Україна на історіографічній мапі міжвоєнної Європи: матеріали міжнародної наукової конф ed. by Я. Мельник (review)

Ukraine on the Historiographic Map of Interwar Europeis a stimulating collection of thirteen essays by some of the foremost historians of modern Ukraine. Edited by Yaroslava Melnyk, Serhii Plokhy, Valerii Smolii, and Frank E. Sysyn, this book is the product of a conference held in July 2012 at the Ukrainian Free University in Munich, Germany. Andreas Kappeler's opening lecture "What Is Ukraine? What Is Europe? What Is a Historiographic Map?" set the gathering's agenda with a series of questions about a heretofore neglected aspect of the Ukrainian experience between the world wars in Europe: the historical profession. Leaving the situation in the Soviet Union to a subsequent conference (held in Kyiv the following year), Kappeler's address asked the attendees to consider the lives and works of the Ukrainian historians who, by choice or necessity, emigrated to Central and Western Europe. Who should be included in this group? What institutions and schools of thought did they join or create? How did the political and historiographical situation in their host societies affect their intellectual labors? Did the Soviet world they left behind nevertheless shape their worldview? What became of those scholars who chose to return and take part in the construction of a communist Ukraine? What were the parameters and chief concerns of interwar Ukrainian studies? In what sense and to what extent were the Ukrainian historians who relocated to Prague, Warsaw, Vienna, or Lviv as "European" as the cities they adopted and the universities that employed or rejected them?

The crux of the matter is Ukraine's location on the map of "Europe," then and now. Of course, this is not a geographic, but a cultural or civilizational distinction; one that places the Soviet and Russophile aspects of the Ukrainian past outside of Europe, within Moscow's sphere and the "Eurasian" alternative. The conference's focus on the Europeanness of Ukraine and its exiled historians continues a perennial debate among Ukrainian intellectuals about their place in the world vis-à-vis East and West. The interwar period – which witnessed the partitioning of the Ukrainian lands into Soviet, Polish, Romanian, and Czechoslovak regions after numerous failed attempts to achieve independence – set this dilemma into sharp relief for Ukrainians. If Ukraine is Europe, what makes it so?

Such questions seem all the more urgent in light of events since the conference took place in 2012. But Ukraine on the Historiographic Map of Interwar Europealready feels like an artifact from a different era; before the Maidan Revolution, the annexation of Crimea, the Russo-Ukrainian war, and the international ascendance of Euroskeptical rightwing populism. Now, after six years of bloodshed with no end in sight, the fundamental question of Ukraine's orientation – toward Europe or with Russia – is as bitterly contested as ever. The writers in this volume examined the problem from a vantage point of relative peace, when Ukraine, despite its many domestic problems, seemed at least externally secure and free to follow its own path, quite possibly into a brighter, more European future. With these hopes frustrated, much as they were a century ago, it is unsurprising that interwar events and personages loom large in the historical and political debates of contemporary Ukraine. It would appear that no other era has given modern Ukrainians more heroes to praise, villains to condemn, tragedies to lament, or sacrifices to honor. The interwar period weighs heavily on historians of Ukraine today, so it makes sense to ask: how did their predecessors – the ones who lived and worked through those grim years – understand their own times and the past up to that point?

Opening this collection is an essential piece of writing by one of the pioneers of modern Ukrainian historiography, Mark von Hagen, who passed away in September 2019. His contribution to the book – an exploration of the life and thought of the Ukrainian historian, political activist, and statesman Pavlo Khrystiuk – is a version of his introduction to...