Readers of the AHY will know Larry Wolff as a historian capable of grand synthesis—and this latest monograph continues unapologetically in the spirit of his seminal 1996 work, Inventing Eastern Europe. Like that volume, The Idea of Galicia analyzes how historical and cultural arguments shape geopolitical realms, stressing the Enlightenment legacy of “civilizing” orientalist discourses applied by the West to subjugate the East. Here the stakes are raised even higher: As Wolff reminds us, Galicia was a region “called into being by Habsburg dynastic exigency” in 1772, upon the partition of Poland (5). Its very existence depended on acts of continual and retrospective justification to give discursive coherence to territories that were historically disparate, as well as ethnically diverse. Yet, as Wolff shows, by the time of its demise in 1918, Habsburg Galicia left a legacy that continues to undermine nationally determined identities, particularly in Poland and Ukraine. His subject therefore touches on some of the dominant preoccupations in recent Habsburg studies: the aftermath of the Empire, sub-national phenomena, and peripheral and borderland identities (as explored in recent work by Pieter Judson and Keely Stauter Halsted).
Wolff's major contribution is to reinforce “the importance of the ‘non-national’ for the construction of provincial identity” and “the provincial as an ideological force overlapping with the forces of the national and the imperial” (6). He does this by cataloguing a range of published sources, principally in Polish and German, which testify to a growing Galician consciousness in the decades after its establishment. The range of material evidences years of archival work. It includes letters from the 1780s by publicist Franz Kratter, designed to acquaint the Viennese with Galicia; ambitious almanacs; records of flora and fauna; a compilation of folk songs in Polish and Ruthenian from the 1830s; and later ethnographic, economic, and statistical studies.
A particular masterstroke is Wolff's pairing of public pronouncements and private reflections. For example, the newspaper Czas (Time), founded in the aftermath of revolution in 1848, demonstrates the public shape of a declarative “Galician” consciousness, while the prominent German- and Polish-language writers Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836–1895) and Aleksander Fredro (1793–1876) reveal some of its inner dimensions. With Sacher-Masoch, public events, literary output, and personal biography connect through the peasant uprising and massacre of the Polish nobles of 1846—a background of violence that Wolff sees as a traumatizing leitmotif of the region's subsequent history, one transmogrified into eponymous “masochistic” fetish in the novel Venus in Furs (1870). Fredro, meanwhile, indexes a symbolic Polish trajectory: from direct engagement with the national cause to pragmatic self-identification in provincial terms. Fredro's campaigning for the Galician railway line that finally came in 1861 tells the outer story; the inner emerges through works like Zemsta (Revenge), which reflect the consciousness of the Polish middle class in a nonnational environment, so much so that this later-celebrated dramatist would be demonized for insufficient patriotism in 1835.
Of course, Wolff cannot neglect the sharpening national conflicts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What might otherwise be a familiar story is enlivened with more trademark, virtuoso juxtapositions from the cultural sphere. The development of Ivan Franko (1856–1916) into a fully fledged Ukrainian bard regains trans-Galician moorings when Wolff intertwines his fate with the archetypal lion of “Young Poland,” Stanisław Wyspiański (b. 1869), whose death in 1907 predated Franko's literal and figurative paralysis by a year. The Jewish element is mentioned recurrently as an embryonic repository of a nonnational Galician identity. Mass emigration to the United States by “Galitzianer” helped reinforce provincial consciousness in exile, long after the existence of Galicia itself. Assimilation before 1918 is mentioned more summarily through the divergent paths of Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) and Joseph Roth (1894–1939), later great Polish and German writers respectively (246). Both are invoked to underscore the problematic legacy of a provincial identity that does not fit the modern anachronism of nationality.
To this reader, at least, the theme of how such legacies continue to shape discussion in modern Ukraine and beyond remains the most tantalizingly undeveloped aspect of Wolff's erudite and wide-ranging book (Haunted Epilogue). Other scholars, cited by Wolff, have taken up the gauntlet. I, for one, would enjoy hearing Wolff's considered views, not least because his narration is refreshingly free from terminological jargon, rich in sources, and overflows with imagination and insight. Against that background, repetitions of subject matter are a forgivable pitfall amid an approach that blends theme and chronology. A bibliography would have been a welcome addition. Perhaps we can look forward to one in a second edition.
