Serhiy Bilenky

Mykhailo Petrovych Drahomaniv

N. I. Kostomarov

V. Antonovych

The Writings of Mykola Kostomarov, Volodymyr Antonovych and Mykhailo Drahomanov

Fashioning Modern Ukraine

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century Kyiv was an important city in the European part of the Russian empire, rivaling Warsaw in economic and strategic significance. It also held the unrivaled spiritual and ideological position as Russia's own Jerusalem. In Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands, Serhiy Bilenky examines issues of space, urban planning, socio-spatial form, and the perceptions of change in imperial Kyiv. Combining cultural and social history with that of urban studies, Bilenky unearths a wide range of unpublished archival materials and argues that the changes experienced by the city prior to the revolution of 1917 were no less dramatic and traumatic than those of the Communist and post-Communist era. In fact, much of Kyiv's contemporary urban form, architecture, and natural setting were shaped by imperial modernizers during the long nineteenth century. The author also explores a general culture of imperial urbanism in Eastern Europe. Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands is the first work to approach the history of Kyiv from an interdisciplinary perspective and showcases Kyiv's rightful place as a city worthy of attention from historians, urbanists, and literary scholars.

Kyiv, 1800 - 1905

Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands

This book explores the political imagination of Eastern Europe in the 1830s and 1840s, when Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian intellectuals came to identify themselves as belonging to communities known as nations or nationalities. Bilenky approaches this topic from a transnational perspective, revealing the ways in which modern Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian nationalities were formed and refashioned through the challenges they presented to one another, both as neighboring communities and as minorities within a given community. Further, all three nations defined themselves as a result of their interactions with the Russian and Austrian empires. Fueled by the Romantic search for national roots, they developed a number of separate yet often overlapping and inclusive senses of national identity, thereby producing myriad versions of Russianness, Polishness, and Ukrainianness.

Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations

Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe

Serhiy Bilenky

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