'For the Future Ukrainian Science': Contesting Polish Rule and Constructing Western Ukraine in the Memoirs on the Polish-Ukrainian War

• In Event: Official Narratives and Repressed Voices on the Disputed Territory of Habsburg Galicia in the Interwar Period

Abstract

The Western Ukrainian People’s Republic and its Ukrainian Galician Army were unsuccessful in defending their state-building attempt both on the battlefield and in international diplomacy, which brought the dreams of the involved nation-builders to an abrupt end. Since the pivotal Battle of L’viv, Ukrainian memoirists produced countless accounts on the struggle, addressed either to “the future Ukrainian science” or to a broader readership.
Institutionalized in the ranks of the army, in POW camps and Ukrainian publishing houses, meticulous instructions for the writing of memoirs were circulated amongst participants of the battles, appropriating these Polish patterns of knowledge-production and adjusting them to the Ukrainian realities. Ukrainian elites thereby attempted to delegitimize the Polish interpretation of the events while attempting to install a generic Western Ukrainian narrative both for the national and the international audience.
Even though these projects remained fruitless on the level of international politics, they shaped the Ukrainian ‘culture of defeat’ and the interrelated understanding of the contested space of the former Eastern Galicia. This paper investigates how such memoirs co-constructed the discourse on ‘Western Ukraine’ and the western Ukrainian borderlands in the interwar period, namely the politically and culturally contested Lemko and Hutsul regions in the eastern Carpathians.

Author

• Martin Rohde, U of Vienna (Austria)