A Review of Reviewing, or On Current Problems of Historiography

Anatol Trafimchyk (2010). On Our History and Yours. Baranavichy: Baranavichy city organisation of the Francysk Skaryna Belarusian Language Society, 144 pp.

Review prepared by Andrei Vashkevich.

At first glance, it is not easy to write a review, or even a short response, to a book that is itself a collection of reviews of a whole series of interesting publications on historical topics. But this is not the case with a book written by Anatol Trafimchyk. After all, Trafimchyk is also a poet, and poets remain poets in any undertaking.

We greatly lack books that would speak about history accessibly, in the form of a dialogue with the reader, and that would raise problems that are, to one degree or another, relevant to each of us: the historical path of our country, our ties with neighbours, and current demographic and social problems viewed through the prism of history. Here one recalls the excellent collection of essays by the contemporary Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak, Life, Death and Other Troubles (Hrytsak, 2008), and it seems to me that something similar on Belarusian material could be created precisely by Anatol Trafimchyk.

The collection On Our History and Yours is also a kind of dialogue, although not so much with readers as with the authors of the books reviewed by Trafimchyk. In total, the book contains thirteen texts, eleven of which are reviews of books by Belarusian, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian researchers. The volume also includes the author’s essay on the meaning of the exoethnonym “Moskal” in Belarusian discourse; although quite substantial in itself, it nevertheless stands apart from the general selection of reviews.

Another text also contrasts with the overall concept: a twenty-page translation of a chapter from War in the Crowd by Dmytro Korchynsky, one of the leaders of Ukrainian radical nationalists, devoted to Ukrainian participation in the Minsk events of spring-autumn 1996. This fairly well-known text is interesting for its unusual observations and for Korchynsky’s general conclusion that the Belarusian opposition suffers defeat after defeat because “the only revolutionary in Belarus is Lukashenka himself”. It is unclear how this conclusion can be applied to the context of the events of the following fifteen or twenty years, but it can probably be fully applied to the realities of 1996.

All the books reviewed by the author were published in 2001-2008. A significant part of the reviews is devoted to general presentations of the history of our neighbours in a European context: Georgiy Kasianov’s Ukraine 1991-2007, Norman Davies’s Europe East and West, and An Outline of the History of the Polish State and Nation (Kasianov, 2008; Davies, 2007; Outline of History…, 2006). These reviews may be of interest to Belarusian readers, who are often surprisingly poorly informed about the history of our neighbours, the Poles and Ukrainians, as well as, incidentally, Lithuanians and Latvians. Moreover, even when Trafimchyk delves into seemingly purely philosophical-historical matters such as the concept of “historical justice”, he does not forget to interpret them in relation to Belarusians.

The most critical review is perhaps the one of Bryhadzin and Ladyseu’s book Between East and West: The Formation of Belarusian Statehood and Territorial Integrity (1917-1939) (Bryhadzin, Ladyseu, 2003). Referring to the authors’ texts written in the last quarter of the twentieth century, Trafimchyk shows the evolution of the book’s authors themselves from an unequivocal glorification of the Soviet period of Belarusian history to a more critical perception of it.

Several reviews are devoted to works that touch on various aspects of our shared history with our neighbours, such as Anatol Vialiki’s At the Crossroads and Śleszyński’s The Soviet Occupation of the Białystok Region (Vialiki, 2005; Śleszyński, 2001).

The author notes with satisfaction that in many topics Belarusian historiography has made a real breakthrough in recent years, yet it still continues to lag behind its neighbours. This is dangerous and unforgivable, since even in democratic states the historian continues to work in the context of nation-building and the maintenance of national myths, and if we lack our own history, “our neighbours will write that history for us”. Trafimchyk says this when discussing the absence in Belarus of in-depth studies of the West Belarusian past of 1921-1939.

The author demonstrates his interest in Tadeusz Kościuszko through two reviews of works by Piotr Mitzner (Mitzner, 2002) and Leanid Nestsarchuk (Nestsarchuk, 2006). Kościuszko interests Trafimchyk not only, and not so much, as a real person, but as a kind of myth that played an essential role in the formation not only of Polish but also of Belarusian patriotism in the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.

Every review or response to a scholarly monograph or collection of documents is an exceptionally difficult and, it must be said, highly subjective task. It is always difficult to single out the main and most important points in order to allow another person to decide whether to read the reviewed publication or not, whether to regard it as a serious contribution to the study of current problems of historiography or not. I think Anatol Trafimchyk has coped with this task quite well.

 

Literature mentioned in the review

1. Yaroslav Hrytsak (2008). Life, Death and Other Troubles. Kyiv: Hrani-T.

2. Kasianov, H. (2008). Ukraine 1991-2007: Essays in Recent History. Kyiv: Nash Chas.

3. Davies, N. (2007). Europa między Wschodem a Zachodem. Kraków: Znak.

4. An Outline of the History of the Polish State and Nation. Tenth-Twenty-First Centuries (2006). Warsaw: Demart Sp. z o.o.

5. Bryhadzin, P.; Ladyseu, U. (2003). Between East and West: The Formation of Belarusian Statehood and Territorial Integrity (1917-1939). Minsk: BSU.

6. Vialiki, A. F. (2005). At the Crossroads: Belarusians and Poles during Resettlement (1944-1946). Minsk: BSPU named after M. Tank – National Archives of the Republic of Belarus.

7. Śleszyński, W. (2001). Okupacja sowiecka na Białostocczyznie w latach 1939-1941. Propaganda i indoktrynacja. Białystok: Agencja Wydawnicza Benkowski, Białostockie Towarzystwo Naukowe.

8. Mitzner, P. (2002). Teatr Tadeusza Kościuszki. Postać Naczelnika w teatrze 1803-1994. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Kardynała Stefana Wyszyńskiego.

9. Nestsarchuk, L. M. (2006). Andrei Tadeusz Bonawentura Kościuszko: The Return of a Hero to His Homeland. Brest.