HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

UKRAINE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST 179Under the impact of events of the last half-century, at least one pessimisticPolish critic subscribed to the idea of his country's cultural displacementtoward the East and put his compatriots of 1992, "Europeans, after all,"smack in the middle between Asia and Europe. To my regret, he alsoimplied that Asia began east of the river Bug, that is, at the present Polish-Ukrainian frontier. 5No wonder, then, that the success of Jurij of Drohobyc" in Bologna—theonly Ukrainian to become rector of a great Western university—was possiblein the fifteenth century when Poland was considered to be an unequivocalpart of the West. When we adopt this perspective, it is easier to understandwhy in the Ukrainian consciousness the inclusion of a part of theUkrainian territory into the unambiguous West dates from 1772 when Galizienand Lodomerien ceased to be part of orientalized Poland and wereincluded into the empire of the Habsburgs.I shall introduce the next section of my paper with an example from1990; it may no longer be operative today, but it retains its validity in thelarger scheme of things. When, in the Kievan hotel "Moskva"—note theprestigious name—Aeroflot advertised a flight Kiev-Afiny-Kiev, it used theRussian—originally Byzantine and Modern Greek—form for the city ofPericles and Plato. If a Kievan of today also flies "v Afiny" instead of flying"v Ateny" or even "do Aten," a usage that would mean following theWestern traditions of the Kiev Mohyla College, he does so because hisancestors were subject to a counteroffensive by the byzantinizing East. Thiscounteroffensive has lasted since the 1650s, although its progress has variedin time, depending on the area of the Ukrainian territory.Again, a difficulty arises at this point. We saw at the beginning of thispaper that the primary influence of the Byzantine "East" came to Ukrainefrom the South, both from the Byzantine capital itself and through thebyzantinized Balkans; now, it is worth pondering that the secondaryinfluence of the Byzantine "East"—and more—came from the North, to acertain extent from the Muscovite tsardom but, mainly later, from the RussianEmpire. To be sure, in the very first stages of cultural relations betweenMuscovy and Russia, on the one hand, and Ukraine on the other, the counteroffensiveof the North was preceded by the defense of the North's indigenousoriginality of the Byzantine type. This went along with a skillfulexploitation both of Ukrainian achievements and Ukrainian manpower: letus recall the dispute that took place in the residence of the patriarch of5Cf. Smecz in Kultura (Paris), 537 (June 1992): 73. By thus siding with PantelejmonKulis—see the first motto at the beginning of this paper—Mr. Smecz, like Kulis, failed to dojustice to Poland's past achievements as messenger of the West in Ukrainian lands.