Appreciation: Kate Brown's Report from Nowhere

Kate Brown has written a wonderful book* on the shadowy roots of statehood in the void between Poland, Russia, the Ukraine and heaven knows what else, fit to stand on the shelf with Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities and John Scott's Seeing Like a State, but she seems to have paid the price for it by spending a lot of her youth in disagreeable, not to say muddy, places. Her focus is the kresy which, as she says, "has no definite polity becaue it was never the seat of power but always the peripherey, whether rulers arrived from the north, west, or east. ... Never the center of things, the kresy has played the role in east-central Europe of an arena in which warring parties have time and again fallen into the exhausted embrace of worn-out prize fighters."

Setting aside a tangled prehistory, Brown asserts that it was the Soviets who did most to imposes nationalist/ethnic identities in Eastern Europe--ironic, for an ideology so committed to internationalism--and then turned on its progeny when they began to stand on their own feet. Her particular focus is Dovbysh, once Marchlevsk, once burned (i.e., from above, from Moscow) with the peculiar destiny of becoming a center of Polish culture and society. "Dovbysh," she says

is classified as 'a rural settlement of the urban type,' a Soviet euphemism which translates as a village with a population and industrial base nearing that of a town. It means Dovbysh lacks both the conveniences of the city and the charm, the space, and greenery of a village. The result is a sludge, lots of it, washing the overtaxed infrastructure in human and animal excrement.

"In order to reform" she continues, "modernizing societies first take stock. ... Jews were relatively easy to count. .... Germans too were distinguished by religion and tradition. ...

The Polish population, however, was more ambiguous. Although the official statistics listed the population of Poles in the Marchlevsk territory as 70 percent of the total population, less than half of tht number actually spoke Polish; fewer than half of those spoke it well and used it daily ... When asked to stste their nationality, many peasants replied simply "Catholic." One peasant said he spoke quite well the "Catholic language." Other peasants said they spoke po-chlopski, "in the peasant way," or "in the simple way" (pro-prostomu) or "the languge of here" (tutai'shi). Investigastors went form location to location reporting that no two villages were alike, each place contained a different blend of language, ethnicity and social composition.

This sometimes-comical chasm of bewilderment and incomprehension certainly doesn't excuse, but it may help to explain, the epidemic of paranoia, emanating first from Stalin himself, that turned the Bolshevik regime into an enemy of the people. Brown's account reminds one of nothing so much of Mark Twain's story of his uncle who "went to bring the good news to the savages, and they et him." Only here as so often, it may have been the "savages" who got the worst of it.

*A Biogrphy of No Place: From Ethnic Boderland to Soviet Heartland.

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...

My Word for the Day: Hektarnitsa

As of 11:21 am today, Google had no links to this word except the one I am quoting. That is, Hektarnitsa:

Her biography would serve as an emblem of [a] new kind of spacial immobility coupled with an economic simplification. The hektarnitsa was a woman assigned a hectare (2.6 acres) of beet field. She was responsible for sowing, weeding, watering, and harvesting her hectare alone, by hand. In Ukraine, women ran households by mastering the nuances of caring for livestock, weaving, sewing, healing, preserving, as well as growing garden produce that almost entirely fed the family. In Kazakhstan, the hektarnitsa's workday narrowed to 2.6 acres, where she performed repetitive motions on uniform rows of a single crop.

The herktarnitsa worked hard, all of her life. She worked through her childbearing years, trying to keep up with the demands of her hectare. On most days of the growing season, she was in the field in heat or brisk wind. She stooped oer her eight-months-gone stomach to block and hoe, taking her children along with her to work the hectare because "no one could manage a hectare alone." When I asked these former hectarnitsi to write down their addresses, they pressed their hands behind their backs and said, "No, no, you write. I'll tell it to you." Their lives spared them no time for grammar. Yet, since literacy had become a primary ticket to prosperity, without education the hektarnitsa worked for the next generation, toward a personal definition of progress, trying to make something of the destiny handed to her, trying to get the children out opf the closed settlement to study, becaue "you had to study if you didn't want to work the beet fields all your life."

That's Kate Brown again, in A Biography of No Place. This time she has followed her Polish Ukranians on to their forced resettlement in Kazakhstan.