Krytyka
Eurozine
Krytyka
2007-07-16
Summary of Krytyka 6/2007
The June issue of Krytyka opens with "Beneficia non obtrundur" (Benefits are not imposed) by the Kyiv legal expert Serhii Balan, which focuses on the role of constitutions and the functioning of law in the everyday life of societies. The present political crisis in Ukraine is examined from the point of view of legal culture and various traditional values.
In his "To forget and to repeat: The construction and reproduction of authority", Moscow sociologist Boris Dubin examines the mechanisms of forgetting and repetition in Russian society, with particular emphasis on the growing feelings of isolation from the surrounding world. He argues that the self-isolation and the weakness of the state stem from the weakness and isolationism of the ruling nomenklaturam while a sense of fundamental splits imbues all spheres of society. This takes shape as a basic division of all things into "native" and "foreign", a rhetoric of alienation, and illusory attempts at restoring the past. The topic of contemporary Russian authoritarianism is continued by American political scientist Alexander J. Motyl, whose article "Post-Weimar Russia as a challenge to Europe" is conceived as an answer to two basic questions: why has Putin's Russia become so visibly aggressive and nationalistic and why has it turned to authoritarianism and at the same time turned away from the West? The central metaphor in the article is the parallel that is drawn to Post-Weimar Germany which calls attention to the weaknesses of an apparently firmly grounded regime. Separate attention is focused on Russia's relations with the European Union and the latters' "soft" policies, especially in terms of Russian-German relations.
In his wide-ranging essay "Returning to the histories of Ukraine", American historian of Russia and Ukraine Mark von Hagen summarizes his long-standing interest in Ukrainian history and casts a glance at developments in Ukrainian historiography, both in Ukraine and in the diaspora. Going beyond his earlier provocative question, "Does Ukraine have a history?", which elicited a broad discussion, von Hagen now turns to the various scholarly projects that focus on Ukrainian cities and regions, on its borderlands, its multiculturalism, and its minorities. The topic of borderlands is picked up by the Lviv historian Ihor Chornovol in his "Frontiers of Russia", where the Lviv-based historian applies Turner's concepts to an analysis of Russian history, and in particular comments on the work now being done in Russian and Western historiography, especially that of William H. McNeil, Donald W. Treadgold, Alfred Rieber, Alexei Yefimov, and others. Among these, the author considers the work of Andreas Kappeler to be a model of such research.
In his "The civilization of Wierzbolowo", Lithuanian writer and essayist Marius Ivaskevicius casts a nostalgic glance on a small corner of southwest Lithuania where at the end of the nineteenth century there existed a special kind of Polish-German-Russian borderland. In his "Ukraine on the side-roads: An anthropological journey", Lublin writer Pawel Laufer tries to reconstruct a typical Polish perspective on Ukraine -- its landscape, its people, its margins.
The issue concludes with the Kyiv essayist and translator Andrii Bondar writing on "Ryszard Kapuscinski between history and literature" -- a tribute to the recently deceased Polish intellectual and journalist. Philosopher Vasyl Lisovyi devotes his obituary to the recently deceased Ukrainian historian of philosophy Vilen Horskyi.