Description:
This book explores the political imagination of Eastern Europe in the 1830s and 1840s, when Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian intellectuals came to identify themselves as belonging to communities known as nations or nationalities. Bilenky approaches this topic from a transnational perspective, revealing the ways in which modern Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian nationalities were formed and refashioned through the challenges they presented to one another, both as neighboring communities and as minorities within a given community. Further, all three nations defined themselves as a result of their interactions with the Russian and Austrian empires. Fueled by the Romantic search for national roots, they developed a number of separate yet often overlapping and inclusive senses of national identity, thereby producing myriad versions of Russianness, Polishness, and Ukrainianness.
Review Quotes: "Altogether, the book is a welcome addition to scholarship on Eastern Europe. It is both significant and praiseworthy that a study of the 'geographical imagination' of the three largest nations of the region has been written by a scholar of Ukrainian background. It signals an interpretive change and calls for readjustment of many works on Russia and Poland that have not taken the rise of the Ukrainian nationality into account."--Ewa Thompson "Slavic and East European Journal"