Towards an Intellectual History of Ukraine: An Anthology of Ukrainian Thought from 1710 to 1995 ed. by Ralph Lindheim and George S.N. Luckyj (review)

128 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 Ralph Lindheim and George S.N. Luckyj, editors. Towards an Intellectual History of Ukraine: An AnthologJ} ofUkrainian Thought from 1710 to 1995 University of Toronto Press in association with the Shevchenko ScientiHc Society. xii, 420. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper Over twentyyears ago, Omeljan Pritsak presented his plan to translate sixty volumes of Ukrainian historical texts to his colleagues at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. As with many projects of that visionary organizer of scholarship, some more modest part of his plan has been fulfilled. Six volumes of translations of medieval and early modern texts have already appeared in the excellent Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature.Modem Ukrainian history has notbeen as fortunate, despite the increasing interest in Ukraine and teaching of courses in the field. Towards an Intellectual History ofUkraine is a major contribution towards filling this need. It emerges from the University of Toronto Slavic Department ,long a leading centre in the study of modern Ukrainian intellectual and literary history. George Luckyj has published monographs on the literary debate in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920S, a biography of Panteleimon Kulish, a ground-breaking study on the cultural and literary world of Ukraine in the early nineteenth century, entitled Between GogoI' and Sevcenko, and an examination of the S. Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood. His colleague Ralph Lindheim is a specialist in Russian literature who has also already co-operated before with Luckyj on projects of Ukrainian literary studies (the publication of a translation of Mykola Kulish's Sonata Pathetique). The anthology contains forty-two texts ranging from less than a page to thirty pages in length. Five selections date from the eighteenth century, seventeen from 1800 to 1917, seventeen from 1917 to 1991, and three since the renewal ofUkrainian independence. While for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the generally recognized leaders of Ukrainian intellectuallife are represented, with the exception of V.olodyrnyr Antonovych, for the twentieth century the selections are more a matter of the ectitors' preference, perhaps because the canon is not so well established. Mosthave never appeared in English before. Twenty-six were translated by the editors .Fortunately, the well-written introduction places the texts in a broader intellectual context and mentions authors who could not be included. 1bis reviewer will desist from the temptation to lament what is not there, other than to say that the Western Ukraine is underrepresented and the teacher of Ukrainian history would wish for the introduction to Rusalka Dnistrovaia (The Dnister Nymph), the 1836 publication that initiated the national revival in Galicia. Rather, one must be grateful for the feast of authors and intellectual currents that is presented. HUMANITIES 129 The editors have sensibly eschewed the usual dividing line of 1800 (the French Revolution, Herderian thought, and Romanticism are generally associated with the onset of national movements, in the Ukrainian case often dated to the first major work in the modern vemacularJ Kotliarevkis Eneida, which appeared in 1798). While their justification for not including the texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on grounds that they. were usually written by clerics may not seem fully convincing, their inclusion of the Bendery constitution and the fragments of Poletyka and Divovych gives a view into the political thought ofthe Hetmanate that was one of the sources of the Ukrainian revival of the early nineteenth century. They wisely do not limit their 'selection of texts to those significant for Ukrainian politicalculture. Their inclusion ofProkopovych gives representation to the Ukrainian influence on modem Russian political thoughtJ while that ofSkovoroda exemplifies a unique development ofphilosophical thought in eighteenth-century Ukraine. They have followed a similar pattern for the nineteenth century by induding,in addition to the selections ofKostomarov,Shevchenko, Kulish, Drahomanov, Kachala, Nechui-Levytsky, and Hrinchenko, the letters of Gogol on his Ukrainian identity, a text by the noted lingUist Potebnia on linguistic denationalization, and an example of the writings of the Ukrainian philosopher Yurkevych. For the early twentieth centuryJ wellknown texts by Franko and Mikhnovsky are accompanied by a less widely known reply by Bohdan Kistiakovky to the attacks of the Russian liberal Petr Struve on the Ukrainian national movement. For the twentieth century , selections come from...