SUMMARY:

The “Methodology and Theory” section of the current issue features the publication (in Russian translation) of the exchange between Harvard historian Roman Szproluk and Polish historian Andrzej Nowak on the question of whether Polish historical experience may be interpreted with the help of the concept of empire. This exchange aroused interest on the side of Ukrainian historian Andriy Portnov, who together with Szporluk and Nowak contributed to the second round of exchange on questions that arose from the first exchange between Szporluk and Nowak.
The initial exchange between Szporluk and Nowak was spearheaded by questions by Nowak on the applicability of the concept of empire to the history of Rzeczpospolita. This exchange revealed the problematic nature of attempts at a monolithic definition of empire, and signaled the principal epistemological difficulty of rendering the pre-national reality in a language permeated with the discourse of nationalism. Szporluk insisted on the political dimension in the analytical concept of empire, that is, on the inequitable relationship between the core and periphery, which makes it difficult to apply the concept of empire to the history of Polish Commonwealth. Yet, he also acknowledged the lack of a conceptual vocabulary to describe the heterogeneous reality of this polity and society without falling into the fallacy of taking Polish language and culture as congruent with the Polish ethnic group. The evolved discourse revealed two prevalent conceptualizations of empire in Polish historical thinking: one that makes Muscovy and the Russian empire as a referential case of empire; and another that is linked to the conceptual revolution of Polish National Democracy, which relegated the history of Rzeczpospolita to the type of history of pre-modern and multiethnic polities.
Szporluk and Nowak also addressed in their exchange the question of comparative analysis of the history of Polish nationhood, including the impossibility of working with a Manichean dichotomy of Western (advanced) and Eastern (backward) development of nation-building, and the case of Ukrainian nationbuilding in its past and present.
In responses from the second round, participants gave a detailed explanation of their intellectual positions on the question of modernity and the perception of modern historical development as neatly congruent with the processes of nation-formation.
Joining the discussion, Andriy Portnov provides an analysis of changes in historiography of the historic role of Rzeczpospolita in the region of Eastern Europe from the perspective of Ukrainian, Byelorussian, and Lithuanian history writing. Portnov notes that history of Rzeczpospolita changed its interpretation in the abovementioned historiographies from the principal Other to that of the modal frame of common European historical experience of the lands of Eastern Europe (with the partial exception of Ukrainian historical writing). He further notes that though this historiographic reorientation helped to correct the national and Soviet ideological distortions of the historical representation of the past, it also brought about modernization of this past in the framework of neo-romantic and politically loaded myths of Polish political thought.