Dynasty Divided

Winner of the W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize

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-siècle 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.

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

Dynasty Divided provides a new perspective for the discussion of long-standing problems.

This book is a very important contribution to the ongoing debates about the nature of nationalism in Eastern Europe and in the Russian Empire as well as Russian-Ukrainian relationships.

Baumann presents a fascinating microhistorical account of one particular family situation in one particular imperial city, broadening our understanding of multi-edged nationalism, hybrid imperial contexts, and the omnipresent gray zones that affected the lives of individuals who decided to become nationalist activists. The attention to detail and innovative engagement with archival materials in the book are of particular value for historians of the era.

Fabian Baumann's Dynasty Divided is a real breakthrough in the realm of the Russian-Ukrainian entangled history during the long nineteenth century. This elegantly written and dramatic book is an extraordinary achievement that must be read by all historians of Russian-ruled Ukraine and anyone interested in borderlands and nationalism in eastern Europe.

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.

Faith C. Hillis, University of Chicago, author of Utopia's Discontents:

This meticulously researched and elegantly argued book offers a new way of conceptualizing the relationship between Russian and Ukranian nationalism— and a novel approach to the problem of national formation more generally. A must-read.

John-Paul Himka, University of Alberta:

This book does a lot. It explores the border between Ukrainian and Russian identities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It lifts the veil on the hidden power of the women. It draws on innovative studies in Habsburg history to forge new insights.

Theodore R. Weeks, author of Vilnius Between Nations, 1795–2000:

This is a major contribution to our understanding of late imperial Russia, the interplay between Ukrainian and Russian nationalisms and the highly personal nature of politics of the time as exemplified by this family.