More than ornaments to supplement historical narratives, maps are valuable tools of statecraft and nation-building in contested borderlands. Constructing Lithuania, Vytautas Petronis’ dissertation published by Stockholm University in 2007, attempts to contextualize a treasure trove of archived maps and other cartographic literature housed mainly at the Russian Geographical Society in St. Petersburg and the University of Vilnius Library. While he remains close to his sources, Petronis’ intellectual breadth, organizational clarity, and sustained content analysis of the maps is refreshing. The dissertation treats maps, atlases, and expeditionary literature as main sources. Many of the maps – in French, German, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian – appear in color throughout Petronis’ first major work. Arguing that Lithuania was “constructed” cartographically in a systematic and transformative manner, Petronis smartly borrows from history, intellectual history, and historical geography (P. 15) to generate a critical interdisciplinary approach.
To contextualize Lithuania’s representation, Petronis surveys the Petrine modernizing thrust of Russian state-sponsored cartographic science, which was further developed by an expansionist-minded Catherine II in the second half of the eighteenth century. He shows convincingly how maps after 1800 came to be used as tools of administrative ordering and governance. Such maps made definitional claims to lands and peoples of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) appear simpler, even when they were plainly incongruous and used (consciously or unconsciously) to suit the rationalization of provincial lands and peoples into gubernii. Petronis argues that the Lithuanian nation was “constructed” not because he wishes to deny its cultural or political existence, as Poles and Russians often did using nineteenth-century nation-state discourse, but to point out the vanity of acts of “proving” which side was right using this-or-that historical or demographic argument: the polarized cartographic discourse that continues, for instance, today in Gaza and the West Bank. Surprisingly, a tried-and-true Rankean historicist approach works well here. The author offers a “source-critical analysis… treating [the maps] as historical documents… contextualizing [their] production” (P. 15), and refers to the influential writings of J. Brian Harley (Pp. 30-31).
Attentive to grand-scale projects such as Catherine the Great’s General Land Survey, Petronis emerges from the krajowcy federalist (multiethnic) Lithuanian historiographical tradition. Here, Leonid Gorizontov’s “empire of regions,” which came to pass in Russia after the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (PLC), is suitable for an evaluating Russian imperial organization and Lithuanian efforts at ethnic nation-building and federalist autonomy before 1914. Of greatest interest to Petronis is how the early modern GDL was reconstructed spatially into Lithuania through Russian territorial boundary-making, the development of ethnographic science, and expeditionary quantitative and qualitative research in borderlands. He concludes that the process of “vertical integration” (P. 39) (annexation? acquisition? conquest?) was a problematic process despite Russian efforts at systematization. The mapping of the GDL’s lands and peoples was subject to provincial plans to secure elite loyalty (Pp. 68-82), thwarted Decembrists’ plans for restructuring (Pp. 83-90), changes of paradigm in Russian ethnography in 1845-1848 (Pp. 122-125), the Polish uprising of 1863-1864 (which resulted in the establishment of a “northwest” imperial zone), and, from top to bottom, the caprices of each and every Romanov tsar. Adding to the literature on Russification, Petronis adds the important caveat that “almost all scientific works became susceptible to the political currents of the time, and colluded in the drawing of ‘politically correct’ conclusions” (P. 195). By considering empire/nation dialectics in a flattened two-dimensional frame, we can reconsider the course (or curse) of the nineteenth-century Lithuanian intelligentsia’s nation-building efforts in Imperial Russia’s borderlands. Neither the militarily and bureaucratically inclined empire-preservers nor the mobilizing cultural and political nation-builders proved able to map out where an “ethnoterritorial” GDL/Lithuania ended and began, although, as Petronis argues, a crystallization of “constructed” Lithuania as an imperial/national ethnoterritorial collective was completed by 1870 (P. 222).
Petronis’ profiling of maps is selective, perhaps overselective. With the Lithuanian Question always in the foreground, the cut-and-paste Russian multiethnic “empire of regions” advances the GDL’s multicultural legacy in certain respects, but only insofar as the “construction” of Lithuania remained inclusive, in a static sort of way, of its minority populations. Urban spaces posed the greatest issue for the assimilation/differentiation of nineteenth-century Lithuania’s lands and peoples, but this is not explored. Petronis generally treats Polish national and statist claims to the old Commonwealth (PLC) fairly, but he gives the impression that Polish cartography of the GDL was in abeyance between 1831 and 1914, when quite the opposite was true in the emigration and autonomous Galicia after 1867. He does provide a substantial overview of Adam Jerzy Czartoryski’s Lithuania and “dual-loyalty” (Polish autonomous) efforts to “secure Polish identity and the Vil’na Education District” between 1803-1831 (Pp. 94-99). For minority issues, he also looks comparatively at de-Russian Polonization efforts after 1863-1864, and “ethnic fragmentation in the Western provinces” (Pp. 138-139). A great strength of the dissertation is his look at the relative historiographical neglect (P. 37) of the Vil’na (Northwest) branch of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, which was opened in 1867, closed in 1876, and reopened in 1910.
Judging from his introductory quote from Isaiah Bowman, the Chief Territorial Adviser to the American Peace Commission in 1919, Petronis ensures that the wartime and postwar conflict over Vil’na/Wilno/Vilnius looms large, though it is not mentioned until the last page (P. 275). He is content to show that all scientific maps have potential for slippage. Petronis is at his best in these classical map content analyses, in which he unearths and then historicizes cottage industries of ethnographic cartography in Central/Eastern European borderlands: Pavel Josef Љavařik, Pyotr von Kцppen, Roderick d’Erckert, and Aleksandr Rittikh. He investigates a number of relatively unknown cartographers, such as Iulii Petrovich Kuznetsov-Kalějs and Antanas Maciejauskas, and even Lithuanian pedagogical and some Belarusian “ethnic” mapmakers in the wake of the 1897 census and convening of the First Duma in 1906, when the quantitative representation of nationalities in provinces had become further politicized both by Russian and Lithuanian parliamentarians who ultimately failed at attempts to secure autonomy for the region. Petronis’ last chapter takes underexplored cartographic output of the Lithuanian Scientific Society (Lietuviш Mokslo Draugija), established in 1907 (Pp. 260-269). Instead of treating the Society as an exemplary Lithuanian association in a nationalist vacuum, he broadens the scope of functioning bureaucratic and associational producers of maps relative to nineteenth-century European notions of progress and a cooperative international community of scientists. He notes, correctly, that the Lithuanians’ own research paralleled the imperial rules and tasks of the IRGS and the Vienna Anthropological Society.
In Petronis’ defense, to add a multiethnic cartography of the Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian, and Belarusian Questions would require the incorporation of much more original research and monograph literature. Basically, this would be an encyclopedia, not a dissertation. As a thought experiment, the inclusion of other so-called “ethnic” mappings might have result in a different thesis, or at least a different model. At the time of V. Verbickis’ 1911 “Map of Lithuania with Ethnographic Boundaries” (“Lietuvos Žemelapis su etnografijos siena”), for instance, would spatially self-identifying (or being labeled as) Jews and Lithuanians in, say, Stakliskes or Trakai mean the same thing? Would all Jews in the Lithuanian Pale call themselves ethnic? Would such constructions of identity and territory mean something else in urban Vil’na?
Petronis’ application of the “empire of regions” to cartography has some structural weaknesses, but it leads us to speculation. First, we can see the extreme nature of a Russian top-down administrative-topographical and ethnographic “vertical integration” of the GDL into the empire after 1800. Second, the “empire of regions” model, because it risks essentializing Russian anti-Polishness after 1831, challenges us to rethink Polonocentric (rather than Lithuanian) federalist rather than ethnic imaginings of GDL lands after that point. By WWI, once “anti-Polish” Lithuanian elites on the Imperial periphery lost their “core” St. Petersburg in 1917, they were left without their patron, having to face the countering Polish “historical” (pre-1772) territorial claims cast in the verbiage of Wilsonian “national self-determination,” and against the Polish giant in the field of cartography, Eugeniusz Romer, at Versailles in 1919 and Riga in 1921. Third, the “empire of regions” applies best to Russian-Lithuanian relations, but not for a polycentric Ukrainian Question after 1848. (Where, one might ask, was the Ukrainian historical “core” to the empire(s): Galicia, Volhynia, the Hetmanate, Right-Bank Ukraine? Which empire: Habsburg, Russian, Ottoman? If the Ukrainian movement after 1795 and 1848 claimed Vienna, Kyiv, or L’viv as their metropole, as many did, would not St. Petersburg or Moscow be a “region” rather than a core?) Fourth, a Russocentric (and Lithuanocentric?) “empire of regions” risks omitting German historiography and the course of German nationalism, statism, and imperialism: how geographers mapped the Balkans in the late 1870s and colonial Africa in the mid-1880s, and how German empire-builders rivaled Lithuania. Foucauldian and Harleyan theories of space and cartographic interpretation aside, Germany’s twentieth-century wars cast a pall over taxonomic and nineteenth-century “scientific” nation-state geography, ethnography, anthropology, and cartography. Expansion-minded rossiiskii actors in former GDL borderlands, many of whom were Germans, in fact used colonially-oriented ethnolinguistic classification systems to label, collectivize, resettle, and often exclude minority populations (namely, Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews) by their maps. This stands beyond the book’s own pale, but Petronis has opened many new avenues to the readers of Ab Imperio, and there is room for further research and debate.
Overall, Constructing Lithuania is thought-provoking and promises to suggest new directions and critical correspondence among all interdisciplinarians interested in maps. Vytautas Petronis must be commended for this bold intellectual endeavor, for his dissertation succeeds in treating the complex cartographic “construction” of lands and populations comprising Lithuania on the serious terms they deserve.