Baar Monika. Historians and Nationalism: East-Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century

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298 Conclusion

of the creative genius and irrational forces.¹² The communist takeover

following the Second World War radically disrupted the continuity

of academic life, pushing social questions and the satellite countries’

relationship with Russia to the top of historians’ agendas. Apart from

these pivotal turning-points, anniversaries often served as occasions for

revisiting the ﬁve scholars’ work.

In their individual contexts the reception of my historians’ under-

takings could obviously occasionally deviate from this paradigmatic

(chronological) scheme. In Poland, the anti-Romantic turn was trig-

gered by the tragedy of the failed uprising in 1863. At the forefront of

the positivist movement were a group of historians commonly referred

to as the ‘Cracow school’. Their most eminent representative, Michał

Bobrzy

nski (1849–1935), produced a brilliant synthesis, Dzieje Polski

wzarysie(Outline of Polish History, 1879) which aimed to discredit

Lelewel’s powerful legacy. Bobrzy

nski dismissed Lelewel’s theory of

unique early democracy as a myth and even claimed that, far from

being malign, German feudalism in fact contributed to national sur-

vival. He deﬁned his preferred political arrangement as an efﬁciently

governed monarchic state, because he believed that republicanism was

an anachronistic system based on the unhealthy dominance of the noble

estates, which refused to accommodate essential political and social

reforms. Contrary to Lelewel, he held the Poles themselves responsible

for the partitions and considered Polish civilization to be underdevel-

oped, a circumstance he attributed to his nation’s delayed integration

into European civilization and to its distorted political evolution.¹³

Lelewel came to be evaluated more favourably in the interwar period;

subsequently, in the communist era, his work was assessed according

to the dictates of Marxist ideology and terminology, focusing primarily

on socio-economic conditions.¹⁴ 1961 saw the hundreth anniversary

of the Polish scholar’s death, which sparked a renewed interest in his

legacy.

Bobrzy

nski’ s Czech counterpart was Josef Peka

r (1870–1937), who

attacked Palack

y’s portrayal of Hussitism, and its further elaboration

by Tom

s Garrigue Masaryk which placed the issue of humanity at the

¹² See Bal

azs Trencs

enyi’s forthcoming book, The Terror of History: Visions of National

Character in Interwar Eastern Europe.

¹³ Piotr P. Wandycz, ‘Historiography of the Countries of Eastern Europe: Poland’,

American Historical Review 97:4 (1992), 1015.

¹⁴ Joan A. Skurnowicz, ‘Lelewel in Polish Historiography in People’s Poland’, Polish Review

36:3 (1991), 269–82.

Conclusion 299

core of the Hussites’ ideology. Peka

r’s highly original contribution to

the interpretation of Czech history, Smysl ˇcesk´ych dˇejin (The Meaning

of Czech History)¹⁵ argued that, far from being an early manifestation

of the struggle for liberty and equality, the Hussite movement actually

represented a medieval heresy. It followed that John Hus was not

the forerunner nor the founder of the Reformation, but a Catholic

with a fanatical devotion to church reform. Peka

r also cast aspersions

on the alleged universal signiﬁcance of the Hussite movement, and

disputed the connection which Masaryk established between Hussitism

and national awakening. In addition, unlike Palack

y, the Catholic Peka

held the Baroque culture of the Counter-Reformation period in high

regard.¹⁶

As early as the 1890s, Palack

y’s polemical stance towards German

culture provoked the burning of copies of his Dˇejiny in the squares of

Sudeten German towns. During the period of the Nazi protectorate in

Czechoslovakia (1939–45), his name was erased from public discourse.

Following the rise of communism, scholars approached Palack

y’s legacy

through the prism of Marxism, and encountered several obstacles when

attempting to reconcile it with the new dominant ideology. They took

issue with Palack

y’s restricted focus on the contemporary interests of his

own social class, the Czech liberal bourgeoisie.¹⁷ Nor did they endorse

his disapproval of revolutionary means and disregard for social equality

in favour of the equality of the rights of nationalities.¹⁸ However,

Palack

y’s anti-German biases could be productively transformed into

tenets which resonated with the Czech communists’ struggle against

Nazism, while his Slavophile leaning could be interpreted as an early

indication of brotherhood between the Czechs and Russians. Even the

appropriation of the Hussite tradition presented no impediment to

Marxist scholars, they simply focused on its social, revolutionary and

anti-clerical aspects.

Daukantas was discovered by the ﬁrst generation of Lithuanian ‘na-

tional awakeners’, who came to maturity after the failure of the (Polish)

uprising of 1863. Lithuanians’ participation in this event was punished

by a regime of Russiﬁcation, which entailed a ban on printing and

importing Lithuanian books in the Latin alphabet (until 1904). Instead,

¹⁵ The German version is entitled Der Sinn der tschechischen Geschichte (Brno, 1937).

¹⁶ Janowski, ‘Three Historians’, 207.

¹⁷ The Marxist reception of Palack

y’s ideas is discussed in Joseph F. Zacek, ‘Palack

yand

the Marxists’, Slavic Review 24:2 (1965), 297–306.

¹⁸ Ibid., 300.

300 Conclusion

a speciﬁc version of the Cyrillic alphabet was prescribed. However, not

only did this policy fail, but it also caused book smuggling to ﬂourish,

and helped to instigate the ﬁrst short-lived but nonetheless important

Lithuanian periodicals, Auˇsra (The Dawn, 1883–6), and Varpas (The

Bell, 1889–1905). Both journals were published in Lithuania Minor, a

Prussian territory, and then smuggled into Russian-dominated Lithua-

nia.¹⁹ Auˇsra’s inaugural volume contained an appreciative article which

marked Daukantas’s discovery by Lithuanian intellectuals. The journal’s

agenda revealed a clear line of continuity with his legacy: its efforts to

standardize the Lithuanian language, its perception of the nation along

ethnic lines, together with a veneration of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania

stretching from the Baltic to the Adriatic Sea.

The second periodical, Varpas provides yet another instance of

syncretism, the coexistence of different and often opposing intellectual

currents in the cultural and intellectual life of East-Central Europe.

Editors of the journal, which was launched only six years after Auˇsra,

sought to relinquish the nostalgia for bygone times and strove to infuse

historical writing with a more sober tone. Daukantas’s vision of national

independence proved particularly valuable to historians of the interwar

period, faced with the task of providing a retrospective legitimization

of Lithuanians’ admittedly unexpected acquisition of independence.

During the Soviet period,

emigr

e scholars in the United States joined

local historians in ensuring that my historian’s legacy was preserved.

Horv

ath did not epitomize the quintessential Romantic historian,

and this may be one of the reasons why his reception did not follow the

typical Romantic-positivist-neoromantic path. Another reason may be

connected with the peculiarities of Hungarian historical scholarship, the

axis of which continued to revolve around the relationship with Austria,

even after 1867 (when it became contractually regulated by the Com-

promise).EveninHorv

ath’s own lifetime, a group of mainly Protestant

historians had already begun to criticize this arrangement, asserting that

it disadvantaged Hungary. The interwar period saw representatives of

another orientation, who viewed the Habsburg Monarchy as a gateway

to the West, and who displayed Catholic sympathies, gain inﬂuence.

Horv

ath’s endorsement of the Compromise must have proved unac-

ceptable to the former faction, whilst the latter might have found his

unfailing insistence on secularization and modernization indigestible. In

¹⁹ Art

uras Tere

skinas, ‘Between Romantic Nostalgia and Historio-Pedagogic Sentiments:

A Few Ways to Discourse the Lithuanian Past’, Lituanus 43:3 (1997), 11–48.

Conclusion 301

the second half of the twentieth century Marxist scholars came to admire

Horv

ath’s preoccupation with the peasantry, but his endorsement of the

commercial tradition must have seemed too bourgeois and his venera-

tion of the ancient constitution too reactionary for their purposes. Thus,

it seems that Horv

ath’s unique voice has caused Hungarian scholarship

to overlook him.

Kog

alniceanu’s approach to historical writing was devoid of pop-

ulist excesses, but nevertheless belonged to the Romantic brand of

patriotic historiography. In Romania, representatives of the Junimea

movement, who appeared on the intellectual scene in the 1860s, under-

took a conservative-critical assessment of this tradition. They advocated

a measure of detachment from history and questioned deep-rooted

convictions in a tone that resembled that of Positivist scholars, although

no major historians emerged from their circle. Junimists also sought

to relate to contemporary problems without obsessively referring to

historical precedents, whether to support the maintenance of ancient

privileges or to advocate radical change.²⁰ After 1900, an autochthon-

ist counter-current to Junimea became dominant, and accordingly,

the Romanians’ distinct legacy gained new emphasis. The twentieth

century’s foremost Romanian historian, Nicolae Iorga, added a new

aspect to the historiographical tradition which predominantly revolved

around the Roman heritage: he transformed Romanians into the inher-

itors of the historical and political tradition of Byzantium, in addition

to emphasizing their European mission. Iorga genuinely appreciated

Kog

alniceanu’s attainments, calling him the founder of Romanian cul-

ture and praising his initiatives to improve the situation of the peasant

population.

As such generous engagement with my historians’ legacy reveals, the

‘national paradigm’ by no means remained conﬁned to the Romantic

epoch. Not only did historical writing ‘in a national key’ survive, but it

constituted the predominant tradition in Europe between approximately

1850 and 1950.²¹ The next two decades saw the pluralization of

historical discourses, through which national history either competed or

formed alliances with rival master narratives, such as class and gender.

Spatial alternatives, including local and regional history (Central Europe,

the Mediterranean, etc.) also presented a challenge to the national

²⁰ Boia, History and Myth, 51–4.

²¹ Stefan Berger, ‘A Return of the National Paradigm?’, Journal of Modern History 77:3

(2005), 631.

302 Conclusion

paradigm. During the 1980s, the decade culminating in the collapse

of communism, national history experienced another revival, but in a

diversiﬁed form: it now became impossible to return to the homogeneous

models of earlier epochs.²² The fact that the nation-state has remained

the favoured legal, constitutional and bureaucratic framework in Europe

justiﬁes the survival of the genre in contemporary times. Nonetheless,

more recently there has been a move away from essentialist arguments,

and historical discourses have instead emphasized the constructed nature

of the national heritage.

The enthusiastic reception and enduring status of my historians’

legacy in the domestic academic context stands in sharp contrast with

international scholarship’s neglect of them. I have taken a decidedly

revisionist stance towards their a priori dismissal as unoriginal, biased

and irrational scholars. However, my motivation has not been to

show at all costs that they were ‘better’ historians than they have

previously been given credit for. Rather, I have sought to elucidate

some fascinating aspects of their work and explore the complexity of

their achievements, which can only be properly appreciated through

comparison and contextualization.

In seeking to uncover what was groundbreaking about my histori-

ans’ attainments, several problems have arisen. One of these concerns

marginality, a concept which tends to invite the label of unoriginal-

ity: colonial hierarchies typically identify the ‘core’ with inventiveness,

rationality and progress, whilst the periphery is usually assigned the

qualities of imitativeness, irrationality and stagnation.²³ Against these

assumptions, I sought to demonstrate that even dependency on other

cultures, an engagement with something ‘given’ (for example, transla-

tions) can prove ‘innovative’, and ‘original’ if it results in a creation

which ﬁlls a lacuna in the receiving culture. Furthermore, the con-

tested nature of the concept of originality, which is paradigmatically

associated with innovation, also becomes obvious when assessing the

qualities of nineteenth-century scholars who occupy established and

undisputed positions in the historiographical canon. The majority of

these historians have become canonized not because of their innovative

ambitions, which were rarely fulﬁlled, but due to their masterful and

appealing style; an element through which they expressed continuity

²² Ibid., 661.

²³ J. M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric

History (New York, 1993), 17.

Conclusion 303

with an earlier historiographical tradition. Another problem concerns

the presumption, tacit or otherwise, that reliance on a foreign culture is

invariably ‘imitational’, and perhaps even ‘unnatural’; a premise which

implies that cultures are self-contained universes with very limited scope

for interchange. In the same way, it is especially difﬁcult to justify why

borrowing from a foreign culture should be seen as imitational when

borrowing from one’s native predecessors or contemporaries is perceived

as a ‘natural’ continuation of a given tradition. Lastly, it appears that

an agreed standard of what constitutes scholarly excellence does not

do justice to the diverse manifestations of prominence, which are often

contingent on the structures of individual scholarly cultures. In that

context, I have emphasized that my historians had no giants on whose

shoulders they could stand. They excelled in laying the foundations of

national scholarship, a venture which might appear less impressive than

crowning the efforts undertaken by their predecessors.

No serious contemporary scholar would deny a strong element of

invention in national historiography. But even speculations about the

extent of ﬁctionality may disclose value judgements. In this context,

an overt or tacit implication in many accounts of nationalism is that

historiography in East-Central Europe (and other ‘margins’) contained

a greater degree of ‘invention’, hence it was of poorer quality. In par-

ticular, the absence of a continuous state tradition has been associated

with such shortcomings, as the term ‘nations with empty histories’

implies. The analysis of my historians’ narrative in a European context

has conﬁrmed the prevalence of speciﬁc tropes. This suggests that the

typologies which are commonly employed to assess the varieties of

nationalism, such as ‘continuous’ versus ‘non-continuous’ traditions,

may have limited relevance in the realm of historical writing, even if,

as we have seen, continuity represented one of the foremost political

concerns of nineteenth-century historians. In light of my protago-

nists’ accomplishments, another word of caution may be necessary.

The relevance of the words which are omnipresent in the study of

nationalism—constructing, imagining, inventing and dreaming—is

undisputable. Nonetheless, at least on one point these words may not

do justice to my (and other) historians’ work: they fail to indicate the

purposefulness, the very pragmatic and conscious nature of their endeav-

ours, not to mention the painstaking work involved in their political,

cultural, historiographical ‘multi-tasking’. Their ambitious endeavours

deﬁnitely needed vision, but daydreamers alone would have been unable

to make the impact upon scholarship that my historians did.

304 Conclusion

The ultimate objective of my assessment of correspondences and

divergences in historical writing has been to contemplate the question

of whether it is meaningful to refer to East-Central European histo-

riography as a distinct explanatory model. The more I have tried to

ﬁnd peculiarities, the more I realized that the alleged differences do not

comprise an independent tradition; rather, they represent variations on

a common theme. By and large, my case studies have conﬁrmed Anne

Marie Thiesse’s declaration that ‘nothing is more international than the

construction of national identities’.²⁴ My historians might have played

different instruments from those of their ‘Western’ contemporaries, but

they certainly produced the same music.

²⁴ Anne- Marie Thiesse, La cr´eation des identit´es nationales: Europe XVIII

–XX

si`ecle (Paris,

1999), 1.

Bibliography

PRINTED PRIMARY SOURCES

Because my historians’ output was immense, I have listed below only those of

their writings (in chronological sequence) which are directly relevant to my

study. In addition to individual accounts and collected volumes, I include

some excerpts (mainly in English). These are relatively easy to access and

may offer a ﬁrst insight into my historians’ world, therefore, I also relied on

them in the book.

Works by Joachim Lelewel

Throughout the book, whenever possible, I referred to the widely available

modern edition of Lelewel’s collected works, Dzieła. However, this is an

incomplete collection, only nine volumes of the envisaged thirty were ever

published. Therefore, I also found it necessary to avail myself of the far more

comprehensive nineteenth-century edition, Polska, dzieje a rzeczy jej,which

has a very restricted availability. Importantly, however, the Polish version of

Lelewel’s perhaps most signiﬁcant book, Uwagi nad dziejami Polski i ludu

jej, was published only in this edition. Works not included in these two

collections as well as the books that I consulted in individual editions are

listed separately, alongside the most important foreign versions of Lelewel’s

writings. A comprehensive bibliography of Lelewel’s rich oeuvre, Bibliograﬁa

utwor´ow Joachima Lelewela, edited by Helena Hleb-Kosza

nska (Wrocław,

1952) contains over a thousand entries.

Edda, cyzli ksi

ega religii dawnych Skandynawii mi

eszka´nc´ow (Vilna, 1807).

Bibliograﬁcznych ksi

ag dwoje, 2 vols. (Vilna, 1823 and 1826), reprint (Warsaw,

1980).

Atlas do Historyi i geograﬁi staro˙zytnej (Warsaw, 1828).

Atlas do Dziej´ow polskich z dwunastu krajobraz´ow zło˙zony (Warsaw, 1829).

Geschichte Polens unter Stanislaus August (Braunschweig, 1831).

Numismatique du Moyen-

Age (Paris, 1835).

Etudes numismatiques et arch´eologiques (Brussels, 1841).

Histoire de Pologne (Paris, 1844).

Betrachtungen ¨uber den politischen Zustand des ehemaligen Polens und ¨uber die

Geschichte seines Volkes (Leipzig, 1845).

Stracone obywatelstwo stanu kmiecego (Brussels, 1846).

Geschichte Polens (Leipzig, 1846 and 1847).

Polska wiek´ow ´srednich (Pozna

n, 1846–51).

Examen g´eographique des voyages de Benjamin de Tud`ele (Brussels, 1852).

306 Bibliography

Polska, dzieje a rzeczy jej,20vols.,ofwhichVols.XIVandXVwerenever

published (Pozna

n, 1855–68).

Cze´s´c bałwochwalcza Sławian i Polski (Pozna

n, 1857).

Sprawa ˙zydowska w 1859, w li´scie do Ludwika Merzbacha rozwa˙zana (Pozna

1860).

Die Judenfrage im Jahre 1859, in einem Briefe an Ludwig Merzbach er¨ortert

(Lemberg, 1860).

Histoire de la Lithuanie et de la Ruth´enie jusqu’

a 1549 (Paris, 1861).

G´eographie du moyen

age, 5 vols. (Brussels, 1850–2), 2nd edn. (Amsterdam,

1967).

Dzieła, 9 vols. (I–VIII and X), ed. Marian Henryk Serejski (Warsaw, 1957–73).

Joachima Lelewela odpowied´z na aniket

e historyczn

a Franc¸ois Guizota,trans.

Marian Henryk Serejski (Wrocław, 1962).

Joachim Lelewel: Textes Choisis (Brussels, 1986), ed. Teresa Wysoki

nska.

Excerpts:

‘Prawno

c narodu polskiego’, in Andrzej Walicki and Jan Garewicz (eds.), 700

lat my´sli polskiej: Filozoﬁa i my´sl społeczna w latach 1831–1864 (Warsaw,

1977), 779–98.

‘Legitimacy of the Polish Nation’, in Bal

azs Trencs

enyi and Michal Kope

cek

(eds.), Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe

(1770–1945), Vol. II: National Romanticism (Budapest and New York,

2007), 33–41.

Works by Simonas Daukantas

The deﬁnitive edition of Daukantas’s historical works can be found in Raˇstai

and Istorija

Zemaitiˇska (1993). I have relied on these volumes because they

contain a critical apparatus, in addition to being more widely available. I also

consulted and have thus listed the original editions of Daukantas’s national

histories; however, these are extremely rare and employ the old orthography,

which makes it difﬁcult to decipher them. Daukantas’s dictionaries, folklore

collections, translations and correspondence are listed separately.

B¯udas senov˙es lietuvi

u, kaln˙en

uirˇzemaiˇci

u (St Petersburg, 1845).

‘Istorija

Zemaiti

ska’, under the title: Lietuvos istorija,2vols.(Plymouth,PA,

1893–7).

Darbai sen

ulietuvi

uirˇzemaiˇci

u (Kaunas, 1929).

Pasakojimas apie veikalus lietuvi

utautossenov˙eje (Bit˙enai, 1929).

Dain˙es

Zemaiˇci

u (Petropilis, 1846).

Raˇstai, 2 vols. (Vilnius, 1976).

Zemaiˇci

utautosaka, 2 vols. (Vilnius, 1983–4).

Vertimai ir sekimai (Vilnius, 1986).

Istorija

Zemaitiˇska, 2 vols. (Vilnius, 1993).

Bibliography 307

Didysis lenk

u-lietuvi

u kalb

uˇzodynas, 3 vols. (Vilnius, 1993–6).

Laiˇskai Teodorui Narbutui: epistolinis dialogas (Vilnius, 1996).

Works by Frantiˇsek Palack´y

Palack

y’smagnumopusisundoubtedlyhisnationalhistory,whichwas

published in numerous editions. Apart from the German version, below are

listed the following Czech editions: the ﬁrst one of 1848–57, as well as the

edition of 1876–8, which is considered classical. Also included is the six-

volume edition of 1939–40, which was published in Prague by Kva

snicka

and Hampl. This version, which draws on the deﬁnitive publication of

1876–8, is more readily available than the earlier ones. I used it as my

personal copy and my references in the book are also based on it. Palack

y’s

individual monographs and pamphlets, the collections of his minor writings

and correspondence are listed separately. A comprehensive biography of my

historian’s works can be found on the website of the journal D˘ejiny a souˇcasnost

(History and the Present): http://www.dejiny.nlh.cz/Bibl/Palacky.html. A

note on orthography: in non-Czech publications, in both primary and

secondary sources, the accents are occasionally omitted from Palack

y’s name.

Below I follow the spelling on the title-page of the publications.

W¨urdigung der alten b¨ohmischer Geschichtschreiber (Prague, 1830).

Geschichte von B¨ohmen, gr¨osstentheils nach Urkunden und Handschriften,5vols.

in 10 (Prague, 1836–67).

Franz Palacky and Paul Joseph

Safa

rik, Die

altesten Denkm

aler der b¨ohmischen

Sprache (Prague, 1840).

Archiv ˇcesk´y,ed.Palack

y, 6 vols. (Prague, 1840–72).

Dˇejiny n

arodu ˇcesk´eho v

Cech

ach a v Morav˘e, 5 vols. in 10 (1848–67).

Idea st

atu rakousk´eho (Prague, 1865).

Oesterreichs Staatsidee (Prague, 1866).

Die Geschichte des Hussitenthums und Prof. Constantin H¨oﬂer: Kritische Studien

(Prague, 1868).

Zur B¨ohmischen Geschichtschreibung: Aktenm

assige Aufschl¨usse und Worte der

Abwehr (Prague, 1871)

Radhost, 3 vols. (Prague, 1871–3).

Politisches Verm

achtnis (Prague, 1872).

Urkundliche Beitr

age zur Geschichte des Hussitenkriegs, 2 vols. (Prague, 1872–4).

Gedenkbl

atter (Prague,

1874).

Dˇejiny n

arodu ˇcesk´eho v

Cech

ach a v Morav˘e, 5 vols. in 11, ed. Josef Kalousek

(Prague, 1876–8).

Frantiˇska Palack´eho spisy drobn´e, ed. Bohuslav Rieger, Vojt

ech Jaromír Nov

cek

and Leander

Cech, 2 vols. (Prague, 1898–1902).

Frantiˇska Palack´eho korrespondence a z

apisky,3vols.,ed.Vojt

ech Jaromír

Nov

cek (Prague, 1898–1911).