Class 3: Geography and Ancient History (1)
- Okay, greetings everybody.
Welcome to lecture three.
I knew when I was gonna give this lecture
that it would be after I had gone to Ukraine
and back in-between.
So the nice people who are filming this
asked me not to wear the same shirt as I wore last week,
both times, which I'm sure you guys noticed.
I didn't notice.
It was very tactful for you guys not to mention that.
(class laughs)
'Cause I could've just worn the same shirt all semester,
and you guys would've been cool.
You wouldn't have said a thing.
I am wearing the same shirt that I wore on the train,
because the train is 30-
It's like, from here to,
in case you were thinking about doing this next weekend,
it's a solid 35 hours from here to the center of Kyiv.
And there's no way to make it shorter.
That's like in the best case.
So I knew when I was gonna give this lecture
that I was gonna be going there and back again.
And so I thought I would make this subject of this lecture,
what I'm calling Geography and Deep History,
or maybe just Deep Geography for short.
That is, the way that we think about places
and how the way we think about places then has to do
with how we apprehend what happens in the world.
So the subject today is going to be naming and placing
and how the names and the places then affect
how we understand events before our eyes.
Which may seem a little misty and abstract,
but hopefully as I get into the geography
and then a little bit into the war,
it will come clear
how the deep notions that we have of place
tend to suggest, trigger, push us in certain directions
when we're confronted with events.
So what is the place I was going to?
So in the reading, this is kind of ambiguous.
So the place that I was going to, maybe it was Ukraine,
or maybe it was the Ukraine?
What's the difference?
I have already told some of you what the difference is,
so don't cheat.
But what is the difference
between going to "Ukraine" and going to "the Ukraine"?
I mean, you probably know that if you say "the Ukraine",
you'll get disapproving looks from the Ukrainians.
But beyond that, what's the difference?
Yeah.
- [Student] Saying, going to the Ukraine
implies that Ukraine is a region,
a sub-region of something like Russia or the Soviet Union.
- Exactly.
So if you say "the Ukraine", it already, it means,
in Polish you can actually say "going to the Lithuania",
which you can't say in English,
but that suggests where this all comes from.
It's important to remember that English
is not the master language for everything.
And that very often, the way we say things in English
actually comes from somewhere else.
So we say "the Ukraine" because in Russian and in Polish,
you can say, "na Ukraina".
Yeah, I even have this on the sheet this time,
you can say "na Ukraina",
which is something like more like "at".
So you're going to someplace which is not quite defined.
As opposed to "v",
"v Ukraina" or "v Ukraini," which means "in Ukraine".
It's a place that's like, if it's a "v",
that means it can be contained.
So it has a border. It's a defined place.
Maybe a state, because a state has borders
and a state is defined.
So if you say "na", you're not really talking about a state.
And you may be talking about something
which is kind of misty and undefined
and maybe a little bit poetic.
So in your reading, up to now,
like the article from Rudnyts'kyi,
who cannot be accused of being anything but a Ukrainian,
it was still okay in the '60s for him to be saying,
or maybe it was required of him, I'm not sure,
to say "the Ukraine".
And while we're on the subject of-
Okay, so is that clear, the "v" and the "na"?
So it's very important,
if you're speaking Polish or Ukrainian or Russian.
And so, the Poles, it's interesting,
the Poles all switched over in the early '90s.
They switched over.
When I learned to speak Polish, you were supposed to say,
"na Litvia", but now people say-
that means sort of "at Lithuania",
but now people say "v Litvia",
meaning "in the state of Lithuania".
And "na Ukraina" was how I was taught to say it in Polish.
But now I would say "v Ukraina" because it's a state.
And Ukrainians have very clear ideas about this, too.
So while we're on the subject, though,
you might have noticed that the capital of Ukraine
is spelled a couple of different ways
in your readings as well.
What's the difference there?
Anybody wanna take a stab at that? Yeah.
- [Student] One is the Ukrainian spelling
and the other is the Russian spelling and pronunciation.
- Yeah. One is a transliteration. Exactly.
So you guys know what transliteration is?
There are many alphabets,
and when you render from one alphabet to another alphabet,
that's called transliteration or transcription, technically.
So in the standard English spelling
of the capital of Ukraine, for a very long time,
until very, very recently, in fact, was Kiev, K-I-E-V.
And that was a transliteration from Russian.
In Ukrainian, it's Kyiv,
hence the English transliteration, K-Y-I-V.
Which is a little bit awkward,
because there just aren't that many words
that don't involve '90s punk bands,
which have Ys and Is in front of them.
The Y-I is not a normal combination in English.
And this was an evolution.
So in my early books, I wrote Kiev, K-I-E-V,
just because I thought,
"This has been standard in English for so long.
It's not really such a big difference between Kiev and Kyiv.
People reading English are just gonna be distracted
by this Y and the I together.
Why should I do it?"
But then at a certain point, I changed.
The last few books, I spelled it
with the Ukrainian transliteration.
And if you want, you can check and see
when the New York Times changes.
Because the New York Times always does everything right.
(class laughs)
And, (laughs) thank you, that was good.
The New York Times always does everything right,
but even the New York Times has to change from time to time,
how they're gonna do certain things.
And so you can check and see when they changed
from spelling it one way to another way,
'cause that represents a certain kind of cultural consensus.
And so, these things change.
And the reason why it's interesting that they change
is that these things that might seem to be superficial,
like language, are actually very deep,
because they're the things that you read and you take in,
you don't call them into question.
And then they may form how you see the world
when you're confronted with something surprising.
So, the "v" and "na" or the "the":
Is it a region or a country?
Kiev or Kyiv: Is it Russian or is it Ukrainian?
It's a pretty big-
And what is actually normal in English?
This is really interesting, because you might think,
let's say, you're, I'm assuming
many of you are native English speakers.
All of you know English, or you wouldn't be in this class.
Or you're in this class doing some kind of weird meditation
that involves listening to a language you don't understand,
which is cool. You'll probably pass, anyway.
(class laughs)
I'm assuming if you're doing that,
you're taking it pass/fail.
But you might think, "Well in English,
we all have a certain distance from all this.
There's a certain objectivity,
whatever it is in English is somehow just neutral."
But it's not.
What it is in English has effects too, very much so.
And what it is in English is also subject to change,
as we've seen in both of these examples.
Just in the little span of time
between when your readings start and now,
the basic uses in English
for both the country and its capital have changed.
And you're presumably, if you have kids,
which I know that none of you are thinking about now,
because when you signed to go to Yale,
you promised not to get married and not have kids, I know.
But when you have kids, presumably,
they will think K-Y-I-V is totally normal.
Maybe you already think it's totally normal.
And they'll think, it will not occur to them
that it might have been some other way.
But these things change all the time.
Now this notion of deep geography also has to do,
so I've talked just about of words and letters.
It also has to do with narratives.
So a story can tell you where you are.
A story can tell you where you are before you get there.
And this occurred to me during this trip,
because I was talking to a bunch of American diplomats,
and we were pondering,
I mean, just to put it very briefly and brutally,
we were pondering why every American gets everything wrong
about Ukraine all the time.
Like that basic question, which you can't help dealing,
you can't help asking with respect to the war,
because even the people
who were supposed to know what they're talking about
were totally wrong.
It's a luxury for me to say this because I wasn't,
but in general, everybody was totally wrong
about everything with respect to the war.
Ukrainians are gonna lose after three days.
They can't possibly fight back.
They're gonna lose, it's a stalemate, blah, blah, blah.
Everything that the consensus has said in the US
has been wrong the whole time.
And you can't kind of say,
"Well, this is just a matter of lack of military analysis,"
or whatever.
No, there's something else deeper going on.
And we were sort of trying to ponder that together.
And I think it has to do with the deep narrative
that everyone is taught.
Because the deep narrative that everyone is taught,
all these diplomats were taught it too,
everybody who studied East Europe,
almost everybody, not in this class,
but almost everyone who studied East European history
in the US has the narrative, which says:
There was Kyiv.
And then, from Kyiv, somehow there was Moscow,
there was some kind of transfer.
And the thing in Moscow was the same state
as the thing in Kyiv, even though that,
I'm not gonna say "even thoughs",
I'm just gonna try to tell the narrative.
The thing in Moscow somehow inherited the traditions
of the thing in Kyiv.
And therefore the thing in Moscow fulfilled itself,
when it actually incorporated Kyiv in the late 17th century.
That was somehow natural.
That's part of the destiny of this place.
And it's normal that Moscow and Kyiv
will be together forever.
And in some way, it's all Russia. It's all Russia.
So I didn't do a good job with that narrative,
because frankly, that's not what I'm being,
that's not my job here to do a good job with that narrative.
But that's the basic narrative.
But the point is that everybody who has ever studied this
has that narrative.
And if you have that narrative,
then it makes you think that Russia's a real place.
And what is Ukraine?
Because in that narrative,
nothing called Ukraine ever appears.
So there must be something suspicious about Ukraine.
It must be somehow invented or somehow marginal
or somehow provincial or in some way questionable.
Whereas nobody ever questions Russia.
No one ever- I mean, is that wrong?
No one ever questions that Russia is a real place.
No one ever questioned the Soviet Union
