ЮРІЙ ШЕВЕЛЬОВ ПРО СВІЙ ВИБІР УКРАЇНСТВА ТА ПРО СТАВЛЕННЯ ДО «ЧУЖИХ» У СПОГАДАХ «Я – МЕНЕ – МЕНІ... (І ДОВКРУГИ)»

Abstract

Reflections of the outstanding scholar-Slavicist Yuriy Shevelov about his paradoxical experience of ethnic- identification, on the background of this problem as a general human and fundamental one, have a lot of weight. The escape of a young Ukrainian scientist from occupied Kharkiv to the West was driven by conscious aspirations to self-fulfillment and freedom. The path from Ukraine to Europe, and later to America, saved him from war and physical destruction, which threatened not only him but also a significant part of his people. Thinking of this path as salvation, he soberly and quite tolerably showed the environment of the Ukrainian and foreign intellectuals. He was a close acquaintance with them in pre- war and occupied Kharkiv and Lviv, in the German DP camps for Ukrainian refugees, in the research centers of Western Europe, and later in the United States. Openness and sincerity, as well as the scale of experience and depiction, the depth and self-criticism of comprehension of his own experience, make the book of Yu. Shevelov particularly valuable in the Ukrainian culture of the twentieth century. Yu. Shevelov rightly considered the reason for a special hatred on the part of representatives of the “Russian world” (in particular, in the face of the Russian emigrant Roman Jakobson and Ukrainian traitor Ivan Bilodid) their desire to destroy in his person a representative of an independent Ukrainian culture, a qualified researcher of its history and language, capable of advancing and advocating scientific ideas, those contradicted their Russification desires, which formed in the minds of the representatives of the scientific community of the western world non-penetrating barriers to the penetration of the voice of the stateless Ukrainian ethnic group. He called a complete defeat the result of his confrontation with the “Russian world” in the western scientific world. However, based on the fact that his labor is now in demand, and those who want to affirm the “Russian world” in the West and in Ukraine were already diminished, we can assert: his efforts have not gone in vain. Identification is that complex of ideas, which is made up in human heads, and here the truth goes up over the lie.