Rus’, Russia and National Identity: Another Voice1

It could be argued that enough has already been written about the book edited by S. Franklin and E. Widdis, which has become the object of a lively discussion, a discussion where emotional reactions seem occasionally to dominate, even though the questions at stake deserve to be treated in a scholarly and dispassionate way. Understandably, these questions are not just scholarly; they are at the same time the depository of proofs, arguments or counter-arguments for sought after, imagined or historically real self-identities. Ironically, the discussion is about a book that is neither among the most important nor the best in the last years. A reader will find interesting pages and information here, but the authors often offer several different interpretations of the same fact, failing to provide proofs for the correct one. Let me mention the in the lands in the film Aleksandr Nevskij, which has nothing to do with the betrayal of Christ (p. 113): the Judas par excellence in Russia was (is?) Mazepa, who also passed to the German (Swedish) camp. The allusion to mazepynstvo is quite obvious in the film. As to the bank notes of the 1990s, I do not think that they lend themselves to a double interpretation, namely, as either overlapping Soviet images or being a challenge to them (pp. 24-28): in my opinion, by 1996, they were already a symbol of of the new state and challenged the Soviet/Russian interpretation of the Kyivan past. Incidentally, the notes were considered state symbols already by Andrew Wilson in his book The Ukrainians: Unexpected nation (2001; cf. pp. 227-228). The Greek ruins on the same notes do suggest the 2000 year old history of the Ukrainian lands: this may be considered a manifestation of silly nationalism, but let us recall that the first person who stated the same idea for Russia was V. Tatishchev. Thus, today myths of antiquity are as silly as the ones-although that is not often appreciated nor recognized as dangerous.Although the book contains only minor errors,2 I am skeptical about its usefulness. It is a hybrid product of post-modernist and late-structuralist criticism, trying to unite various specialties, ranging from philology and language to history (spanning a time-frame from the early-medieval to the present), from modern cultural studies to questions of nation-building, not to mention issues of identity of the self and/or the other. As a result, the first surprise is that the book is 'only' 244-pages long. Brevity is often a virtue, but it can become a handicap when one tries to include everything just to suggest the endless contradictions and fluidity (as the editors say in the Preface) of all the parameters that make up National Identity and Russian Culture. It is hard to find a more difficult and broader subject in all of the human sciences, and to distil them into a short book requires enormous skill and clarity of vision. Unfortunately, the current book is a hybrid product designed for only a vaguely identified audience. Scholars will find it more or less useless because of the oversimplifications-and will treat the book as redundant. On the other hand, it is hard to recommend the book to non-specialists or students (the intended audience), since it lacks basic historical, cultural and linguistic data that might allow that type of reader to follow the culturological discourse that the editors tried to initiate. To give one example: B. Gasparov's analysis of the linguistic situation in Old-Rus', in Muscovy, and then in the empire, the USSR and even in contemporary Russia is hardly profitable for a student that has not taken courses in the history of the language and medieval literature, or digested books and articles by people like B. Uspenskii and V. Zhivov. On the other hand, for a specialist, Gasparov's short overview of such radically different works (both in terms of language and socio-cultural background) as Monomakh, Epifanii the Wise, Avvakum, and Zyzanii only provides evidence of the superficiality of his approach. …

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