Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies

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.

George 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.

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.

While Russia was growing stronger in the international sphere, Poland-Lithuania had begun a decline that would eventually lead to the ever-increasing absorption of its territories by its adversaries. This book concentrates on the diplomatic relationship between the two powers as witnessed by the records of the respective offices responsible for foreign affairs. Particular attention is paid to the residences maintained in Warsaw and Moscow.

This 17th-century work by the Frenchman Guillaume Le Vasseur, Sieur de Beauplan is one of the earliest, most colorful West European descriptions of Ukraine and the Cossacks. This volume includes an English translation of the original French text, reproductions of the original illustrations, and an extensive introduction by the translators. A separate box contains a representative selection of Beauplan’s maps of Ukraine.

This collection examines the Ukrainian economy during the late 20th century—a period of epochal change. The papers are divided into five sections: Framework; Resources; Performance; Welfare; and External Relations, and will be of interest both to specialists and to students and others interested in Ukraine today.

David 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 papers presented at the Third Quinquennial Conference on Ukrainian Economics. It contains 14 essays dealing with the one thousand years of Ukrainian economic history prior to World War I. The contributions are divided into three parts, covering the periods of Kievan Rus’, the 16th and 17th centuries, and the 19th 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 mutual antagonism by creating a Ministry of Jewish Affairs in the new Ukrainian state. This experiment ended in failure as violence swept the countryside amidst civil war and foreign intervention. Abramson sheds new light on these events.

This book argues that myth serves as the underlying code and model of Taras Ševčenko’s poetic universe. Examining the structures and paradigms of Ševčenko’s mythical thought provides answers for various crucial and heretofore intractable questions, such as those concerning the relation of his Ukrainian poetry to his Russian prose and more.

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.

The linkages between nationalism and socialism and the nature of peasant and artisan politics in East Europe are the fundamental problems engaged by this study of socialism in nineteenth-century Galicia. The origins of the socialist movements lay in democratic national movements formed in response to the introduction of the Austrian constitution.

This controversial and groundbreaking book revisits the origins of one of the most beloved works of East Slavic literature, Slovo o polku Igoreve (The Igorʹ Tale). Keenan argues that the text is not an authentic 12th-century document but rather was created by the Bohemian scholar Josef Dobrovský in the late 18th century.

To offer a broad historical and contemporary portrait of the European city Lviv, John 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.

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.

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.

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.

Frank Sysyn examines the failure of Polish policy through the career of Adam Kysil. Based on extensive archival research in Poland and the USSR, Sysyn’s study is a contribution not only to scholarship on Eastern Europe, but also to discussions on the preconditions and nature of early modern revolts and on the change of political and social elites.

Ukrainization originally meant active recruitment of Ukrainians into the Soviet state, but soon Ukrainian communists came to demand far greater self-determination than Moscow would tolerate. Those who made such demands in the 1920s were labelled “national deviationists,” and the issues they raised engulfed the regime in a major political crisis.

Elaborate icons and murals of the Last Judgment adorned many Eastern-rite churches in medieval and early modern Ukraine. The largest compilation of its kind, The World to Come includes more than eighty such images from present-day Ukraine, eastern Slovakia, and southeastern Poland, with most printed in full color.

This book explores the factors that led to the largely peaceful integration of Crimea into Ukraine and places the situation in the larger context of conflict-prevention studies, explaining this critical case in which conflict did not erupt despite a structural predisposition to ethnic, regional, and even international enmity.

Christian Raffensperger tracks the dynastic marriages of the Volodimeroviči, the ruling family of Rus´. Using a modern scholarly approach and broad range of primary sources, he delivers a fully realized picture of the Volodimeroviči from the tenth through twelfth centuries and the first comprehensive, scholarly treatment of the subject in English.

Mark R. Baker focuses on Ukrainian-speaking peasants during the 1914–1921 revolutionary period. Arguing that the peasants of Kharkiv province thought of themselves primarily as members of their particular village communities, and not as members of any nation or class, he advances the historiography beyond the ideologized categories of the Cold War.

Based on original and previously unavailable documents, Yuri Kostenko’s account of the negotiations surrounding the Budapest Memorandum agreement between Ukraine, Russia, and the U.S. reveals for the first time the internal debates of the Ukrainian government, as well as the pressure exerted upon it by its international partners.

The first English-language biography of Dmytro Dontsov, the “spiritual father” of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, this book contextualizes Dontsov’s works, activities, and identity formation diachronically, reconstructing the cultural, political, urban, and intellectual milieus within which he developed and disseminated his worldview.

Survival as Victory is the first anthropological study of daily life in the Soviet forced labor camps as experienced by Ukrainian women prisoners. Oksana Kis pulls from the written and oral histories of over 150 survivors to bring to life the gendered strategies of survival, accommodation, and resistance to the dehumanizing effects of the Gulag.

Edited and curated by the renowned medievalist Andrei Pliguzov, Documentary Sources on the History of Rus´ Metropolitanate is a rich resource for any reader interested in the controversies and preoccupations of the Orthodox hierarchy and the clergy throughout the Rus´ metropolitanate up to the early modern period.

A collection of texts in Latin, Hebrew, Church Slavonic, and Arabic, and their English translations, Jews in Old Rus´ offers unique insight into Slavic–Jewish relations, realigns the position of East European Jews within the larger diaspora of European Jews, and adds nuance to our understanding of the difficult relations Rus´ had with Khazaria.

The Frontline collects essays in a companion volume to Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe and Chernobyl. The essays present further analysis of key events in Ukrainian history, including Ukraine’s relations with Russia and the West, the Holodomor and World War II, the impact of Chernobyl, and Ukraine’s contribution to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute commemorated the 70th anniversary of the man-made famine inflicted on Ukraine with a 2003 symposium 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 there.

Eugene Fishel asks whether, how, and under what circumstances the United States has considered Ukraine’s sovereignty in its relations with Moscow. The Moscow Factor brings together for the first time documentary evidence and declassified materials, retrospective articles by former policymakers, and memoirs by erstwhile senior officials.

Civil society in Eastern Europe has long been labeled weak based on a lack of participation in formal organizations. However, this fails to recognize the impact of informality where it permeates economic, political, and social spheres. Below the Radar convincingly shows that informal engagement constitutes an essential component of civil society.

Ukrainian communist Oleksandr Shumskyi’s case offers unique insight into a survival strategy in Stalin’s terror machine. Shumskyi endured his tortures; his refusal to confess to false charges denied his interrogators a key piece to demonstrate the “legality” of their investigations. Stalin’s Liquidation Game examines resistance and survival.

In Breaking the Bonds of Corruption, Elena Denisova-Schmidt investigates corrupt behavior in higher education, both in the Ukraine and internationally, as well as reliance on corruption in Ukrainian business. This is the first English-language book dedicated to examining corruption as a widespread social phenomenon in post-Soviet Ukraine.