Dmytro Donzow

Dmytro Donzow

Dmytro Ivanovych Donzow ( Ukrainian Дмитро Іванович Донцов ; English transcription : Dmytro Dontsov ; born August 29, 1883 in Melitopol , Taurian Governorate , Russian Empire ; † March 30, 1973 in Montreal , Canada ) was a Ukrainian lawyer and journalist. He is considered the most influential ideologue of radical Ukrainian nationalism .

Life

Donzow grew up as the son of a businessman in what is now southern Ukraine. After secondary school in his hometown of Melitopol , he attended high school in Tsarskoye Selo (today Pushkin ), where he passed the school leaving examination in 1902. He then studied law at the University of Saint Petersburg . Initially a supporter of Marxism , he was one of the founders of the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party (RUP) in 1900 and joined the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers' Party (USDRP) in 1905. He began his journalistic career in 1906 with the newspaper Ukrainskaja schysn ("Ukrainian Life") in Moscow. He was imprisoned several times for his political activities, in 1908 he was imprisoned for eight months. When he was released on bail, he fled to Galicia, which was then Austrian . He continued his studies at the University of Vienna . In Vienna he met Marija Batschynska, whom he married in 1912. He finished his studies in Lviv . There he devoted himself more to the Ukrainian independence efforts, which he supported journalistically.

He resigned from the USDRP in 1914 because of conflicts over the national question and his downright anti-Russian stance. He founded the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (SBU), which took a pro-Austria position, and became its chairman. During the First World War he spent in Berlin, where he promoted the idea of ​​an independent Ukraine among German government circles, and in Bern, where he organized a center for emigrants. He received his PhD in 1917 in Lviv to Dr. jur. At the beginning of 1918 he went to Kiev, where Pavlo Skoropadskyj, as a hetman with the support of the Central Powers, proclaimed a Ukrainian state , under whose government Donzow was in charge of the telegraph administration. From 1919 to 1921 he headed the press office in the diplomatic mission of the Ukrainian People's Republic in Bern .

In Lviv, which according to the Ukrainian Polish War for the Republic of Poland belonged, he led from 1922 to 1932, the traditional magazine Literaturno-naukowyj wistnyk ( "Literary-scientific messenger"). From 1933 to 1939 he published the follow-up publication Wistnyk . He became a proponent of “ integral nationalism ”: All other political goals should be subordinated to the unity (sobornist) in the sense of the unification of all Ukrainian settlement areas in a Ukrainian nation-state and independence of Ukraine. This goal should be achieved with amoralnist ("amorality"), that is, the absence of moral criteria in the choice of allies, as long as these were directed against great Russian aspirations. In his 1926 book Nazionalism ("Nationalism") he demanded:

“Instead of pacifism (…) - the idea of ​​struggle, expansion, violence (…) Instead of skepticism, lack of faith and character - a fanatical belief in one's own truth, exclusivity, hardship. Instead of particularism, anarchism and demo-liberalism - the interests of the nation above all, (...) and the subordination of the individual to the national. "

Donzow took up ideas from Friedrich Nietzsche , Georges Sorel and Charles Maurras . He became the main source of ideas for the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) founded in 1929 , but not a member of this organization. From the 1930s onwards he developed an affection for the Axis powers , he translated works by Mussolini and Hitler into Ukrainian and presented the German Nazi state as a model for an independent Ukraine. Immediately after the outbreak of World War II, on September 2, 1939, the Polish authorities imprisoned Donzow in the Bereza Kartuska prison camp . He managed to escape and emigrated to Romania, in Bucharest he published the magazine Batawa from 1940 to 1941 . Then he moved to German-occupied Prague, where he wrote articles about Ukraine for German publications.

In 1945 he emigrated to the United States via Paris and London . From 1947 he lived in Montreal , Canada , where he taught Ukrainian literature at the university from 1949 to 1952. While he removed the positive attitude towards the Axis powers from his later works, he essentially remained true to his ideology formed between the world wars. He died in Montreal on March 30, 1973 and was buried in the cemetery of the Ukrainian Orthodox St. Andrew Memorial Church in South Bound Brook , New Jersey , United States .

Memorial plaque for Dmytro Donzow in Melitopol

Works

An incomplete selection of his works, u. a .:

• Greater Poland and the Central Powers. Berlin 1915.
• The Ukrainian state idea and the war against Russia. Berlin 1915.
• Українська державна думка і Європа Ukrajinska derschawna dumka i Jewropa , (English: Ukrainian Political Thought and Europe ), 1919.
• націоналізм Nazionalism , ' (English: Nationalism ), 1926.
• Дурман соціалізму Durman Sozialismu , (English: The Intoxicant of Socialism ), 1936.
• Росія чи Европа Rosija tschy Ewropa , (English: Russia or Europe ), London 1955. (The incorrect spelling Европа Ewropa instead of Європа Jewropa , as it appears in the original title, has been corrected in some online sources.)
• The spirit of Russia. Schild-Verlag , Munich 1961 (with a preface by JFC Fuller ).

Web links

Commons : Dmytro Donzow  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Dmytro Donzow in the catalog of the German National Library
• Donzow, Dmytro in the WorldCat bibliographic database
• Dontsov, Dmytro Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies / University of Toronto; English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Grzegorz Rossoliński love: Stepan Bandera - The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist. Fascism, Genocide, and Cult. ibidem-Verlag, Stuttgart 2014, p. 77.
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Wojciech Roszkowski, Jan Kofman (Ed.): Biographical Dictionary of Central and Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century. ME Sharpe, 2008, entry Dontsov, Dmytro.
3. ^ Frank Golczewski: The Ukrainian and Russian emigration in Germany. In: Karl Schlögel: Russian emigration in Germany 1918 to 1941. Life in the European civil war. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1995, pp. 77–84, here p. 83.
4. ^ Kerstin S. Jobst: History of the Ukraine. 2nd edition, Reclam, Stuttgart 2015. Chapter 13: The Ukrainian countries in World War II .
5. ↑ Quoted from Andreas Kappeler: Brief history of the Ukraine. 2nd edition, CH Beck, Munich 2000, pp. 210-211.
6. ^ ^{A b} Per Anders Rudling: The Return of the Ukrainian Far Right. The Case of VO Svoboda. In: Ruth Wodak, John E. Richardson: Analyzing Fascist Discourse. European Fascism in Talk and Text. Routledge, New York / Abingdon (Oxon) 2013, pp. 228–254, here p. 229.
7. ↑ Дмитро Донцов у книжках та унікальних жандармських фотографіях, istpravda.com (Ukrainian)
8. ↑ Dmytro Dontsov, ideologist of nationalism ukrainian this in "Ukraine weekly" April 7, 1973 Page 2; accessed on March 6, 2016
9. ↑ Example: Дмитро Донцов - Росія чи Європа? , Myslenedrevo.com.ua, see also illustrated title page (accessed June 10, 2020)

literature

• Reinhard Lauterbach: Civil War in Ukraine: History, Background, Participants Berlin: Ed. Berolina, 9783958410022