On the possibility of peasant intellectuals: the case of the Ukrainians in Habsburg Galicia.

EUROPE; UKRAINE; EASTERN Europe

While historiography has questioned the peasantry’s ability to produce ‘organic intellectuals’ of its own, the article claims that Antonio Gramcsi’s concept is applicable to peasant activists in late nineteenth-century Habsburg Galicia. It examines recent Ukrainian historiography of the period and argues that it has been interpreting social transformation taking place in the region primarily in terms of nation-building while imagining the nation as both constructed by elites and as a relatively uniform way of self-identification. Case studies of peasant activism and intellectual output reveal that peasants entered national politics and the national public sphere as a distinct voice representing and articulating a particular social class. Their intellectual contribution to the discussion has been universally recognized, while peasant activists used the nation not only as a venue for political action but also as an arena open to contestation and struggle. A closer look at peasant activists’ words and deeds provides an opportunity to rethink the process of nation formation, definitions of intellectuals and intellectualism, and the nature of the peasant class in the Habsburg monarchy after the great constitutional reforms of the 1860s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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