More Mysteries of Statehood: Snyder on Eastern Europe

Here's another item on the mysteries of statehood, at least as instructive and entertaining as Kate Brown's: Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 . Snyder works on a larger canvas than Brown, with more scope if less intimacy and texture, but both develop essentially the same argument: the practical impossibility of a coherent nationalism, and the tragic destructive power of any efforts to achieve it.

Snyder finds a rich vein of grotesque humor in the work of one Jonas Basanavičius, who in 1883 undertook to establish a Lithuanian-language newspaper. Lithuania (such as it was) languished under the thumb of the Tsar. Basanavičius was living in Prague; he enlisted compatriots in Germany. One obstacle:

Although the Lithuanian language was legal in the Russian empire, it had to be printed in Cyrillic characters. In Germany, Lithuanian activists could publish in the Lithuanian language and Latin script, then smuggle their work in to the Russian empire.

The title of the new journal was Aušra, "the Dawn," -- revealing (as Snyder explains) "the universal conceit of nations with weak state and cultural traditions: what seems to be death is only a sleep and the sleeper will awaken as the world turns and night becomes day." Part of the task of recreation, then, was to fashion an alphabet that respected the "traditions" of the beloved object. The spelling "Aušra itself was a kind of a statement. It was an adaptation of Czech orthography. The conventional spelling at the time was Auszra, but the editors thought Auszra looked "too Polish." Snyder notes:

The shift had nothing to do with publishing in the Russian empire: both spellings used Roman characters and both were therefore illegal. The Russian police would have confiscated a journal called "Aušra" and one called "Auszra": only something called "Аушрa" would have been permitted.

Snyder sums up:

The ironies of the Lithuanian borrowing from Czech are four: (1) in the Middle Ages, before the association of Poland and Lithuania, Polish had become a written language under the influence of precisely Czech... (2) But because Prussia banned the use of Latin characters in Lithuanian writing, Lithuanians ... used the Czech letters to write their (more or less) reformed Lithuanian across the border in German East Prussia. In this roundabout way a script designed to limit the spread of German culture made its way into Germany. (3) ... So...a German supported the part of the Czech solution by which Polish influence upon the Lithuanian language could be shrouded in Russia. (4) The German philological interest in the Lithuanian language was itself part off the Romantic turn in German scholarship, which was partly an attempt to emancipate German culture from French influence

Okay, so much for the alphabet. And then they had to manufacture a literature...