Polish Encounters, Russian Identity

Introduction: Russian Identity in Its Encounter with Poland

1 Introduction: Russian Identity in Its Encounter with Poland David L. Ransel and Bozena Shallcross Poland forms a key element in the historical creation and continuing reconstruction of Russian identity. National identity is shaped in large part through images reflected in encounters with the people of neighboring countries . Russian writers, artists, and publicists habitually viewed themselves in the mirror of Polish life and culture, employing that mirror to sharpen their perception of themselves as a people. This volume seeks to elucidate how Russian self-understanding was informed and crystallized by the encounter with Polish life and culture. The role of other neighboring peoples was likewise important but of a different and less problematic character. The boundaries of identity to the east and south were sharply drawn against the Turkic peoples and others of Muslim faith.1 To the north and northeast resided peoples of Finnic language and animistic religious practices who were distinguishable from Russians yet not threatening to Russian identity because their cultures were insufficiently attractive or accessible. Russians moved through the porous homelands of these peoples without being strongly altered by contact with them. On the contrary, the Finnic peoples with time became Christianized and, in the case of the David L. Ransel and Bozena Shallcross 2 Mordva, largely Russianized.2 Beyond lay the lands of the so-called small peoples of the north, the Siberian tribespeople of Buddhist and Shamanist religion whose stature, appearance, and practices set them unmistakably apart from Russians and against whom Russians could easily define their difference and their sense of superiority.3 The western boundary of Russia was more problematic. The very openness and fluidity of this borderland challenged efforts to stabilize identity. Throughout history, state borders on Russia’s west shifted back and forth over a wide territory. The people who occupied this space were overwhelmingly Slavic in their speech. The language they spoke at the western end of this continuum (Polish) was different from that spoken at the eastern end (Russian ), but they were linked through an infinite series of gradations with no place to draw a precise linguistic boundary. Moreover, state boundaries determined what languages would enjoy official status and would be taught in schools so that the educated elites in the borderlands usually spoke a language different from that of the common people of their region. And since the state boundaries were constantly in flux, linguistic lines were likewise unstable. This unsettled situation was further complicated by the presence of large populations of increasingly nationally conscious Jews and Ukrainians who wished to assert their own claims to autonomy and, in the case of the Ukrainians , territorial integrity. Lacking clear geographic, ethnographic, and linguistic boundaries by which they could mark their difference, Russians had to build the borders of their identity in the more rarified and contestable realms of religion and culture. These discursive fields of identity construction had the advantages and disadvantages of being inherently highly pliable and subject to both official and unofficial interpretation. Official religion, because of its institutional underpinnings, could be and indeed was imposed by one side or another when governments had the ability to do so. But conformity to religious ideas was less easily controlled, and the powerful historical associations of identity with confessional adherence proved difficult for governments to break. Cultural expression was much less institutionalized and was open to educated people across the region. It could be seductive and influential in ways that were ungovernable by states and that easily transcended political boundaries. This realm of identity formation was therefore accompanied by dangers of penetration, which provoked anxieties about the dilution of Russian identity and the corruption of Russian values that lay at the foundation of that identity. Poland was a nation of equal or greater duration and consciousness than Russia itself. Not only did it have an experience with statehood more ancient than Russia’s but it also boasted a literary language and high culture that enjoyed great appeal among its neighbors. Russia came within Poland’s cultural orbit from the late sixteenth century on, and the powerful attraction of many educated Russians to Western culture in its accessible Polish expression generated fears in Russians who were not confident of the definition and strength of their Introduction 3 own culture and therefore of its ability to resist this influence. They feared as well the...