Myl’nikov’s book can be seen as a continuation of his two previous books dealing with ethnic and national consciousness in early modern Eastern and Central Europe.^[1] This is despite the fact that the author himself does not mention his earlier works and places his book more in the context of investigating the formation and development of Central European nations. Myl’nikov views the process of nation-formation as occurring in the 18th-19th centuries and connects it with the transition from feudalism to capitalism. For Myl’nikov, Central Europe, for this particular period, coincides with the Prussian, Habsburg and Russian monarchies, although in the case of the latter it seems to be limited to the non-Russian nations of the Empire’s “western borderlands.”
Myl’nikov defines his task as a comparative investigation of the “national self-consciousness,” which played “key and most generalizing role” in the formation of the region’s “incomplete” (in original “not posessing the full right” – nepolnopravnykh) nations. According to the author, national self-consciousness was part of a larger cultural system, which, in turn, was being transformed in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. National self-consciousness is represented as having grown up from the interaction of ethnic, social and “spiritual” contexts of the age. This self-consciousness had a “multidimensional structure,” which included self-definition, self-positioning and self-assertion. While the first two could be connected largely with intellectuals and their work, the last one indicated a more mature stage in the development of the nations, the involvement of the masses, and the fulfillment of key ethno-psychological functions.
The stage of a nation’s self-assertion was characterized by the growing importance of signs and symbols. National symbols combined into symbolic systems providing an explanation for national differences. Drawing on the reserve of symbols gathered in the pre-national period, the nations composed their own symbolic inventories. The author stresses the selectiveness of this process, the formation of new national semiotic systems, which had little to do with the history of concrete symbols, the meaning of which could be understood only in the context of this new national system. The main function of nationalized symbols was to unite an ethnic group, thus contributing to the development of national-consciousness.
National self-consciousness, being a new phenomenon, was not inserted from above, but combined both guidance, represented by the city as a generator of national consciousness and spontaneity represented by the village, the reservoir of national consciousness. The development and elaboration of national theories by the patriotic intelligentsia was successful only because it was supported by the spontaneous growth of national consciousness among the wider masses. Myl’nikov represents the theoretical elaboration of national consciousness and its constant modernization as the process of “structuration.” The mode of this process was patriotism. The author makes a distinction between pre-national patriotism, which reflected feudal realities and modern national patriotism. Modern national patriotism went through three periods, which basically coincide with Hroch’s A, B, and C phases. While the national bourgeoisie was using patriotism for its own means, patriotism had first of all a democratic and humanist value for the progressive national intelligentsia.
The author tries to solve the problem of the relationships between national and “people’s (narodnaia) culture.” Mel’nikov states that the ethnic culture of the transitional period from feudalism to capitalism was as heterogeneous as the social structure. Some phenomena of people’s culture interacted with upper (ordodominant) culture, and participated in the formation of national culture, and some did not. These two main subcultures interacted intensively during the process of national formation and we can trace their influence on each other, which varied in the concrete cases of each nation.
The formation of national culture meant “objectivation” of the national self-consciousness. National culture provided communicative space for the accumulation and distribution of knowledge. Myl’nikov’s discussion of culture as communicative space concentrates on two aspects – books and theatre. The growth of publishing strengthened national languages and together with educational reforms led to the growth of the consuming public. Nationalist intellectuals brought national culture up to the standards of the progressive Western culture and at the same time tried to make their work understandable to the bearers of “people’s culture.” These were two key factors in the success of nation-based publishing projects. Theatre, on the other hand, was important for the illiterate, serving as a “universal instrument of the synthesizing of spiritual and material forms of culture.”
Finally, the author tries to analyze “other factors” influencing the formation of national self-consciousness, such as inter-ethnic contacts, and some political events. In his concluding remarks, Myl’nikov tries to place Central Europe in a global context. He speaks of three types of nation-formation. The first pattern, evident in Central Europe and the majority of European nations, was characterized by the formation of the nation on the basis of the “previous stable development of ethnic communities.” The second one was the formation of nations during mass migrations and resettlements (American variant). The third one was the formation of nations on the ethnically diverse territories of former colonies.
This book has two serious shortcomings. The first one has to do with theoretical framework. Written in the tradition of Soviet schools of ethnography and cultural study, it neglects extensive Western literature on nationalism, including some indispensable theoretical works, most notably Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. Myl’nikov writes from the essentialist and teleological position. For him there were real ethnic organisms, which had to become nations. The author reifies not only ethnic groups and nations, but almost everything he writes about – culture, consciousness, and social structure. Lacking a knowledge of key works on nationalism, or even on the national identity of the region and the time-period he is discussing results in the absence of a serious engagement with discussions about nationalism and national identity. The author refers to some discussions taking place inside of Russian academic and research institutions, but not world-wide scholarly debates.
The second major shortcoming of this book has to do with empirical aspects. The sheer volume of this book is insufficient, considering that author’s intent is to cover the whole of Central Europe over such a long and intense period of its history. Some contexts, like the Czech, are better known to the author and covered in the book in more detail, but as for the rest, he has very selective and very superficial knowledge, which does not allow him to elaborate on his argument. Most of the “comparisons” he made are based on general surveys (Istoriia Vengrii, Istoriia Pol’shi, etc.), which figure prominently among his sources. Most of the author’s argument remains at the level of statements without serious engagement with the historical “matrix” of the times and places to which his statements refer.
Nevertheless, this book remains an interesting testimony of the approach to issues of national formation of certain scholarly circles in the post-Soviet space. It is also one of the rare attempts to make some original theoretical contribution to the debates on nationalism coming from that cultural space. We may hope that Myl’nikov’s book will stimulate new discussions and will challenge other scholars to engage in debate.