Returning Intellectuals’ and the History of Polish-Ukrainian Relations:
Examining Border Territories and Views of the State at the End of the 19th Century
This research, “‘Returning Intellectuals’ and the History of Polish-Ukrainian Relations: Examining Border Territories and Views of the State at the End of the 19th Century,” takes the “intellectual migration” as its key concept. It then examines how the experiences of migrating intellectuals in the societies, to which they migrate as newcomers, affect and change the societies in which they resided and belonged prior to their migration experiences. The region and period of this research is Poland from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century as the sending society, and the United States (from the turn of the century to World War I) as the destination societies. After the partition of Poland, the “migrating intellectuals” were in a special position and took on the role of diplomats in the broad sense of the word, representing “Poland” externally after it lost its status as a sovereign state. Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849), who moved from place to place in Paris and other parts of France during the “Great Exile” after the November Uprising (1830-31), is the best-known example of the “intellectual on the move. Until the First World War, expatriate intellectuals continued to use their linguistic (literary) and artistic prestige to argue for Poland's survival as a communal and political entity to the international community. This study focuses on “intellectuals on the move” during the turn of the century who returned to Poland from their countries of migration, and examines how their discourse influenced people's views of the state in shaping an independent Poland after World War I.
