Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising

Stanford Studies on Central and Eastern Europe

by Amelia Glaser (Editor)

In the middle of the seventeenth century, Bohdan Khmelnytsky was the legendary Cossack general who organized a rebellion that liberated the Eastern Ukraine from Polish rule. Consequently, he has been memorialized in the Ukraine as a God-given nation builder, cut in the model of George Washington. But in this campaign, the massacre of thousands of Jews perceived as Polish intermediaries was the collateral damage, and in order to secure the tentative independence, Khmelnytsky signed a treaty with Moscow, ultimately ceding the territory to the Russian tsar. So, was he a liberator or a villain? This volume examines drastically different narratives, from Ukrainian, Jewish, Russian, and Polish literature, that have sought to animate, deify, and vilify the seventeenth-century Cossack. Khmelnytsky's legacy, either as nation builder or as antagonist, has inhibited inter-ethnic and political rapprochement at key moments throughout history and, as we see in recent conflicts, continues to affect Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, and Russian national identity.

Genres: Ukraine

319 pages, Hardcover

First published August 10, 2015

About the author

Amelia M. Glaser is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego, and an award-winning translator. She is author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands and has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jewish Quarterly, and the Times Literary Supplement.

Reviews

[Garen Gregorian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating insights into a variety of perspectives. Though it is a dense piece of academic work.