Overview

Dynasty Divided uses the story of a prominent Kievan family of journalists, scholars, and politicians to analyze the emergence of rivaling nationalisms in nineteenth-century Ukraine, the most pivotal borderland of the Russian Empire. The Shul'gins identified as Russians and defended the tsarist autocracy; the Shul'hyns identified as Ukrainians and supported peasant-oriented socialism. Fabian Baumann shows how these men and women consciously chose a political position and only then began their self-fashioning as members of a national community, defying the notion of nationalism as a direct consequence of ethnicity. Baumann asks what made individuals into determined nationalists in the first place, revealing the close link to private lives, including intimate family dramas and scandals. He looks at how nationalism emerged from domestic spaces, and how women played an important (if often invisible) role in fin-de-siecle politics. Dynasty Divided explains how nineteenth-century Kievans cultivated their national self-images and how, by the twentieth century, Ukraine steered away from Russia. The two branches of this family of Russian nationalists and Ukrainian nationalists epitomize the struggles for modern Ukraine.

Full Product Details

9781501770937

Table of Contents

Reviews

Dynasty Divided such a rich, thoughtful, well-written book. Anyone interested in the cultural and historical claims to Ukraine, in the dynamic life of an imperial periphery and its role in supporting – or breaking free from – that empire, in political and cultural life as a family project, and most broadly in nationalism as a contingent political choice for both women and men, must read it. * Ab Imperio *

Author Information

Fabian Baumann is a research associate at the University of Heidelberg.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available