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Ukrainian Studies: Framing the Contexts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

George G. Grabowicz
George G. Grabowicz*
Affiliation:
Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University
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Type
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Information
Slavic Review , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , Fall 1995 , pp. 674 - 690
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1995

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References

1. Cf. Horace G. Lunt, “Notes on Nationalist Attitudes in Slavic Studies,” Canadian Slavic Papers xxxiv, no. 4 (December 1992).

2. Cf. Harvard University Extension School 1994–1995, Cambridge, 1994, 90–95.

3. Thus Drahomanov, in his “Antrakt z istorri ukrai'nofilstva, 1863–1872” (An Episode in the History of the Ukrainian Movement), makes only in passing the point that on the right bank Ukrainian territories there was only the Polish aristocracy and no Polish narod as such (cf. Drahomanov, M. P., Vybrane [Kiev, 1991]: 207 Google Scholar).

4. Cf. the writings of Mykola Riabchuk, Oksana Zabuzhko, Solomea Pavlychko, Tamara Hundorova and others; cf. also Pavlyshyn, Marko and Clarke, J.E.M. eds., Ukraine in the 1990s: Proceedings of the First Conference of the Ukrainian Studies Association of Australia; Monash University, 24–26 January, 1992; (Melbourne, Monash University Slavic Section, 1992).Google Scholar

5. The most recent such venue was the Columbia conference on “Peoples, Nations and Identities: The Russian-Ukrainian Encounter,” 13–15 November 1994.

6. A late Soviet variant on this, which one would be likely to hear from the Russian man in the street, was the catalogue of “Ukrainian” general secretaries of the CPSUKhrushchev, Brezhnev, Chernenko and even Gorbachev. It goes without saying that even if there were identifiable Ukrainian ethnic roots (which has hardly been demonstrated), it is more than obvious that for such a position a national identity of any form other than the crudely ethnographic, i.e., one that would easily fit the mold of homo sovieticus, would have been an insuperable handicap.

7. In the case of enlightened and creative individuals like Prokopovych, the imposed denial of one's roots and intellectual heritage could be found to leave a visible textual trace. Cf. Sherekh, Iurii [Shevelov, ], “Moskva, Maroseika” in Ne dlia ditei (New York: Proloh, 1964), 34–42 Google Scholar. One should also note here that the formation of modern Ukrainian literature in the early nineteenth century is precisely a study in this process of bifurcation and separation from the dominant canon.

8. Cf. for example, the conclusions regarding the exploitative inter-republican system of Soviet economics in Bandera's, Volodimir N. “Income Transfers in Macroeconomic Accountability from the Standpoint of Ukraine,” The Ukrainian Economy: Achievements, Problems, Challenges, Koropeckyj, I. S., ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.Google Scholar

9. Cf. Weber, Eugen, Pesants into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976 Google Scholar.

10. Most telling in this respect are the titles—and the conceptual and narrative paradigms that they project—of two of the most substantial and influential histories of Ukraine in nineteenth century Russia, i.e., Kostomarov's Bogdan Khmelnitskij i vozvrashchenie Iuzhnoi Rusi k Rossii (1857) and Kulish's Istoriia vozsoedineniia Rust (1874, 1877).

11. Cf. Savchenko, Fedir, Zaborona ukraïnstva 1876 r. (Kiev: Derzhavne vydavnytstvo Ukrainy, 1930 Google Scholar; English translation: The Suppression of the Ukrainian Activities in 1876 (Munich: W. Fink, 1970).

12. Cf., for example, Kostomarov's “Zadachi ukraïnofilstva,” Vestnik Evropy (1882), I: bk. 2, 886–900.

13. The programmatic awareness of cultural relativism and the consciousness that all dominant ideologies, including the scholarship that grows on that basis, have their immanent “tendentiousness” or, more generally, their systems of values and paradigms of perception, was determined only in the twentieth century in the social and cultural sciences and on the basis of post-evolutionist theories.

14. Compare, for example, Gombrowicz's notion of “pasting on a mug” (Ferdydurke) or Frantz Fanon's explicit metaphor: Black Skin, White Masks.

15. Cf. my article on “Ukrainian-Russian Literary Relations in the Nineteenth Century: A Formulation of the Problem,” in Ukraine and Russia in their Historical Encounter (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, University of Alberta, 1992); and Swoboda, Victor, “Shevchenko and Belinsky,” Shevchenko and the Critics 1851–1980 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 303–23.Google Scholar

16. Cf. his “Sud'ba imperii,” Novyi zhurnal xvi (1947).

17. V. Vynnychenko, “Bula..ie i bude,” Literaturna Ukraina, no. 49 (December 1994).

18. Cf. Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Random House, 1963 Google Scholar; and Oksana Grabowicz, “Kolonial'na spadshchyna v s'ohodnishnii Ukraïni: kil'ka kliuchovykh pytan'” (The Colonial Legacy in Contemporary Ukraine: Some Key Questions), Arka, no. 1(3) (January-March 1994): 14–17.

19. Cf. Zvit pro diial'nist’ Akademiï Nauk Ukraïny, u 1993, r. (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1994); cf also Akademiia nauk Ukrainy, Dovidnyk (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1993).

20. Ibid., 124–26.

21. I am specifically referring to the Shevchenko Institute of Literature and the Ryl's'kyi Institute of Art, Folklore and Ethnography, but by all indications the same pattern obtains generally. Again, it should come as no surprise: if people are not paid for months on end, one can hardly expect them to work. At the same time, virtually all of the humanities institutes located at 4 Hrushevs'kyi Street in Kiev, the two already mentioned as well as the institutes of history and of linguistics, have leased a considerable portion of their premises to commercial interests—since in the absence of funding from the Presidium of the Academy this is their only source of income. Similarly, bookstores survive by leasing out part (often the larger part) of their premises to purveyors of other wares; in the case of the Poeziia bookstore on Maidan Nezalezhnosti these are photographic supplies and videos.

22. An eloquent example here is a proposed five-volume, illustrated history of Ukrainian culture which echoes the gigantic MAIRSK project on Slavic cultures that was so strongly criticized at the International Congress of Slavists in Sophia in 1988 and has now apparently died on the vine. In the Ukrainian case, i.e., for the Academy of Sciences, the lesson was not learned; cf. its official Plan-prospekt iliustrovanoï “Istoriï ukraïns'koï kul'tury” u 5-ty tomax, (Kiev, 1992).

23. V. Iaremenko and Ie. Fedorenko eds., Ukraïns'ke slovo. Khrestomatiia ukraïns'koï literatury ta literaturnoï krytyky, (Kiev: Ros', 1994).

24. In this area there are a number of important and welcome governmental initiatives—a ministry of nationality and minority affairs, support for minority education, press and cultural activities—and various intellectual and scholarly initiatives: conferences, symposia, publications, exchanges and so on.

25. In Canada their profile was clearly greater—there were courses and degrees were given—but there, too, a genuine presence was established only with the creation, in some measure echoing the Harvard project, of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) in Edmonton and then the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto.

26. A major exception here were the Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the US. Cf. also Omeljan Pritsak's critique of Ukrainian émigré scholarship, “Orhanizaciia i zavdannia ukraïns'koï nauky u SShA” [The Organization and Tasks of Ukrainian Scholarship in the US], Suchasnist’ no. 4(76) (April 1967): 107–14; here, 109.

27. One example of this could be the fact that one could do a study of, say, “the Soviet novel” and discuss only Russian writers and their works, and no one, neither the publisher, nor the reviewers nor readers would think that anything was amiss. This was simply the code, or rather the very clear, albeit unwritten canon: for serious purposes “Soviet” meant “Russian. “

28. Kulish, P, “Vospominanie o Nikolae Ivanoviche Kostomarove,” Nov 4, no. 13(1885): 61–75; here, 66.Google Scholar