Dmytro Dontsov, probably the most prominent and controversial among Ukrainian nationalist thinkers, started his political life as a devoted Marxist and ended it as an ultranationalist religious mystic. Son of provincial merchant in southern Ukraine, he studied law in Saint Petersburg and Vienna, edited a leading literary journal and published numerous influential pamphlets in inter-war Lviv, lived and worked in Berlin, Bucharest, Prague and Montreal. Dontsov (1883–1973) lived a long life, and his first intellectual biography written by Mykhailo Sosnovs’kyi was published less than a year after his death.1 This book was not at all hagiographic and reflected both controversial attitudes towards Dontsov in Ukrainian diaspora and Sosnovs’kyi’s taste for European philosophy and comparative analysis.2 For decades, it remained the only monograph on Dontsov.

This has changed recently. Apart from well-researched monographs in Polish and Ukrainian3, Myroslav Shkandrij – in his insightful overview of Ukrainian nationalism with special emphasis on its literary dimensions – proposed a helpful introduction to Dontsov’s writings by pointing out that the entire tone of his keynote essay “Nationalism” (1926) “breathes the spiteful resentment of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man”.4 Now, Trevor Erlacher has published the first English-language intellectual biography of Dontsov. His aim is to put Dontsov and his writings into transnational context and to highlight “flux and contingency, as well as the contradictions, paradoxes, and ambiguities” of Dontsov’s thinking (p. 42).

Erlacher presents Dontsov as “an intolerant, exclusivist ultranationalist by conviction and a multilingual, globetrotting cosmopolitan by necessity” (p. 7). Carefully reconstructing Dontsov’s ideological evolution from an orthodox Marxist and atheist to a xenophobic nationalist, he stresses Dontsov’s insistence on his own consistency and his incapability to recognize own mistakes and failures. Along the way, Erlacher reveals general features beneath his protagonist’s ideological surface and self-representation, namely iconoclastic authoritarianism (a sociological concept of Theodor Adorno and his colleagues) and cosmopolitan nationalism. The latter term has been proposed by Michael Stanislawski in his research on Zionist Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, whose writings and biographical trajectory Erlacher finds to be characterized by “striking biographical and intellectual parallels” with Dontsov (p. 77).

Searching for the origins of Dontsov’s voluntarist and dogmatic style, Erlacher suggests to take a closer look at the impact of Russian Slavophile thinking (especially, Nikolai Danilevskii’s vision of Russia’s eternal and inevitable struggle with the West) and political tactics of Russian reactionaries, like the proto-fascist and anti-Semitic Black Hundreds in late imperial times (p. 14). No less important was the intellectual impact of Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Vasilii Rozanov and Nikolai Berdiaev (p. 59), to an extent that Dontsov’s “active” nationalism can be seen as “the mirror image of… Russian Eurasianism” (p. 168). Despite (or, probably, because) of such strong Russian intellectual influences, Dontsov’s political ideology was uncompromisingly anti-Russian. At the same time, his older brother Vladimir remained a devoted Bolshevik, who personally knew Lenin, considered himself “Russian”, and lived in Moscow until he was arrested and executed in Stalin’s purges in 1938 (pp. 56–57, 371).

Erlacher argues that Dontsov’s radical move towards authoritarianism and statism was triggered by the violent experiences of the First World War (when he worked as a propagandist for Austria and Germany) and the Revolutions 1917–1921 (Dontsov spent almost the entire year of 1918 in Kyiv, serving as a director of the Telegraph Agency for Hetman Skoropads’kyi conservative and pro-German Ukrainian State). In the 1920s, Dontsov settled in Lviv (thanks to his wife, Mariia Bachyns’ka, whom he had married already in 1912), where he discovered his “ideal ancestors” in Fichte, Bismarck and Nietzsche (p. 115).

A native of Russified southern Ukraine and a former social democrat, Dontsov became “the spiritual dictator of Galician youth” in interwar Poland (p. 207). This recognition came from Yevhen Konovalets’, the founding leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists – an organization Dontsov never belonged to. In other words, Dontsov reinvented himself as a prophet of a new nationalist ersatz religion while avoiding engagement in any legal or illegal party work. Erlacher sees Dontsov as a representative of Europe-wide reactionary modernism (a term by Jeffrey Herf) and as one of the founding fathers of Ukrainian “active nationalism”, which was characterized by exaltation of youth and war, order, discipline, and hierarchy, ideas of initiative minority and of redemptive violence, as well as willingness to destroy internal and external enemies (p. 225). Severely anti-Russian and openly anti-Semitic, Dontsov’s writings praised Bolshevik violent methods, rejected humanism and universal values, declared admiration for Mussolini and Hitler, and propagated racism and social darwinism. For Erlacher, Dontsov’s doctrine “was a form of reactionary modernism, aestheticized politics, and generic literary fascism” (p. 229).

It might have been fruitful for Erlacher’s analysis to include a broader discussion of the interwar Polish context, the situation of the Ukrainian population in Poland, and political divisions within the Ukrainian community. Erlacher’s substantial analysis of the Polish Marxist Stanisław Brzozowski’s impact on Dontsov could be complemented by a broader discussion of Roman Dmowski’s influences and interconnections with Ukrainian nationalism. The discussion of the reasons for Dontsov’s popularity among Ukrainian youth could be supplemented with memoir and other ego documents evidence. For example, Leo (Lev) Bilas, a Ukrainian German historian, reflected in his memoirs on emotions evoked by Dontsov writings in his fellow students at the Lviv Ukrainian gymnasium, describing them as “an irrational desire for security (Geborgenheit), for protection from the hostile world around us, which the new ‘collective’ of people organized into a modern nation promised to provide”5. While Erlacher rightly analyses the mutual intellectual influence between Dontsov and Soviet Ukrainian writer Mykola Khvylovyi, more could be said about the presence and perception of Dontsov’s writings in Soviet Ukraine: from Mykola Zerov’s critical treatment of nationalistic interpretations of Ukrainian literature to the example of a Dnipropetrovsk professor, who gave “Nationalism” to his students and discussed the text afterwards.6

Besides, some seemingly minor things about Dontsov’s biography deserve special attention, for instance, the issue of his doctoral degree in law supposedly obtained in 1917 in Vienna. I have failed to find in the existing literature any information about the title and/or supervisor of Dontsov’s dissertation. However, Dontsov himself and a number of his followers willingly and proudly emphasized his “doctoral” status.

The Second World War, which “Dr.” Dontsov had called for in numerous publications, proved to be a challenge for him. Unlike some close collaborators and friends of him, he never went to Ukraine and never participated in any undergoing fighting. As Trevor Erlacher puts it, Dontsov, “openly pro-Nazi throughout the 1930s and the Second World War, moved freely in Hitler’s New Europe (though he dared not set foot in Ukraine)” (p. 429). In other words, it seemed that Dontsov called for fight and sacrifice he himself preferred to avoid. This decision cost him respect from a number of interwar admirers. In postwar years, when he moved to America, lectured Slavic literatures at the University of Montreal and spent his last years in Canada, Dontsov never regained a charismatic influence comparable to the one he had enjoyed during the interwar period. Instead of reflecting critically on his own ideological path, he tacitly eliminated most evident pro-Nazi statements in the new editions of his writings.

Trevor Erlacher’s book is thoroughly researched, well written and can be called exemplary in terms of translations and transliterations. There are only a few minor mistakes, inevitable in any bigger publication. In one place, two prominent figures with the same family name – Volodymyr and Dmytro Doroshenko – are mixed up (pp. 53, 517). It was Volodymyr, a literary scholar, and not Dmytro, a historian, who once described Dontsov in a private letter as a “typically Russian intelligent” and to whose speculations Dontsov famously and angrily responded.7 Elsewhere, Erlacher mistakenly mentions Eduard Winter among other professors of the Prague-based Reinhard Heydrich Foundation institutes who “fled Prague to safety in the American zone and took up positions at various West German institutions” (p. 557). In fact, Winter chose to continue his career in East Germany, where he became the rector of Martin Luther University of Halle (1948–1951) and the director of the Institute for the History of the Peoples of the USSR at Humboldt University Berlin (1951–1966).8

All in all, Dontsov`s intellectual biography written by Trevor Erlacher convincingly succeeds in bringing historiography of Ukrainian nationalism “toward a more nuanced, diachronic, personal and transnational approach” (p. 434). One could only hope for comparable English-language monographs on maybe less known, but no less fascinating and prominent figures of Ukrainian political thought such as the religious conservative Viacheslav Lypyns’kyi, the Marxist Roman Rosdolsky, or the liberal socialist Ol’gerd Bochkovs’kyi.

Notes:
1 Mykhailo Sosnovs’kyi, Dmytro Dontsov. Politychnyi portret. Z istorii rozvytku ideolohii ukrains’koho natsionalizmu, New York 1974.
2 For instance, Sosnovs’kyi claimed similarities of Dontsov’s writings to those of the Polish conservative mystics Marian Zdziechowski or speculated about influences on Dontsov of Marx’s views of Russia as the danger for the West. Ibidem, p. 184.
3 Roman Wysocki, W kręgu integralnego nacjonalizmu. Czynny nacjonalizm Dmytra Doncowa na tle myśli nowoczesnych Romana Dmowskiego. Studium porównawcze, Lublin 2014; Oleksandr Zaitsev, Natsionalist u dobi fashyzmu. Lvivs’kyi period Dmytra Dontsova, 1922–1939 roky, Kyiv 2019.
4 Myroslav Shkandrij, Ukrainian Nationalism. Politics, Ideology, and Literature, 1929–1956, New Haven 2015, p. 82.
5 Lev Bilas, Ohliadaiuchys’ nazad. Perezhyte 1922–2000 rr. i peredumane, L’viv 2005, p. 56.
6 See Vasyl’ Chaplenko, Mii uchytel’ P. O. Yefremov, in: Ukrains’kyi samostiinyk 5 (1960), pp. 10–15, here p. 14.
7 See Halyna Svarnyk, Do ideinoi biohrafii Dmytra Dontsova, in: Ukrains’ki problemy 1 (1997), pp. 142–148.
8 Compare his memoir Eduard Winter, Mein Leben im Dienst des Völkerverständnisses, Berlin 1981.