Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Publications

Morozov provides behind-the-scenes insights on Yeltsin, Kuchma, Dudaev, and other important players still active today. His book will firmly alter our perception of the USSR and its demise, the Soviet military machine, and the rise of a modern, independent Ukraine.

The Old Testament Book of Esther in Slavonic translation is known from East Slavic manuscripts of the late 14th to the late 16th centuries. Working from the Masoretic Hebrew texts and Greek translations, Horace Lunt and Moshe Taube examine textological clues to the circumstances of Esther’s translation, sources, and redactions. This study creates a solid basis from which scholars can now discuss the particulars of this important translation, the nature of East Slavic biblical translating activity, and the relationship of old East Slavic bookmen to Hebrew and Greek.

Oleh Lysheha is considered the “poets’ poet” of contemporary Ukraine. A dissident and iconoclast, he was forbidden to publish in the Soviet Union from 1972 to 1988. Since then, his reputation has steadily grown to legendary proportions. His work is informed by transcendentalism and Zen-like introspection, with meditations on the essence of the human experience and man’s place in nature. The Selected Poems here include facing-page English and Ukrainian versions of selected poems and a play, Friend Li Po, Brother Tu Fu. It represents a rare example of translations that are as beautiful as the original poetry and poems that anyone interested in the written word will appreciate.

Written in honor of one of the foremost observers of nationalism and culture in Central and Eastern Europe, this volume brings together 35 eminent scholars from the United States, Canada, Ukraine, and Poland. Supplemented by a bibliography of the work of Roman Szporluk, these fresh, urgent essays mirror Szporluk’s broad and comparativist approach.

The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute commemorated the seventieth anniversary of the man-made famine inflicted on Ukraine and surrounding areas with a symposium in October 2003 titled “The Ukrainian Terror-Famine of 1932–1933: Revisiting the Issues and the Scholarship Twenty Years after the HURI Famine Project.” This volume contains some of the papers presented at the symposium (previously published in Harvard Ukrainian Studies volume 25, no. 3/4), including Sergei Maksudov’s large-scale demographic study drawing on available documents of the era; and Gijs Kessler’s study of events in the Urals region from the same period.

Yuri Shcherbak--former Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.S.--is a writer and physician who came to international prominence with his exposé on Chornobyl, as a founder of the Ukrainian Green Party, as Ukraine’s first minister of environmental protection, and as its first ambassador to Israel. The Strategic Role of Ukraine assesses the period during which Ukraine rose to become an important part of the European geo-strategic posture.

The foremost authority today on Soviet and post-Soviet archives in Eastern Europe considers the essential problems of Ukrainian archeography.

Ukrainian Cossacks used icon painting to investigate their relationship not only with God but also their relationship with the Russian tsar. In this groundbreaking study, Serhii Plokhy examines the political and religious culture of Ukrainian Cossackdom, as reflected in the Cossack-era paintings, icons, and woodcuts. By encouraging the iconography to "speak," Tsars and Cossacks enriches our understanding of Ukrainian iconography as well as Russian imperial political culture.

The work of Potebnja, a leading Ukrainian linguist of the nineteenth century, has significantly influenced modern literary criticism, particularly Russian formalism and structuralism. Yet despite his remarkable achievements in linguistics and literary theory, Potebnja’s work was officially renounced in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and in the West he remains virtually unknown. In his study, John Fizer carefully reconstructs Potebnja’s theory of literature from the psycholinguistic formulations found in his works on language, mythology, and folklore.

Shevelov’s book, based on extensive study of factual material, traces the development of Modern Standard Ukrainian in relation to the political, legal, and cultural conditions within each region. It examines the relation of the standard language to the underlying dialects, the ways in which the standard language was enriched, and the complex struggle for the unity of the language and sometimes for its very existence.

This is a publication of a diptych in which names of the dead and living Orthodox faithful with members of their families (including tsars, princes, patriarchs of Muscovy, and Ukrainian hetmans) were entered by emissaries of St. Catherine’s Monastery to Muscovy, the Ukrainian Hetmanate, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Crimea, and the Ottoman Empire from the 1630s to the 1730s in exchange for alms for the monastery and the prayers of its monks.

By the late nineteenth century Odessa was the most polyglot and cosmopolitan city in the empire. In the first decades of the twentieth century, however, strikes, revolutionary agitation, and pogroms brought about the city’s decline. In this book Patricia Herlihy contrasts Odessa’s rapid development during the nineteenth century with the growing tension within its society up to the First World War.

The present collection deals with the Ukrainian economy during the late twentieth century--a period of epochal change. The papers are divided into five sections: Framework; Resources; Performance; Welfare; and External Relations. Because of the wide range of topics and extensive source material, this collection will be useful not only to specialists, but also to students and others interested in Ukraine today.

Professor Frick’s biography—the first major English—language work on Smotryc’kyj—examines the ways in which established cultures were altered by cross-cultural understandings and misunderstandings, resulting from the confrontation and mutual adaptation of two or more diverse cultures.

This volume contains the papers presented at the Third Quinquennial Conference on Ukrainian Economics. It contains fourteen previously unpublished essays dealing with the one thousand years of Ukrainian economic history prior to the outbreak of the First World War. The contributions are divided chronologically into three parts, covering the periods of Kievan Rus’, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the nineteenth century.

Crisis and Reform provides an excellent overview of the ecclesiastical structures in Eastern Slavic lands from their Christianization to the late sixteenth century.

Stefan Pugh analyzes the Ruthenian language use of one of its most outstanding practitioners, Meletij Smotryc’kyj (ca. 1578-1633): polemicist, cleric, and scholar. This study will provide the groundwork for the next generation of scholarship on the Ruthenian language.

In 1903 Bogdan Kistiakovsky railed against Lenin’s concept of a vanguard party to lead the revolution. His charge was wholly consistent with a life devoted to the development of rule of law in the Russian Empire--a new government based on respect for national minorities, human rights, and constitutional federalism. Susan Heuman’s study shows the fresh urgency of Kistiakovsky’s ideas as Russia, Ukraine, and the other countries of the former Soviet Union seek to establish precisely those values that Kistiakovsky put forth ninety years ago.

From its inception just before World War I to its demise during the Stalinist repression of Ukrainian culture in the 1930s, Ukrainian Futurism was much maligned and poorly understood. It has remained so into the late twentieth century. Professor Oleh Ilnytzkyj seeks to rectify the misinterpretations surrounding the Futurists and their leader Mykhail Semenko by providing the first major English-language monograph on this vibrant literary movement and its charismatic leader.

In this sweeping and synthesizing work Professor Omeljan Pritsak charts the influence of Western European, Arabic, Khazaro-Bulgarian, and, later, Byzantine metrological and numismatic systems on the development of these systems in Kyivan Rus’.

After the fall of the Russian Empire, Jewish and Ukrainian activists worked to overcome previous mutual antagonism by creating a Ministry of Jewish Affairs within the new Ukrainian state and taking other measures to satisfy the national aspirations of Jews and other non-Ukrainians. This bold experiment ended in terrible failure as anarchic violence swept the countryside amidst civil war and foreign intervention. Abramson sheds new light on the relationship between the various Ukrainian governments and the communal violence. A Prayer for the Government treats a crucial period of Ukrainian and Jewish history, and is also a case study of ethnic violence in emerging political entities.

This controversial and groundbreaking book revisits the origins of one of the most beloved works of East Slavic literature, the Slovo o polku Igoreve (the Igor’ Tale). Keenan delves into the history of its publication and argues that the text is not an authentic twelfth-century document, but was rather created by the Bohemian scholar Josef Dobrovsky’ in the late eighteenth century.

To offer a broad historical and contemporary portrait of the European city Lviv, Czaplicka has gathered together a wide range of scholars from the areas of historiography, history, art and architectural history, urban planning, literary history and criticism, and cultural history. Known variously over the centuries as Leopolis, Lwów, Lvov, and Lemberg, this city served as laboratory for the forging of modern Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian identities.

Leonard Friesen presents a study of the transformation of New Russia--the region north of the Black and Azov seas--from its conquest by the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth century to the revolutionary tumult of 1905. Friesen focuses on the multifaceted relations between the region’s peasants, European colonists, and Russian estate owners.

Ottoman survey registers are recognized as unparalleled sources on the demographic, economic, and linguistic characteristics of the regions for which they were made. The register for Kamaniçe is the only surviving survey register of Ukrainian lands. The full text of the defter is given in transcription in the first part, with a facsimile edition given in the second part.

The Tale of Bygone Years (Povest’ vremennykh let) is the most important source for the history of early Rus’. This massive undertaking provides scholars and general readers with the first fully legible text that includes all of the known redactions of the Povest’. The text consists of an intercollation of the five oldest redactions, three more modern redactions, three later interpolations, and Ostrowski’s own final interpretation. The intercollated texts are nested line-by-line. This three-part set will be of fundamental importance to Slavic philologists and historians of early Rus’.

A prominent religious figure and polemicist, Meletij Smotryc’kyj was caught up in the struggle between Orthodox and Uniate beliefs. His polemics served as the cornerstone of the Orthodox response to the Polish-Lithuanian Reformation and Counter-Reformation. He later argued for a new unity between the eastern and western Churches. The works collected in this volume, written over a period of twenty years, offer unique insight into the elite of early modern Rus’ and their place in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Krevza’s Defense of Church Unity (1617), on the Uniate side, and Kopystens’kyj’s Palinodia (1621), a monumental defense of the Eastern Church, are arguably the most erudite, comprehensive, and persuasive works on the ecclesiastical debate between these two groups. This two-volume work illuminates the intense struggle ignited when, at the time of the Union of Brest (1596), a large part of the Ruthenian ecclesiastical hierarchy declared itself in communion with the Roman Catholic Church.

Among the finest products of early Ukrainian literature were the Lives of the first Rus’ saints. Hollingsworth provides a lucid introduction that discusses each saint and his or her cult in the historical as well as social contexts and examines the literary and textual features of the Rus’ vitae.

Kohut examines the struggle between Russian centralism and Ukrainian autonomy. He, concentrates on the period from the reign of Catherine II, during which Ukrainian institutions were abolished, to the 1830s, when Ukrainian society had been integrated into the imperial system. This book not only is a major contribution to Ukrainian studies, but also enlarges on such wide-ranging topics as the formation of the Russian Empire, the origins of Russia’s nationalities problems, and the general conflict between royal absolutism and regional privilege.

Throughout the nineteenth century the province of Galicia was noted for political conflicts and the cultural vibrancy of its three major national groups: Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews. This volume brings together for the first time eleven essays on various aspects of the last seventy-five years of Austrian Galicia’s existence.

The authors included in this volume—Ilarion, Klim Smoljatic, and Kirill of Turov—are remarkable for both their personal and literary achievements. Simon Franklin prefaces the texts with a substantial introduction that places each of the three authors in their historical context and examines the literary qualities as well as textual complexities of these outstanding works of Rus’ literature.

Fixed in the Western mind through the cinematic masterpiece Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, the Hutsul people of the Carpathian region live in the crossroads of numerous peoples. The fruition of the late Polish linguist Jan Janów’s work, this atlas provides a fundamental resource for Slavic dialectologists.

Carpatho-Ukraine in the Twentieth Century offers political memoirs and commentary by Vincent Shandor, an elder statesman who served as head of the Carpatho-Ukrainian Representation to the Prague Federal government during the period preceding and at the beginning of World War II. Significant both as scholarly critique and as autobiography, Shandor’s work presents materials never before available in English about events leading up to and during World War II.

Halil Inalcik, the acknowledged dean of American Ottoman studies, has contributed a stunning new study of economic life of the Black Sea under Ottoman Rule by examining the customs register of Caffa. All those interested in the Ottoman period and Black Sea history will find this to be a signal publication.

The Kievan Caves Monastery was for centuries the most important Ukrainian monastic establishment. It was the outstanding center of literary production, and its monks served throughout the territory of Rus’ as bishops and monastic superiors. Heppell now makes available the first complete English translation of the Paterik.

This booklet contains the proceedings of the first Annual Conference sponsored by the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University, and the Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University at Harvard University, May 12-13, 1994.

As part of his personal archive, Krawciw’s maps were bequeathed to Harvard University upon his death in 1975. This book serves as both a catalog of his collection and a description of how the maps he collected serve as an invaluable source for Ukraine’s history and a symbol of Ukrainian national identity.

In 2009, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute gathered scholars from around the globe and from various fields of study to mark the 300th anniversary of the Battle of Poltava. This collection of their papers provides a fresh look at this watershed event and sheds new light on the legacies of the battle’s major players.

Ukrainian literature, reflecting a turbulent and often discontinuous political and social history, presents special problems to the historian of literature. In this book Grabowicz approaches these problems through a critique of the major non-Soviet position in the field, the History of Ukrainian Literature of the eminent Slavist Dmytro Čyževs’kyj.

This volume explores the impact of the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932–1933, on Ukraine. The range of topics considered include the immediate aftermath of the Holodomor and its effects on communities and subsequent generations; World War II, with its wartime and postwar famines; and the Holodomor’s place in present-day Ukrainian culture.