Serhii Plokhy. The Cossack Myth: History and Nationhood in the Age of Empires.

Extract

History of the Rus', which tells the ( inaccurate) story of the Cossacks of the Hetmanate and their heroic deeds up to 1760s, remains one of the most intriguing historical texts produced in early nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. Its meaning and origins, authorship, place, and time of creation have remained subjects of passionate debates since the 1820s when it first surfaced. Serhii Plokhy has made the History the subject of his new, very entertaining book. He addresses all the key issues related to the text itself and the long story of its reception and political (ab)use across two centuries.

Plokhy constructs his narrative as a sort of detective story in order to target a readership broader than just specialists in Ukrainian and Russian history. For some tasks this strategy works extremely well. Plokhy tells amazing stories of the various interpretations of the History in conjunction with often dramatic individual stories of those literati and scholars who tried to interpret and analyze the mysterious text in tsarist Russia, interwar Polish Lwów, Nazi-occupied Kiev, and Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine. Equally fascinating is the reconstruction of family ties and relations within the Cossack milieu of the Hetmanate, where the History was created, as well as familial connections in the imperial capital and bureaucratic structures. Plokhy skillfully relates the personages and localities mentioned in the History to his analysis of the Cossack nobility of the early nineteenth century, a gesture that allows him to build a convincing argument about the town of Starodub where the text was produced. Plokhy identifies a circle of people around the retired general Stepan Shyrai who could have been involved in writing the text, and he estimates that the text was produced sometime around the second decade of the nineteenth century. He comes to the conclusion that the History was originally produced by a group of people and then by an individual author. Plokhy also identifies the sources of inspiration for the History, which included not only Cossack chronicles and oral stories, but also the Russian translation of Jean-Benoît Scherer's Annales de la Petite-Russie. These parts of the book contain some inaccuracies such as dating the Polish uprising 1861 instead of 1863, the assertion that Ukrainian publications were forbidden altogether in 1863, or failure to mention the role of the tsar's family in buying Shevchenko out of serfdom (pp. 47, 76). In general, however, the book is a truly fascinating read.