Harvard Papers in Ukrainian Studies – serie

Between 1772 and 1795, Russia, Prussia, and Austria concluded agreements to annex and eradicate the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. With the partitioning of Poland, the dioceses of the Uniate Church (later known as the Greek Catholic Church) were fractured by the borders of three regional hegemons.Larry Wolff's deeply engaging account of these events delves into the politics of the Episcopal elite, the Vatican, and the three rulers behind the partitions: Catherine II of Russia, Frederick II of Prussia, and Joseph II of Austria. Wolff uses correspondence with bishops in the Uniate Church and ministerial communiqués to reveal the nature of state policy as it unfolded.Disunion within the Union adopts methodologies from the history of popular culture pioneered by Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre) and Carlo Ginzburg (The Cheese and the Worms) to explore religious experience on a popular level, especially questions of confessional identity and practices of piety. This detailed study of the responses of common Uniate parishioners, as well as of their bishops and hierarchs, to the pressure of the partitions paints a vivid portrait of conflict, accommodation, and survival in a church subject to the grand designs of the late eighteenth century’s premier absolutist powers.

Omeljan Pritsak and the Intellectual Origins of the Ukrainian “Harvard Miracle” is the first English-language intellectual biography of Omeljan Pritsak—a prominent and controversial historians of Ukraine, Central Europe, and the Turko-Osmanic and Mongol worlds. This concise study serves as a new intellectual history of Ukrainian history.

Omeljan Pritsak and the Intellectual Origins of the Ukrainian “Harvard Miracle” is the first English-language intellectual biography of Omeljan Pritsak, the co-founder of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and the first professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard. Andrii Portnov places Pritsak’s life and legacy in the context of Ukrainian and world historiography and illuminates the development of his scholarly interests, which emerged in interwar Poland and developed through the Sovietization of Western Ukraine and the perturbations of World War II. His scholarship ranged from German Oriental Studies in the 1940s and 1950s to North American Slavic studies to the international studies of the origins of Rus´. Pritsak’s trajectory unfolds as he faces the challenges of establishing the field of Ukrainian studies in North America while engaging with influential scholars such as Dmytro Čyževskyj, Roman Jakobson, Ivan Krypiakevych, Oleksandr Ohloblyn, and Natalia Polonska-Vasylenko. Based on unique materials Portnov uncovered in several German archives, this concise study serves as an invitation to reassess the intellectual history of Ukrainian history. Containing unique, previously unpublished photographs from Pritsak’s personal collection at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, this book sheds light on the life and work of the enigmatic figure of Omeljan Pritsak—one of the most prominent, controversial, and multifaceted historians of Ukraine, Central Europe, and the Turko-Osmanic and Mongol worlds.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II have brought attention to the displaced cultural and archival heritage of many nations. The situation of Ukraine provides a striking example of the many international problems involved in questions of restitution. Patricia Kennedy Grimsted considers (among many topics) the problems of defining the archival heritage of Ukraine vis-à-vis Russia; international precedents for post-imperial archival devolutions and postwar restitution; intentional Soviet archival destruction in 1941; the Ukrainian component of Soviet library and archival trophies in Moscow and Kyiv; Russia’s bitterly disputed 1998 law nationalizing cultural trophies; and post-1991 Ukrainian restitution policies.Containing significant new revelations about cultural treasures previously thought lost, Trophies of War and Empire will be of interest to all those interested in the contemporary rebuilding of cultural and intellectual institutions in Eastern Europe.