HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

464 FRANK E. SYSYNDiscourser felt against the Ruthenians. This text indicates that theissue of national enmity as a cause and factor in the revolt must bereexamined. Its role may not have been major, but it certainly existed.Polish scholars have recently directed attention to the function ofxenophobia toward other states and societies among the nobles of theCommonwealth. 60 Some of this attention should be paid to the xenophobiathat existed between communities in the Commonwealth,including that between Polish Catholic and Ruthenian Orthodoxnobles. 61 It may have been muted and on the decline, but nonethelessit must be examined if we are to understand the relations among thecommunities in the Commonwealth at the time.The Discourser did foresee the way that the national factor came toplay a major role in the revolt. His warning that the rebels might breakaway from the Commonwealth and form a "new Cossack Commonwealthor Ruthenian Principality" proved almost prophetic. His dualdesignation for the polity that might emerge encompassed the tworelated but never fully integrated concepts that were to contend in therebel lands in the decade that followed.The Discourser's statement is, of course, no proof that Khmel'-nyts'kyi was trying to set up such a state from the onset of the revolt. Itdoes show, however, that from the very beginning there were suspicionsthat such an entity might emerge. The conceptualization of sucha possibility by the rebels and their opponents was the first necessarystage in the political revolution that was to occur in the Ukraine.The Discourser wove the religious, social, and national factors of thegreat revolt into a composite. In so doing, he expressed the majortenets of the nobility's ideology at the moment the Commonwealthfaced a most serious internal challenge. Political and social thought inthe Commonwealth was generally less creative and flexible in themid-seventeenth century than in the late sixteenth and early seventeenthcenturies. The "Discourse" exemplifies the rigidity in thoughtand politics that was precluding evolution or reform. In the centuryafter 1648 the nobles, convinced that their institutions were perfect,responded to challenges and crises by defending their political inheri-60See the collection of essays, Swojskość i cudzoziemszczyzna w dziejachkultury polskiej, ed. Zofia Stefanowska (Warsaw, 1973).61Władysław Czapliński points out the need for such studies in his essay "Wieksiedemnasty w Polsce: Próba charakterystyki," published in his O Polsce siedemnastowiecznej,p. 61.