ABSTRACT

The lands that once comprised the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth pose a fascinating challenge to studies of identity. In the last two-and-a-half centuries in place of an erstwhile multinational Commonwealth, countries have disappeared and re-emerged, often in new guises, in the fault-lines between land-based empires. The relationship between discourse, territory and identity has a complex history in the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, a multinational polity composed of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The 1569 Union of Lublin, which formally created the Commonwealth, eventually resulted in the installation of Polish as the dominant language of high culture, with the old Ruthenian language going into decline in the Grand Duchy and the Ukrainian lands. One of the most influential answers to this problem was to subsume other ethnolinguistic identities into the symbolic space of Polish identity, especially the fellow Slavs of what are Belarus and Ukraine.