On The Frontiers of Central Europe:
Ukrainian Galicia at the Turn of the Millennium

The date was the 18^th of August and the Emperor in question was Franz Joseph I, which would not be so surprising if not for the fact that the city in which this event took place was L'viv and the year 2000. L'viv celebrated the 170^th anniversary of the Emperor's birthday exactly a week before the celebration of the ninth anniversary of Ukraine's independence. The petition signed by the participants in the seminar stated that: "this monument should also become a very special symbol-testimony of our choice of Europe and our will to co-exist in the circle of free and independent nations of Central Europe."¹

To start with, I do not think that these events were just a chronological coincidence. I believe that the juxtaposition of these two events, the tribute to Franz Joseph I and Independence Day, was made on purpose. The events held during the birthday celebration differed significantly from the official pompous celebrations of Independence Day the following week. It is worth noting, for example, that the artistic performance "Waiting for a…" was organized by Volodymyr Kaufman, the director of the first and thus far only postmodern performance staged at the L'viv opera ("Chrysler Imperial") during the urban carnival called Vyvykh in the early 1990s. Self-irony, burlesque rituals like searching for the ghost of the Emperor, and implicit sacrilegious comparisons between him and the Messiah were part of the birthday celebration. On the other hand, it was not just a bohemian event: two basic presentations for the seminar – "The birthday of a new epoch" and "Franz Joseph at his office" – were prepared by leading researchers at the Center for Political Research of a quite serious political party, "Reforms and Order."

Media coverage of the events was also quite serious. The headline in the official newspaper of the regional administration declared: "Monument will stand by next year to celebrate the 85^th anniversary of Franz Joseph's death."² The new L'viv radio station "New Wave" on that day played only "Central European music" and we must remember that the issue of broadcasting music became highly political this summer in L'viv because of the beating and death of the Ukrainian composer and singer Ihor Bilozir, which was represented as the cultural side of the national conflict.³ The slogan of the celebration – "in the past we are searching for traces of the future" – stressed the agency of the celebration and its political aspects.⁴

The most serious part of the event was, of course, the "scientific seminar." According to Taras Batenko (one of those presenting at the seminar): "We have Franz Joseph to thank for many, many things. First of all, for the tradition of parliamentary democracy, for the tradition of an organized social-political life, for having a political elite, for the tradition of a real multi-party system, real competition and discussion of political ideologema." Telling the story of how the Ukrainian national movement matured to the state life of its own in Austria-Hungary, Taras Batenko stated: "I am not sorry that as a historian I started with the Austrian period because I see the unity in the political progress of the Ukrainian movement since the beginning of the nineteenth century up to our time." According to Taras Batenko, Franz Joseph I is a symbol of "hope and faith" and "with him the Ukrainian symbolic queue [meaning the gallery of national heroes] reaches its former greatness." These were the last words of his presentation.⁵ In general, it would appear that the artistic part of the celebrations and its bohemian overtones camouflaged the more serious issue at stake.

But let's not allowed ourselves to be taken in by these statements. Participation in the celebration itself was limited to exclusively "elite" circles, something which was also acknowledged by the organizers. The "general public" does not patronize cafés and restaurants where this kind of nostalgia for the lost nineteenth century is expressed because they are too expensive. Actually most of the cafés and restaurants trying to capitalize on this retro atmosphere, utilize more artifacts and images from the interwar Polish period than from the Habsburg past. Even those making references to popular sentiment could not point to the portraits of Franz Joseph anywhere else than over their own desks. The popularity of the Emperor and of the Empire in L'viv cannot be compared even with Ukraine's closest neighbors, let's say Polish Galicia, where the presence of the Habsburg past is much more visible. This emphasis on popular sentiment serves to hide the fact that the event has much more to do with the construction of a visible Galician past than with some real continuity from that past, and is part of the project to legitimize itself through the past.

Now I would like to cite an account of the celebration from the newspaper Postup which has for a few years been promoting the idea of the special status of Ukrainian Galicia in its relationships with the rest of Ukraine and which can be seen as the most important medial protagonist of these ideas. The article in that newspaper refers to Franz Joseph I as "Him" (with a capital H), mentions "His glorious times," and states that our dream to meet both of them (Franz and his times) will be materialized in the form of a monument:

I guess it is quite obvious that we are dealing here with something larger than just "popular sentiments," with something that is deliberately provocative, with something that tends both to exaggerate and to label. We are dealing with speaking "on behalf of," with attempts to inscribe that pose as reading, with, I would say, a typical identity project. The monument is presented as a realization; people are honoring someone and something that is already there. Franz Joseph stands for the old Galicia, for the Galicia of the golden age "when we also belonged to Europe."

Failure on the part of the current Ukrainian state is also involved here, which is usually referred to as "the disappointment in realities." Phrases like permanent economic crisis, political impotence, and corrupt and irresponsible government have become clichés in journalistic discourse. But this failure has several aspects. The shifting alliances of those in power are difficult to trace and to analyze. The phrase "party of power" has become a standard phrase used by both journalists and political scientists. We could say that the opposition "the power-block versus the people" is an obvious and consensually recognized factor of political life in Ukraine. But is this the only aspect of Galician dissatisfaction with the regime? At least in the strategies of the proponents of Galician regionalism, we do not see attempts to mobilize people against this power-block, to build up a political alliance; we do not see detailed projects of economic reforms. It seems that Galician regionalism signals other things.

The projected monument can be seen as a signifier not only of disappointment in "realities" but also of disappointment in the more general Ukrainian project. It is an attempt to revise the whole construction of the Ukrainian nation, the way it was imagined in the nineteenth century. It is difficult to characterize the current Ukrainian state as a nation-state – it does not "nationalize":⁹ Ukrainian identity is still unstable, Ukrainian citizenship is not much of an asset, not only economic but also cultural capital flows are not regulated by the Ukrainian borders. To paraphrase Roman Szporluk, it is not clear if the Ukrainian state will provide better access to the world.¹⁰

I think that this growing dissatisfaction with the Ukrainian identity is the greatest resource of Galician regionalism. But this aspect, the non-Ukrainianness of the Ukrainian state does not figure prominently in the discourse of Galician regionalism, partly because this aspect has already been appropriated by the rhetoric of the nationalist parties, and partly because of the nature of the new Galician project. The distinctive feature of the discourse of Galician regionalism is "Central Europe." In terms of the political criticism of the Ukrainian state expressed by Galician regionalism, this state as a whole is too slow, or not at all eager to enter this particular space, in which Galicia shares while the rest of Ukraine does not. I would argue that "Central Europe" in this case covers Galicia's longing for the modern nation-state that contemporary Ukraine is failing to consolidate (in the address cited at the beginning of the paper Central Europe is imagined as a circle of free nations).

My position is that instead of speaking about popular sentiments and analyzing the assumed distinctness of Galicians (or, at least, of L'viv's population) vis-à-vis other Ukrainians, we should look into how these differences have been created and how this new Galician identity has been constructed in close connection with the symbol of "Central Europe." Political and economic factors play a huge role but these "factors" are accessible only as cultural manifestations within a clearly defined cultural field, represented in a certain way, appropriated and negotiated. These "factors" do not function independently of the cultural field in which they are placed. These "factors" do not constitute an independent referent, providing satisfactory answers in themselves. We should try to decipher how these "factors" serve as rhetorical strategies within the general discourse, and how they constitute the rules for constructing the referents we encounter in this discourse.

Like any other attempt to create a distinctive and more suitable (or, as the proponents of this movement would say, to uncover the real) identity, this modern Galician movement produces its own canon, which shows how Central European culture, which is the code in which these things are mediated, is created and how it signifies. A striking example of these attempts at codification is to be found in the ninth issue of Ji journal published in 1997, the issue of a Cultural Studies (kul'turolohichnyi) journal dedicated to Central Europe. Let's look at the contributors to this Central European issue. We have poets, prose writers, political scientists, Otto von Habsburg, literary critics and philosophers (for the complete list of the authors see Appendix A). To gather all these texts in one issue makes very little sense unless we understand that it creates its own "order of things," and targets intellectuals to whom such an order appeals. Contributors from "Central Europe" come from Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland and Ukrainian Galicia; the gender ratio is 34 men to 3 women. The underlying myth is a common set of high culture products, knowledge of which defines Central Europe. A certain mode of cultural production determines the existence of Central Europe and indicates the eastern border of that space. This is Kundera's Central Europe with an emphasis on the Ukrainian parts of the Habsburg Empire. It is very important to note that the issue codifies a larger space, of which Galicia is an integral part.¹¹

I do not want to create the impression that all this Galician business is just a pig-headed attempt to create one more outpost of "Europe." I believe that there is much more to it. I must say that the perspective of Galician regionalism is actually very appealing because it is a counter-hegemonic project (if we assume that hegemony is a useful term for the description of the cultural politics in contemporary Ukraine), probably the only project in contemporary Ukraine that pays attention to the identity politics involved and provides us with an opportunity to revise existing approaches which neglect a cultural perspective on the processes in contemporary Ukraine. Sometimes it makes me feel that Galician is, in fact, the only "real" regionalism in contemporary Ukraine.

Because I do not believe in the continuity of culture and in history as a flow of events that naturally sorts things out, I will be looking here at historical aspects of Galician regionalism, which does not mean that a spatial program for Galicia or a geography of this new regionalism is unproblematic. The articulation of the Habsburg heritage forces us to put together Galicia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia, and not pay attention to the fact that the latter "experienced" the Habsburg rule very differently from the former two. At the same time, Volyn', which is in many aspects quite close to Galicia, which shared with the latter the "experience" of being part of the interwar Polish state, and which for the average citizen of Ukraine or the former Soviet Union (who would never use word like Halychyna (Galicia)) is definitely part of "Western Ukraine," is excluded from this space. But in the narratives of modern identity, space is constructed through historical time, and the historical narratives surrounding this Galician revival are very revealing of its formation and its problems.

On one hand, those telling this particular version of Ukrainian Galician history are fully aware of their connection with the present. Taras Batenko, for example, writes that:

Taras Batenko's presentation was published in L'viv regional council's official newspaper. Taras Batenko, who did his undergraduate in history and his Ph.D. in Political Science in L'viv, specialized in nineteenth century Habsburg politics; therefore it is surprising to find in his presentation statements like: "… democratic centralism, as it is known, he [Franz Joseph I] changed with the liberal parliamentary regime, then tightened the screws once more, and loosened them again introducing significant liberal reforms in 1860." He mentions "democratic centralism" more than once; however, as far as I know, no account of Austrian history prior to 1860 does likewise.¹⁴

It is interesting that Kost' Bondarenko's more "sober" talk has not been published, whereas Taras Batenko's historical outburst has. Both speakers claim to arrive at their views by engaging with historical material which opened their eyes to the "real" position of Galicia, its "real" cultural face. That is where they cease to be present-oriented. They claim to find "real" history, one that formed the place in which they live, more than any other history.

The number of historical articles and monographs on Ukrainian Galicia grew with an amazing speed during the 1990s. All of them in one way or another contribute to the construction of Galician identity but I will look at a particularly recent piece, one directly connected with the events, people and media I have been discussing. An example of serious historical discourse which wholeheartedly supported this construction and seemed in touch with public debate appeared in Postup (no surprise here) on May 30, 2000. It was the full version of a paper delivered by Vasyl' Rasevych at a seminar of the Ji journal on May 11, 2000. The article is entitled "Austrian Ukrainians between National Idea and Imperial Loyalty."

The article begins with a statement about the possible political consequences of research on this topic: "Many Ukrainian politicians will easily discern in this topic a danger to the independence and unity of the Ukrainian state." Is this a confession of a partisan of the Galician revival? Not exactly, because his views are based on the uncovering of the real past against the ideological schemata that have shaped and still influence research on Ukrainian history. Rasevych states that many contemporary Ukrainian historians are not that different from the historians of the Soviet time; they accepted the new ideological scheme of Ukrainian nationalism just as they worked in the older Soviet Marxist style. The author himself arrived at the ideas expressed in this presentation after working on the history of the Ukrainian National Democratic Party in Galicia. While working on the project, he discovered that the Ukrainian parties in Galicia had before 1918 never thought about the creation of an independent Ukraine (they merely claimed cultural unity with other Ukrainians in the Russian Empire), and he explains that the difference between Galician and Russian Ukraine was obvious for the Galician Ukrainians. World War I separated Ukrainians on both sides of the border even more than they were separated before. That is why the Austrian Ukrainians proclaimed a Ukrainian state in the Austrian Empire and why they did not want to join the "Greater Ukraine," when the Western Ukrainian Popular Republic was created in November 1918.

It is highly symptomatic of modern identities to privilege certain chronotopes and to suppress temporal reorganizations of space. That is why Vasyl' Rasevych omits the question of which kind of Ukrainian state was in the Russian Ukraine in November 1918, and the debates surrounding the union of the two states. He prefers to explain the behavior of the Western Ukrainian state through the differences between the Austrian and Russian Empires. (For the summary of this point from his own paper see Appendix B.) But the problem is that when he discusses differences, he accepts the usual schema of Ukrainian history. Many of the differences he articulates can be found in Shlemkevych's Halychanstvo; others appeared in interwar publications dealing with the problems of the defeat and tensions between the two states. The new thing is that while in these older texts the differences were presented as written onto the singular material of the Ukrainian nation with the same texture, a texture that was more important than fractures in it, in Rasevych's narrative this common texture of the nation disappears and fractures are absolutized. Again, Vasyl' Rasevych tries to define the properties of Galician Ukraine – conservatism, parliamentary democracy, lawyers as political leaders, national consciousness –, the properties whose traces will prove the existence of the autonomous subject who possesses them. In the same way as all projects that aim to become dominant, he does not attribute positive or independent properties to the adversary; the "Other" is defined solely through negation. His discussion of the encounters between the two Ukraines proves this: Eastern intellectuals were not able to understand Galicia (Drahomanov), Eastern symbols could not be appropriated on Galician soil (Cossack ideal).

As you see, all his points are based more on the assumed explicit opposition between Galicia and the rest of Ukraine than on any claims to engage with the historical sources. He explains the behavior of the Western Ukrainian state through the difference between the realities of the Austrian and Russian Empires.

I will now turn to a Polish historian who recently published a book on Ukrainian-Polish relations to show how Rasevych's construction mirrors Partacz's, substituting Ukrainians with Eastern Ukrainians and Poles with Galician Ukrainians. Actually, two sections from Partacz's book (see Appendix C) describe the object of Rasevych's research, precisely Ukrainian national democracy, in a totally different light. This does not mean that I like Partacz's book; I actually believe that Partacz applies to the relations between Poles and Ukrainians the procedure Rasevych used with Galicians and Eastern Ukrainians. When you read Polish sources from the beginning of the 20th century, you have the impression that they attribute to the Galician Ukrainians all the "negative" properties – like social radicalism, rhetoric instead of pragmatism, inciting popular sentiments, unfitness for parliamentary procedures – which Rasevych attributes to the Russian Ukraine.¹⁵

This problem, that historians are somehow inclined to see regions like Central Europe in terms of continuity and a stable identity informed by absolutized "historical experience," is not limited to Ukrainian history. The vision of history as a flow of events that determines boundaries and not of history as a contemporary and political discourse still informs much historical writing. Allow me to cite a passage from Aleksei Miller's article on the concept of Central Europe:

The question right now is neither about Galicia nor Ukraine. One of the points, on which I believe this construction rests, is that Galicia is more Ukrainian than the rest of Ukraine. Right now the idea of a separate Galician state is not in the public discourse. But this does not make this project less important. The question is what kind of Galicia, what kind of Ukraine and what kind of Central Europe. At the very same time when the 170^th anniversary of Emperor Franz Joseph was being celebrated in L'viv, there took place across the border, in a small Polish town, an international festival dedicated to the good soldier Swejk. Admirers of Hasek and his famous novel gathered at this festival but no Ukrainian or Galician delegations attended, despite the fact that in the book Swejk's odyssey ends in Ukrainian Galicia, near the small town of Felshtyn in the later Sambir district.

The new cultural movement I have been attempting to describe is trying to resist the dominant tendencies of the Ukrainian state, but in this attempt it is resorting to the old methods of historical construction. Trying to overthrow the singular narrative of Ukrainian national history, its historians are creating a similarly singular version of Galician Ukrainian history, culture, etc. Trying to oppose a strong Ukrainian state and to create an independent public sphere in Galicia, intellectuals at the same time open this public sphere only to a certain kind of debate, to a certain kind of politics, and envision a Galician identity which is (from my point of view) very problematic.

Is there any way to transform this still somehow sympathetic project into something different, something able to accommodate different kinds of history and to redefine Central Europe and Galicia while avoiding the construction of a homogenous cultural space enclosed by the boundaries of identity?

Iurii Andrukhovych is a name one often runs across in the discussions, such as during the seminar dedicated to the anniversary celebrations of Franz Joseph's birthday. For example, it was said that "The theorization of this nostalgia of Western Ukrainians for the times of Austria-Hungary (which they know only from their grandparents' stories), we can find in the several essays by Iurii Andrukhovych in his latest book Disorientation in place. Attempts…"¹⁷ While I agree that Andrukhovych in these essays theorizes Galicia, Central Europe, and Ukraine – the spaces of his poetry and prose –, I also believe that he is too often misread by his interpreters, especially with respect to his views on Galicia and Central Europe.

Let's start with temporality, which, paradoxically, is missing from the narratives of the historians constructing this Ukrainian Galicia. Unlike the Galicia of the serious historians, which is still intact, Andrukhovych's Galicia is no longer there. About the quintessential Galician city of Stanislaviv, he writes: "today it is almost non-existent." The past has passed, it is lost, his Galicia is the product of imagination. He started imagining it when he came to study in L'viv, he constructed it in opposition to the "realities" of the city, with its bee-hive-like apartment-blocks dominated by the newcomers from the countryside, and by Soviet mass culture. His Galicia, with its Polish Counts and Barons, its balls, its Yiddish speaking Jews, Ukrainian peasants unspoilt by industrialization (or Sovietization), has nothing in common with the contemporary Western Ukraine except that it's the same territory. His Galicia was possible only because of the Soviet system in and against which it was constructed.

In claiming that Andrukhovych has been misread, I am not saying that I do not see any problems with his narratives. There is, especially in the earlier essays, an elitism, a nostalgia for a high culture that has disappeared, and simplifying statements about cultures and people, but even in these earlier essays, there is also irony and self-irony. Only those totally charmed by his style or those expecting to find only an apologia of Galicia will not notice it. He makes "points" about what Galicia did for Ukrainian culture but at the end he says that, probably, some "points" could have been made differently, even all of them, because if something is left from this Galicia, it cannot be caught, and if it is caught, it is no longer something left. Moreover, in his later essays, the image of his Galicia changes significantly.

His essay on L'viv starts with the quotation that on the spot where the Carpathian mountains now stand, millions years ago there was a sea. And now, L'viv is positioned on the watershed which, in fact, should be viewed not as a watershed but a joint. The sea is gone and L'viv suffers from a lack of water supplies. This is an allegory of culture. With all the talk about multiculturalism, especially in the context of Central Europe, the most important thing about that multiculturalism is that it belong to the past. That is why it is so easy to talk about it now. Those who see the Habsburg Empire as a multicultural society can do so easily because this multiculturalism is pacified by the framework of the contemporary state borders. Discussing the multiculturalism of days gone by is a handy way for not discussing the new multicultural problems of Central Europe, such as those connected with migration and racism. That is why Andrukhovych says that "Idyllic and painless multilayerdness of cultures is a myth and I am not sure that this myth is harmless."¹⁸

Andrukhovych's Europe, especially Western Europe, the real one, the one not discussed much in this Galician regionalism, is not as innocent and idyllic as those would have it who state that Galicia belongs to the European imagination. Andrukhovych is able to go there because his visa to Germany was signed by Rainer Maria Rilke whose poems he was translating; the knowledge of high culture, and participation in it, gave him access to this materialized paradise. Even there he is not quite happy with living in a comfortable villa close to Munich; the paradise does not substitute for his imagined Galicia. In Europe he is searching for the carnival but carnival escapes him or rather he cannot catch up with it. His essays stress the discrepancy between Europe imagined by Europeans and Europe imagined in Galicia: "the point is that we are happy in our own ways. And for that we should be paid a tribute – we are happy because we do not know anything about the world."¹⁹

And this is not just the matter of Galicia not knowing Europe, it is also about Europe's attitude towards places like Galicia. In the essay "After the Ball," he describes this as follows:

Let's go back to the first essay in the collection, "Erts-herts-perts." On the one hand, the Habsburg Monarchy is praised for things for which Ukrainians should be grateful to this Empire, such as the Ukrainian language, the touch of European culture. On the other hand, this Empire is an encounter, and not an enclosed space, an encounter which is not a belonging. The title of this essay, the nonsensical "erts-herts-perts," is the answer of a Galician peasant recruit requested to repeat the rank and name of his superior, "Erzherzog Albert von Toskana." According to Andrukhovych, this is the "diagnosis" of "everything we do," of Ukraine and of Ukrainian. It is a mockery and dislocation of meaning. It is a mockery not just of the Empire but of Ukrainian attempts to belong to Europe as well. But the imagined belonging of Ukrainians to the European space is not important for Andrukhovych, because "the most important thing in my project is the evening wind, the flight of quiet angels, which adds to everything an unstable, slightly disheveled appearance."²²

In the last essay of the collection, Andrukhovych develops the idea of Galicia as a marginal and marginalized space, which does not mesh well with the established construction of the Ukrainian nation (see Appendix D). But it does not mesh well with the imagined Central European space either. Andrukhovych stresses Galicia's hybrid nature and is obviously responding to attempts to codify this Galician space in the ways I have discussed. Andrukhovych is against the essentialization of differences; differences are always in the process of being made, they are always used and appropriated. This kind of view allows Galicia to enter the discursive field while remaining a minority discourse. Andrukhovych's Galicia recognizes the minority position as legitimate for articulation and provides an opportunity to avoid this striving to become dominant.

While Disorientation in place is about space, in a more recent article, "Central-Eastern Revision," Andrukhovych tackles time.²³ There is a fascination with the past, an addiction to the past, in his part of the world, which he shares: "since early childhood I have been attracted by ruins." Andrukhovych defends this kind of historical consciousness but stresses that his ruins are different from those of many other historians: "it could be just the smell and it could have nothing to do with Geist.²⁴

Andrukhovych starts with his personal history. He pieces together his personal narratives, memories from his youth, memories of his grandparents and parents. By doing so he shows that this is not about recalling – his personal history is about constructing. He shows how Central Europe is constructed in his case and implies that larger histories use similar mnemonic techniques. History is constructed but it cannot be controlled; because of its memory-like nature history always remains a journey.

His family's journey begins with a Sudeten German who arrives in Galicia. Then there is his grandfather's father who gets run over by a streetcar in Chicago; his wife goes there to search for the husband, gets rich (by Galician standards) and returns. Left alone, his grandfather travels west to reach the "Great Water" which took his parents; the "great water" he reaches is actually the Danube: "The little boy is contemplating the river. Beyond the river the New World begins. On the other side of the Danube America lies, in fact, the future, on the other side of the Danube everything that, with time, will come true (or will not come true)." Later, the grandfather, now a former Austrian officer, fights in the ranks of the Ukrainian Galician Army in 1918-1919 and dies in 1944, killed on a train by the airplane he and other volunteers had taken on their way to join the Ukrainian army which had been created by the Nazis to fight on the Eastern front: "His devilish ally was slowly losing the war, but like thousands of optimists he had not given up the hope that in the result of the final collision between the brown and red Satan it would possible to liberate the country."²⁵ It is a typical Central European death which Andrukhovych characterizes as a "prison or camp death and a collective one." He dies in the train and so his Central European journey ends, a journey which is always an escape.

A key figure in the essay is Andrukhovych's father. His Central European journey took place in 1944-1945. He is the one traveling as a child in a train of refugees from Galicia, a train which is an ideal society, having its own lawyers who rule, artists who perform, boy scouts who exercise and so on. And this society moves west. The train is a symbol, a tool of modernity, changing its connotation from the first trains of progress to the trains heading for Auschwitz. The trip ends in Vienna, and his father discovers his own "great water" but he didn't arrive there in search of it, as had been the case with the grandfather. He had been brought there by the "Central European fear," a fear that swings between two anxieties: "The Germans are coming, the Russians are coming." Propelled by fear, the train with his father arrives at the banks of the Danube and there the father discovers a perfect thing, the Riesenrad in the Prater. This ferris wheel is something Andrukhovych could not understand: when he was leaving for a conference in Vienna his father told him that he must see this ferris wheel in the Prater: "I wanted to answer: 'why in the hell do I, with my 37 years, need this Riesenrad,' but, thank God, I did not."²⁶

His father has no other connection with the Habsburg Empire and with Vienna except this ferris wheel, and Andrukhovych realizes the importance of the wheel only when his father dies. The father who had grown up on Westerns in interwar Poland, and who had enriched his vocabulary during his service in the Soviet Army. This father stands for a different kind of Central Europe, defined not through "belonging" but through its "in-between" position. Just like that Central Europe, Andrukhovych's Galicia is shaped by an acute awareness of modernity. For him, Galicia is not only after totalitarianism, it is a place still very sensitive to any kind of totalitarianism. "Russians go, Germans" and "Central European fear" in Andrukhovych's essay go beyond a geopolitical conceptualization of Central Europe between two great powers. His view is that totalitarianism is not as much past as it isa series of projects that are still possible. Some critics wonder why, despite all his postmodernity, quite often for Andrukhovych "white is white, black is black and red is red."²⁷ I would say this is because "postmodern" for him means this acute awareness of the consequences of certain projects and the imperative to react to them. To the projects trying to stop the ferris wheel of the Central European space.

If we go back to history, Andrukhovych says, "Fortunately I live in the part of the world where the past is terribly important. Some call it rootedness and some –obsession. I do not know what to call it: it just that this part of the world has too many ruins, too many skeletons under one's feet. Fortunately I cannot get rid of that… I'm worth nothing without my memory…"²⁸ For him this attitude to the past and this work with memory retains its critical potential because histories are not only about remembering but even more about forgetting. Andrukhovych's history is an alternative to the linear time of Enlightenment, to the time that arrests memories and anchors identities.

We can assume a "criminal" thought that the differences between the Austrian and Russian Ukrainians, and not tactical considerations, were the main obstacle [to unification in 1918]. We can provisionally divide the factors that contributed to these differences into the following groups:

a) those determined by the peculiarities of the process of national self-identification of the Austrian Ukrainians

b) those determined by the peculiarities of the social structure and political leadership.

Among factors in the first category we can put the following:

* The political modernization of Austrian Ukrainians took place under the conditions of a constitutional state while Russian Ukrainians were elected to the Council for the first time in 1906. This means that they had almost no experience of legal and constitutional work.

* The process of national self-identification among Austrian Ukrainians was intrinsic and not unidirectional. Apart from the problems of self-identification, there were difficulties with the acceptance of the names "Ukraine" and "Ukrainian," which were new for Galicia and Bukovina.

* The idea of a united and independent Ukraine adopted by Ukrainians in Austria was that of a nation to be realized in a distant future, rather than during their lifetimes. This could be explained by the discontinuity of the state tradition which transformed the idea of unification into a purely theoretical demand which did not always work out in practice and did not produce the expected results during the process of national mobilization.

* The differences in the national characters of the Austrian and Dnieper Ukrainians did nothing to contribute to the assertion of an ideology of unification. Particularly, we are talking about differences in the historical tradition (the experience of living in different state-political formations), the mental and confessional division between Greek-Catholic and Orthodox (including the whole complex of stereotypical images of the other), a lack of information about the other and of cultural exchange caused by the existence of the state border, and totally different policies of these states regarding the national question. All these differences were caused by the fact that Ukrainians entered the process modern political nation formation while remaining in two totally different political systems, which were also different mentally.

On the factors in the second category:

* Politically, Austrian Ukrainians matured under the conditions of a constitutional monarchy. There were no persecutions by the Austrian authorities based on the principle of nationalism. The availability of the parliamentary tribune and a comparatively liberal law on the freedom of assembly provided an opportunity to conduct political struggles by legal means.

* The political leadership of the Austrian Ukrainians consisted of up to 80% lawyers, which is why all their activities were dominated by the principle of legalism. At the same time, in the Russian Empire the prohibition of a Ukrainian movement in any form led to the formation of a group of activists inclined to illegal action. Because of the persecutions of the Ukrainian movement in the Russian state and the comparatively favorable conditions for the national development in the Austrian one, the only legitimate source of power for the Galician Ukrainians was the Habsburg state.

* The conservatism of the Ukrainian Galician environment was marked by the significant participation of the Greek Catholic clergy in the political process, while in the Dnieper Ukraine that movement had leftist leanings.

* The fact that Ukrainians were staying in the Austrian state created a numerically small but influential patriotic group, whose political credo can be described as schwarzgelb [monarchist]. These were the patriots of the Habsburg state; for them loyalty to the ruling dynasty was of utmost importance and determined their identity to a significant extent.

* Simultaneously, the Ukrainian national movement in the Russian empire did not have the characteristics of a mass movement, while in the Austrian part the opposite was true.

* The social structure of the Ukrainian society in Austria was more developed that in Russia.

* In the Habsburg Empire, national mobilization penetrated all levels of Ukrainian society, while in Russia it was limited to the narrow circle of the Ukrainian intelligentsia.

"Among the national-populists, extremist and radical groups were prevailing. The moderates Olesnyts'kyi or Vasyl'ko counted less and less in the internal political games. Each time, a more radical tone was set in the Ukrainian press, and changes in provincial and state politics towards more radical tactics were encouraged. Svoboda encouraged expelling Polish and Russian occupants from Ukrainian soil. One of the most active local politicans of the UNDP, Rev. S. Onyshkevych, called in Dilo for "courage and warrior skills." Ievhen Olesnyts'kyi tried to prove that parlamentary obstruction was the only way to achieve numerous goals. After the meeting of the Ukrainian deputies to the State Council, which took place in L'viv on March 6, 1908, there was no doubt that deputies with extremist views gained the upper hand" (221).

Galicia is a non-Ukraine, some kind of geographical makeweight, Polish hallucination. Galicia is thoroughly dummy and doll-like, puffed up, in everything and everywhere trying to impose upon Ukraine its non-Ukrainian will, that has been infused in dark Zionist laboratories. Galicia is deprived of epic, this is the place where from time immemorial the anecdote reigns, and base ones at that.

To be more precise, this is a rootless space, fit only for nomadic tribes – hence all those Armenians, Gypsies, Karaims and Hassids. Galicia is a Philistine motherland of Freemasonry and Marxism. Galicia is mischievous and false, it is a stinking menagerie overfilled with serpents and chimeras, Galicia is good only for mutants like Bruno Schulz or all those petty Stanislaviv Kafkas, and if you are not a mutant but let's say a Stefanyk, the only thing left to you is the inevitable taking to drink in the first available Rusiv. …

The ironic tone fits perfectly here. All Galicia is ironic and immoral; that is why this eternal tergiversation and being accomodating, permanent Uniate-ness, children sold to America. Galicia is ostentatious and superficial, like plated mannequins; ridiculous shuffling in all directions, kissing hands and door-knobs with a preserved peasant smack; Galicia is endless and drowsy boringly hackneyed conversations about Europe, Europa, Ouropa, about "we are also in Europe," while the whole printed production of Galicia can be accommodated in the single mid-sized L'viv suitcase…