Patrice M. Dabrowski has written an excellent book on a topic that has been long neglected. Environmental history and the history of tourism have been slow to develop in Polish and Ukrainian studies, which is surprising considering their well-established connection to the national imaginary—a popular subject in both these geographical fields. With the publication of The Carpathians, this major mountain range is finally beginning to catch up with the Alps and the Pyrenees as another kind of borderland that offers scholars a unique perspective on the development of modern national identities and everyday life.
The notion of “discovery” is central to Dabrowski's subtle analysis of how patriotic activists of these two primarily lowland nations reimagined the Carpathians. In the late nineteenth century, they wrote about “discovering” the mountains, and in the twentieth, about their “rediscovery,” but in both cases it was all about forging a new vision of the nation on the anvil of the Carpathians.
Stories of people going to the Carpathian Mountains to express their social ideals will sound both familiar and surprising to students of modern nationalism, such accounts springing from different parts of the Carpathian range. The first four chapters of Dabrowski's book deal with the Tatra Mountains, what was then the administrative border between Austrian Galicia and the Kingdom of Hungary. The “discovery” of the Tatras as the place of “Polish freedom” begins in the 1870s with a mountain-climbing Catholic priest and patriotic doctor from Warsaw, who promoted mountaineering as a sublime and healthy experience. But it took a major Polish writer, Stanisław Witkiewicz, to complete the myth of the Tatras as the place where modern intellectuals and professionals confirmed their Polish identity by getting close to nature and the Tatra Mountain highlanders (górali)—the latter imagined as carriers of primeval Polishness. An even more famous literary figure, Henryk Sienkiewicz, inserted the patriotic górali into his historical novels. Yet, the transformation of the southern Polish town of Zakopane into a high-altitude resort sounded a discordant note, with nativists becoming disillusioned with the “real” natives’ endorsement of commercial development.
The next cluster of four chapters takes the reader into the eastern Carpathians (Beskids), where the “discovery” begins around the same time, but from the outset involves two, if not three, national projects claiming the highlander natives, the Hutsuls. That mountain-climbing priest belonged to the Greek Catholic Church, which followed the Eastern Christian rite and was historically associated with the Ruthenians (Ukrainians). When Franz Joseph I visited the region in 1880, he attended two competing ethnographic exhibitions: one organized by the Polish elites and another by the Ruthenian Kachkovsky Society (of pro-Russian rather than Ukrainian cultural orientation). But by the 1890s, the nationally conscious Ukrainian intelligentsia uncovered the Poles’ attempts to claim the Hutsuls, whose religion and dialect made them “Ukrainian,” for their narrative of a multiethnic Commonwealth. It then organized a rival cultural project centering on the village of Kryvorivnia. During the interwar period, the Polish authorities tried to freeze the Hutsul identity lest it become unequivocally Ukrainian.
The final and shortest group of chapters deals with the post-1945 period, when the Bieszczady became the only Polish part of the Carpathians. Following the forced resettlement of Ukrainians in 1947, the “rediscovery” of the mountains happened only in the mid-1950s. From the very beginning, it was a confrontation between the Polish communist state, which was interested in large industrial projects, mass tourism, and discreet hunting lodges for the party brass, and students pushing for nature protection and trekking. In the early 1980s, functionaries were obliged to return their villas, but the pragmatic interests of the locals again clashed with the intelligentsia's dream of establishing a major national park.
Dabrowski's well-researched book leaves the Polish story of the Carpathians unfinished, perhaps happily so, by referring obliquely to “private property claims, and not the public good,” a situation that became pervasive since the 1990s (195). There is also much more to say about the Ukrainians’ engagement with the Carpathians after 1945 and in independent Ukraine, when this legendary mountain range became truly central to that nation's identity. Future Ukrainian and Polish historians of the Carpathians will build their work on this magisterial stepping stone. Dabrowski writes so eloquently that her book will surely attract both the general public and scholars.
