Textiles' materiality and the imaginary of the 18th-century Cossack Hetmanate
Key words: Textiles, Flowers, Cossack Hetmanate, Sarmatismus, Orient
The Cossack Hetmanate was a state that existed in the 17th and 18th centuries in the central part of present-day Ukraine. It emerged in 1648 in the course of a Cossack rebellion against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and, after seven years of independent existence, came under the Muscovite protectorate. In the 18th century, the Russian Empire absorbed the Cossack state, gradually eliminating all attributes of its sovereignty and implementing a systematic policy of Russification.
The culture of the Hetmanate developed a rich tradition of applied arts, including textile production. Carpets, interior furnishings, and clothing fabrics were imported from abroad and locally manufactured. We can learn about them from inventories of the property of Cossack elite figures, which mention dozens of carpets, tablecloths, bed linens, silk embroidery, and from painted portraits that provide detailed images of clothing fabrics. The most valuable material for the study also comes from extensive museum collections in Ukraine and abroad.
The first publications about textiles in the Cossack Hetmanate appeared at the beginning of the 20th century. These studies primarily focused on attributing and describing the extant objects (Peshchansky, 1924; Kryzhanovsky, 1926; Shcherbakivsky, 1927). After World War II, historical essays emerged that examined Hetmanate-era artifacts within the context of the metanarrative of Ukrainian textile history (Zhuk, 1966; Zapasko, 1966; Taranushenko, 1964). In recent decades, there has been a particular focus on the research of clothing fabrics (Stelmashchuk, 2000; Vasina, 2006; Stelmashchuk, 2011) and embroidery (Kara-Vasilyeva, 2008; Zaychenko, 2012) as well as carpets (Kohut, 2000, 2003, 2022).
In this paper, I explore the role of the textiles materially in informing the Cossack Hetmanate elite's mental imaginary and, specifically, the relationship between the material images of textile production and the mental images of the elite's ideology. I aim my research to contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between art and the social sphere, between the material and the discursive. I argue that the 18th-century textiles of the Cossack Hetmanate, utilizing motifs from Asian nature, enriched the elite's habitus with material images of the Orient, masking the tangible absence of their imagined mythological ancestral homeland―Sarmatia/Khazaria.
Halyna Kohut, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Faculty of Culture and Arts at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine. Kohut is an alumna of the CAA-Getty international program and has received scholarships and grants from the Volkswagen Foundation, Vector Foundation, Samuel H. Kress Foundation, among others. Her specialization lies in eighteenth-century East European carpets and textiles.
https://kultart.lnu.edu.ua/employee/kohut-halyna-volodymyrivna
Here, I explore the role of textiles in the imagination of the elite of the Cossack Hetmanate (established in the 17th c. in the central part of today's Ukraine and which, after seven years of independent existence, came under the Muscovite protectorate, undergoing gradual Russification in the 18th c.). The inventories mention silk carpets, tablecloths, sheets and embroideries that are today in extensive museum collections in Ukraine and abroad. I contend that these textiles, using motifs of Asian nature, enriched the elite's habitus with material images of the Orient, masking the tangible absence of their imagined mythological ancestral homeland, Sarmatia/Khazaria.