series of studies on Ukrainian literature Graciotti raised the issue of ancient Ukrainian literature as the realization of the still unique “pan-European synthesis,” which became an indispensable part of European culture. Professor Graciotti constantly turns to the historical role of an intermediary that multidenominational and multilingual Ukraine played in the dialogue between Europe’s West and East and as a bridge between the two part of the Slavic world that adhered to, respectively, the “Latin” and “Byzantine” tradition.
At a symposium on the 1932–1933 Holodomor in Ukraine, Graciotti spoke about the socio-cultural and ethical problems of this man-made famine calling it a spiritual genocide. An important landmark in the development of Ukrainian studies in Italy was the symposium on Ukraine’s religious history that Graciotti organized. It resulted in Europe’s first panoramic study on the history of Ukraine’s churches and the current situation with religions in Ukraine.
We are now honored to have the pre-eminent professor in Kyiv after a long period of years.
You have devoted all your life to studying the Slavic world and have always fought for the parity between Slavic and Western cultures. Thus, you have made a great contribution to liberating Eastern European countries from the ghosts of totalitarianisms. What is your view of the changes that have taken place since that time? What prevails in these countries — faith in their future or bitterness and anxiety?
“I would not want my confession to disappoint those who will read or listen to this interview. However, I have to say that no matter what I did in my life I always did something else at the same time. So the narrow specialists in each separate field of my activity were right in sometimes not accepting me completely in earnest, because I have never thought solely as a specialist in one and only one field. Of course, I have been and remain a philologist, i.e., a historian and analyst of the written word, but what I saw through each written word was, first and foremost, man, while what I read through the history of the language was the history of man. So my Slavic philology also became “Slavophilism,” i.e., a specialization I chose owing to my love for this research area and, at the same time, owing to my love for the world I studied.
“I believe it would be interesting to tell you that the topic of my inaugural speech in 1965, when I was appointed head of a department in Milan university was “Slavic philology and the unity of the Slavic world.” As a scholar who was just making his entry into the field of Slavic studies, I suggested returning, with the necessary corrections and due attention to real history, to an overly romantic 19th-century myth — the myth of Slavic Wechselseitigkeit (reciprocity).
“What is even worse is that half a century later I continue thinking in the same vein, so much so that last year when I was working a project to launch a Slavic department in one of Milan’s academies (Accademia Ambrosiana), I was pleased to think that Slavic studies were enabling people from various cultures of the Slavic West and East to come together in a friendly atmosphere and hold discussions in the context of a dialogue aimed at a rediscovery of the common roots of the Slavic nations.”
“Regarding my contribution, it was a very modest one at best. It pertains to the period that started shortly after the beginning of my scholarly career, but it lasted for nearly 40 years: I am speaking about my cooperation with the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice. The foundation was actively working to establish and develop a systemic and increasingly intensive cultural cooperation with Eastern European countries subjected to the Soviet regime.
“I was responsible for academic contacts starting from 1963. We established ties with the countries on the other side of the “iron curtain” and arranged for academic exchanges with the Soviet Union, Poland, and Hungary and later with Czechoslovakia, Serbia, Croatia, Belarus, and Ukraine. We also had conferences half of which took place in Venice, while the other half — in one of the partner countries.
“In this way we hosted in Venice, along with KGB agents, brilliant scholars, in particular from the Soviet Union, who were not able to get out to the West otherwise. In Venice they had an opportunity to meet with their Western colleagues (historians, philologists, linguistics, literary critics, etc.) and the representatives of Russian and, more generally, ex-Soviet diaspora. These contacts helped them feel they were already in Europe and feel they were Europeans, in part through making personal contacts with the West. Later they came here to work and were hospitably received in the West.”
You played a foundational role in the development of Ukrainian studies in Italy. When and how did you develop an interest in Ukraine? What is the place that your conception of Ukraine as “small Europe” and your concept of a “pan-European synthesis” have in the general palette of your Slavic studies?
“My interest in Ukraine is to a certain extent linked also to my activities in the Cini Foundation. However, the ideological and ethical prerequisites for this interest emerged much earlier: Ukraine as a victim of the pressure from its mighty neighbors was bound to become a priority in my research.
“I became the head of the Department of Slavic Philology in Rome University on Nov. 1, 1972, and right from the outset I decided to renew the teaching of Ukrainian, which had a fairly ephemeral life there prior to that.
“My first trip to Ukraine was, in a way, linked with this decision. I came here one year before I was able to visit the USSR. … I went Leningrad, Moscow, Kyiv, and Tbilisi.
“So when I first found myself in Kyiv, I was struck by the sunny atmosphere of this city and its citizens — it was so different from the gloomy and anxious atmosphere in Moscow. The writers Ivan Drach and Vitalii Korotych accompanied me on my visit to the city and enabled me to see everything that could possibly be crammed in two (or three) days. This included a visit to the cathedral during a service conducted by the metropolitan. I was especially stunned by how he went along the aisle at the end blessing parishioners on both sides. Among them I saw a couple of newlyweds and a draftee.
“This fact struck me deeply because it demonstrated authentic religious belief that all parishioners publicly expressed, including young people, in the context of a universal holiday. The different between Kyiv and Moscow was again so profound that I had a feeling I was somewhere else than in the Soviet Union.
“My first visit to Kyiv was followed by more: I participated in the International Congress of Slavists in the fall of 1983, in the First International Congress of Ukrainists in August 1990, and in the First Italian-Ukrainian Congress organized by the Cini Foundation in cooperation with Ukraine’s Academy of Sciences in September 1994. This was followed by other Italian-Ukrainian initiatives in the subsequent years. Each of these events, just like every trip I made to the Ukrainian land, confirmed to me my first impression that Ukraine was significantly different in terms of culture, temperament, and living style from Russia and Russians. At the same time, it was especially open to Western values and consonant with my Italian identity.
“However, it was, above all, my detailed study of Ukrainian history that enabled me to grasp the essence of your particularly apt definition of Ukraine as ‘small Europe.’ I call it ‘pan-European synthesis’: we are talking here about a socio-cultural reality between the European East and West that accepts and blends their values into a synthesis that has an extremely high ontological weight and a great perspective for the future.”
