Page 13 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

century to claim that the region was civilizationally connected to Poland, rather than to the Russian

empire. For Polish nationalists of a more Romantic bent, the broader region of the eastern

borderlands to which Volhynia belonged—known in Polish as kresy—was central to the formation of

15
a noble (szlachta) national identity that also embraced ethnically non-Polish populations.
Nationally minded poets of the nineteenth century like Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki, both

of whom hailed from the multilinguistic kresy, wrote about the area as one of national and religious

harmony, imbued with the spirit of the Polish nation. If Polishness was defined by diversity,

Volhynia was its quintessential symbol, a colorful mosaic of languages, religions, and ways of life,

far removed from the ethnic center. And yet what Polish elites meant by civilization was itself

changing. While some continued to celebrate a heroic national mission in the kresy, by the late

nineteenth century, others were holding Volhynia up against a pan-European list of “civilized”

characteristics. They found it, and the rest of the kresy, to be seriously wanting.

The shift toward thinking about the kresy as a backward region in need of Poland’s

civilizational guidance accelerated after the failure of the 1863 armed uprising against Russian

imperial rule when Polish intellectuals began to focus their attention on a scientific construction of a

16
nation that was to include ordinary people (in Polish, lud). As scholars engaged in modern

academic disciplines like ethnography and geography, and as the Positivistic concept of the-nation-

as-everyday-work gained popularity, many argued that the primitive mentality and outlook of

populations in Volhynia was creating a worryingly circular relationship between environment and

people. In a typical account, the Polish ethnographer Eugeniusz Frankowski, who journeyed to the

15 During the interwar years, the term also covered the six provinces that lay along the Polish-Soviet border, as well
as the eastern parts of Lwów and Białystok provinces, and, in some cases, the whole of eastern Galicia, which had
been under Austrian rule prior to 1914. For more on the kresy as an imagined space, see Jacek Kolbuszewski, Kresy
(Wrocław, 1995); Stefan Kieniewicz, “Kresy. Przemiany Terminologiczne w Perspektywie Dziejowej,” Przegląd
Wschodni 1, no. 1 (1991): 3-13; Feliks Gross, “Kresy: The Frontier of Eastern Europe,” Polish Review 23, no. 2
(1978): 3-16. More recently, see Tomasz Zarycki, The Ideologies of Eastness in Central and Eastern Europe
(London and New York, 2014), particularly 115-151.
16 Brian Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland
(Oxford, 2000).

13