Amelia M. Glaser
In 1863 Mikhail Mikeshin, the artist renowned for designing the monuments to the “Millennium of Rusʹ” in Novgorod and to Catherine II in St. Petersburg, proposed a design for a statue of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, to be erected near Kyiv’s St. Sofia cathedral.1 The year coincided with the Polish insurrection of 1863, and Mikeshin’s early design blended imperialism with bellicose nationalism—Khmelnytsky holds a sword to the East, in defense of Russia, while his horse tramples a broken chain along with representatives of the Zaporozhians’ vanquished enemies: a Polish lord, a Catholic priest, and a Jewish leaseholder.2 Before the horseman stand representatives of Khmelnytsky’s allies: a Russian, a Belarusian, a Galician (representing the Western lands known as Red Rusʹ), and a Ukrainian, alongside a seated Ukrainian kobza player.3 The design was controversial on many levels and was prudently streamlined: due to a shortage of funds and concern about fueling ethnic tensions, Tsar Alexander II’s administration compelled Mikeshin to eliminate the images of allies and antagonists from the final monument. The sculptor also removed the inscription, which had read “A united, indivisible Russia—to Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky,” the names of Ukrainian Cossack heroes, and these lines from a Ukrainian folk song: “Oh, it will be better/oh, it will be more beautiful/When in our Ukraine/There are no Jews, no Poles/And no Union.”4 The final, unembellished monument that was unveiled in 1888 bore only the horseman with a short inscription.5 Nonetheless, Mikeshin’s early draft offers an appropriately enigmatic portrait of Khmelnytsky, a deeply controversial figure. Prominent Ukrainophiles, and not only ethnic minorities, had reason to oppose the valorizing of the hetman.6 As Frank Sysyn has shown, “The controversy over the monument reflected both the disagreement about the man and his goals and the desire to appropriate his image that has gone on from 1648 to the present.7 Although Mikeshin intended to present a vision of a united Rusʹ, his inclusion of multiple nationalities and religions in his original model suggests the relevance of Khmelnytsky to competing national and political narratives. Viewed from the vantage point of the Poles, Jews, Russians, and Ukrainians who are stakeholders in the Cossack uprising of 1648, the hetman emerges as either a hero or a villain in the stories that portray him.
The multiple literary accounts that we address in this volume are part and parcel of a single, fragmented, but nonetheless collective narrative, a narrative about the lands that make up present-day Ukraine and the still-troubled relationships with the territories that border them. The Ukrainian territories, caught between competing empires, would overlap at various points with the Polish Rzeczpospolita, the Crimean Khanate, the Habsburg lands, and the tsarist empire. Under the tsar, parts of the Ukrainian lands came to be known as Malorossiia (“Little Russia”), and much of the region was included in the Jewish Pale of Settlement. Geographically speaking, this book is a literary history not only of present-day Ukraine but also of a larger region that includes modern-day Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Turkey, and Moldova. At the center of this collective narrative is a Cossack leader whose political life directly influenced Muscovy, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Ottoman Empire, as well as lands to the North and West. Khmelnytsky’s legacy continues to affect Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, and Russian national identity, and it appears most often in these literatures, but the uprising affected all of the communities living in the region, including Crimean Tatars and Armenians.
Bohdan Khmelnytsky (1595–1657), who, beginning in 1648, led the rebellion against the Polish magnates, claiming freedom and territory for the Cossacks, has been memorialized in Ukraine as a great general and God-given nation builder, cut in the model of George Washington and sometimes Moses. As the compromiser who swore an oath to the Russian tsar, ceding those territories to Muscovy, he has also been described as the son of the Antichrist, a devil, a Judas.8 In Russia he has been viewed, albeit cautiously, as an important ally, his image a signifier for reunification of the Orthodox Great Russians, Little Russians (Ukrainians), and White Russians (Belarusians) for the first time since Kyivan Rusʹ. Khmelnytsky has remained a symbol of Ukrainian freedom in independent Ukraine. When President Viktor Yushchenko was sworn into office in 2005 following the “Orange Revolution,” the ceremony included a mace used by Bohdan Khmelnytsky, which the Warsaw Military Museum lent to Kyiv for the occasion. In Polish history Khmelnytsky was a prelude to the Deluge, a period of fighting, beginning shortly after the Cossack uprising, that would cost Poland a large portion of its population and vast territories, and Khmelnytsky came to be associated with his contemporary, the rebel Oliver Cromwell.9 Jews have likened Khmelnytsky, as the hetman under whom thousands of Jews were massacred, to Haman and Hitler.10 The conflicting semiotic values of Khmelnytsky, either as nation builder or as antagonist, have inhibited interethnic and political rapprochement at key moments throughout history.
This volume addresses, without attempting to resolve, the fundamental literary questions Khmelnytsky’s image provokes: How can drastically different mythologies surround a single figure? What do these competing stories mean for our understanding of the past, present, and future of the nations of Eastern Europe? The figure of Khmelnytsky, in his various mythologized forms, has been important to the formation of all of the aforementioned groups’ identities. Whether the historical figure is viewed as hero or villain, the idea of Khmelnytsky has bolstered national solidarity. Collective memories of the uprising have highlighted the affinities and rifts among the groups who share a geographic territory. Jews in the region often worked closely with Poles and were therefore seen as part of the infrastructure limiting the rights of Orthodox Christian peasants and Cossacks. There were, to be sure, some instances of cooperation and sympathy between Orthodox Christians and Jews, but Jews, given their economic and cultural affinities with the Poles, generally sided with the overlords.11 Following the uprising, large numbers of Jews converted to Christianity and left their hometowns, effectively abandoning hundreds of communities. The Jewish chronicles composed in the wake of the events entered a canon of Jewish liturgical poems, becoming conflated, as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi has pointed out, with the martyrdom of the Crusades.12 A minor fast day commemorates the massacres.13
The multiple literary narratives surrounding Khmelnytsky as an individual, but more specifically as the leader of the 1648 uprising, compete with one another and feed each other. The image of Khmelnytsky as a historical hero was especially important in the Soviet Union, where a narrative of a historically united Ukraine and Russia was essential to fostering patriotism across a border tainted by years of imperial domination. Within Russian historiography, the Cossack uprising culminated in the 1654 Pereiaslav agreement between the Cossacks and the Tsar. In Ukraine Khmelnytsky’s image has since 1996 graced the five-hryvnia note, but collective memory of the leader is far from simple. The Ukrainian national anthem, “Shche ne vmerla Ukraina” (Ukraine has not yet died), excerpts an 1862 poem by Pavlo Chubynsky. The original poem contains the line, “Oh, Bohdan, Bohdan/Our great hetman!/For what purpose did you give Ukraine/to the evil Moskals?” [Oi Bohdane, Bohdane/Slavnyi nash hetʹmane!/Na-shcho viddav Ukrainu Moskaliam pohanym?!] We see similarly anti-imperialist sentiments in the Ukrainian Romantic poet Taras Shevchenko, whose 1845 The Great Crypt (Velykyi lʹokh) is a mystery, narrated by three souls of Ukrainian women who have been damned for inadvertently helping Russia subordinate Ukraine. The first soul belongs to a young woman who, crossing paths with Khmelnytsky as he traveled to meet with the Tsar’s emissaries for the treaty of Pereiaslav, accidentally caused the death of her entire family. In this text, Khmelnytsky freed the Ukrainians only to enslave them to Russia, although the piece ends with the hope that Ukraine will again be free.14 The figure of Khmelnytsky would remain a tragic national motif for Shevchenko, who in 1859 wrote “If only you could, drunken Bohdan/see Pereiaslav now!” [Iakby-to ty, Bohdane pʹianyi,/Teper na Pereiaslav hlianuv!], referring to Russia’s incremental removal of Ukrainians’ rights in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.15 As Mykola Borovyk showed in his 2012 study of shared authority, although twenty-first-century schoolchildren overwhelmingly ranked Khmelnytsky as Ukraine’s most important historical figure, when listing the most tragic events in the nation’s history they also place Khmelnytsky’s signing of the Pereiaslav treaty near the top, second only to the famine (Holodomor) under Stalin in 1932–33.16
The Cossacks themselves have been the subject of mythologies in both Ukraine and Russia. Serhii Plokhy proposes that “[the Cossack myth] now serves to assert Ukraine’s historical uniqueness and independence.”17 Judith Kornblatt has discussed the “ontologically ‘free Cossack’, [which] became codified as part of Russia’s self-image.”18 The Cossack wars, though devastating for the Polish state and its nobility, became an important theme in Polish literature, providing a legacy of battles that would fuel the baroque imagination.19 Despite the fact that 1648 is remembered as a Jewish tragedy, as Israel Bartal shows in the present volume, Jews also valorized Cossacks as embodying the spirit of a free nation.20 A small but visible society of twenty-first-century Zaporozhian Cossacks was present in Ukraine’s pro-Western Maidan demonstrations in 2013–14. Interestingly, among the anti-Maidan demonstrators in Eastern Ukraine in Spring 2014 were Don Cossack units. That is to say, even in the most recent Russian-Ukrainian dispute, both sides eagerly claimed the legacy of free Cossacks.
Cossack societies date back to the years just after the Mongol invasion, when wanderers and bandits populated the Southern Ukrainian steppe. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania took this territory from the Golden Horde in the fourteenth Century, but it remained largely unregulated. In the fifteenth century, the Turkic word Cossack, meaning “freeman” or “bandit,” increasingly referred to Slavic Cossacks.21 The most important Cossack societies to develop were the Don Cossacks in Russia, and the Zaporozhian Cossacks in Ukraine. The Zaporozhians maintained a fortified Cossack host known as a “Sich,” located in the lower regions of the river Dnieper.22
The Zaporozhian Cossacks were a self-governed group of men with their own system of leadership, the highest officer being the hetman. The brotherhood included registered Cossacks, who reported to the Polish crown and sometimes served as border militia; and nonregistered Cossacks who, to quote Subtelny, “owned little more than did peasants.”23 These groups included peasants who fled serfdom and found their way to the Sich. The Polish government sought ways to maintain control over both registered and nonregistered Cossacks. The desire among Zaporozhian Cossacks to increase the number of registered Cossacks, the desire for the rights to elect their own leader (starshyna), as well as the desire to defend Orthodox Christian practices against the infringement of Polish Catholic norms led to a number of revolts in the first decades of the seventeenth century.24 An unsuccessful Cossack uprising of 1637 led to a harsh ordinance of 1638, with a drastic decrease in the Cossack registry: the Polish authorities sought to disable the Cossacks as a united force.25
The Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky wrote at the turn of the twentieth century, “Khmelnytsky’s personal biography is as short on concrete verifiable facts as it is immeasurably long on the legends that enveloped him hard on the heels of his first appearance in the broad arena, making him the beloved hero of all kinds of tales and fictions, and later of works of poetry and belles-lettres as well.”26 For historians of Ukrainian nationhood like Hrushevsky, the stories of Khmelnytsky were at least as important to a national narrative as the facts of his life. Similarly, Russian, Jewish, and Polish histories have a prominent place for the myth of the hetman and relatively little to say about the hetman himself. Extant sources suggest that Khmelnytsky was born in 1595 to parents with Cossack roots, probably in addition to some noble roots.27 He was most likely educated in a Jesuit academy (for lack of an Orthodox academy), studying poetics and rhetoric under Andrzej Humel Mokrski, and completing his schooling around 1620.28 He was certainly highly literate in Latin and Polish, and it is possible that in addition to Slavic languages he spoke French.29 Bohdan’s father was killed in 1620 in the Battle of Ṭuṭora, and the Turks imprisoned Bohdan for two years. We know that soon after his release he took over his father’s estate and married Hanna Somkivna, the daughter of a Pereiaslav Cossack officer, in 1625. Over the next decade and a half, the couple had three daughters and two sons.
Khmelnytsky, who had served as a registered Cossack near his home in Chyhyryn, may well have participated in the uprisings of 1630 and 1637.30 However, there could not have been concrete evidence of his involvement in the rebellions, since the Poles allowed him to become a captain (sotnyk) of the Chyhyryn Cossacks.31 During this time, Khmelnytsky was engaged in diplomatic efforts, meeting with the French ambassador to Warsaw in 1644, and participating in a small Cossack delegation to King Władysław IV, who in 1646 sought Cossack support for a campaign against the Ottomans. Although the king did not carry out his war plans, he is believed to have promised to restore the Cossacks’ pre-1638 privileges.
Belletristic authors have made much of the so-called Czapliński (Czaplicki) affair, embellishing myths surrounding a family drama that took place in 1647. Daniel Czapliński, the Polish vice-starosta in Chyhyryn, was supposedly in competition with Khmelnytsky for a woman known as Helena. Not only did Czapliński succeed in wooing Helena, he appropriated Khmelnytsky’s family property in Subotiv and badly beat his son, possibly causing his death soon after. Khmelnytsky applied to the local court, the Polish Senate, and eventually to King Władysław himself, but he was unsuccessful at all steps of the Polish legal system. Moreover, the Chyhyryn starosta and great landowner Alexander Koniecpolski not only helped to block the Cossack’s appeals within the Polish legal system but also had Khmelnytsky arrested on his return from Warsaw. Khmelnytsky managed to escape and fled to the Zaporozhian Sich, where he was later elected hetman. We must recall, as Magocsi puts it, that “it was not a personal quarrel over ‘Helena of the steppes,’ but the ever-present social, religious, and national tensions in seventeenth-century Ukraine” that led to the 1648 uprising.32 Nonetheless, the local rivalry and family tragedy that the Czapliński affair encompasses offered artists an intriguing synecdoche for the mounting tension between the Cossacks and the Polish authorities.
Khmelnytsky’s military success was a product of his skills as a negotiator and as a warrior.33 In the early months of 1648, an alliance with the Crimean Tatars afforded Khmelnytsky decisive victories over the Polish Commonwealth, setting the stage for a peasant war and the large-scale Cossack uprising that began that summer. In the course of a few months, the Cossacks took control of the Kyiv and Chernihiv palatinates, as well as Pyliavtsi in Right Bank Ukraine, and Lviv and Zamość in the West. By November 1648 Jan Kazimierz, “a candidate acceptable to the Cossacks,” was elected to the Polish throne.34 Thus the campaign resulted in unprecedented political as well as territorial advances for the Cossack hetman. The mass popular revolt ended with the Treaty of Zboriv in 1649. This agreement forced the Poles to recognize Khmelnytsky as the leader of the Zaporozhians, and it increased the number of registered Cossacks; it banished the Polish army, as well as the Jews, who were viewed as assistants to the Poles, from the Kyiv, Bratslav, and Chernihiv regions; and it increased the privileges of the Orthodox Church. Both sides, however, quickly prepared for continued war, this time leading to the Cossacks’ defeat at Berestechko and a new, less favorable treaty at Bila Tserkva.
The balance of powers in Europe shifted during Khmelnytsky’s hetmancy, and this had much to do with his relations with neighboring empires. The steppes of the lower Dnieper, home to the Zaporozhian Cossacks, bordered Orthodox Christian Muscovy to the North and East, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to the West and North, Transylvania and Moldavia to the Southwest, and to the South the Ottoman Empire, which included the Tatar Khanate on the Crimean Peninsula. Throughout the course of his hetmancy, Khmelnytsky engaged in negotiations with the many empires and states that lay claim to Cossack lands or offered hope of protection. Allegiances in the region changed constantly in the years just before and after the uprising.
The Khans ruled the Tatar-dominated Crimean Peninsula. This group had helped to convert many of the groups on the peninsula to Islam.35 A warrior nation like the Cossacks, the Tatars provided soldiers for the Ottoman Empire for various campaigns in Europe and the Caucasus.36 Initially, the Zaporozhians played a crucial role in protecting the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth against invasion by the Ottomans, and specifically against Tatar slave raids. However, in the uprising of 1648 the Cossacks were allied with the Crimean Khan Islam Giray III.37 During the final years of his life, Khmelnytsky, longing for an expanded Cossack state and a weakened Catholic Poland, shifted his allegiances toward the Protestant world (including Sweden, Transylvania, and Protestants in Lithuania) and away from the Islamic Ottoman Empire and Crimean Khanate.38
Of the many rebellions of the seventeenth century, 1648 effected the greatest geopolitical change. Khmelnytsky enjoyed rare success as a leader, successfully establishing a new order in the Ukrainian Hetmanate. His son’s marriage to the Moldavian ruler’s daughter is evidence that his contemporaries came to accept him to some degree as a ruler, albeit grudgingly. The greatest sign of his lasting influence is his establishment of a new social, political, and cultural order. To understand the importance of 1648 to Ukrainian history is to recall that the event led to establishment of a new Cossack state, the Zaporozhian Host, which was first recognized by Poland in 1649 at Zboriv.39 The national importance of the event to Ukrainian self-determinacy thereafter is obscured within Russian historical narrative, which focuses on 1654, the year Khmelnytsky, as hetman of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, swore an oath to Muscovy, moving Tsar Aleksei closer to achieving a long-standing Muscovite goal of reuniting the Orthodox lands of the former Kyivan Rusʹ.40 The Pereiaslav treaty was politically important enough to the Soviet Union that Khrushchev succeeded in formally ceding the Crimean Peninsula to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954, the three-hundredth anniversary of Pereiaslav. However, Khmelnytsky lived until 1657, and the years between 1654 and his death saw continued development of the Cossack Hetmanate, and of Cossack diplomatic policy away from Muscovy. Subsequent hetmans were unable to match the success of 1648. The period from Khmelnytsky’s death to 1686 came to be known as a time of ruin, witnessing, according to Paul Magocsi, “an almost complete breakdown of order.”41 The Cossack state, caught between Poland and Muscovy, was divided by competing spheres of influence.
The Literary Khmelnytsky: Twelve Case Studies
The present volume juxtaposes literary accounts of Khmelnytsky in Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, in hopes of illustrating the creation of a historical hero or villain. Taken together, the literature produced in these languages, from the time of the Cossack uprisings of 1648–49 to the present day, illustrates how an individual can simultaneously be cast in utterly different (albeit equally monochromatic) shades. By examining competing mythologies surrounding Khmelnytsky, the authors of this study collectively question the political and aesthetic implications of imagining a Cossack past in the immediate aftermath of the campaign, during the Ukrainian cultural revival of the nineteenth century and Ukraine’s twentieth-century struggle for independence from Russia. The twelve chapters included in this volume focus on contested memory and the emergence of cultural products. These products include national symbols, such as the Soviet “Order of Khmelnytsky” medal, as well as literary texts that focus debates around memory, nationality, and violence. The goal is to collectively examine the importance of the tales about a Cossack leader and the 1648 uprising to coexisting East European literatures. In addition to examining the function of the Cossack hero in four distinct cultural traditions (Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, and Russian), the case studies presented here develop a comparative approach to literary history that overcomes the limitations inherent in national myths and identity politics.
The inherently multidisciplinary nature of this topic requires an interdisciplinary approach. Although most studies of the Khmelnytsky uprising relate to one distinct community that it affected, this volume aims to highlight the problems with a monolithic approach to literary history. Collaboratively, we have attempted to nuance, on the one hand, the vision of Khmelnytsky as a hero or villain. Both these portrayals of the hetman are exaggerated. On the other hand, we have sought to show how Khmelnytsky has been viewed as a synecdoche specific to the Polish-Ukrainian-Russian borderlands. The chapters that follow explore how 1648 has offered the seeds of a founding myth for numerous nations sharing this region.
Responses to the Cossack uprisings have influenced, and been influenced by, the politics of history and memory. The literary case studies that make up this book are divided into four periods. The first section addresses the century following the Khmelnytsky uprising: across literary traditions we see a blending of literature and historiography. The second section focuses on representations of Khmelnytsky in Romantic literature. In the third section, we deal with modernist images of Khmelnytsky, including as a polarizing force in national solidarity movements. The fourth and final section addresses the role of Khmelnytsky during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. A broad view of the evolution of stories surrounding the uprising, from the seventeenth century to the present, offers insight not only into the changing myths surrounding Khmelnytsky but also into the competing and coexisting literary narratives from the contested territories that would become the modern Ukrainian state. It is worth briefly outlining key literary treatments of Khmelnytsky since 1648, which will provide context for the chapters that make up this volume.
The 1648 uprising yielded an immediate proliferation of Jewish chronicles, many of which can be considered works of literature in their own right. Although some of the chronicles produced in this early period were written as memoirs and others as histories, most of them came to serve a religious purpose: to commemorate the dead, “to pray for the forgiveness of sins . . . , to ask God for deliverance from exile and, often, to call for revenge on their enemies.”42 Many commemorative Yiddish books about 1648 have been lost.43 Those that have survived include a poem by Yoysef ben Eliezer Lipman of Postits’s Kine al gzeyres hakehiles deKaK Ukrayne (Dirge About the Calamity That Befell the Holy Community of Ukraine; Prague, 1648, and Amsterdam, c. 1649).44 The poem laments the violence wrought on a Jewish community and compares the 1648 massacres to historical Jewish tragedies: “Just as Amalek, Krivonos has done” [glaykh az amalek hot giton krivʹa noz].45 As Adam Teller states in Chapter One in this volume, in the Jewish chronicles from the immediate aftermath of 1648, Maksym Kryvonis (Russian and Yiddish: Krivonos), a Cossack leader under Khmelnytsky, is portrayed as the antagonist responsible for the most brutal attacks on Jews and Poles. Among the Hebrew chronicles published across Europe in the immediate aftermath of the uprising are Meir of Szczebrzeszyn’s Tsok ha-‘itim (Kraków, 1650), Gavriel Schussberg’s Petaḥ teshuvah (Amsterdam, 1651), Shabetai ha-Kohen’s chronicle in verse Megilat ‘efah (Scroll of Gloom; Amsterdam, 1651), Shmuel Feivel ben Natan of Vienna’s Tit ha-yaven (The Mire; Amsterdam, 1650), and Avraham ben Shmuel Ashkenazi’s Tsar bat rabim (Sorrows of the Many; Venice). The best known of these chronicles, Natan Neta Hanover’s Hebrew-language Yeven metsulah (The Abyss of Despair), was published in 1653 in Venice.46 Adam Teller demonstrates that Hanover, a skilled storyteller, was exploring the factors that led the Cossack leader not only to rebel against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth but also to turn his anger on the Jews. As Teller shows, Hanover, by presenting us with a portrait of Khmelnytsky, albeit a multifaceted one, led later Jewish writers to attribute the massacres of 1648 directly to the hetman.
Texts in a variety of languages appeared soon after the Khmelnytsky campaign and would influence those writers who came after.47 Ukrainian clerical histories that mention the uprising include the work of the Kyivan monk Feodosii Sofonovych from 1672–73.48 Cossack chronicles from the late seventeenth century include Roman Rakushka-Romanovsky’s Eyewitness Chronicle (written between 1672 and 1702), which focuses on “the Polish persecution of the Orthodox and oppression of the Cossacks” as well as on the injustices perpetuated by Jewish leaseholders and liquor merchants.49 Key political actors of the period kept notes on the Cossack uprising and its aftermath.50 Monastic chronicles were recorded in the Catholic cloisters in Lviv and elsewhere, many of them appearing in published form only in the nineteenth century.51 In this period, the Dutch engraver and cartographer Willem Hondius created the first known portrait of Khmelnytsky. Hondius, who had left The Hague for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, was the royal engraver in the court of Władysław IV Vasa.52 The most important literary work of the seventeenth century to deal with the uprising was Samuel Twardowski’s 1681 epic poem Wojna domowa (Civil War), which served as a source text for later works. During the century following the uprising, a great number of texts appeared in Polish, Ukrainian, and Latin. Only in the nineteenth century did monographs begin to appear in Russian.53 The geographical, professional, and national diversity of the authors of these early texts attests to the importance of the uprising across social strata and across Europe.
The turn of the eighteenth century saw the writing of a series of Ukrainian chronicles, which were eventually published in the nineteenth century. These include a largely fictionalized chronicle by Samiilo Velychko (1670–1728), and the chronicle kept by Hryhorii Hrabianka (1686–1737/8), which has been preserved in differing redactions and manuscripts.54 Hrabianka’s was the most widely disseminated of the chronicles in Ukraine and is the subject of Chapter Two. Frank Sysyn demonstrates that the work, though historically called a chronicle, is actually a narrative history with similarities to Baroque literature. Early twentieth-century scholars such as Ivan Franko and Mykola Zerov viewed Hrabianka’s text as one of the first major prose works of modern Ukrainian literature. Sysyn examines the depiction of Khmelnytsky as a hero in the Hrabianka Chronicle. He also treats that image’s impact on subsequent Ukrainian historiography and literature.
In his 1933 novel Der Sotn in Goray, the Yiddish novelist and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer drew a direct connection between the destruction Khmelnytsky’s Cossacks wrought on Jewish communities and the messianic Sabbatean movement that followed it, a movement that many view as equally catastrophic to, if not more than, the massacres under Khmelnytsky.55 Singer’s depiction of the Sabbateans is in keeping with early historiography of the movement, which presented the Khmelnytsky uprising as the main trigger for the mid-seventeenth-century mass messianic-kabbalistic movement of Shabetai Tsevi. In Chapter Three Ada Rapoport-Albert considers this historiographical tradition against Gershom Scholem’s claim that events in Ukraine were too local and too distant from the birthplace of the Sabbatean movement to account for the remarkable receptivity to its gospel throughout the Jewish world. Rapoport-Albert reevaluates the contribution of the “Khmelnytsky factor” to our understanding of Sabbateanism. Among the links between Shabetai Tsevi and the events of 1648 is Shabetai Tsevi’s third wife, Sarah, who was reputedly an orphaned refugee from one of the communities devastated by Khmelnytsky’s troops.
The Khmelnytsky uprising had a strong effect on the literary and historical documents of the turn of the nineteenth century. At a moment when the rise of national consciousness was paramount, writers of different ethnic groups described the Khmelnytsky uprising with an eye to their own developing national literary traditions. In this period, kobzar guild members cultivated and popularized epic poems known as dumy. As Natalie Kononenko has shown, songs about the uprising led by Khmelnytsky make up one of the three central categories of dumy to appear in collections.56 In Ukrainian literature the essential contemporary text that deals with Khmelnytsky is the Istoriia rusov (History of the Rusʹ People, written ca. 1800–1820s and published in 1846), which culminates in the “official” perspective of the Hetmanate, a perspective going back to the school drama Mylost’ Bozhiia Ukrainu . . . svobodyvshaia (God’s Grace . . . which has freed Ukraine) of 1728, which, as George G. Grabowicz shows in Chapter Four, deifies Khmelnytsky.57 Grabowicz offers a comparative approach to the major pre-Romantic and Romantic writers in Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish. As Grabowicz demonstrates, the trope of national leader or national symbol was applied more regularly to Khmelnytsky in this period, as reflected in two Polish dramas titled “Bohdan Chmielnicki,” by Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz (1817) and by Tymon Zaborowski (1823), as well as in Decembrist writings, particularly those of F. Glinka and K. Ryleev. The historicist interest in Khmelnytsky that dominated in the early part of the century soon gave way to a poetics emphasizing the folk, the national cause, and the structures of mythical thought. Here Khmelnytsky becomes more marginal, if not entirely absent, from depictions of the Cossack Ukrainian past. Nikolai Gogol, for example, deals at length with Cossacks in his Ukrainian fiction but does not specifically write about Khmelnytsky. The great Ukrainian Romantic Taras Shevchenko portrays Khmelnytsky as a tragic figure who turned Ukraine over to the Tsar at Pereiaslav.
Taras Koznarsky, in Chapter Five, examines the stock repertory of heroic qualities assigned to Khmelnytsky in Ukrainian historical narratives of the first decades of the nineteenth century. Koznarsky argues that the cult of Khmelnytsky was crucial to the self-perception, mobilization, and self-promotion of the Ukrainian elites in the Russian empire. That is to say, it served to legitimize the Ukrainian historical narrative itself. Khmelnytsky functioned as an antidote to the stigma of Mazepa the traitor, an image ingrained in the self-perception of Ukrainian elites as well as in the Russian popular imagination. Koznarsky demonstrates the mirrorlike connection between Khmelnytsky the hero and Mazepa the villain at the level of the structure of their biographies, attributes, and agencies in Ukrainian historical narratives.
In Chapter Six, Roman Koropeckyj focuses on Polish Romantic literature and its legacy, demonstrating that Khmelnytsky, who is an object of interest to such pre-Romantics as Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz and Tymon Zaborowski, also plays a role in Romantic historiography, as seen in the works of Joachim Lelewel. However, other Cossack legacies overshadow Khmelnytsky’s story. For almost all of the Polish Romantics writing about Ukraine and the Cossacks, the stories of Ivan Gonta and Maksym Zalizniak, two Cossack leaders of the 1768 Koliivshchyna rebellion against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, largely displace the events of a century earlier. Koropeckyj explores possible reasons for the erasure, particularly in view of the literary revival of the figure of Khmelnytsky by the post-Romantic Henryk Sienkiewicz in his 1883–84 historical novel Ogniem i mieczem (With Fire and Sword).
Following the nation-building trends of the Romantic period, the late nineteenth century ushered in a reinvention and reassessment of national traditions. This is apparent in politics, historiography, and art. This period saw republication of historical texts about Khmelnytsky, including Solomon Mandelʹkern’s 1878 Russian translation of Hanover’s Yeven metsulah in 1883 and a fourth edition of Nikolai Kostomarov’s 1857 Bogdan Khmelʹnitskii in 1884, both of which influenced reappraisals of Jewish-Slavic relations. The pogroms of 1881–82 that followed the assassination of Alexander II played no small part in the concern, among Jewish writers, about the history of anti-Jewish violence in the same region. One Jewish-born modernist who revived Hanover’s Hebrew account of the uprising was the Russian symbolist poet Nikolai Minskii (pseudonym for N. M. Vilenkin). In Chapter Seven, I examine Minskii’s retelling of the massacre at Tulʹchyn in his Russian-language play in verse, “Osada Tulʹchina” (The Siege of Tulʹchyn), which appeared in the St. Petersburg Jewish literary journal Voskhod in 1888 (the same year Mikeshin’s monument was unveiled in Kyiv’s St. Sophia Square for the nine-hundred-year anniversary of the baptism of Rusʹ). Minskii emphasizes Jewish resistance to the Cossacks and creates a heroic Jewish figure, a Marrano named Josif de Kastro, who flouts Ashkenazi passivity to fight the Cossacks. Avrom Reisin translated this play into Yiddish in 1905. Many aspects of Minskii’s version of the Tulʹchyn episode would reappear in twentieth-century Jewish narratives about 1648, including Sholem Asch’s 1919 Kiddush ha-Shem, which describes the uprising as a test of Jewish protagonists, revealing unexpected acts of bravery and heroism in the face of destruction.
Not all modern Jewish treatments of 1648 are lachrymose. In Chapter Eight, Israel Bartal addresses lesser-studied positive images of the Ukrainian struggle for independence as depicted in the writings of several Jewish radical Zionists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Positive images of Cossacks found their way to Palestine and had considerable influence on the emerging Israeli popular culture. The Cossack warrior served as a model for the “regeneration” of a “New Jew,” claimed, for example, by members of Labor Zionism in Palestine. The Eastern European “other”—the horrifying enemy of the shtetl Jew, had transformed in the minds of some of the “Second Aliyah” pioneers (1904–1918) who settled in Palestine into an ideal example of heroism, simple rural life, and unlimited national commitment. Furthermore, they tended to apply some supposedly Cossack traits to the Middle Eastern Bedouin.
Of course, the Khmelnytsky episode played an important role in the consolidation of Ukrainian national identity in the early twentieth century. In Chapter Nine, Myroslav Shkandrij examines portrayals of the Ukrainian leader in light of the nationalist discourse that developed in the 1930s and 1940s. The nationalist writer and publisher Dmytro Dontsov encouraged writers to portray historical heroic figures. Not everyone followed Dontsov’s guidelines, as an examination of expatriate novels by Panas Fedenko, Yurii Lypa, and Semen Ordivsky indicates. In the later 1940s Yurii Kosach produced portrayals that were a critique of authoritarian nationalism. Shkandrij compares these depictions to those in Soviet Ukrainian fiction produced at this time, notably to the novels of Ivan Le and Iakiv Kachura.
The remythologization of Khmelnytsky in the twentieth century took a number of forms. In October 1943, the Soviet Army recognized the importance of Ukrainian Cossackdom as a constituent of the usable past by introducing the Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. This was the only Soviet military order named after a non-Russian historical personality. The role of Khmelnytsky as a heroic unifier was further emphasized in the same year when the town of Pereiaslav, site of the 1654 Pereiaslav Treaty, was renamed Pereiaslav-Khmelnytsky. In Chapter Ten, Gennady Estraikh analyzes the reaction of Soviet and non-Soviet Jews to Khmelnytsky’s elevated position in the official hierarchy of national heroes.
Since World War II, Ukrainians and Jews have sought to revisit the historical relationship between the two peoples. Twentieth-century Ukrainian writers and poets, including Natan Rybak, Pavlo Zahrebelʹnyi, Lina Kostenko, and Vasyl Shevchuk, have sought to place the Ukrainian-Jewish encounter during the years of 1648–49 beyond the traditional narrative of Jewish victimization. In Chapter Eleven, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern focuses on a semiforgotten two-volume novel, Den’ Hnivu (The Day of Rage), which the Ukrainian novelist Yurii Kosach wrote in a displaced persons camp during World War II and published in 1947 in Germany. Kosach, nephew of the Ukrainian poet Lesia Ukrainka, creates a fictionalized version of the Khmelnytsky uprising. Kosach depicts Jews as people who understood the reasons for the sviatyi hniv (holy rage) of the rebels and found ways to help them. Forgotten by the Diaspora literati because he was believed to have cooperated with the Soviet Union, and by the Ukrainian critics because he was an émigré Diaspora writer, Kosach challenged the established Ukrainian and Jewish ethnocentric narratives of 1648–49.
In the final chapter of this volume, Izabela Kalinowska and Marta Kondratyuk discuss film portrayals originating within a number of national and political contexts. They examine the historical and cultural ramifications of Khmelnytsky as a character in Igor (Ihor) Savchenko’s Bohdan Khmelnytsky (1941), Jerzy Hoffman’s With Fire and Sword (1999), and Mykola Mashchenko’s Bohdan-Zinovii Khmelnytsky (2007). Although in each work the particulars of the world around the hetman conform to the ideological circumstances of the film’s making, Khmelnytsky emerges as a positive character in all of them. The chapter offers insight into how an enigmatic historical figure has retained a heroic image, not only for the Ukrainians and Russians but for Poles as well.
The period since Ukrainian independence has cast Khmelnytsky as a needed national symbol. As Frank Sysyn has shown elsewhere, “The Soviet icon of ‘Reunification’ has been replaced with the statist school’s image of statesman and national hero.”58 As the following chapters show, a heavily mythologized figure like Khmelnytsky can imply either a national or an internationalist narrative. At first glance, Khmelnytsky’s appearance in the different literary traditions presented here highlights the irreconcilability of diverse cultures sharing a single territory. Closer examination of these representations exposes the interconnected nature of unique cultural narratives.
Introduction
1. Mikeshin also collaborated with Shevchenko and Kostomarov by providing illustrations for the 1860 and 1876 editions of Kobzar. Faith Hillis, “Ukrainophile Activism and Imperial Governance in Russia’s Southwestern Borderlands,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History (Spring 2012), vol. 13, no. 2: 315.
2. Frank Sysyn has called attention to the relationship between the Polish insurrection and Mykeshin’s design. Sysyn also notes that Mykhailo Maksymovych initially proposed the monument in 1857. Sysyn, “The Changing Image of the Hetman: On the 350th Anniversary of the Khmelʹnytsʹkyi Uprising,” Jahrbücher fur Geschichte Osteuropas (1998), vol. 4, no. 46: 531–545; Sysyn cites Maksymovych’s Vospominanie o Bogdane Khmelʹnitskom and Pisʹma o Bogdane Khmelʹnitskom, in Sobranie sochinenii M. A. Maksimovicha. Tom 1. (Kiev: 1876), 396–397 and 475–485.
3. As Faith Hillis has put it, “The model melded expressions of Little Russian patriotism with reminders of the ways that Ukrainophilism reinforced imperial unity.” Hillis, “Ukrainophile Activism and Imperial Governance in Russia’s Southwestern Borderlands,” 316.
4. “Union” refers to the Uniates, or Polonized Greek Catholics in the region. Ibid.; Hillis cites Mikeshin, “Mikeshin to Iuzefovich, 19 February 1869” (TsDIAK f. 873, op. 1, d. 48, 1. 30 ob.); and M. G., “Istoriia Odnogo Pamiatnika,” Golos Minuvshego (1913), vol. 7: 284. Hillis notes that Mikeshin is referencing the Union of Brest of 1596, under which the Ruthenian Church became part of the Catholic Church. The translation is Hillis’s.
5. This inscription, too, was streamlined. It originally read “We desire to be under the Eastern Orthodox Tsar” [Volim pod tsaria vostochnogo, pravoslavnogo] and “To Bogdan Khmelʹnitskii a united, indivisible Russia” [Bogdanu Khmelʹnitskomu edinaia nedelimaia Rossiia]. Mikhail Bulgakov refers to this inscription in The White Guard [Belaia Gvardiia] when he describes “Gray men belted with dashing straps and bayonets could be seen climbing the stairs up Bogdan’s crag and trying to knock off the inscription on the black granite.” [I bylo vidno, kak podnimalisʹ na lestnitsu serye, opoiasannye likhimi remniami i shtykami, pytalisʹ sbitʹ nadpisʹ, gliadiashchuiu s chernogo granita]. These inscriptions were later removed (in 1919 and 1924) and replaced by the simpler “Bogdan Khmelʹnitskii, 1888.” Mikhail Bulgakov, White Guard. Trans. Marian Schwartz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 265. Mikhail Bulgakov, Sobraniie sochinenii: v 5–ti tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1992), 391. For a discussion of the changes in inscription, see Vladimir Oliinyk, “Mify i pravda o ‘mednom Bogdane’” in ZN, UA, July 19, 2013, accessed June 11, 2014 http://gazeta.zn.ua/history/mify-i-pravda-o-mednom-bogdane-_.html.
6. Sysyn, “The Changing Image of the Hetman,” 532. On the controversy, Frank Sysyn cites Orest Levytsʹkyi, “Istoriia budovy pamiatnyka B. Khmelʹnytsʹkomu u Kyivi,” in Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk (1913), vol. 16 no. 6: 467–483.
7. Sysyn, “The Changing Image of the Hetman,” 532. On the controversy, Frank Sysyn cites Orest Levytsʹkyi, “Istoriia budovy pamiatnyka B. Khmelʹnytsʹkomu u Kyivi” in Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk (1913), vol. 16, no. 6: 467–483.
8. Valerii Smolii and Valerii Stepankov, Bohdan Khmelʹnytsʹkyi (Kyiv: Alʹternativy, 2003), 5.
9. For more on these archetypes, see Sysyn, “The Changing Image of the Hetman,” 532. Sysyn cites Janusz Kaczmarczyk, “Bohdan Chmielnicki—Szatan czy mesjasz?” in Studia Historyczne (1991), vol. 34, no. 3: 369–385; Stephan Welyczenko, “Malo znany portret Bohdana Chmielnickiego,” in Studia Historyczne (1981), vol. 24 no. 2: 303–308; and Liubomyr Vynar, Problema zvʹiazkiv Anhlii z Ukrainoiu za chasiv hetʹmanuvannia Bohdana Khmelʹnytsʹkoho 1648–1657: Istorychna studiia (London and Cleveland: Nakl. Ukrainsʹkoi vydavnychnoi spilky, 1960).
10. Shaul Stampfer has called into question the assumption that the massacres in 1648 were a result of a genocidal impulse among Ukrainians against Jews, and that early estimates of Jewish deaths, ranging from the tens to the hundreds of thousands, are historically inaccurate. He estimates that out of a population of about forty thousand Jews living in the region, the number of Jewish casualties could have been up to eighteen to twenty thousand. Shaul Stampfer, “What Actually Happened to the Jews of Ukraine in 1648?” Jewish History (Jan. 1, 2003), vol. 17, no. 2: 210, 221.
11. Bernard D. Weinryb, “The Hebrew Chronicles on Bohdan Khmelʹnytsʹkyi and the Cossack-Polish War,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies (June 1, 1977), vol. 1, no. 2: 162. The Jewish chronicles of 1648–49 note instances where Jews fought alongside the Poles. For fictionalized portrayals of a brief collaboration at Tulʹchyn, see Chap. 7 of this volume.
12. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 49; Yerushalmi cites J. Katz, “Bein TaTNU le-TaḤ ve-TaT [Between 1096 and 1648],” in Sefer ha-yobel le-Yitsḥak Baer (Jerusalem: Hahebrah hahistorit hayisraelit, 1961), 318–337.
13. There is, indeed, no reason to view Khmelnytsky as sympathetic to the Jews of his time. Hrushevsky notes that in Khmelnytsky’s letters, “the merciless extortion by the Jews was represented as particularly intolerable.” Mykhailo Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rusʹ: The Cossack Age, 1626–1650, ed. Frank E. Sysyn, trans. Marta Daria Olynyk, vol. 8 (Edmonton, Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Study Press, 2010), 319; Hrushevsky cites Akty, Otnosiashchiesia k Istorii Iuzhnoi i Zapadnoi Rossii, Sobrannye i Izdannye Arkheograficheskoi Komissiei, vol. 3 (St. Petersburg, 1863), 16.
14. For a good discussion of The Great Crypt as it pertains to nineteenth-century Ukrainian-Russian relations, see Myroslav Shkandrij, Literature and the Discourse of Empire from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times (Montreal: McGill-Queens Press, 2001), 141–146.
15. Although this poem appears in complete scholarly Soviet editions of Shevchenko’s work, several popular Soviet editions omit the poem. These include many one-volume Soviet editions of Kobzar, as well as the 1963 three-volume edition and the 1970 five-volume edition. For a discussion of varying interpretations of this line, see Yurii Barabash, “Sluchai Khmelnʹnitskogo (Shevchenko i Gogolʹ, Fragment),” Voprosy Literatury (March–April 1996): 115. I thank Taras Koznarsky for sharing his bibliographic expertise.
16. Mykola Borovyk, “Prohulianky z Pamʹiatnykamy,” Krytyka (October 2012), vols. 9–10: 23, 26; Borovyk bases his study on Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990).
17. Serhii Plokhy, The Cossack Myth: History and Nationhood in the Age of Empires (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 366. See also Serhii Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 18.
18. Both Kornblatt and Brian Boeck point out the Don Cossacks’ importance to Russian literature. According to Boeck, “the Don Cossacks were a living embodiment of Russia’s conflicted self-identity as both a nation and an empire.” Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, The Cossack Hero in Russian Literature: A Study in Cultural Mythology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 4; Brian J. Boeck, Imperial Boundaries: Cossack Communities and Empire-Building in the Age of Peter the Great (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 3.
19. For early examples of this, see Miłosz’s discussion of Sarmatian epic poetry. Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 140–145.
20. According to Bernard Weinryb, a few Jews numbered among the Cossacks in the early seventeenth century. Moreover, “Jewish names appear in the Cossack registers of 1649 and earlier, while converted Jews are also mentioned as Cossacks in rabbinical sources.” Weinryb, “The Hebrew Chronicles on Bogdan Khmelʹnytsʹkyi and the Cossack-Polish War,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies (1977), vol. 1: 153–177, 160.
21. Serhii Plokhy notes, moreover, that the term Cossack was most likely applied to Ruthenian populations in correspondences between the grand prince of Lithuania and the Crimean khan in 1492; Serhii Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 18.
22. The location of the main Zaporozhian Cossack stronghold changed several times.
23. Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 111.
24. Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 136.
25. For a good, brief discussion of the Zaporozhian Sich in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see ibid., 32–38.
26. Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rusʹ, vol. 8: 367.
27. According to Hrushevsky, Khmelnytsky’s father was Mykhailo Khmelnytsky, an officer in the Chyhyryn starosta district. Ibid., vol. 8: 378.
28. Ibid., vol. 8: 378–379.
29. Subtelny, Ukraine, 126.
30. According to Magocsi, the Poles suspected as much. Magocsi, A History of Ukraine, 210.
31. Magocsi, A History of Ukraine, 210.
32. Ibid., 213.
33. Hrushevsky maintains that we have every reason to assume that Khmelnytsky conducted himself diplomatically and politely, although “he flared up easily and was carried away by strong emotions.” Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rusʹ, vol. 8: 385–386.
34. Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine, 49.
35. The Crimean Tatars emerged as an ethnic group by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries through the conversion of a variety of peoples, including Greeks, Italians, and Armenians already living in the region. Brian Glyn Williams describes the Crimean Tatars as “a heterogeneous ethnic group having its roots in the deepest Crimean antiquity and claiming descent from an array of earlier ethno-religious groups who occupied the diverse terrains of the peninsula since the time of the Scythians and Greeks.” Brian Glyn Williams, The Crimean Tatars: The Diaspora Experience and the Forging of a Nation (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2001), 29. The ruling classes traced their lineage back to Jengiz Khan. See also Magocsi, A History of Ukraine, 177–187.
36. Alan W. Fisher, The Crimean Tatars (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1978), 37. The Crimean Khanate, which maintained independent relations with the Polish and Russian governments, remained Ottoman until 1783, when Catherine II annexed the region, making it part of the Russian empire.
37. Gábor Ágoston, Bruce Alan Masters, Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Infobase, 2009), 150. The authors note, “In the ensuing civil war some Cossack factions accepted Ottoman suzerainty, which dragged the Ottomans into wars with Poland (1672–99) and Muscovy (1676–81).”
38. Magocsi, A History of Ukraine, 233.
39. Magocsi has discussed the naming of the Cossack state. See ibid., 245.
40. Ibid., 227.
41. Ibid., 231.
42. Weinryb, “The Hebrew Chronicles on Bohdan Khmelʹnytsʹkyi and the Cossack-Polish War,” 163.
43. Dov-Ber Kerler, The Origins of Modern Literary Yiddish (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 180.
44. Ibid., 34; Kerler cites Max Weinreich, Bilder fun der yidisher literaturgeshikhte, fun di onheybn biz Mendele Moykher-Sforim (Vilne: Tomor, 1928), 193–4; for Weinreich’s critical edition of the poem, see 198–218; Kerler also mentions a shorter anonymous poem describing the events of 1656. Kerler, The Origins of Modern Literary Yiddish, 35; see Weinreich, Bilder fun der yidisher literaturgeshikhte, fun di onheybn biz Mendele Moykher-Sforim, 194–196 and 215–218; see also Weinreich’s discussion of texts on 1648–49 in languages other than Yiddish. Max Weinreich, Shturemvint: Bilder fun der Yidisher geshikhte in zibtsntn yorhundert (Vilne: Farlag “Tomor,” 1927), 75–76.
45. Weinreich, Bilder fun der yidisher literaturgeshikhte, fun di onheybn biz Mendele Moykher-Sforim, 206.
46. For a good discussion of the Hebrew chronicles, see Weinryb, “The Hebrew Chronicles on Bohdan Khmelʹnytsʹkyi and the Cossack-Polish War.”
47. For the best overview of sources on the Khmelnytsky era, see Hrushevsky. For an overview of texts written in the aftermath of the uprising, see Kohut. Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus, vol. 8: 670–681; Zenon E. Kohut, “The Khmelnytsky Uprising, the Image of Jews, and the Shaping of Ukrainian Historical Memory,” Jewish History (2003), vol. 17: 141–163.
48. Kohut notes that Sofonovych, who was the hegumen of St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv, “relied heavily on Polish writers, especially Maciej Stryjkowski.” Kohut, “The Khmelnytsky Uprising, the Image of Jews, and the Shaping of Ukrainian Historical Memory,” 143.
49. Ibid., 145–146.
50. These include, for example, Albrycht Stanisław Radziwiłł, chancellor of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and Stanisław Oświęcim, marshal of nobility in the court of the crown Hetman Stanisław Koniecpolski.
51. Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rusʹ, vol. 8: 672.
52. See Figure I.2, p. 10 in this volume. Hondius is believed to have fought in the Polish army under Janusz Radziwiłł beginning in 1651. See Irena Fabiani-Madeyska.
53. These include histories of the siege of Lviv by Kuszewicz and Czechowicz, a history of the siege of Zamość, and accounts of the Zboriv campaign. Among these histories are artistic accounts of the uprising, such as Samuel Twardowski’s chronicle in verse Woyna domowa z Kozaki i Tatary, Moskwą, potym Szwedami, i z Węgry (The War of the Homeland with the Cossacks and Tatars, Muscovites, then the Swedes and Hungarians), which was translated into literary Ukrainian. Hrushevsky notes that prose adaptations appeared in Polish in Wroclaw in 1840, and in Russian in 1846. Velychko based his history of Khmelnytsky on Twardowski’s work, vol. 8: 674. Western-language accounts, including those by Pierre Chevalier, Linage de Vauciennes, Alberto Vimina, and Samuel Gradzki, appeared in Paris, Venice, and Pest. See Pierre Chevalier, Histoire de la guerre des Cosaques contre la Pologne, avec un discours de leur origine, païs, moeurs, gouvernement et religion, et un autre des Tartares Précopites (A discourse of the original, country, manners, government and religion of the Cossacks: with another of the Precopian Tartars) (Paris: Barbin, 1663); Linage de Vauciennes, L’origine veritable du soulevement des Cosaques contre la Pologne (The true origin of the uprising of the Cossacks against Poland) (Paris: Clousier et Auboüin, 1674); Alberto Vimina, Historia delle guerre civili di Polonia (History of the Polish Civil War) (Venice: G. P. Pinelli, 1671); and Samuel Grondski de Grondi (Gradzki), Historia belli cosacco-polonici (History of the Cossack-Polish wars) (Pest: Patzko, 1789).
54. The Velychko text, which comes down to us in manuscript form, is missing a few years from the Khmelnytsky period. Kohut notes that “the surviving part of [Velychko’s] description of Khmelnytsky’s revolt is heavily dependent on the account of the Polish historian Samuel Twardowski, while the supposedly contemporary documents that Velychko quotes have been proven to be fictitious, some probably invented by Velychko himself.” Kohut, “The Khmelnytsky Uprising, the Image of Jews, and the Shaping of Ukrainian Historical Memory,” 147.
55. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Der Sotn in Goray: a mayse fun fartsaytns, Globus, 2, 7 (Jan. 1933), 17–31; 8 (Feb.), 1–22; 9 (Mar.), 54–75; 10 (Apr.), 29–49; 11 (May), 45–64; 12 (June), 1–21; 13 (July–Aug.), 27–47; 14 (Sept.), 26–32. Republished as a complete novel, Warsaw: Bibliotek fun Yidishn P.E.N. klub, 1935. Published in English translation as Satan in Goray: A Novel. Trans. Jacob Sloan. New York: Noonday Press, 1955.
56. Natalie Kononenko, Ukrainian Minstrels: And the Blind Shall Sing (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1998), 22.
57. According to Kohut, Istoriia rusov marks the increased prominence of Jews in narratives surrounding the Khmelnytsky uprising. See Kohut, “The Khmelnytsky Uprising, the Image of Jews, and the Shaping of Ukrainian Historical Memory,” 149–150.
58. Frank E. Sysyn, “Bohdan Chmelʹnycʹkyj’s Image in Ukrainian Historiography Since Independence,” Ukraine (2000), vol. 42, no. 3/4: 188.
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