Ivan Franko And His Community

This book brings us to the very core of the debates about nations and nationalism. It presents a microhistory of Ivan Franko (1856-1916), a prolific writer and political activist, who was an indisputable leader in forging a modern Ukrainian identity in the late Habsburg Galicia.

Courage and Fear is a study of a multicultural city in times when all norms collapse. Ola Hnatiuk presents a meticulously documented portrait of Lviv’s ethnically diverse intelligentsia during World War Two. As the Soviet, Nazi, and once again Soviet occupations tear the city’s social fabric apart, groups of Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish doctors, academics, and artists try to survive, struggling to manage complex relationships and to uphold their ethos. As their pre-war lives are violently upended, courage and fear shape their actions. Ola Hnatiuk employs diverse sources in several languages to tell the story of Lviv from a multi-ethnic perspective and to challenge the national narratives dominant in Central and Eastern Europe.

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 communiquŽs 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.

Twenty-five tales, including elements of Ukrainian folklore, relate the adventures of the wily Fox Mykyta who relies on his wits to outwit his enemies.

Ukrainian Galicia was home to Poles, Jews and Ukrainians for hundreds of years. It was witness to both World Wars, starvation, mass killings and independence movements. Family members of the authors include survivors of German concentration camps and the GULAG prisons. They fought in Austrian, Polish, Russian and German armies, as well as in the Ukrainian pro-independence army. They were arrested by the Gestapo and the NKVD, tortured and even declared dead. They survived against the most unlikely odds. Their stories, shadows and secrets permeate this book and provide a rich background to some of the most dramatic events humanity has witnessed.

Ukraine and Europe challenges the popular perception of Ukraine as a country torn between Europe and the east. Twenty-two scholars from Europe, North America, and Australia explore the complexities of Ukraine's relationship with Europe and its role the continent's historical and cultural development. Encompassing literary studies, history, linguistics, and art history, the essays in this volume illuminate the interethnic, interlingual, intercultural, and international relationships that Ukraine has participated in. The volume is divided chronologically into three parts: the early modern era, the 19th and 20th century, and the Soviet/post-Soviet period. Ukraine in Europe offers new and innovative interpretations of historical and cultural moments while establishing a historical perspective for the pro-European sentiments that have arisen in Ukraine following the Euromaidan protests.

Pp. 283-297, "Mykhailo Drahomanov and the Problem of Ukrainian-Jewish Relations", discuss the views of the Russian nationalist as expressed in two articles. In the first (1875) he opposed legal discrimination against Jews, as it was based on medieval prejudice and did not achieve its aim of safeguarding the peasants' interests. The second was a response to the pogroms of 1881-82. He blamed the Russian policy of concentrating the Jews in the Pale of Settlement for Ukrainian-Jewish tensions. He also criticized the Jews as a parasitic class which felt no solidarity with the Ukraine. He saw the solution in a Jewish socialist movement and a federation of Russia and Austro-Hungary, in which Jews would enjoy equal rights. Pp. 299-313, "The Problem of Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Nineteenth-Century Ukrainian Political Thought, " discuss the approaches of three Ukrainian thinkers to the "Jewish question": Mykola Kostomarov, Mykhailo Drahomanov, and Ivan Franko. Kostomarov published an article in 1862 in "Osnova" to counter accusations in the Jewish journal "Sion" against the Ukrainian cultural movement. He supported Jewish emancipation, but accused the Jews of clannishness, indifference to the fate of their country, and acting as instruments of Polish oppression and exploiters of the peasants. Franko was a disciple of Drahomanov; he adopted the idea of Ukrainian independence and advocated Jewish-Ukrainian cooperation.

Galicia was created at the first partition of Poland in 1772 and disappeared in 1918. Yet, in slightly over a century, the idea of Galicia came to have meaning for both the peoples who lived there and the Habsburg government that ruled it. Indeed, its memory continues to exercise a powerful fascination for those who live in its former territories and for the descendants of those who emigrated out of Galicia. The idea of Galicia was largely produced by the cultures of two cities, Lviv and Cracow. Making use of travelers' accounts, newspaper reports, and literary works, Wolff engages such figures as Emperor Joseph II, Metternich, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Ivan Franko, Stanisław Wyspiański, Tadeusz "Boy" Żeleński, Isaac Babel, Martin Buber, and Bruno Schulz. He shows the exceptional importance of provincial space as a site for the evolution of cultural meanings and identities, and analyzes the province as the framework for non-national and multi-national understandings of empire in European history.