This interesting book begins with a strikingly humble, even self-deprecatory, preface. Already on pages 10-13 Valer Bulhakau provides a lengthy catalogue of his book’s shortcomings: unoriginal theory and methodology, interpretations often borrowed from more developed Ukrainian scholarship, insufficient knowledge of recent Belarusian publications, sketchy referencing, stylistic and methodological differences among the three parts of the book, and conceptual inconsistencies that occur in the text. To top it all off, the author states that the first hundred pages or so “will not be interesting to specialists” because they simply summarize modern scholarship on nationalism. The book’s very title is misleading because Bulhakau thinks he is writing about the prehistory of Belarusian nationalism.
Most of the sins to which the author confesses are real. I am not sure how many readers will continue reading his book after such a preface, but persistent ones will be rewarded with Bulhakau’s original, perhaps intentionally provocative, ideas in the latter part of the book.
However, the question of genre needs to be addressed. Published in Russian in Lithuania, this book by a trained literary historian is based on the author’s dissertation, which was written in Belarusian in Ukraine and defended at the Institute of Philosophy of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Bulhakau is also a well-known Belarusian oppositional intellectual and editor of the journal ARCHE. The author claims in the preface that this is a semi-popular work (nauchno-populiarnoe izdanie, P. 12), and his decision to translate the text into Russian seems to indicate his intention to reach out to a wider readership in Belarus and elsewhere. Yet only the first part and the epilogue fit this definition stylistically and in terms of level of complexity. Part 2 and the lengthy conclusion will be a challenging read for people without a serious background in history; Part 3 requires an understanding of some basic concepts from the field of literary analysis. On the positive side, every type of reader – historians, literary scholars, and Russophone Belarusian general readers – will find something of interest in Bulhakau’s book.
Part 1 is actually a protracted summary of the state of knowledge on nations and nationalism in general, with special attention to the Russian and Polish cases in the last section. Yet the author’s occasional references to Belarusian nationalism signal his unorthodox vision, which is often formulated in a deliberately striking way. At one point, Bulhakau promises to show that “the first Belarusian nationalist” was in fact the Russian monarchist and imperial patriot of Belarusian birth, Mikhail Koialovich, who is usually seen by historians as a reactionary figure (P. 41). This already indicates to the reader Bulhakau’s intention to revise the traditional history of modern Belarusian national identity usually narrated as the story of the gradual introduction of peasant vernacular into high literature.
Bulhakau explains his alternate understanding in Part Two. Early writers in modern Belarusian, such as the famous “founder of the new Belarusian literature,” Vintsent Dunin-Martsinkievich, “did not have a direct effect on Belarusian nation-building” (P. 124). They wrote some works in Belarusian, but they did not have a concept of Belarus as a separate ethnic community and remained politically committed to the Polish cause. Ironically, a new concept of Belarus was developed as the result of the Russian imperial project in the aftermath of the 1863 Polish rebellion, hence the importance of Koialovich. According to Bulhakau, the Belarusian nationality “was invented in order to serve the program of intentional Russification of the masses that had not yet acquired unambiguous national consciousness or developed its ‘false,’ or Polish, form” (P. 144). Koialovich was the first to describe Belarusians as an ethnic group separate from the Poles and suffering under Polish domination. His aim was to present Belarusians as part of the greater Russian nation, but the conceptual innovation opened up the discursive space for the future development of Belarusian nationalism (Pp. 147-154).
This is an excellent example of applying post-colonial theory to the Belarusian case – the colonized uses the categories of colonial knowledge against the colonizer. As the reader quickly realizes from the references, Bulhakau benefited greatly from the theoretical models advanced in Myroslav Shkandrij’s Russia and Ukraine: Literature and the Discourse of Empire (titled V obiimakh imperii: Rosiiska i ukrainska literatury novitnoi doby in the Ukrainian translation that Bulhakau consulted).^[1] Of course, the Russian colonial discourse about Belarus differed from imperial representations of Ukraine. Bulhakau describes the “colonial epistemology” of Russian knowledge about Belarus as backward, poor, weak, and in need of protection – which contrasts with the contemporary image of Ukrainian lands as beautiful and fertile, although with a carefree and somewhat lazy population. But the general principles of “mapping” and “narrating” the borderlands remained the same.
In Part 3, Bulhakau gives an in-depth analysis of the legacy of Frantsishak Bahushevich (1840-1900), who established modern Belarusian literature in the 1890s with his poetry collections and the first short story written in Belarusian. The author is particularly interested in Bahushevich’s introductions to his two poetry collections; they are reproduced in full in the book and analyzed in great depth. Bulhakau calls Bahushevich a “radical nationalist” who generated a “counter-discourse of national resistance” (P. 210), but these terms should not be taken in their modern political meaning. Bahushevich did not contemplate an independent Belarus and, like many Belarusian writers before him, he was a member of various Polish political organizations. Rather, his innovations and revolts were cultural in nature and rejected the cultural discourse of Russian domination.
Bahushevich, who had studied for a time in Ukraine, not only imitated the metric structure of Taras Shevchenko’s poems, but also borrowed some cultural models and strategies from the more developed Ukrainian national movement. In examining his poetic imagination, Bulhakau fittingly also borrows methodological approaches from George Grabowicz’s classic work The Poet as Mythmaker: A Study of Symbolic Meaning in Taras Љevčenko,^[2] which he read in Ukrainian translation. Like Ukraine for Shevchenko, Belarus for Bahushevich is a sacred and eternal, rather than historical, notion. Bulhakau runs into difficulties, however, when he tries to find the Belarusian equivalent of the Ukrainian Cossack myth. His references to Bahushevich’s notions of a Belarusian “golden age” and its “revival” are too vague – a few examples would help the reader determine whether the poet is alluding to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Principality of Polatsk, or both.
In fact, one of the central points of the lengthy conclusion is precisely that the lack of historical dimension in the Belarusian national myth undermined the national movement more than any sociological “incompleteness” of the Belarusian nation, absence of universities, or the nonexistence of a region that served as a magnet, or “Piedmont,” for Belarusian nationalists. If so, the author’s ambiguity in the description of Bahushevich’s historical mythology is not incidental. Another crucial negative factor that Bulhakau highlights is the unusual number of “national projects” in the Belarusian lands during the nineteenth century – Polish, imperial Russian, Ukrainian (in the southeastern region), and Belarusian. I am not convinced, however, that being “project no. 4” was in itself a disadvantage. John-Paul Himka’s work on Ukrainian Galicia – which Bulhakau cites – documents the same, if not larger, number of identity-building projects in that region, which by the end of the century still managed to emerge as the stronghold of Ukrainian nationalism.^[3] Joining the competition for popular allegiances so late in the game, in the early 1990s, surely was a drawback, but it was the result of other processes rather than an independent factor.
Most Belarusian specialists will likely find fault with Bulhakau’s dismissive evaluation of Dunin-Martsinkievich, Ian Chechot, Ian Barshcheuski, and other nineteenth-century poets and historians. I am tempted to propose that Bulhakau reexamine Miroslav Hroch’s three-stage scheme of East European national movements. In my own work on Ukraine, I usually emphasize how factors external to the logic of national movements – imperial repressions, rebellions of Polish nobility, European wars, or Soviet indigenization policies – can skew the scheme beyond recognition. But in this case, it seems that the predecessors of Bahushevich would fit into the general description of Hroch’s first, “academic,” stage of the national movement. The author compares the difference between Bahushevich and Dunin-Martsinkievich to that between Shevchenko and Ivan Kotliarevsky in Ukraine. If so, Dunin-Martsinkievich rightfully belongs to the stage of “academic” interest in the nation’s culture and past. National activists at this stage did not necessarily have a clear concept of their nation as an ethnic and cultural community. They could simultaneously consider themselves members of other “political nations,” such as Russia or Poland. But they were contributing to a new national project, even if they lacked a coherent vision of it.
Overall, different types of readers will take different things from Bulhakau’s book. Historians and literary scholars may disagree with the author, but they will appreciate his provocative suggestions. The general reader will receive food for thought about the contemporary situation in Belarus. There is even an interesting recommendation for Western policy makers: to support Belarusian cultural institutions, a move that would advance the nation-building process, instead of political centers that are trying to mobilize civil society (P. 321). Like many things in Bulhakau’s book, this idea is controversial but thought-provoking. Scholarship on modern Belarus will only benefit from Bulhakau’s book and any polemics that it is sure to generate.