If I were to ask you to list the characteristic elements of Ukrainian culture, the average Ukrainian would pause for a moment and come up with a list like this:
The vyshyvanka, the kobzar, the Cossacks (with all their paraphernalia from the cradle, trousers, and curved sabers to the oselyets, hopak, and the hetman’s mace) – just this alone gives us eight points on the list. Then we’ll bring in the trembita and the sheepskin vest worn fur-side in. Remembering the vest, we’ll start mentioning thriftiness (in comparison to the Russians), good-naturedness (in comparison to the Russians), and attitudes towards family and children (in comparison to the Russians). If we don’t recall the vest, we’ll think of the trembita and the bonfire. If the respondent is hungry, they’ll remember varenyky, borscht, salo, and, strangely enough, very rarely – stuffed cabbage rolls. Generally, no one can remember anything else. Of course, there are other things that are characteristic elements of Ukrainian culture. An ethnicity with such a rich and eventful history cannot fail to form them. I will provide examples of such cultural elements later in the text. Right now is not the time. Right now, I want to make you think about something else.
Everything mentioned above is not originally Ukrainian. The vyshyvanka and kobzar come from Romania. The Cossacks with their attributes are a copy-paste of the Turkish janissaries. Their military tactics are even similar. Of course, the Sich was a refuge for deserters. Trembita, bonfires, and vests – all of this also comes from Transylvania. Varenyky are analogous to Polish pierogi. Even the English Wikipedia page discusses them and compares varenyky to pierogi. Borscht, a dish with tomatoes and bell peppers, is characteristic of Hungarians and Romanians. You can even find versions of goulash with beets (Szeged goulash), which is somewhat like borscht. And so on. And what, you might ask, is that normal? You would be right to say so. It is normal because national borders are a constructed concept, and peoples lived where they lived and exchanged their cultural achievements with their neighbors. It doesn’t matter who has priority over varenyky, the Poles or the Ukrainians.
Do you know what’s wrong? And why is it hard to notice? It’s difficult to notice what isn’t there. In the borscht of Ukrainian culture, where vegetables from all over the world float, we don’t see anything Russian. One can start denying and say that “nothing came from the barbarians; everything, on the contrary, came from us.” Or one can start searching and actually find it. I will also provide some examples below that might surprise you, revealing the elephant in the room that we didn’t notice. Russians are colonizers, conquerors, imperialists. Okay, no problem. But Ukraine was part of that empire since the times of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. By the way, you might want to look up the origin of the word “hetman” as well. We can dig even deeper and realize that the Moscow kingdom, founded by the princes of Kyiv, cannot lack cultural elements shared with Kyiv. So why is it that what is “Russian” doesn’t immediately come to mind?
Because it’s not the Ukrainians who identify themselves. Ukrainians have outsourced their self-identification to the Russians. We consider what is exotic to Russians as Ukrainian. This is precisely what we nurture and what makes us sentimental. Ukraine has turned into a souvenir shop for Russian tourists. Entertaining the Russians, as both Gogol and Gulak-Artemovsky wrote—just look at the plot of his opera “The Cossack Beyond the Danube”—it’s pure “ethnic clowning,” set to music borrowed from Mozart with some “folk motifs” thrown in. It’s a kind of pastoral entertainment for the Russian nobility.
I can’t help but recall the story of a charming native boy, a gay who was bought from Polish gays by Petersburg artists—with clear intentions—who quickly figured out that his role and path to success was to be a “Ukrainian.” And he stuck with that, even though he kept his personal diaries in Russian. There are plenty of examples that support the idea that Ukrainian identity is a dream of the Muscovite, and Ukrainians are the heroes of that dream, not its masters. There are probably no counterexamples. A Russian simply won’t see anything Ukrainian in things that are indeed Ukrainian, but are quite ordinary for a Russian. “It’s not authentic… I’ve seen this in Moscow… Why did I even come here?”
However, if you look at Ukraine, say, through the eyes of a Pole, Romanian, or Hungarian, they will immediately mention temple architecture, icon painting, Ukrainian bread, cut paper art, glass painting (which came from China, from the East), and Petrykivka painting (too far from Ukraine’s western border to be commonplace for them). They probably won’t even think of salo and varenyky – they have plenty of their own. But they will remember golubtsy, as they are related to dolma and traveled to Europe with the nomads, making them a curiosity for a Pole. They will also recall pirozhki and pies, as they trace their lineage back to Turkic burek, thus making them something “exotic.”
But we look at Ukraine through the eyes of a Russian, and not the most educated one at that. He won’t be able to name the Petrykivka painting style—”it’s like that Khokhloma stuff, you know,” he might say. He won’t remember what “Ukrainian Baroque” is, and he won’t even know words like “malanka,” “pysanka,” “motanka,” or “vytynanka.” He won’t look down at the carpets and won’t recall them, and he won’t realize that “mazanka” is a Ukrainian word, even though, yes, that method of building with mud and sticks has existed for tens of thousands of years, including among Russians (see khibarka).
A more educated Russian might recall, after reading Gogol, words and terms like Sorochintsy Fair, Ivan Kupala, vertep, Taras Bulba, Viy, Chumak, and venok as a women’s headdress, as well as ladanka (the one: “…for happiness, for happiness, my mom put a ladanka on me…”).
But a Russian will never remember that things like religion and the alphabet, which are so significant for culture, are considered “Ukrainian.” Because Orthodoxy and Cyrillic are also present in Russian culture. At the same time, Cyrillic is almost a fundamental part of Ukrainian culture. It is the script in which all Ukrainian literature and poetry are written, scientific and philosophical works are composed, dictionaries are published, and folklore is recorded. Do you know what catastrophe happened in Vietnam? They switched to the Latin alphabet, and the next generation could no longer read the literature written in characters, which is now waiting in vain for readers in libraries. Vietnam effectively culturally castrated itself.
Orthodoxy, yes, the “Russian” type – is also part of Ukrainian culture. Only in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus do congregants have to stand; nowhere else in the world are women required to cover their heads (on the contrary, in fact) and so on. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church is part of Ukrainian culture. But, damn it, it’s too “Russian,” lacking that special touch, you know…
And now there will be a real “betrayal.” A Russian will not consider the Russian language a part of Ukrainian culture. The idea that Ukraine could have its own version of the Russian language with “v” instead of “na” simply won’t fit in their mind, just as Belgium has its own Dutch and French, Austria has its German, and Switzerland has its Italian.
Right now, there is a war. Ukraine is fighting for its existence. But it turns out that the war is taking place within the Russian discourse. Look up, in the first version of the list – some “Ukrainian” things were described as opposites of ” Russianness,” and you, the readers, swallowed it. You can’t defeat Cthulhu because you are inside his dream. You can’t defeat the Matrix while being inside it. Of course, you can dramatically take down the Smith agents, but the Matrix will remain. To dismantle the Matrix, you need to step outside of it.