Page 18 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

clusters, and messy files of correspondence that bounced back-and-forth between Warsaw and

Volhynia. In the archive in Rivne in western Ukraine, which has vast amounts of Polish interwar

materials but where scholars do not always travel, a Ukrainian-speaking archivist handed over

Polish-language records that I had ordered from a Russian-language catalog. Once past the linguistic

labyrinth (which has its own political and institutional history), I found materials that offered the

kind of details that bring Volhynia to life: anxious police reports, carefully filled-out questionnaires,

the lively minutes of town meetings, and letters penned by horrified health inspectors. At the other

end of the spectrum, materials on Volhynia at the British government archives in Kew, the Sikorski

archives in London, and the Hoover Institution archives at Stanford provide a valuable international

perspective, showing how Poles interacted with global audiences and institutions.

These sources do not, of course, give us every perspective on Volhynia—but, then again, I

did not ask them to do so. While the viewpoints of self-declared Ukrainian (and to a lesser extent,

Jewish and German) groups are included in some parts of the book, my task has not been to depict

comprehensively what Volhynia meant to each of them. Similarly, the voices of the non-elite, non-

literate majority of the province’s inhabitants are heard from less often—and, even then, they appear

in a somewhat indirect way. Instead, my published and archival sources, when read together, offer

insights into how a wide range of people, most of whom identified as Polish, shaped and were in turn

shaped by their encounters with Volhynia during the 1920s and 1930s. I use them to reveal not only

dramatic change over time, but also the continuities that transcended the more obvious political

divisions of interwar Polish history. Vacillating between national self-confidence and profound

anxiety about the capacity of Poles to carry out a civilizing mission on the state’s eastern fringes, the

second-tier actors put forward an unstable and contradictory set of claims, rather than a single

coherent vision. I have endeavored to read the documents not simply for what they say, but also for

what they do not say; not simply for what their authors make clear, but also for what they obscure,

muddle, and avoid.

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