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Zorian Dolega Chodakowski (1784–1825) and the Unity of Slavonic Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

David Saunders
David Saunders*
Affiliation:
Dept. of History, The University of Newcastle, Upon Tyne, England
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Extract

October 1819 was a key month in the history of relations between the Slavs. Alexander I spent the early part of it in Warsaw, drawing on the contitution of the Congress Kingdom of Poland and putting the finishing touches to his project for a pan-imperial constitutional charter. In Tsarskoe Selo the conservative historian N. M. Karamzin reacted with horror to the tsar's concurrent plan for the revivification of Poland. On 9 October, in the hope of securing official support for his archaeological and ethnographic studies, the Pole Zorian Dolega Chodakowski arrived in St. Petersburg. His first publication in Russian, which appeared later in the month in Moscow, argued that before the coming of Christianity the Slavonic peoples were ‘everywhere and in all respects’ identical. Behind these three events — Alexander's charter, Karamzin's sense of outrage, Chodakowski's arrival — lay three approaches to the bringing-together of the Slavs: the federal, the Russifying, and what I shall call the cultural. In various hands, these approaches were long-lived in pre-revolutionary Russia. Chodakowski's significance lay in the impetus he gave to the third of them.

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , Fall 1983 , pp. 284 - 297
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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References

Notes

1. Georges Vernadsky, La charte constitutionelle de l'empire russe de l'an 1820, (Paris, 1933), p. 75; see also N. V. Minaeva, ‘Pravitelstvennyi konstitusionalizm v Rossii posle 1812g.‘, Voprosy istorii, 7 (1981), pp. 32-41.Google Scholar

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4. See the modern edition of this essay in Z. D. Chodakowski, O Slawianszyczyznie przed Chrzescijanstwem ora inne pisma i listy, ed. J. Maslanka, (Warsaw, 1967) (hereafter Maslanka, O Slawianszczyznie), p. 49.Google Scholar

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12. By, for example, Russifying Polish educational establishments, dispersing their libraries, and requiring Polish students to study in Russia: Tsentralnyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv SSSR (hereafter TsGIA), fond 733, opis 66, dela 2-3 (on the russification of schools in Belorussia in the 1820s), dd. 151-2 (on the transfer of books from Vilna to the universities of Kiev and Kharkiv in the 1830s), and op. 87, d. 341 (on the despatch of students from Poland to Russia between 1835 and 1840). By striking at Polish education Nicholas reduced the likelihood of the sort of Russo-Polish cultural exchange which occurred in 1819.Google Scholar

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14. Black, op. cit. (fn. 2), pp. 1-2.Google Scholar

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18. Reprinted in Maslanka, O Slawianszczyznie, p. 301.Google Scholar

19. See, for example, the obituary in Bibliograficheskie listy, 38, (13 March 1826), cols. 562-4.Google Scholar

20. A. N. Pypin “Zoriian Dolenga-Khodakovskii: Biograficheskii ocherk,” Vestnik Evropy, 6 (1886), pp. 305-57. The remainder of this paragraph is based on Chodakowski's false autobiography and Pypin's article, updated where necessary by the introduction to Maslanka, O Slawianszczyznie (pp. 5-14). Literature on Chodakowski to 1965 is listed in J. Maslanka, Zorian Dolega Chodakowski: jego miejsce w kulturze polskiej i wplyw na polskie pismiennictwo romantyczne (Wroclaw-Warsaw-Cracow, 1965), pp. 148-9 (hereafter Maslanka, Chodakowski).Google Scholar

21. Chodakowski's movements in 1813-14 remain obscure; see Maslanka, O Slawianszczyznie, p. 7, and Chodakowski, pp. 32-3.Google Scholar

22. All reprinted in Maslanka, O Slawianszczyznie: the essay of 1818 which gives the volume its title (pp. 19-31); “Razyskaniia kasatelno russkoi istorii,” first published in Vestnik Evropy in October 1819 (pp. 49-59); and “Proekt uchenogo puteshestviia po Rossii, dlia obiasneniia drevnei slavianskoi istorii,” first published in Syn otechestva in 1820 (pp. 75-100).Google Scholar

23. By Malash-Aksamitova, op. cit. (fn. 3).Google Scholar

24. Nikolai Polevoi: Materialy po istorii russkoi literatury i zhurnalistiki tridtsatykh godov, ed. V. N. Orlov (Leningrad, n. d.), pp. 137-40.Google Scholar

25. Rukopisnyi otdel Instituta russkoi literatury AN SSSR (hereafter IRLI), f. 154, edinitsa khraneniia 55, 11. 10-11.Google Scholar

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27. Maslanka, Chodakowski. Google Scholar

28. Maslanka, O Slawianszczyznie. Maslanka listed in Chodakowski, p. 146, Chodakowski's posthumously-published essays which were not reprinted in O Slawianszczyznie. He admitted (Chodakowski, p. 145) that his Soviet archival references might not be complete. Many more were supplied by R. W. Woloszynski, Polsko-rosyjskie zwiazki w naukach spolecznych 1801-1830 (Warsaw, 1974), pp. 302-18 (especially p. 313, fn. 30). So far as I am aware, no one has noticed Chodakowski's letter to A. R. Tomilov, cited below.Google Scholar

29. Ukrainski narodni pisni v zapysakh Zoriana Dolenhy-Khodakovskoho, ed. O. I. Dei and L. A. Malash, (Kiev, 1974).Google Scholar

30. Ibid., p. 51.Google Scholar

31. P. S. Wandycz, The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795-1918, (Seattle and London, 1974), p. 95.Google Scholar

32. P. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978), p. 9.Google Scholar

33. P. Brock, “Z. D. Chodadowski and the Discovery of Folklife: A Chapter in the History of Polish Nationalism,” The Polish Review, XXI: 1-2 (1976), pp. 3-21.Google Scholar

34. Slavianovedenie v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii: biobibliograficheskii slovar, ed. V. A. Diakov et al. (Moscow, 1979), pp. 357-8.Google Scholar

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36. Pypin, op. cit. (fn. 20), pp. 306, 313-14, 338; V. Domanytskyi, “Pioner ukrainskoi etnohrafii (Zorian Dolenha-Khodakowskyi)” Zapysky naukovoho tovarystva im. Shevchenka, vol. 65 (1905), first pagination, pp. 27-30.Google Scholar

37. Maslanka, Chodakowski, pp. 32-51.Google Scholar

38. V. A. Iuzvenko, Ukrainska narodna poetichna tvorchist u polskii folklorystytsi XIX st. (Kiev, 1961), p. 14.Google Scholar

39. Maslanka, O Slawianszczyznie, p. 6, fn. 6.Google Scholar

40. Domanytskyi, op. cit. (fn. 36), p. 29.Google Scholar

41. On this debate see, for example, the review by Angus Walker of P. K. Christoff's The Third Heart in Slavonic and East European Review, L:1(1972), p. 138.Google Scholar

42. Maslanka, O Slawianszczyznie, p. 301.Google Scholar

43. Ibid., p. 7; Malash-Aksamitova, op. cit. (fn. 3), p. 130.Google Scholar

44. D. Beauvois, “Ecole et societe en Ukraine occidentale (1800-1825),” Revue du nord, LVII: 225 (1975), pp. 173-84.Google Scholar

45. In 1814 the Kiev director wrote to the Minister of Education to say that, unless special measures were set in train, it would take twenty years to extirpate the “harmful thoughts” implanted by Czacki: TsGIA 733/69/1, 1. 191.Google Scholar

46. Beavois, op. cit., p. 178.Google Scholar

47. T. Czacki, O litewskich i polskich prawach, 2 vols. (Warsaw, 1800-1); I. N. Loboiko, a teacher at Vilna university, reported to N. P. Rumiantsev in May 1825 that Czacki's work was selling locally for twenty silver rubles: Tsentralnyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov (hereafter TsGADA), f. 17, ed. khr. 61 dopolnitelnaia, 11. 76-7.Google Scholar

48. TsGIA 733/62/185, 11. 16-17 (a Russian translation made in 1810). Maslanka (Chodakowski, pp. 11-12) refers to two anonymous Polish articles of 1805 similar to that of Czacki, but assigns them to Jan Sniadecki and Lubicz Czerwinski. I have not been able to ascertain whether one of them was in fact Czacki's paper.Google Scholar

49. See the summary at the end of Chodakowski's proposal (Maslanka, O Slawianszczyznie, pp. 99-100).Google Scholar

50. TsGIA 733/62/185, 1. 22, A. K. Razumovskii to Czacki, 13 November 1810. Women had been drowned in the western Ukraine in the attempt to discover whether they were witches.Google Scholar

51. Maslanka, O Slawianszczyznie, p. 165, a letter of 1805.Google Scholar

52. Rumiantsev's secretary, the Polonophile V. G. Anastasevich, knew Czacki, visited Krzemieniec in 1810, and in 1816 brought “certain appeals” of Chodakowski to Rumiantsev's attention: Woloszynski, op. cit. (fn. 28), pp. 304, 318, 321. Anastasevich received these appeals not from Chodakowski himself, but from a mutual acquaintance in Krzemieniec; perhaps he passed them on because he recognized the inspiration of Czacki.Google Scholar

53. Some of Chodakowski's ideas, however, were common to many contemporaries. His correspondent Loboiko, for example, expressed an interest in the study of place-names, one of Chodakowski's principal concerns, two years before they met: Gosudarstvennaia biblioteka im. Lenina, otdel rukopisei, f. 255, karton 12, ed. khr. 34, 11. 2-3 (from a study-plan submitted by Loboiko to N. P. Rumiantsev in 1817).Google Scholar

54. The estate from which he promulgated his 1805 paper had been confiscated by the Russians in 1794 because he was suspected of complicity in the Polish uprising of that year. Czacki got the estate back in 1796, but in 1807 was still seeking compensation for his losses: TsGIA 733/62/18, 11. 60-88.Google Scholar

55. Brock, op. cit. (fn. 33), p. 21.Google Scholar

56. Wandycz, op. cit. (fn. 31), p. 102.Google Scholar

57. Maslanka, O Slawianszczyznie, p. 49.Google Scholar

58. Gosudarstvennaia publichnaia biblioteka, otdel rukopisei (hereafter GPB), f. 440, op. 1, ed. khr. 4, 1. 15, Chodakowski to Loboiko, Moscow, January 1823.Google Scholar

59. Ibid., 1. 11, Chodakowski to Loboiko, Moscow, 23 November 1822.Google Scholar

60. R. F. Iusufov, Russkii romantizm nachala XIX veka i natsionalnye kultury, (Moscow, 1970), shows that the Russians were interested in non-Slavs too.Google Scholar

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64. A Pavlovskii, Grammatika malorossiiskogo narechiia, (St Petersburg, 1818); N. A. Tsertelev, Opyt sobraniia starinnykh malorossiiskikh pesnei, (St Petersburg, 1819).Google Scholar

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66. His paper of 1819, “Razyskaniia kasatelno russkoi istorii” (Maslanka, O Slawianszczyznie, pp. 49-59), was a critique of the early part of Karamzin's work.Google Scholar

67. See N. Trubitsyn, “O narodnom poezii v obshchestvennom i literaturnom obikhode pervoi treti XIX veka,” Zapiski istoriko-filologicheskogo fakulteta imperatorskogo S.-Peterburgskogo universiteta, vol. 60 (1912), passim.Google Scholar

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69. Frank W. Thackeray, Antecedents of Revolution: Alexander I and the Polish Kingdom, 1815-1825, (Boulder, Colorado, 1980), pp. 58-9; G. Struve, “Alexander Turgenev, Ambassador of Russian Culture in Partibus Infidelium,” Slavic Review, 29 (1970), pp. 444-59.Google Scholar

70. See Saunders, op. cit. (fn. 35), pp. 61-2.Google Scholar

71. The standard work on the early history of Slavonic studies in Russia remains A. A. Kochubinskii, Admiral Shishkov i kantsler gr. Rumiantsev: nachalnye gody russkogo slavianovedeniia, (Odessa, 1887-8); on the Rumiantsev circle see also V. P. Kozlov, Kolumby rossiiskikh drevnoslei, (Moscow, 1981).Google Scholar

72. October 1819 to June 1820; in March 1820 Chodakowski wrote to the Minister of Education saying that he was in ‘extreme need’ (Maslanka, O Slawianszczyznie, p. 294).Google Scholar

73. Russkii arkhiv, vol. 2, (1889), p. 354, Bolkhovitinov to Anastasevich, 21 June 1820.Google Scholar

74. He regretted the tsar's departure abroad in August 1822, because it slowed down official decision-making (Maslanka, O Slawianszczyznie, p. 363).Google Scholar

75. TsGIA, 733/2/1, 1. 185, Karamzin to the Minister of Education 23 December 1822, expressing no views on Chodakowski's progress apart from agreement with the (hostile) opinion of the Ministry's assessor.Google Scholar

76. GPB, 440/1/4, 11. 14-15, Chodakowski to Loboiko, Moscow, 10 May 1823.Google Scholar

77. TsGIA, 733/2/1, 11. 141-4, an assessment of 23 May 1821.Google Scholar

78. The friend, I. S. Orlai, was unhelpful: 1. S. Sventsitskii, Materialy po istorii vozrozhdeniia Karpatskoi Rusi, vol. 1 (Lvov, 1905), p. 29.Google Scholar

79. GPB, 440/1/4, 11. 14, 20, Chodakowski to Loboiko, Moscow, 10 May and 11 January 1823.Google Scholar

80. TsGIA, 1086/1/214, Chodakowski to Tomilov, Moscow, 13 March 1822 (a hitherto unnoticed letter).Google Scholar

81. Ibid., 1. 2.Google Scholar

82. IRLI, 154/55, 1. 11 (Loboiko's memoirs).Google Scholar

83. GPB, 588/4/82, 11. 2-3.Google Scholar

84. TsGIA 735/1/80, in which Shishkov saved Bibliograficheskie listy from the criticism of M. Magnitskii; according to Diakov (fn. 34), p. 182, Magnitskii succeeded in getting the journal closed in 1826.Google Scholar

85. TsGIA, 733/2/222, 1. 15.Google Scholar

86. GPB, 588/4/78, 1. 7, Loboiko to Chodakowski, Vilna, 8 December 1822.Google Scholar

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88. GPB, 588/4/78, 11. 11-12, Loboiko to Chodakowski, Vilna, 12 October 1823.Google Scholar

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