Authors

Michal Narozniak¹;  ¹ European University Institute, Italy

Discussion

The paper presents the transnational production of sexual knowledge in the Habsburg Empire and draws unexpected connections between Slavic national ethnographies and early psychoanalysis. The geographic focus is on the rural areas of Eastern Galicia, their Ukrainian and Jewish inhabitants, and two thought collectives: Shevchenko Scientific Society (that gathered Ukrainian nationally-minded intellectuals) and Galician-Jewish members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Members of both groups imagined rural Galicians as a "sexually liberated Naturvolk" in contrast to the repressive sexual regime governing the "civilized" middle class (mostly in German lands). This intellectual maneuver, staging "the people" against sexual values presented as "foreign" and "Western," is a commonplace practice among nationalist intellectuals in East Central Europe. However, while the East-West tension remained, the imagined assignment of values on the conservative-liberated scale reversed. Thus, this study presents the possible potential and limits of disruptive innovations moving to the center from the peripheries. The paper examines this phenomenon in two examples. The first is a 2-volume collection titled "Sexual Life of the Ukrainian Peasantry," edited by Volodymyr Hnatiuk and published in Leipzig in 1909 and 1912 under the auspices of the yearly journal "Anthropophyteia." Run by Friedrich Salomon Krauss, the journal published works on sexual and scatological content in folk cultures from Austria-Hungary and beyond (Krauss's specialty was the Balkans). "Sexual Life of the Ukrainian Peasantry" provided an unconventional base for modern nationalism but was meant to play this very role. It consists of 719 short narratives collected among ethnic groups considered a part of the larger Ukrainian nationality. Ivan Franko contributed his fieldwork products to the collections. Flatulence, joviality, trickery, and promiscuity of women and the clergy formed the commonplace narrative elements. The collection was influenced by Freud's 1908 article "Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness," among other references to psychoanalytical work, and meant to provide evidence supporting the Freudian hypothesis.The second source is the autobiography of psychoanalyst-turned-revolutionary Wilhelm Reich, born and raised in rural Galicia and Bukovina in 1897. Reich extensively describes childhood sexual interactions with domestic workers recruited from the local rural population. Male servants taught him vulgar gestures, and at the age of 13, he began a sexual relationship with a female cook. Those examples served to juxtapose the sexually unrestrained rural workers with the repressive character of Reich's middle-class parents and his later experiences in "frigid" Vienna. Reich's text shows how the tension between "the West" and "the people" informed the interpretation of intimate experiences.