Abstract
Michał Czajkowski, alias Sadyk Pasha, typically figures in historical accounts as a colorful, unstable adventurer operating within the orbit of nineteenth-century Polish émigré circles. His Ukrainophilism and production of Cossack tales usually appears in connection with a shortlived trend in Polish Romantic literature rather than as a political conviction. This article examines Czajkowski’s political ideas and places his writings, primarily the anonymously published Cossackdom in Turkey, in the context of debates about Ruthenian identity within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth stretching back to the 1569 Union of Lublin. Until his infamous conversion and embrace of Russian Slavophilism, Czajkowski consistently advocated for a vision of Ukrainian identity loyal to the civic and parliamentary traditions of the Commonwealth. This Ukrainian identity remained distinct from both the Polish culure that claimed the Commonwealth as its own history and the civilization of Russia, which viewed Ukrainians as region variation of the Great Russian nation. Czajkowski’s vision of Ukrainian belonging emphasized early modern values of voluntary cooperation and even friendly rivalry within the federated, multinational Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but his ideas encounted hostility and misunderstanding among Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian nationalists, for whom the unitary nation state had become the only conceivable political model. Although Czajkowski’s political convictions drew more on idealizations than practical experience, his vision offered an alternatively imagined community, one potentially more inclusive and civic, than the ethnic nationalism gaining adherents in his time. Frustration with the failture of his ideas to gain traction, not least among his Polish confederates, Czajkowski’s return to Russia did not represent so much a change of conviction as an exchange from Russian to Polish antagonists for his Ukrainian nation.
Original language | English |
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Journal | Harvard Ukrainian Studies |
Publication status | Accepted/In press - 2022 |