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consciously civilizing practices, in both public and domestic places, depoliticization itself became a

political competition over the correct institutional locus of rural authority.

Part III considers the ways in which Volhynia as a concept was created, transformed, and

destroyed over time, with a focus on both intellectual and social developments. Chapter 6 follows

advocates of the Volhynian regionalist movement that flourished between the late 1920s and the mid-

1930s through a close reading of texts associated with museums, journals, regional courses, tourist

associations, and local educational initiatives. While regionalists emphasized narratives of tolerance,

inclusivity, and diversity, which they based on the traditions of the Polish-Lithuanian

Commonwealth, they simultaneously policed cultural borders by creating acceptable molds of pre-

modern folklore into which the province’s Ukrainians and Jews might be placed. If Chapter 6 charts

the construction of the Volhynian idea, Chapter 7 traces its demise within the context of both the

Polish turn to the right after Piłsudski’s death and global changes in the mid-to-late 1930s. As

European discussions of civilizational hierarchies came to focus on more radical “solutions” to

demographic “problems” in multiethnic borderlands, Polish academics also challenged the work of

regionalists who had fostered the conditional inclusion of diverse national groups under the

Volhynian umbrella. In particular, they increasingly emphasized that non-Polish Slavs were either a

proto-national population or Poles who had lost their national identity under aberrant imperial

conditions, while simultaneously arguing that Volhynia’s Jews were a demographically fixed entity

that needed to be “rationally” dealt with—for the good of the state.

The conclusion traces the afterlives of these stories and places, with a focus on the violence

of the Second World War and subsequent political claims in communist and post-communist Poland.

As national borders seem to be ossifying—in Poland, as elsewhere—the case of interwar Volhynia

reminds us that nations are continually constructed in local environments, far from the political

center

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