Page 4 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

A NOTE ON NAMES, PLACES, AND TRANSLITERATION

Making decisions about how to categorize places and populations, particularly when it comes to

national affiliations, is akin to walking into a mind-field. Here, since I almost exclusively deal with

the ways in which self-identifying Poles envisaged and administered Volhynia, and since the

province was part of the Polish state throughout, I use the Polish spellings of counties (powiaty),

districts (gminy), towns, and villages. This implies no assumptions about the “true” nationality of

such places, an approach that I hope will come through clearly in my analysis. Some place names,

such as Warsaw (Warszawa) and Volhynia (Wołyń), are rendered in their Anglicized forms.

Greater problems are presented in naming groups of people. The term “Ukrainian” was used

by Ukrainian nationalist groups, as well as by Poles who believed that there was such a thing as a

Ukrainian nation; “Ruthenian” was favored by those on the Polish right who did not conceive of

these people as Ukrainians. When I write about populations in my own voice, I prefer to use “Polish-

speaking populations” or “Ukrainian-speaking populations” in order to avoid implying a definitive

judgment on levels of national consciousness (although linguistic identifications are themselves

problematic). When politicians, agitators, and social activists identified with a Ukrainian or Polish

nationalist agenda, the terms “Ukrainian” and “Pole” are more appropriate. I use the term “Jews”

throughout, while also highlighting the diversity within this population.

All translations from French, Polish, Ukrainian, and German are my own, unless otherwise

noted. For the transliteration of Russian or Ukrainian words, I use the Library of Congress system,

unless I am referring to a name that is more commonly recognized in the Anglicized form.

4