Over the last twenty years, a concerted effort has been made to uncover the history of the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine. Now, with the archives opened and the essential story told, it becomes possible to explore in detail what happened after the Holodomor and to examine its impact on Ukraine and its people.

In 2008 the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University hosted an international conference entitled “The Great Famine in Ukraine: The Holodomor and Its Consequences, 1933 to the Present.” The papers, most of which are contained in this volume, concern a wide range of topics, such as the immediate aftermath of the Holodomor and its subsequent effect on Ukraine’s people and communities; World War II, with its wartime and postwar famines; and the impact of the Holodomor on subsequent generations of Ukrainians and present-day Ukrainian culture. Through the efforts of the historians, archivists, and demographers represented here, a fuller history of the Holodomor continues to emerge.

This book collects nine articles that originally appeared in the journal Harvard Ukrainian Studies and that arose from the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute’s Millennium Project, an initiative launched in the 1980s to celebrate one thousand years of the Christianization of Kyivan Rus´. The articles cover a wide array of subjects: the ecclesiastical structure of the Christian Church in Rus´ in its earliest period (Andrzej Poppe); the conflict between Orthodoxy and the Uniate Church from 1569 to 1700 (Teresa Chynczewska-Hennel); an account of the Uniate Church and the partitions of Poland (Larry Wolff); the transformation of the Greek Catholic Church under the Austrian Empire (1848–1914) (John-Paul Himka); the Greek Catholic Church in the period between the two World Wars (Andrew Sorokowski); a rethinking of the relationship of Church and society in Galician Ukraine from 1914 to 1944 (Bohdan Budurowycz); and the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine during the interwar period (Bohdan Bociurkiw). The book concludes with a bio-bibliography of Bohdan Bociurkiw, a scholar who devoted his career to the study of Ukrainian Church history (Andrii Krawchuk). These essays provide new insights and a fresh perspective to the discipline.

The Forest Song represents the crowning achievement of Lesia Ukrainka’s mature period and is a uniquely powerful poetic text. A play in three acts, it seemingly breaks with her intellectually charged social and cultural themes, which range from feminism and the deconstruction of patriarchy to the workings of colonialism, even in antiquity. Here, the author instead presents a symbolist meditation on the interaction of humanity and nature set in a world of primal forces and pure feelings as seen through childhood memories and the re-creation of local Volhynian folklore. The play unfolds in spirited dialogues between characters from Ukrainian mythology and people of the land: Old Man River, the Nymph, two water spirits, Uncle Leo, Luke, Sylph, and the peasant woman Kylyna and her mother-in-law. The Forest Song is a testament to the power of love to overcome differences and bring loved ones back from the dead.

The years 2002–2003 marked the seventieth anniversary of the man-made famine inflicted on Ukraine and surrounding areas by Stalin’s Soviet leadership. The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute commemorated the anniversary with a symposium in October 2003 titled “The Ukrainian Terror-Famine of 1932–1933: Revisiting the Issues and the Scholarship Twenty Years after the HURI Famine Project.” This volume contains some of the papers presented at the symposium (previously published in Harvard Ukrainian Studies volume 25, no. 3/4), including Sergei Maksudov’s large-scale demographic study drawing on available documents of the era; Niccolo Pianciola’s description of the denomadization famine in Kazakhstan from 1931 to 1933; and Gijs Kessler’s study of events in the Urals region from the same period. Also included in this volume are Andrea Graziosi’s remarks on the present state of Famine scholarship and how it addresses the question of genocide, Hennadii Boriak’s assessment of the current state of source material, and an essay by George Grabowicz on the legacy of the Famine in Ukraine today.

Taras Ševčenko (1814–1861) is the central figure in modern Ukrainian literature, but despite the enormous attention that has been devoted to his person, his work, and his role in Ukrainian history and the Ukrainian national renascence, the core of the Ševčenko phenomenon—the symbolic nature of his poetry—has received little systematic analysis.

As this book argues, myth serves as the underlying code and model of Ševčenko’s poetic universe. Examining the structures and paradigms of Ševčenko’s mythical thought provides answers for various crucial and heretofore intractable questions, such as those concerning the relation of his Ukrainian poetry to his Russian prose, his sense of a transcendent “curse” and “guilt” in the Ukrainian past and present, the interrelation of his revolutionist fervor with his apparent providentialism, or of the tension between the nativism and the universalism of his poetry.

Moreover, it is through the structures of his mythical thought that we can understand Ševčenko’s “prophecy,” in effect, his millenarian vision. In this framework, too, the author focuses on the religious tenor of Ševčenko’s poetry, in which he is both expiator and carrier of the Word, and, finally, on the reception—indeed the cult of Ševčenko among generations of Ukrainians.

The Battle of Poltava has long been recognized as a crucial event in the geopolitical history of Europe and a decisive point in the Great Northern War between Sweden and the Russian Empire. The Russian victory at Poltava contributed to the decline of Sweden as a Great Power and was a major setback to Ukrainian independence. Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who joined forces with the Swedish king Charles XII against Tsar Peter I, remains a controversial figure even today.

In 2009, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute gathered scholars from around the globe and from many fields of study—history, military affairs, philology, linguistics, literature, art history, music—to mark the 300th anniversary of the battle. This book is a collection of their papers on such topics as the international, Russian, and Ukrainian contexts of the battle; Mazepa in European culture; the language and literature of the period; art and architecture; history and memory; and fact, fiction, and the literary imagination. Mazepa himself is the focus of many of the articles—a hero to Ukrainians but a treacherous figure to Russians. This book provides a fresh look at this watershed event and sheds new light on the legacies of the battle’s major players.

Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861), whose bicentennial coincided with the momentous events occurring in Ukraine in 2014, is almost universally acclaimed as the father of the modern Ukrainian nation and the icon of its cultural and political resurgence. Despite the volume and range of the scholarly attention devoted to him, however, much about his biography and creative output remains murky, largely as a result of the cult and myth that still envelop his legacy. This revisionist study reexamines the four basic frames that structure this legacy: Shevchenko’s biography, his career as a painter, the nature of his poetry, and its counterpoint in his considerable prose output. The questions addressed are fundamental: How did a former serf from the provinces become a presence at the imperial court in St. Petersburg? How could he reconcile a promising career in art and the world of patronage with his revolutionary poetry? How is a national poet made, and how does he function in the face of an official prohibition against writing and painting? And what does his Russian prose tell us about the Ukrainian voice of the national poet? The portrait that emerges shows a much more complex writer and artist than the icon intimates.

Ukrainian literature, reflecting a turbulent and often discontinuous political and social history, presents special problems to the historian of literature. In this book George Grabowicz approaches these problems through a critique of the major non-Soviet position in the field, the History of Ukrainian Literature of the eminent Slavist Dmytro Čyževs'kyj.

Grabowicz examines critically the method and theory as well as the actual literaryhistorical argument of Čyževs'kyj's History and challenges some of its basic premises, particularly regarding the periodization of Ukrainian literature, the thesis of its "incompleteness," and the postulate of a purely stylistic history of literature. Ultimately, he proposes an alternative historiographic model, one which would be attuned above all to the specifics of the given culture.

From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the geopolitical placement of Ukraine drew the attention of some of Europe’s most influential cartographers. Many of these maps, including ones of exceptional rarity, were collected by the Ukrainian scholar and journalist Bohdan Krawciw.

Krawciw traced the physical and aesthetic depiction of Ukraine across its changing borders as a means of self-recognition and as a cultural and political history of the contested nation and its peoples. Of special interest are his maps of Ukraine from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at the crossroads of four empires: Habsburg, Ottoman, Russian, and Soviet.

As part of his personal archive, Krawciw’s maps were bequeathed to Harvard University upon his death in 1975. This book serves as both a catalog of his collection and a description of how the maps he collected serve as an invaluable source for Ukraine’s history and a symbol of Ukrainian national identity. The book contains nearly 100 examples from the collection, many in full color, as well as indices listing maps by cartographer and by place name.