The Partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were among the most impactful geopolitical events in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe. The public in both Ukraine and Poland continues to turn to these distant historical events and their impact, seeking cues and explanations for their present-day relations and politics. Theoretical frameworks and approaches such as ‘mental geographies’, ‘phantom borders’, and ‘hybrid cultures’ were proposed to account for inherited socio-cultural complexities and views of communities which experienced multiple political and epistemic regimes.
This paper takes a closer look at the Ukrainian-Polish encounter and how some intellectuals understood, discussed, and reconciled their interpretations of Ukraine's national distinctiveness and the epistemic conditions that they lived through. At the focal point are interactions between a prominent Ukrainian author, Panteleïmon Kulish (1819-1897), and key representatives of the Polish community in Kyiv during the 1840s and 1850s-a writer, Michał Grabowski (1804-1863), and a collector, Konstanty Świdziński (1793-1855). The period I consider here falls between two crucial events that marked Polish resistance to the Partitions and to imperial rule: the Russo-Polish War of 1830–31 and the January Uprising (1863).
This paper examines an article by Kulish, in which he paid tribute to Świdziński. It was published in Russkiy Vestnik, a newly established Moscow literary and political journal, in 1857. Despite Świdziński’s prominence in Kyiv and Poland, the Russian public hardly knew of him. Why did Kulish write about ‘a great adherent of the Polish nation’ to the readers of the imperial capital? The tribute highlighted existing Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish disagreements over the interpretation of history and national differences. It used the language of cultural symbolism and relevance to signpost key issues and proposed some of the writers and works relevant to the discourse on Ukrainian nationality. Kulish also remarked positively on the Ukrainian-Polish dialogue and promoted mutual recognition.
Kulish’s text in Russkiǐ Vestnik remains a significant source that documented how writers and intellectuals sought to weave their communities' perspectives into their works and to determine cultural specificity and difference. What also becomes evident is that the press's role in sustaining this discourse remains largely underexplored. Far from exhaustive, the instances considered in this paper exemplify how the Polish historical tradition influenced some of Ukrainian historical literature in decades before the Ems Ukaz (1876). On the other hand, Ukrainian scholars and writers shifted the Polish thinkers' perception of their national difference. Further, this period prompted new questions about the future of both nations and the region. Re-examining it now offers new perspectives on present-day political challenges.
