Natalia Laas: Could you start with a short introduction? How did you become a historian and a researcher on Eastern Europe?

Larry Wolff: I began to study Eastern Europe when I was an undergraduate university student in the 1970s, a student at Harvard. I studied Ukrainian history with the famous Ukrainian history Professor Omeljan Pritsak and I studied Polish literature with the famous Polish literature Professor Wiktor Weintraub. They were the people who introduced me into the world of Eastern European history and culture. That was the beginning for me. And later I wrote my PhD dissertation, for my doctorate at Stanford University, and I worked with Professor Wayne Vucinich, who was very important for me, bringing me into the world of Slavic studies.

N. Laas: Did you know anything about Eastern Europe, Russia, Ukraine before Harvard? Why did you choose this field and what were your expectations?

L. Wolff: Really, I had only an average knowledge about the region. I went to the university planning to study mathematics. I changed my mind. I became more and more interested in European history and became close to specific professors who inspired me to study Eastern Europe.

N. Laas: Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was such a stereotype in the US academic milieu that Russia exemplified the Soviet Union, and other counties of the region, as well as Eastern Europe generally, were not so important. I think it is interesting that you chose Ukraine, which, I suppose, was not so popular in Slavic and Soviet studies at that time.

L. Wolff: This was the real inspiration of studying with Professor Pritsak. Before I studied with him, I was very unaware of how interesting and important Ukrainian history was. And because I worked with a Ukrainian specialist and a Polish specialist, probably, the strangest thing about my career in Slavic studies is that I have never really been involved in Russian studies. Because, if you study enough, from the point of view of Ukraine, Poland, and the other lands of Eastern Europe, you even become a little bit allergic to Russian studies. And I have never been involved in that piece of the field. I have written a little bit about Western visitors to Russia, about Western perceptions of Russia, but in my work I try to treat Russia as a part of Eastern Europe, instead of treating Eastern Europe as a part of Russia.

N. Laas: But how did other people consider your rather unusual approach to this region?

L. Wolff: It was a little bit unusual, it is true, when I was doing my doctorate, because at that time in the United States people always studied Russia and Eastern Europe together. It was a phrase: Russia and Eastern Europe, they always came together. But I had a very open-minded adviser when I was a graduate student. He at first suggested to me that I should be doing some fields in Russian history, but I was less interested in doing that. I did ultimately prepare one field with an American specialist in Soviet history. But we called the field International Communism.  It treated the Soviet Union as a part of much larger phenomenon, in which the Soviet Union was important, but we discussed the whole history of the Communist party states in Eastern Europe and the Communist parties in Western Europe, so we discussed Communism from Paris to Moscow.

N. Laas: How did you learn the Russian and Ukrainian languages?

L. Wolff: The language that I studied the most seriously was Polish. That was the language that I studied at the university. This is very common for the American researchers, we study one Slavic language and than the others we try to improvise using the one we know. My Ukrainian is poor, but my Russian is worse. They are improvised from Polish, which means that I can read things I need to read, but my control of grammar is weak, and my conversation is weak. But the one I studied seriously and the one I feel I understand well enough to discuss, let’s say, the subtleties of poems, is Polish. It is a beautiful language.

N. Laas: To my mind, Omeljan Pritsak’s and Ihor Ševčenko’s project to establish Ukrainian chairs at Harvard aimed at providing a legitimate way to speak about Ukraine in the US academic milieu, and to separate Ukraine from Russia (the Soviet Union) as an independent research object. You have witnessed those efforts as a student. What is your opinion about this?

L. Wolff: I think it is absolutely right. They were brilliant men, Pritsak and Ševčenko. I knew them both. I knew Professor Pritsak best, I worked closely with him. I was there, at Harvard, in the 1970s. I was there for the inaugural lecture of the Hrushevsky chair in Ukrainian history. It was Professor Pritsak speaking about the origins of Rus. It was wonderful to watch, the enterprise, the genius of these men, expressed in the creation of the project, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. And when you say that they were trying to distinguish Ukrainian studies from Russian studies, that’s true. But it is also true that there was nothing narrow about what they were doing. That is to say, through Professor Ševčenko Ukrainian studies were also connected to Byzantine studies. On the history side, in modern history, Ukrainian history was also connected to Polish history and to Jewish history. They were very open-minded men, and they were not trying to create a narrowly defined field of Ukrainian studies. You can see it if you look at the journal Harvard Ukrainian Studies. It is actually very open and broad in the way that it understands Ukrainian studies, and in its engagement with other cultures and fields.

N. Laas: What do you think about the main factors that actually influenced the success of this intellectual project, Ukrainian studies in the US?

L. Wolff: I think that the success of the project was connected to the genius of the creators. They were great men. And they were working in a context where there were other professors who understood what it was they were trying to do and who supported them. I am thinking of Wiktor Weintraub, Edward Keenan, Richard Pipes, and other professors not working in Ukrainian studies, but who understood what the value and the importance of the project was. It was a very sympathetic moment.

N. Laas: What do you think about changes in perception of Ukraine in the US academic milieu from the period of Cold War till nowadays?

L. Wolff: The changes that have taken place are in the whole field of Soviet, Russian and East European studies. At first in the 1990s, there was huge encouragement, a burst of interest, and excitement. More people were becoming involved in the field in creative ways. But then, around the turn of the millennium, we began to see a sort of decline, because the whole academic project of studying Eastern Europe had been, to some extent, encouraged by the Cold War. That is to say, there was funding to study Eastern Europe from the American government during the Cold War. And after the Cold War we began to see some of that funding withdrawn. Eastern Europe became less central to the American foreign policy agenda. After this phenomenon of an expansion and then a decline in the academic field, we are looking for some sort of balanced state now. There are still few places where there are professors of Ukrainian history, with whom you can specifically study Ukrainian history. But there are also professors who are teaching Russian history and Polish history, who are now more and more open to discussing Ukrainian issues and participating in discussions about Ukrainian culture and studies.

N. Laas: What do you consider as the most popular trend in Russian and East European studies now?

L. Wolff: Remember I don’t work on the 20th century. My work does not lie in the very center of this field. But I would say the most central problems right now are problems about rethinking national history. That is to say, a lot of historiography about this region, whether consciously or unconsciously, has been shaped by national historiography, taking place within national paradigms. Sometimes it has been shaped by people from within the nation, or people that adopted a national paradigm when they studied the nation even if they came from outside. A lot of recent work has been trying to break out of national paradigms, and trying to rethink the history of the region with the assistance of non-national paradigms, to understand the importance of other forces, identities, agendas, that are not about nationality and nation, as well as questioning, and this is taking place at both theoretical and empirical levels, the nature and significance of nationality itself.

N. Laas: Can we say that we have more or less the same trends if we speak about the state of Western historiographies now? Are there any clear methodological differences in the studies on Eastern Europe in, for example, Canada, the US, or Great Britain? Don’t we have some kind of English-language historiography on this region? Because if you want to be known and recognized at the international level, you should publish something in English. In my opinion, methodologically and theoretically you are closer to your colleagues from other countries who examine Russia and Eastern Europe, then to other American researchers who deal with other regions (Africa, Asia and so on).

L. Wolff: I think that is absolutely right. We have our community of scholars, the other people who are working in our field. It is a strange thing, but it is true for all of us. We work in a department of colleagues at our own home university, but we also work in a separate world of colleagues, virtual colleagues, with whom we correspond on the Internet, who live in many different countries. At some point, they are the most important colleagues, because for them we do our research, they read our work, and they help us to develop our ideas.

N. Laas: What do you think about two expressions American historiography on Eastern Europe and English-speaking historiography on Eastern Europe?

L. Wolff: I think you will find that the American historiography on Eastern Europe, probably, has a particular character of its own during the Cold War years, because study on Eastern Europe was a part of America’s Cold War agenda. I think you’ll find that became less and less true after the end of the Cold War. You could then begin to see more of a common character between American historiography and European historiography, more of a common academic project.

N. Laas: Is it the end of national historiographies, but not only the end of national issues in historiographies?

L. Wolff: I think it is partly true. And in some sense, we are all participating in the same venture, in the same historiography.

N. Laas: Could you say a few words about your research projects and your books? As far as I know, the latest one is about child abuse in Venice. This subject was a little bit surprising for me, because I thought about you mostly as a specialist on Eastern Europe. And this book seems far from this field.

L. Wolff: You mean my latest book, Paolina’s Innocence: Child Abuse in Casanova’s Venice, don’t you? I was always interested in the history of childhood. I teach a course on the history of childhood. And I have done research in this field separately from my East European work for a long time. If you look at my CV, even in the 1980s, I published the book Postcards from the End of the World: Child Abuse in Freud’s Vienna. And I have written many articles about the history of childhood. It is a fascinating area. My book about child abuse in Casanova’s Venice is a continuation of this long-term interest in the history of childhood, but it is also connected to my research in Venice that I did in the 1990s, when I was working on the book Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment.  It was at that time, when I found the material for this other book about child abuse. I knew I wanted to write a book about it, but I put it aside, while I was working on Halychyna. Only when I finished the book on Halychyna (The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture), I came back to the material on childhood. I had made microfilms of the documents, brought them back to America with me, I had the microfilms in my desk for a decade, and I finally sat down and worked on it. I would say, it is not really connected to my work as an East Europeanist, but it is closely connected to the work I have done over the years on the history of childhood, and furthermore, connected to the work I have done on the history of Venice. I think about my work as being principally important in two fields, one is the history of Eastern Europe, and the second is the history of the Enlightenment in the 18th century. You may have noticed that the most of my work is focused on the 18th century. And in that sense, the book about Casanova’s Venice is very close to the center of my interests, because it focuses on the culture of the Enlightenment in the 18th century.

Paolina’s Innocence: Child Abuse in Casanova’s Venice was published by Stanford University Press in 2012. It’s the micro-history of a judicial case in which a 65-year-old man in Venice was accused of having sex with an 8-year-old girl. What was most complicated about the case is that in the eighteenth century it was very difficult to articulate what had happened, since there was no medical or legal concept of child abuse and no medical or legal concept of pedophilia. The case generated 300 pages of judicial documents as the tribunal tried to determine what crime precisely had been committed.

The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture was published by Stanford University Press in 2010 and was awarded the Karl von Vogelsang prize for history by the Austrian government in 2012. This study first explores the geopolitical “invention” of Galicia by Habsburg statecraft in 1772, and then considers how this invented space became authentic and meaningful in the nineteenth century for the peoples who lived there − and then became a geopolitical phantom in the 20th century. I would describe the methodology of the book as the history of a place as an idea.

Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment was published by Stanford University Press in 2001 and explores what it meant for Venetians to rule over an empire of Dalmatian Slavs on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea (today coastal Croatia). Using archival materials and literary sources, I attempted to understand how the Venetians understood the difference between Eastern Europe and Western Europe within their own Venetian state, and I also studied the almost-forgotten Morlacchi who, back in the eighteenth century, were celebrated all over Europe as “noble savages” in the mountains of Dalmatia.

N. Laas: If you have a choice, which book would you recommend to be translated in Ukrainian?

L. Wolff: Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment has already been translated into Russian and into Ukrainian. What I hope is that The Idea of Galicia will be translated into Ukrainian too, because I think it will be wonderful to have a Ukrainian edition. People will be more interested in it here in Ukraine than in the United States.

N. Laas: What was the reaction of the academic milieu on your book about Inventing Eastern Europe?

L. Wolff: Mostly, I had very good responses to it. I think it has been quite widely read in Russia and in Ukraine. I wrote special introductions for both editions. In the Ukrainian edition I wrote about my relation to Ukraine and to Ukrainian history, which, I hope, explains some of the ways in which I connect to the Ukrainian material in the book. The only thing that surprised me a little bit (this is connected to the Russian publication of Inventing Eastern Europe), is that I was told that the book had been given a very good reception by some Slavophile nationalists, who felt that I had shown very well that the West never understood Russia − which surprised me and was not what I intended. But I found it is interesting.

N. Laas: What was the most inspiring book in your life?

L. Wolff: There is a certain amount of French scholarship that has been very important to me and connected to Eastern Europe. And it is quite old. It is a French literature from the 1950s. For a lot of my work, especially for my very first research (it was my doctoral dissertation The Vatican and Poland in the Age of the Partitions: Diplomatic and Cultural Encounters at the Warsaw Nunciature), I was inspired by a very important French book by Jean Fabre about Stanislaw August and Europe’s Enlightenment (Stanislas-Auguste Poniatowski et l’Europe des Lumières, 1952); it is a study of the last king of Poland. It is a large work of beautiful French scholarship. Probably, it still remains the most beautiful and detailed study on culture in the world of Stanislaw August during the last generation of Poland’s existence as a Commonwealth. The second French book from the 1950s, which was very inspirational for me, when I was working on Inventing Eastern Europe was by another French scholar Albert Lortholary, who wrote the book The Russian Mirage in France in the 18th Century (Le Mirage Russe en France au XVIIIe siècle, 1951), which was about the ways in which the French philosophers were misled by Catherine and a Russian mirage. Lortholary sees Russia as a mirage that deceived French philosophers of the Enlightenment, convincing them that Catherine was building a kind of utopia in Russia. It is the beautiful and brilliant book that was also very inspirational for me. In 2001 a Russian colleague and I co-edited a collection of essays that revisited this same theme, published under the same title, Le Mirage Russe.

N. Laas: What was your first time when you visited Russia or any other country of Eastern Europe?

L. Wolff: I was in Russia in the autumn of 1976 for the first time. I went on a “Sputnik” students’ tour of Russia. I was very young, I was 19 years old. It was a period of American-Russian détente, a period of decent relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, a period of Helsinki human rights agreements and so on. This changed in the 1980s, when there was a kind of new Cold War. But the 1970s were a more relaxed period. The travel was totally fascinating. It lasted just one week when I was in St Petersburg, which was called Leningrad at that time, and Moscow. I saw the principal sights; I met with Russian students in Russian student clubs. We had some frank discussions. And then I was in Poland and Czechoslovakia in the following year, in 1977. I am old enough to have had some experience of both Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during the Communist period. It was interesting and valuable for me to have some experience of this region that goes back to the 1970s.

N. Laas: Would you like to add anything at the end of our talk?

L. Wolff: Let me just say something in connection with your project about the American focus on Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Soviet Union. It is really all changing. I am more and more aware of the fact that my generation is the last generation that was fully educated in the world of the Cold War. I got my PhD in 1984, five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. But people who are even ten years younger then me already belong to a different era, even in their graduate education. They are slowly transforming the field in very creative ways. It was very inspirational for me to have been trained during the Cold War and than to live through the end of it. Inventing Eastern Europe is about the 18th century, but it also comes from my own experience of living through the moments in which suddenly our whole understanding of Europe was transformed. As I said, my work and my career had been shaped by the period I lived through. I was 32 in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. Inventing Eastern Europe is a work from my 30s. But scholars younger than I am write from a different perspective, from a new world, and they will bring new perspectives to historical materials, and that is very exciting.

N. Laas: Thank you very much for your time!

Lviv, March 10, 2013

Larry Wolff (born in 1957) is a Professor of History and the Director of the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at New York University. He received his PhD at Stanford University in 1984. Professor Wolff works on the history of Eastern Europe, the Habsburg Monarchy, the Enlightenment, and on the history of childhood. He is the author of the books Paolina’s Innocence: Child Abuse in Casanova’s Venice (Stanford University Press, 2012), The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford University Press, 2010), Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2001), Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 1994), The Vatican and Poland in the Age of the Partitions: Diplomatic and Cultural Encounters at the Warsaw Nunciature (Columbia University Press, 1988), and Postcards from the End of the World: Child Abuse in Freud’s Vienna (New York: Atheneum, 1988). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.