We have already got used to expecting the works of Professor Natalia Yakovenko, both journal articles and books, to produce the effect of wiping off the dust of customary stereotypes in perceiving the past as a text written once and for all. Her styles of written and spoken speech almost coincide, which occurs very rarely, and not only among Ukrainian scholars: terse definitions, ultimate accuracy in raising every question, unusual angles, and eloquent details have the effect of double vision in the reader or listener. The past seems to be scrutinized through both a microscope and telescope. Moreover, each line, paragraph, and page in such a view of our national history teaches you, in the good school-like sense, to behave very decently vis-И- vis History. It is no accident that Ms. Yakovenko instructs her young colleagues at the Society of Researchers of Central and Eastern Europe: her viewpoints are treated with special attention, for they are genuine, devoid of any false piety.
“Ms. Yakovenko, your Outline History of Ukraine tells about each period in the history of Ukraine as a certain failure to seize an opportunity. Do you think it possible in Ukraine now, despite such negative historical experience, to build an optimistic paradigm?”
“History moves from period to period, with a certain zero hour taken as a point of departure. As once was the epoch of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the late 1980s is also a new point of a reference. The Ukrainian people, unfortunately, do not belong to those fortunate nations whose chronicles are boring. But, looking around, we will see that nobody had an idyllic history. Take our Polish neighbors, France, Germany, or the nightmarish upheavals in Russia. For example, it seems to us that only we had such a unique treacherous elite which either turned from Orthodoxy to Catholicism or reinforced Russian and Polish cultures. This is a typical situation for those nations that never had political centers or states of their own. Thus my optimism in viewing Ukrainian history suggests that it should be looked upon as normal in principle, as, incidentally, my friend and colleague, the Lviv-based historian Yaroslav Hrytsak, says.”
“You spoke about Ukrainian history as a dramatic history. But is the most recent history of Ukraine dynamic, in your opinion?”
“Every nation’s history moves by leaps: it either comes to rest or pulsates. The century we are living in can by no means be called somnolent. And although it has brought hundreds of horrors, it has invented nothing new, experimenting with everything that was invented in the nineteenth century, a ‘somnolent century’ of creating theories. All our positive and negative values, all our stereotypes of thinking and behavior, and parameters of future strategies are conceived in ‘somnolent’ epochs. Our tumultuous century has only experimented with the implementation of what was invented by others. I would like very much the coming century to be calmer and to become for our state a time of a pause when it is possible, quietly in silence, to create new values calculated from the fall of the Berlin Wall. That experiment, fortunately, has ended. Europe is really turning a new page in its history, but it is up to Ukrainian citizens to ensure the way this page will be written for this country.”
“Do you think the myths and history of the Ukrainian state have any impact on public opinion and mass consciousness, forming a certain condition of the present- day state?”
“I tend to think not, for the myth of a Ukrainian state emerged in mass consciousness literally before our eyes. The idea of a Ukrainian state was first formulated very late, in the first decades of the twentieth century. But all historians and writers who could put this idea into practice found themselves in emigration after the 1920s. This idea could only have circulated in the deep repositories of closed archives. Instead, the image of a certain self-governing Ukraine was imposed. Later, when a new Ukraine was already in the making, when the Declaration of Independence had been proclaimed, well before the referendum, we expected Leonid Kravchuk to say independent Ukraine instead of self-governing Ukraine. That time, the late eighties, saw only the beginning of some scholarly debates and round tables which quietly groped for the examples from the past to rely upon in defending our state. And now we hear that the idea of a Ukrainian state, as it turns out, has always lived in our minds and never disappeared!”
“And do you feel now that the state-making myth is taking root in Ukraine?”
“Yes, and very much so. But this mainly proceeds from the habit of feeling like a citizen of this state. This shows even in comic examples. When, for instance, boys on a Kyiv bus talk sports and occasionally say: ‘But in our state...’ Here the very fact of using the pronoun our is more than significant. The media have also come to this, so television anchors have at last stopped saying our republic and begun to say our state. For an ordinary citizen, this common word combination is becoming a pattern of thought.”
“What is now destroying the patriotic feelings of very many people for the Ukrainian state is the interpretation and assessment of our state as an apparatus of coercion.”
“I would say otherwise: our state itself has not yet decided what kind of state it ought to be. It is being built chaotically, with many deviations, drawbacks, and even an obvious Mafia tint. But we also feel very strong pressure from the priorities of Western civil society. The more so that this pressure is not only moral but also makes one take certain steps and carry out certain, if creeping, reforms. And there will be no alternative: we will have to wait until the administrative, managerial, political, and other governing structures incorporate a new generation that has already mastered the skills of a new pattern of life.”
“Does the Ukrainian intelligentsia act as a major factor in this Western pressure?”
“The Western community deals with those with whom it can speak the same language. A certain polarization is already discernible in Ukraine, which I think testifies to symptoms of recovery. For gone is the single and fundamental task that once put us all under the same colors. Remember what united us on the crest of perestroika expectations: the desire to win official independence. When that happened, the disintegration of this unity became inevitable. As to the intelligentsia, it still sets priority to old- fashioned values embodied in the nineteenth century populist traditions. Their opponents think that in order to go forward they should speak the language of the late twentieth century, the language of their Western counterparts. This means, among other things, that literature or history should not indulge in idea- creation and patriotic servility but, on the contrary, develop complete independence of thought. I belong exactly to the latter category. Our opponents accuse us being unpatriotic and misunderstanding the noble mission of research in the making of the state and nation. We answer in turn that such tasks as these were in vogue 100 years ago but today this is an anachronism. For what is now more important for our scholarly research, crippled by the Soviet regime, is the liberation of intellectual output from any ideological tasks, no matter who tries to assign them and how. To write and think in a new way, we must also try a different kind of key to open the door of history. For we have lost the whole twentieth century. While our historical thought was marching abreast of what was going on in the West until the late 1920s, we were later divided from it by the Iron Curtain. While the West was shaken with a genuine revolution in philosophy, we conserved the cognitive paradigm of the late nineteenth century, adding Marxism-Leninism to it. To further support it means to turn Ukraine into a ludicrous sanctuary of dear-to-our-heart values in which nobody, except us ourselves, is interested. This also refers, among other things, to our so-called tragic history.
“I think when Ukrainian historians begin to work in the general European stream, there will be less bathos in their writings. In any case, the experience of European historians confirms such a change in tone: they also once shed dragon tears for their national regrets and pains. However, school-taught history seems to still be full of dramatic tension, for children are being brought up on the basis of heroic examples. Meanwhile, history treats both a hero, a traitor, and everyday life as an equally interesting object of study. The historian, as a scholar, minutely scrutinizes even the most despicable traitor, analyzing the situation of the time, behavioral strategies, and possibilities of choice, while the school-taught history builds everything on contrasts that never happen in real life.”
“But there is no patriotic upbringing, as such, in modern Ukrainian schools, apart from the ill-conceived and not-so-tactful imposition of the Ukrainian language.”
“I wouldn’t say so. The essence of history textbooks has changed. There may be different opinions about their quality, but, on the whole, they treat the history of this country as that of Ukraine, not just a part of Russia. Most of our patterns of thinking, including the sense of our national identity, depend on the perception we acquire as teenagers. This is precisely what I call quiet patriotism without high-strung outbursts. I think it is healthy patriotism, when most of the population of a specific state perceive their national identity as much of a given as the air they breathe.”
“But the current generation, including young researchers, bear a sizable share of cynicism and skepticism.”
“I hope this is superficial. Let me give an everyday example with young Poles. Throughout the nineteenth century, Polish scholarship and culture worked for a so-called cohesion of hearts, i.e., nurturing the faith that Poland will sooner or later regain its independence. Of special importance here is Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel With Fire and Sword: every Pole has known its characters and plot since childhood. Today, this is a school-imposed idea, but the younger generation of modern Poland differs very little from ours in cynicism and skepticism. Yet, the film With Fire and Sword Jerzy Hofman directed has been seen by seven million people, including youngsters. For this film, rather modest in its historical and artistic merits, appeals to the subconscious, to what links each Pole with his country and people. Incidentally, our Ukrainian history can in fact suggest a multitude of spectacular themes of battles and love. But unfortunately, we are too penurious to make such quasi-historical movies which find an easy way to the mass viewer. Just recall that even the weak Roksolana (with its incoherent dialogues, miserable scenery, and dullness) managed to attract many Ukrainians to interesting moments in their history. Everybody wants to see himself in the mirror of the past.”
“How fast do you think Ukrainian historical research will develop in the next century?”
“Historical research is immortal. As far back as the late nineteenth century, glum Nietzsche wrote that history was a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Outcries are heard on occasion about the end of historical research, while the number of historians is ever growing. A researcher has calculated that 12 US scholars dealt with the same subject in the 1950s and almost 600 now. In other words, history is a sphere of knowledge that attracts people like a magnet, for they take more interest in deciphering the past than living in the present.
“In what direction will Ukrainian historical research go? I am sure in a direction which will bring it closer to Western scholarship. In brief, this amounts to perpetual debate, a skeptical view of any fetish, and judgment without attempting to condemn or glorify anybody. A historian is not a prosecutor: his aim is to catch and understand an instant of the past. Unfortunately, we are still very far from this historical fashion of the twentieth century. Now Italy and France still remain the countries which set the pace of historical research. It is difficult to catch up with them because in order to use their tools one has to operate with too great an amount of accumulated verifiable knowledge about details of the past. Only those scholars who accumulated information rather than serve the ideas of socialism can afford to play in the subtleties of interpretations. Now it is almost impossible to apply the fashionable ideas how to write history to Ukrainian realities: our knowledge of the past has innumerable holes and scores of the unstudied things which we have hitherto called ‘details,’ although they are the real life of real people in a certain century. We know history as a series of political events, but we know almost nothing about what its creators were guided by. And it will be difficult to speak with the West on equal terms until this sieve is filled. The younger generation should stop these gaps and make the sources speak about what they have been silent up to now. We lack the strength, hands, professional training, and good libraries. Incidentally, Poland is our best partner in this. Our Polish colleagues help us very much, offering research scholarships to work in their libraries and archives. We are very lucky that Polish scholars expect us to mature as soon as possible and be able to study, together with them, our common history. They need us to conduct lively debates and offer them proposals on the same level as theirs in books and other research publications. For the world has already become accustomed (unfortunately, except us) to debates, to the idea that history is a subjective reconstruction and hence a debate. This leaves very little space for the so-called truth of life. Our historical research should turn from a headmistress, who can only pronounce axioms, into a normal intellectual personality who argues and doubts in search of ever new proof of her being right.”
