Natiology According to Olherd Bochkovsky
The name and scholarly heritage of Olherd Bochkovsky (1885-1939) are returning to the Fatherland with a bitter belatedness, although he was a prominent sociologist and public figure, one of the intellectual proselytizers who felt inseparable from Ukraine even when they stayed outside it. The return of Bochkovsky became possible as late as in the 1990s, when ideological considerations and bans no longer stifled the natural desire to know all that had been created by the Ukrainian diaspora on various continents.
It is still not so easy to write even a brief biography of Bochkovsky. For there are too many blank spaces in his life story. Browsing through the archives, Larysa Khosiayinova from the Kirovohrad Ivan Tobilevych (Karpenko-Karyi) Literary and Memorial Museum managed to find a Yelysavethrad (the city’s name before 1917 — Ed.) Roman Catholic register, which says that “a son named Hypolyt was born to the legitimate spouses, city dwellers, Apollon Bochkovsky and Anna, nee Rajecka” on March 1, 1885 “at Dolynska railway station” (now a district center in Kirivohrad oblast). Let the name of “Hypolyt” not misguide you: the newborn’s father, Apollon Boczkowski, was of Polish origin, while his mother came from a Lithuanian family — this in fact explains why the future scholar was given a double name unusual for Ukrainian steppes.
Yevhen Malaniuk mentioned Olherd Bochkovsky as a pupil at the Yelysavethrad municipal secondary school attended, at different times, by the Tobilevych brothers, Yevhen Chykalenko, K. Shymanovsky, H. Neihaus, Y. Yanovsky, as well as Malaniuk himself. Indeed, in 1899 Hypolyt and his family moved to Yelysavethrad when he was 14. Before that, he had gone for some period to a school in Katerynoslav, where his father, a railway station employee, was transferred. In all probability, Apollon Bochkovsky found himself in Yelysavethrad for the same reason: he was transferred to work there. The Bochkovskys’ address — KMRW Station, Yelysavethrad — recorded in school documents might mean that they rented a kind of apartment belonging to the Kharkiv-Mykolayiv Railroad. The Yelysavethrad railway station was a few minutes’ walk from the secondary school which Hypolyt and his younger brother Tadeusz were destined to go to for four years.
It follows from L. Khosiayinova’s materials that Hypolyt was one of the school’s best pupils. He was even exempt from tuition in the fifth, sixth, and seventh (final) grades, itself convincing proof of the schoolboy’s extraordinary progress. Hypolyt Bochkovsky passed all his graduation exams with honors and was awarded a secondary education certificate on June 8, 1903. The certificate marks Bochkovsky’s special achievements in the French and German languages, while his progress in Russian was assessed at four points, his only B grade. The school board of governors awarded him, along with the other three best graduates, the book The Travel of His Imperial Majesty’s Heir, the Tsarevich. This was the departure point of his lifetime journey.
Having studied at the St. Petersburg Forestry Institute for two years, Olherd-Hypolyt Bochkovsky had to emigrate to Bohemia after the revolutionary events of 1905. It is not so difficult to guess why he did so: of course, he took part in disturbances and aired anti-monarchical views. In Prague, he saw the Czech renaissance. Germanized intellectuals were returning to their ethnic roots, which could not escape Boczkowski’s notice. Nor did Professor Tomas Masaryk’s lectures on national problems in European countries leave him indifferent. Brought up in the Polish spirit (Olherd’s brother was a Catholic priest), Bochkovsky finally came to identify himself as a Ukrainian, although this occurred far from Ukraine.
On the eve of World War I, he joined the Prague branch of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Labor Party. In the times of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR), he served as secretary of the Ukrainian diplomatic mission in Prague (1918-1923). After the UNR collapsed, he got a job as a professor at the Ukrainian Economic Academy (UEA) in Podebrady. The UEA was founded in the spring of 1922 on the initiative of the Ukrainian Public Committee headed by Mykyta Shapoval and sponsored by Tomas Masaryk, President of the Czechoslovak Republic. Borys Martos and Yevhen Malaniuk reminisced that the very name of the institution was supposed to show a link with the traditions of the Kiev-Mohyla Academy and, at the same time, with the “primordial common European culture (the ancient).” The UEA was situated at Podebrady, near Prague, in what once was King George’s Hotel. The statute, approved by the Ministry of Farming, defined the establishment as a three-year private higher school. In 1922 the Czechoslovak government appropriated 140,000 korunas to set the UEA in motion, with half this amount to be utilized as students’ scholarships.
As Borys Martos wrote, “the majority of Czechs were rabid Russophiles, so they did not understand the aspirations of Ukrainians to form a state of their own.” For many of the former viewed a large and powerful Russia as the guarantor of Czech independent statehood (in other words, Slavic solidarity will counterbalance, if necessary, potential threats from Germany). It was necessary to explain to the local Podebrady populace who the Ukrainians were and what they wanted. Martos remembers that he was requested to deliver public explanatory lectures. This, too, brings up the name of our hero. “If I really did a good job,” he confessed, “I only did it thanks to Associate Professor Bochkovsky’s help. Being the UNR Mission secretary, living in Prague for many years and having perfect command of the Czech language, he personally knew a large number of Czech men of letters and political figures...”
Thus Bochkovsky was destined to take a major role in performing what his fellow countryman Yevhen Malaniuk called “the miracle in Podebrady.” He meant that “the Podebrady academy was... a laboratory that cultivated a new type of Ukrainian,” that “the academy taught to appreciate and respect the Human Personality in general and the Ukrainian Personality in particular and above all.” What also stands out in Malaniuk’s reasoning is the idea of the exclusive importance of a “cultural milieu” and his claim that “there is no politics without culture.”
A pedagogue, scholar and public figure, Olherd Bochkovsky was one of the creators of the “cultural milieu” Malaniuk spoke about on a festive occasion. The bibliography of his works begins with Czech-language publications dated 1907. They analyze the plight of the Ukrainian, Polish, and Finnish nations in the Russian Empire. In 1913, a few articles by Bochkovsky came out in the Moscow-based journal
Ukrainskaya zhizn (Ukrainian Life) edited by Symon Petliura. One of them was “Prof. T. G. Masaryk on the Ukrainian Question” (1913, No. 4). This seems to be the first comment of a Ukrainian scholar on the activities of the Czech philosopher and politician who became President of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918. Later on, in 1930, Bochkovsky published in Podebrady a large scholarly book T. G. Masaryk: the National Problem and the Ukrainian Question (an Attempt of Characterization and Interpretation), in which he focused a powerful spotlight on Tomas Masaryk’s activities.
It is Bochkovsky that natiology owes its name and existence to. His classic opus Introduction to Natiology was published in 1937 at Podebrady, republished in 1991-1992 in Munich, and an abridged version was put out in 1998 by the Kyiv-based Geneza Publishers.
While ethnology and ethnography study the initial phases of the formation of the ethnos (ethnogenesis), natiology is interested in the genesis of the nation, i.e., the making and development of modern nations. According to Boczkowski, the epoch of Western European ethnogenesis ended after the Great French Revolution. This was immediately followed by the reawakening of the so-called “non-historical” peoples, later to result in a true national renaissance of Europe, the springtime of peoples of 1848-1871.
Of special interest are Olherd Bochkovsky’s comments on the very idea of a nation. With due account of the objective attributes of a nation (the common territory, origin, language, religion, and customs), he still gives preference to the subjective factor. A modern nation cannot be formed without “national identity” and “national will” manifested in a nation’s aspiration for political independence and statehood. A NATION IS THE WILL TO BE A NATION! As to the role of language, the nation is not identical to language, but it still cannot be formed without a national language.
One of the branches of natiology is ethnonational politics which studies the political aspects of a nation’s existence, including the political self-determination of a nation. Quite important is his conclusion that “forced assimilation is a political anachronism” because “it ruins the foundation of a state by making the persecuted people redouble its strenuous efforts aimed at national liberation.” Soviet history, which culminated in the collapse of the communist superpower and in which the nationalities policy was oriented toward an accelerated “fusion of nations” in an internationalist ecstasy, in fact confirming the scholar’s observation.
Among Bochkovsky’s major opuses are The Captive Peoples of the Tsarist Empire, their National Renaissance and Quest for Autonomy (1916), Finland and the Finnish Question (1916), The National Cause: Articles on the National Question in Connection with the Ongoing War (1918), Natiology and Natiography (1913), The Struggle of Peoples for National Liberation (1932), among others. In the early 1930s Bochkovsky was member of the Famine Committee. What had far-reaching repercussions in 1933 was his Open Letter to French Senate President Edouard Herriot who refused to admit the fact of famine in Ukraine.
Olherd Bochkovsky was a man of judicious scholarship and a brilliant orator. He knew several languages, including Georgian and such rare tongues as Catalan and Gaelic. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, he was an outstanding scholar whose ideas would stand today’s Ukraine in good stead.
