INTERVIEW: Ihor Sevcenko on the significance of Hrushevsky in translation

As part of its recent series of book launches for the English translation of Volume I of Mykhailo Hrushevsky's "History of Ukraine-Rus," the Peter Jacyk Center for Ukrainian Historical Research invited Harvard University's Prof. Ihor Sevcenko to Toronto to benefit from his considerable scholarly stature. A graduate of Charles University in Prague (1945) and the University of Louvain in Belgium (1949), Prof. Sevcenko has taught at the universities of California and Michigan, and at New York's Columbia University, and joined the faculty at Harvard in 1965. The respected Byzantine scholar is one of the co-founders of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and has served as associate director since it was established in 1973. The following interview was conducted by Andrij Kudla Wynnyckyj at the Jacyk Institute's offices in Toronto.

Q: Now that Hrushevsky's 10-volume history has begun to appear in English translation, will this have an appreciable effect on Eastern European scholarship in the West?

A: It depends on the people who are the intermediate link between this volume and students in North America. Those who are Ukrainian and those who share Hrushevsky's conceptions will, of course, find his work of great assistance in re-examining the region's history.

Those who were trained by prominent North American historians of Russia might not, particularly those who studied under the leading Russian historians.

In any case, both groups will certainly profit from the factual material contained in the volume.

Q: Would you agree that Hrushevsky's populist approach is in tune with current trends in historiography?

A: That is difficult for me to judge. However, when I was leafing through this volume, I was struck how Braudelian Hrushevsky was in his stress on the formative function of territory, of its geographical characteristics, on the history of its inhabitants. Fernand Braudel [the late author of "A History of Civilization" and founder of the "Eistoire Totale" school in modern historiography] is the inventor of the theory of the long-range developments in history, as opposed to the history of events. The latter, of course, is superficial. In this sense, it is less important to know that George Washington was president of the United States than to be able to analyze the overall process by which a powerful new polity was created on the North American continent.

Hrushevsky insisted on the long-range history of a people inhabiting a territory, so given the present political reality in Europe, his approach is relevant.

It is not the scholarly work that originates a change in historical perspective, it is the political changes that lead to justification of such changes by means of scholarly works. Then the media and popular conceptions come into play.

If Russia expands again, then Hrushevsky will be of no use. But if Ukraine remains independent for at least another generation, then this volume and those that follow could very well be useful for a writer of an op-ed article or a review of current events, or even for a person formulating policy in Europe.

Hrushevsky is, of course, very helpful for Ukrainians, no matter what language he is translated into - whether it be English or Chinese. But beyond that, his is also a work of very solid and serious scholarship, which can be of great assistance to scholars of the region everywhere.

There have been no serious attempts to refute Hrushevsky on the basis of facts by any historians practicing the craft. Of course, there have been ideological challenges, notably from the Soviet academic and political establishments, but this has little relevance.

I'm sure that Edward Gibbon's anti-religious attitude is considered by Catholics today as a pernicious ideology that they do not share, but the value of Gibbon [author of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"], even on the conceptual level, remains undisputed.

It is the problem of the confines of politics and history that proved to be Hrushevsky's glory and his undoing. His keen understanding of political processes eventually placed him at the top of an emergent political entity [Hrushevsky was elected president of the short-lived Ukrainian National Republic government in April 1918] and then placed him on a collision course with another very specific process, the Bolshevik revolution [he died in mysterious circumstances in Moscow, having been forced into internal exile by Stalin].

But his "History of Ukraine-Rus' " stands apart and is a very valuable document.

Hrushevsky's value is twofold: first of all, as a person who reflected the currents of his time as they prevailed in Eastern and Central Europe; and secondly, as an accomplished researcher.

It doesn't matter if you have any idea about whether a particular dynasty represents the core of the Rus' state; any reader can profit from Hrushevsky's outlines and analyses of history.

Take for example the Normanist theory. Hrushevsky was against it because he considered the subject of history to be the people. Therefore, for him it was not important if five or six Vikings came and took over in a particular region.

Hrushevsky had an absolute mastery of the totality of evidence available at his time. Because he examined such a wide variety of sources in making his arguments, one can both argue with him and be thankful to him. Of course, in the mean time, evidence has increased in terms of archeology, but not in terms of written texts. When it comes to written texts, nobody beats him.

Another admirable quality is Hrushevsky's common sense, his ability not to kid himself or the reader. On that score, in my opinion, he rates very highly. There are historians before and since whose command of sources was equal to Hrushevsky's, but few had his restraint when faced with hypotheses, and many influential Russian historians have proven to be better fantasists than scholars.

Now, some people will say that Hrushevsky was a populist and this determined the direction and focus of his scholarship, but that's not the point. If he was a populist that's fine and relevant if you want to study the Zeitgeist of the late 19th century and early 20th.

But this is not relevant to the actual examination of the past he conducts. Take me for example. I make Freudian asides in my writings, because when I was young this was an influential intellectual current. Of course, we've since learned that Freud made mistakes, but this is only important to a social historian of the 20th century, and has no bearing on the quality of my work on Byzantium.

Q: To pick up on this, would you say that this summer's "Glory of Byzantium" exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum could change Western perceptions of the Byzantine and perhaps minimize some of the traditionally negative associations people have with the "mysterious" East?

A: Well, the answer I'll give you will be vague. I participated in this exhibit, I gave a lecture there, and it was attended by over 450 people. An incredible number for a lecture of the sort.

I've been told that this exhibit was attended by 400,100 people, which is about 100 more than the population of Constantinople/Byzantium at its height. It is four times more than the standing army of Justinian, the great emperor of the sixth century. So, in theory at least, this should be a very big deal. However, the U.S. now has a population of about 270 million, so one has to look at it in relative terms.

Mechanically speaking, the exhibit attracted attention because it was targeted at those communities who were, or thought that they were, connected to Byzantium. These were the Greek Orthodox Church, Armenians, Melchites, Syrians, Orthodox Lebanese and so on. These communities sent pilgrimages to the exhibit.

The second reason for its success, to my mind, was that it was an exhibit of exceptional value, an exhibit which presented Byzantium as it was - as a multinational state.

And so of course, this entailed a Kyivan connection. This was presented in a fashion that was very favorable to Ukrainians and, of course, this was because of the very capable Olenka Pevny's position at the museum. But in no way did it detract from either the esthetic or the historical value of the exhibit.

The mosaics, the Ostromir Gospels, showed how quickly Kyivan Rus' adopted the techniques of the first rate products of Byzantine civilization. Since I study such documents, I can tell you that this manuscript [of the Gospels] was a perfect example of the copying technique, and make-up, of a corresponding 11th century Byzantine manuscript.

Now, to answer your question: will the exhibit influence attitudes? Yes, in a vague fashion. The 400,000 people who saw it will tell others about what they saw because it was all very beautiful.

One of the intentions of the exhibit was to show the influence of Byzantine culture on Western medieval and subsequent art. It was there, but it wasn't obvious, and the probability that most people will grasp this is low.

Will it affect the profession? Not much, because the profession was aware of Byzantium's impact already, and the profession does not have enough influence to change the curriculum to the extent that Byzantine topics would be enlarged at the expense of Western medieval topics.

Q: Might it produce more balance?

A: No, because the United States is an heir to the Western tradition and to Western values. The elite here will always look to its roots, even if it has a romantic view of Byzantium. Of course, there is a small but very powerful segment, and that is the Greeks. There is a very high proportion of Byzantinists who are Greeks in the U.S., just as Dr. Frank Sysyn [director of the PJCUHR and its Hrushevsky Translation Project], is not a pure Anglo-Saxon, and this explains, to some extent, his presence in the field of Ukrainian history.

There might be a shift in interest in favor of Byzantium, but definitely nothing on the order of the interest in space travel following the launch of the Sputnik.

I must say that the exhibit's popularity was a surprise to me, but it was not undeserved. The intelligence and perseverance shown by the curators and organizers in obtaining artifacts which had never before been let out was remarkable - those objects that came from Mount Athos and the monastery in Sinai, for example.

Having been to Sinai I can tell you that they chose the best. But this is not surprising; what is surprising is that the monks of Sinai gave the best. The zeal and the skill of the organizers to obtain these artifacts should be acknowledged.

Q: They appear to have been equally skillful at avoiding a tug of war over Byzantine patrimony that might have developed.

A: Yes. They invited Russians whom I know personally, and invited Ukrainians whom I didn't know personally, and there was not even a peep out of the Russians over "our Kyiv" or some such considerations. They were very tactful.

There was a certain amount of protest on the part of the Greeks. Some of them felt cheated because the word "Greece" did not appear on any of the exhibit's promotional slogans, or what have you. For some it was controversial to mention, as I did, that Byzantium was a multinational empire. But this merely shows that you can't please everybody.

Q: In terms of the kind of things that Hrushevsky might have focused on, how would you evaluate the Byzantium exhibit?

A: Like many of my generation and many Ukrainians before and since, I was raised on Hrushevsky's "Illustrated History," and I remember leafing past all of the mammoth's tusks and so on to the artifacts of Kyivan Rus'. I think Hrushevsky would have recognized some of the crowns and bands among the artifacts on show in New York.

Of course, as a man more interested in the people, Hrushevsky would not have been so proud of the achievements and trappings of the upper classes.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, November 9, 1997, No. 45, Vol. LXV

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