Page 213 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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nothing less than “turn Poles into Ukrainians and Ukrainians into Poles.” This was a bold vision in
a nominal nation-state.

By the late 1920s, Sanacja regionalists attempted to use various institutions at the level of the

village—both religious and secular—to make this vision a reality. In the arena of church affairs, for

instance, Józewski aided the creation of a Ukrainianized Orthodox Church in order to reduce Russian

influence, foster a Ukrainian group loyal to the Polish state, and show Ukrainians under Soviet rule

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that Poland offered better religious conditions. When it came to literary culture, the pro-Józewski
VUO’s Ukrainian-language newspaper Ukrainian Field (Ukraïns’ka Nyva) published multiple

articles that supported Polish statehood (many of which were translated into Ukrainian from the pro-

Sanacja newspaper Volhynia), celebrated Ukrainian cultural figures like the national bard Taras

Shevchenko, and declared that the VUO carried “light and the word of truth into the far corners of

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the Volhynian village.” Attempts to disseminate translated versions of the Polish epic poem Pan
Tadeusz through a network of mobile libraries further encouraged the idea that these two populations

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shared a common cultural canon. The fact that Mickiewicz’s classic text promoted an older concept

of multiethnic pluralism in the eastern borderlands—it famously began “Lithuania! My Fatherland!

You are like health”—only added weight to the regionalists’ claim that Poland’s status as a tolerant

and inclusive nation was most keenly felt in borderlands like Volhynia.

CONSTRUCTING KNOWLEDGE AT THE MUSEUM

Pursuing a solution to the problem of Volhynia’s national diversity that did not rely on the

fundamental reconstruction of administrative boundaries meant that regionalists needed to package

17 “Report on the Eastern Marches of Poland” (1930), NAL FO 417/27/93.
18 Snyder, Sketches, 147-154.
19 “U dni natsional’noho sviata,” Ukraïns’ka Nyva, March 10, 1933, 1.
20 According to Jan Dec, books were passed from peasant to peasant and found enthusiastic readers everywhere. See
Dec, “Książka–jako miły gość na wsi wołyńskiej,” Wołyń, November 26, 1933, 7.

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