Europe: A History (166 page)
Nevertheless, nationalism did not only flourish where it was most likely to succeed: on the contrary, it thrived on deprivation and repression. One might almost say that the fervency of the national ideal increased in proportion to the improbability of its success. Throughout the century, committed national activists strove to arouse the consciousness of the people whom they wished to recruit. Poets, artists, scholars, politicians appealed to six main sources of information to construct the image of reality that was to inspire the faithful.
History was raked to furnish proof of the nation’s age-long struggle for its rights and its land. Prehistory was a favourite subject, since it could be used to substantiate claims to aboriginal settlement. Where facts could not be found, recourse had to be made to myth or to downright invention. National heroes and heroines, and distant national victories, were unearthed to be praised. Anything of universal interest was ignored. Anything that reflected discredit on the nation, or credit on its foes, was passed over.
Language was reformed and standardized as proof of the nation’s separate and unique identity. Dictionaries and grammars were compiled, and libraries collected, where none had existed before. Textbooks were prepared for national schools and national universities. Linguists set out to show that previously neglected vernaculars were every bit as sophisticated as Latin or Greek; that Czech or Catalan or Gaelic or Norwegian was every bit as efficient a means of communication as the existing state languages. The Norwegian case was specially interesting. A composite construct of peasant dialects called
nynorsk
or
landsmål
(New Norse or ‘country language’) was invented in order to challenge the established
riksmål
or
bokmål
(the ‘state language’/’book language’ of Denmark and Norway). The New Norse movement, which came to a head in 1899, saw itself as the necessary partner to the drive for political independence. But like Gaelic in Ireland, it achieved only limited success,
[NORGE]
ABKHAZIA
T
HE
Abkhazians are a small nation of less than a quarter of a million souls living on the Black Sea Coast some 300 miles east of the Crimea. Their chief city is Sukhum or Sukhumi. Their language and Moslem culture, which resemble those of the Circassians, have little in common either with the Russians to the north or the Christian Georgians to the east. They say that they live ‘at the end of Europe’.
The site of a medieval kingdom, which flourished under Byzantine-Greek influence, Abkhazia has always occupied a vital location linking southern Russia with the Caucasus. Its conquest by the Tsars between 1810 and 1864 (see Appendix III, p. 1290) forced many natives to flee. From 1931, it became one of three nominally autonomous republics within the Georgian SSR; and a major influx of Russians and Mingrelian-Georgians turned the local population into an absolute minority in their own land. Stalin’s police chief, Beria, who was himself a Mingrelian, deported the entire community of Pontic Greeks whilst initiating the brutal policy of georgianization.
Hence, when Georgia broke free from Moscow in 1991, the Abkhazians sought a measure of genuine self-rule from Georgia. Yet their conflict with Tiflis during the devastating Georgian civil war of 1992–3 only opened the way for the re-occupation of Abkhazia by Russian forces. As a foreign reporter was told by a Cossack ataman, the fate of peripheral territories like Abkhazia or the Kurile Islands would test Russia’s greatness. ‘These are ours—and that’s the truth.’
1
Discord among the ex-Soviet nationalities was fuelling an ugly brand of Russian nationalism. Voices in Moscow called for the re-conquest of Russia’s ‘near abroad’. For after Abkhazia, there waited several further targets for Russian intervention, including Tatarstan and Chechenia, and other non-Russian lands within the Russian Federation. Sooner or later, Russia would be forced to choose between its new-style democracy and its old-style imperialism.
Folklore, or
Volkskunde
, was mined for all it was worth. For one thing, it was thought to join the modern nation to its most ancient cultural roots; for another, its authenticity could not be easily checked. Unlike Herder, whose collection of
Volkslieder
(1778) had included songs from Greenland to Greece, nationalist scholars confined themselves to national folklore. In this connection, the work of the brothers Jakob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859) must be regarded as seminal. Their huge range included the
über den altdeutschen Meistergesang
, the
Deutsche Sagen
, the
Deutsche Grammatik
, and the world-famous
Kinder- und
Hausmârchen
(1812–15), ‘Grimms’ Tales’. Their Serbian contemporary Vuk Karadzic* (1787–1864) published a well-known collection of Serbo-Slavonic tales in addition to his grammar, his dictionary, and his reform of the Cyrillic alphabet,
[KALEVALA]
Religion was mobilized to sanctify national sentiment, and in many instances to erect barriers between ethnic groups. For national Protestant or Orthodox Churches this form of separatism had long existed. But even the Roman Catholic religion could be turned against its universal mission, to separate Croats from Serbs, to keep Lithuanians immune from russification, or Poles from germaniza-tion. In some countries Christians looked on bemused as interest was revived in the rites and practices of the nation’s pagan gods. Welsh Baptist ministers dressed up as Druids at the Welsh national
Eisteddfod;
the Germanic gods rode again on the stage and page of imperial Germany,
[SHAMAN]
Racial theories exerted powerful attractions. The notion of a Caucasian race was invented in the late eighteenth century. The allied notion of the ‘Aryan race’ was first uttered in 1848 by a German professor in Oxford, Max Muller. Every nationality in Europe was tempted to conceive of itself as a unique racial kinship group, whose blood formed a distinct and separate stream. Extraordinary interest was devoted to ethnology, and to the study of ‘racial types’ that supposedly corresponded to each of the modern nations. In London, the Royal Historical Society sponsored a series of experiments on its Fellows showing that the brain-pans of those with Celtic names were inferior to those of Anglo-Saxon origin.
27
(There is no hope for the Davieses.) In Germany, the science of eugenics came up with similar results. Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), an Englishman resident in Germany, narrowed the creative race from Aryans to Teutons. ‘True history’, he wrote, ‘begins from the moment when the German with mighty hand seizes the inheritance of antiquity.’ Or again, ‘Whoever maintains that Christ was a Jew is either ignorant or dishonest.’
28
[CAUCASIA]
In Russia, the pan-Slav movement was loaded with racial overtones. Arguing for the unification of all Slav peoples under the aegis of the Tsar, it often assumed that political solidarity would emerge from the (non-existent) racial affinity of the Slavs. It enjoyed little resonance among Catholic Poles and Croats, who had both produced earlier versions of pan-Slavism, and who now countered with scientific papers showing that the Russians were really slavicized Finns.
29
It enjoyed its greatest currency amongst Serbs, Czechs, and Bulgars, all of whom looked to Russia for liberation. Russian nationalism, blended with pan-Slavism, exhibited unparalleled messianic fervour. Dostoevsky could wring an optimistic note from the most unpromising material:
Our great people were brought up like beasts. They have suffered tortures ever since they came into being, tortures which no other people could have endured but which only made them stronger and more compact in their misfortunes … Russia, in conjunction with Slavdom, and at its head, will utter to the world the greatest word ever heard; and that word will be a covenant of human fellowship… [For] the Russian national idea, in the last analysis, is but the universal fellowship of man.
30
This was wishful thinking on a scale well suited to the country concerned.
KALEVALA
T
HE
Kalevala
or ‘Land of Heroes’ is generally regarded as the national epic of the Finns. It is a poem of some 50 cantos or 22,795 lines, published first in 1835 and in its second, definitive edition in 1849. It is a semi-literary epic compiled largely from authentic folklore. In fact it is, in large measure, the product of its main compiler, Elias Lönnrot (1802–84), who used classical models to transform and embellish the raw oral materials which he had collected among the peasants of eastern Finland and Russian Karelia. As such, it illustrates not only the legacy of Europe’s pagan folklore but also the process whereby nineteenth-century activists drew on neglected popular sources to create a national consciousness. Herder (1744–1803) had established the idea that modern nations can only flourish when they possess a distinct cultural identity based on the vernacular language and on popular traditions. The
Kalevala
was a Herderian exercise
par excellence
.
In Lönnrot’s time the Finns passed from rule by Sweden to that of Tsarist Russia, and were feeling the urge to dissociate themselves from the culture of their Swedish and Russian masters. The stories centre on Vainamoinen, the ‘Eternal Sage’ who presides over the land of Kalevala, leading it in the struggle against Pohjola, peopled by gods, giants, and unseen spirits:
| Siitävanha Väinämöinen, | Then the aged Vainamoinen |
| Laskea karehtelevi | Went upon his journey singing, |
| Venehellà vaskisella, | Sailing in his boat of copper, |
| Kuutilla kuparisella | In his vessel made of copper, |
| Ylaisihin maaemihin | To the land beneath the heavens |
| Alaisihin taivosihin. | Sailed away to loftier regions. |
| Sinne puuttui pursinensa, | There he rested with his vessel |
| Venehinensà vàsàhyti. | Rested weary, with his vessel, |
| Jàtti kantelon jalille, | But his kantele he left us, |
| Soiton Suomelle sorean, | Left his charming harp in Suomi, |
| Kansalle ilon ikuisen, | For his people’s lasting pleasure, |
| Laulut suuret lapsillensa. | Mighty songs for Suomi’s children. 1 |
All the nations of Europe passed through the phase of compiling, romanticizing, and inventing their folklore. The republication of the Arthurian romances of Chretien de Troyes and Sir Thomas Malory belonged to the same trend. Even the Americans wanted to participate; and Lonnrot’s work exerted a strong influence on the
Hiawatha
(1855) of Henry Longfellow, who knew a German translation of
Kalevala
published in 1851 by a member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg.
National epics such as the Finnish
Kalevala
or the Welsh
Mabinogion
held special significance for those nations whose drive towards a separate cultural identity was inhibited by political dependence. It is not surprising to find that both
Hiawatha
and the
Kalevala
had been translated into Polish by the 1860s.
SHAMAN
T
HE
Shaman, or tribal ‘medicine man’, is a well-known figure among the native peoples of Siberia, and further afield among the Innuit and Amerindians. Folk healer, sage, and magician, he is a member of an immemorial profession whose potions, rituals, and proverbs give him unique authority. Dressed perhaps in a horned mask, and carrying the characteristic instrument of his trade, the drum, with which he communes with the spirits of wood, stone, and sky, he can be a force for good or for evil. He travels unseen to the other worlds, above and below, and brings mankind the wisdom of the Great Spirit. Shamanism has survived until modern times in many remote parts of Russia; but it is not entirely expected in Central Europe.
1
Women, too, can shamanize.
In Hungary, controversy over the origins of the Magyars raged throughout the nineteenth century. They were popularly thought to be related to the Huns,
[csaba]
But scholars thought otherwise. One school looked to Iranian or Khazar forebears. Another, founded by Janos Sajnovits (1733–85), looked farther to the east. Since then, the Finno-Ugrian connection has been definitively proved by philologists, archaeologists, and anthropologists. A burial site at Bol’she Tigan on the Kama River, for example, discovered in 1974, has been confirmed as one of the major staging-posts before the Magyars moved off to the West. Similarly, modern research into Magyar folklore has revealed numerous traces of Shamanism, thereby underscoring the once unsuspected association with Siberia.
2
All over Europe, every branch of art and literature was mobilized to illustrate and to embroider national themes. Poets sought to win the accolade of national bard or ‘poet laureate’. Novelists developed a penchant for writing historical or pseudo-historical romances about national heroes and national customs. The Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) were the acknowledged model in this field, although earlier examples can be found. A novel called
Thaddeus of Warsaw
(1803) by Jane Porter (1776–1850), who fictionalized the life of Kosciuszko, gained international celebrity. Painters and sculptors followed Romantic hankerings in the same direction. France’s leading Romantic, Victor Hugo (1802–85), contrived to shine in all fields at once.
Musicians recruited the harmonies and rhythms of their native folk dance and folksong to elaborate distinctive national styles that became the hallmark of numerous ‘national schools’. From the exquisite mazurkas and polonaises of Chopin and the Hungarian Rhapsodies of Liszt, a brilliant trail leads through the delights of the Czechs Bedfich Smetana (1824–84), Antonin Dvorak (1841–1904) and Leoá Janáéek (1854–1928); the Norwegian Edvard Grieg (1843–1907), the Finn
Jan Sibelius (1865–1957), and the Dane Carl Nielsen (1865–1931); the Spaniards Isaac Albeniz (1860–1909), Enrique Granados (1867–1916), and Manuel de Falla (1876–1946); the Hungarians Béla Bartók (1881–1945) and Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967); the Englishmen Edward Elgar (1857–1934), Frederick Delius (1862–1934), and Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958); and the famous Russian ‘Five’—Cesar Cui (1835–1916), Mily Balakirev (1836–1910), Alexander Borodin (1833–87), Nicholas Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1909) and Modeste Mussorgsky (1839–81). These national schools served to widen the social appeal of music. What is more, nations who were thwarted by the language barrier from furthering their cause through literature could address the whole of Europe through the concert hall.
