Andriy Zayarnyuk

Mapping Identities: The Popular Base of Galician Russophilism in the 1890s

Since the 1980s, the eastern part of the nineteenth-century Habsburg province of Galicia has served as a testing ground for constructivist theories of nationalism and national identity. Historians who used these theories developed a variety of tools to analyze the practices and discourses that had allegedly created national communities. Galicia presented these historians many opportunities to weigh the value of “constructivist” theories by offering a rich supply of local empirical material. The Greek-Catholic or “Ruthenian” part of the Galician population has proved to be an especially gratifying object of investigation for these scholars.

On the possibility of peasant intellectuals: the case of the Ukrainians in Habsburg Galicia

They read and educated themselves with passionate enthusiasm. (Even today, when one asks the inhabitants of Casas Viejas about their impressions of the former militants, now often dead or dispersed, one is most likely to hear some such phrases as ‘He was always reading something; always arguing.’) They lived in argument. Their greatest pleasure was to write letters to and articles for the anarchist press, often full of high flown phrases and long words, glorying in the wonders of modern scientific understanding which they had acquired and were passing on.

Peasant activists reflect on World War I: War poems by Ukrainian peasant soldiers from Habsburg Galicia

Abstract This study examines poems sent by peasant soldiers of the Austrian army to the editorial board of Svoboda [Freedom], a Ukrainian Galician newspaper aimed at the common people, during World War I. It argues that soldiers’ poems can be seen as a continuation of the relationship established between peasant activists and popular newspapers. The article situates the poems in the traditions of peasant correspondence and “peasant literature” as they emerged in the nineteenth century. Soldiers used poetry to reflect on the unique and historically significant events in which they participated and to convey their personal experiences to the wider public and for posterity. The poems allow us to reconstruct the whole spectrum of soldiers’ concerns and expectations. Interestingly enough, not a single poem from this collection was published by the newspaper. The analysis of articulations of Ukrainian nationalism and imperial patriotism in soldiers’ poems shows that changes in the nationalist discourse, military developments, and the international situation influenced soldiers’ personal identity. At the same time this study argues that deeper existential motifs deriving from the war are also prominently present in these letters and subvert their patriotic and nationalist rhetoric.