Slovo o polku Igoreve, Rus'/Rossija

[Hanya Krill]

At 11:58 PM 5/9/98 -0400, Milman/Rancour-Laferriere wrote:
>9 May 98
>
>Colleagues,
>I am enjoying the interventions of Markus Osterrieder, and I look forward
>to pulling out my German dictionary and reading the articles he mentions.
>
>In the meantime, I note his suggestion that there was great tribal
>diversity in Rus' (or in various areas of Rus' in its various temporal
>incarnations).  In addition, there was great educational and political
>diversity.  Perhaps the only people we should be calling Rusians were the
>various East Slavic elites who thought of themselves as Rusians.  Most
>occupants of the territory/territories in question did not "know" they were
>Rusians.  Indeed, I am not sure even the elite knew, for I see no evidence
>that "rus'skii" was an ethnonym.  The widespread term "rus'skaia zemlia"
>does not seem to have been ethnonymic, but more dynastic or even cultish.
>
>Similarly, most occupants of Russia did not "know" they were Russians until
>late nineteenth-early twentiethth centuries.  Instead, as Valerii Tishkov
>(following the lead of Gellner, Anderson) points out, they called
>themselves "locals," "Pskovians," "Dukhobors," "Pravoslavnye," etc.
>National identity among the masses is a remarkably recent development.  And
>again, even among the elite national consciousness was slow in coming.  Can
>anyone provide an example of "russkii" used as an ethnonym before the
>eighteenth century (as in the standard ethnographic term "russkie," not as
>an ordinary adjective)?  I find Avvakum calling Aleksei Mikhailovich a
>"rusak" in the seventeenth century, but this is unusual.
>
>If the foregoing is true, then it is certainly an anachronism to be
>speaking of "Kievan Russia" / "Rossiia kievskaia," as many have ever since
>Karamzin (and this apart from the fact that the term offends some
>Ukrainians).  "Russia" / "Rossiia" came in late, probably from Latin via
>Polish.  The term came to be attached to the expanding Muscovite empire.
>Rus' was earlier, and Rusians were not Russians because Russians did not
>exist yet.  The term "russkie" contains an etymological memory of Rus', but
>that does not suffice to synonymize Rusians with Russians.  As Keenan has
>observed, there is practically no evidence that participants in the initial
>Muscovite expansion of the late fifteenth-sixteenth centuries  which led to
>the formation of "Rossiia" even thought they were restoring the legacy of
>Kievan Rus'.  That particular reclamation project, which continues to this
>day in some quarters, did not get under way until the middle of the
>seventeenth century, around the time Muscovy was expanding into Kievan
>territory.  One purpose of that project has been to deny legitimacy to any
>potential heirs besides Russia to the "post-Kiev space" (Roman Szporluk),
>and to ensure that "Ukraine has no independent historical existence" (Paul
>Robert Magocsi).
>
>To return to the Igor tale.  I think I will continue to teach it in my
>"Russian Culture" course because it has so much to offer as a literary gem,
>and now because it has even more to offer than it did before in terms of
>ethnohistorical debate.  Certainly I do not want to "police" what tradition
>the work should be attached to, and I'm sorry if I conveyed that
>impression.  I actually don't mind if my colleagues in the English
>department teach Tolstoy, and I even edited a book recently by mostly
>English professors, a couple of whose articles were on Dostoevsky.
>However, I will continue to point out that those Russians who foster a
>"myth" that "appropriates" the Igor tale (to use Douglas Clayton's terms)
>are best characterized as Russian nationalists (and of course Ukrainians
>who do are Ukrainian nationalists).  And I will continue to insist, with
>Lunt, that Rusians were not Russians.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Daniel Rancour-Laferriere
>Professor, Director of Russian
>University of California, Davis
>BarDan at compuserve.com
>
>PS. - I don't have a damned thing to say about Jeffrey Sachs.
>
>