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Choice of Name versus Choice of Path: The Names of Ukrainian Territories from the Late Sixteenth to the Late Seventeenth Century
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Choice of Name versus Choice of Path The Names of Ukrainian Territories from the Late Sixteenth to the Late Seventeenth Century Natalia Yakovenko The very act of demarcating the real or imagined boundary of “our land” creates two geographic and cultural entities—the “land of the Other” and “one’s own” space. Establishing the name of “one’s own” living space is far from the least important step toward endowing it with meaning . Thus canonized, it is transformed by the inhabitants’ unwritten convention into the sacred name of a fatherland—a land inherited from ancestors on which objectively existing reality (territory) is infused with a series of imagined values projected onto that territory; values associated with common “blood,” interests, history, cultural tradition, and the like. In the Ukrainian case, it was the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that saw the definitive “establishment of the convention,” when the palm was awarded to the name “Ukraine” (Ukraïna). But the contest of proposals began three centuries earlier, signaling the emergence of a “national preoccupation” in a society content until then to define itself with the vague notion of Rus´, at once an ethnonym and the name of the territory inhabited by Ruthenians in the Polish-Lithuanian state. The first round of that “contest,” which took place between the late sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries, is the principal subject of this essay. We shall also have to make an excursion into prehistory, for some of the competing versions were articulated much earlier in other, Greek and Roman, cultural poles of Europe. Thus, by comparing the victories and defeats of the different versions reanimated by the Ruthenians , we can obtain an indirect notion of the priorities of the consumers , who were making a choice (just like present-day Ukrainians) between “East” and “West.” In conclusion, we shall examine the fluctuations of a hypothetically native creation, the concept of “Ukraine,” which in time was to win the grand prize. It is no easy task to give a brief account of the material on which my observations are based. References bearing on the subject are to be encountered in practically all texts of the period, from official documents to private jottings and from scholastic verses to theological treatises . The point, then, was not so much research as selection. My main criterion was the Ruthenian origin of the authors, although, in order to tease out particular nuances, it was necessary to seek views from the sidelines; from the Polish or “Lithuanian” (more precisely, official Vilnius ) perspectives. As for the intellectual grounding of this article, it comes mainly from the pioneering thesis advanced by Giovanna Brogi Bercoff, who maintains that the constitutive characteristic of Ukrainian cultural space in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was its “polymorphism ,” meaning its multilayered and polyglot character, mutability, and susceptibility to external assimilative influences. In Brogi Bercoff’s opinion, this elasticity of “cultural code” may be explained both by an “immanent” tendency—dating from the times of Kyivan Rus´—to synthesize divergent traditions and, in functional terms, as a response to the threat of disintegration facing a cultural community that was not yet fully formed.1 As regards more particular questions, my thinking has something in common with studies by Frank Sysyn and Serhii Plokhy devoted to somewhat later (late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century ) changes in the naming of Ukrainian space.2 Rosia/Russia/Rus’, Ruthenia, Roxolania The Byzantines anticipated developments by naming a territory that had not managed to come up with a general name for itself: the notion of Rosia (Ρωσι ′α) was first used to denote the “land of the Rus´” in De ceremoniis by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (908–59).3 But the “Rus´ people” (Ρω ′ ς) had come to the Byzantines’ attention much earlier, and that particular form of appellation—indeed, self-designation—is recorded in the Annales Bertiniani under the year 839, where it is recounted that people came from Constantinople to the court of Louis the Pious and “said that they—that is, their people—were known as Rus´” (se, id est gentem suam, Rhos vocari dicebant).4 In the mid-tenth century, Bishop Liutprand of Cremona employed another Latin variant of the Rus´ name, Rusii, derived from the Greek ρουσιοι. According to Liutprand’s Antapodosis, the Byzantine mercenaries included “a certain people… whom the Greeks call… Rusii… because of the strength of their bodies” (gens quaedam… quam a qualitate corporis Graeci vocant… Rusios).5 118 Natalia Yakovenko [34.205.246.61] Project MUSE (2024-03-28...