A roundtable on Myroslav Shkandrij’s Ukrainian Nationalism: Politics, Ideology, and Literature, 1929–1956.

Abstract

Editor's introductionSince 2015, our journal's publisher, Taylor and Francis, has sponsored the annual Canadian Association of Slavists' Taylor and Francis Book Prize. It is awarded annually for the best academic book in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies published in the previous calendar year by a Canadian author (citizen or permanent resident). The winner of the 2016 prize, to be awarded at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Slavists at Ryerson University in Toronto in May, is Myroslav Shkandrijof the University of Manitoba for his book Ukrainian Nationalism: Politics, Ideology, and Literature, 1929-1956 (Yale University Press, 2015). To mark Professor Shkandrij's achievement and to further the discussion of his important work, Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes invited three major Ukrainian scholars of literature and history (and the relationship between the two) to comment on the book. Following interventions from Yaroslav Hrytsak, Tamara Hundorova, and Oleksandr Zaitsev, Professor Shkandrij offers a response.Comment by Yaroslav HrytsakMy review of Myroslav Shkandrij's book is inevitably subjective. He cites me several times in his book and those mentions are always made in a positive context.1 This shows that in many, if not in the majority of aspects our views are very similar.I would like to emphasize one detail. Shkandrij did in his book the same thing I tried to achieve in my biography of Ivan Franko: he demonstrated that Ukrainian nationalism cannot be reduced only to politics or ideology but is also connected to literature. As a result, the main ideological principles are often formed by writers and in the field. As I tried to show, some of Franko's verses are simply rhymed political statements. Franko died one year before the revolution of 1917. The aspect of Ukrainian nationalism, if not strengthened, definitely did not weaken from the time of his death. It is no coincidence that two leaders of the Ukrainian national revolution, Volodymyr Vynnychenko and Semen Petliura, were a writer and journalist and that one of the most influential ideologists of Ukrainian nationalism, Dmytro Dontsov (and, appropriately, one of the main heroes of Shkandrij's book), was a critic. The other six heroes of the book, Olena Teliha, Leonid Mosendz, Oleh Olzhych, Iurii Lypa, Ulas Samchuk, and Iurii Klen, were writers and poets. According to the author, [a]s a group they best represented in literature the authoritarian brand of nationalism, one that is most closely associated with the integral nationalism of the OUN [Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists].2Viacheslav Lypyns'kyi called this phenomenon literary Ukraine. It was obvious to him that the Ukrainian national leaders had a predisposition to develop their political programs based on literary-cultural perceptions.3 Of course, this strong interdependence between nationalism and literature was not an exclusively Ukrainian phenomenon and scholars and theorists of nationalism have drawn attention to it for a long time. What is strange is that scholars of Ukrainian nationalism have studied this aspect so little and so rarely; for them, the intellectual history of Ukrainian nationalism was almost exclusively the history of political texts and military doctrines. Shkandrijhas filled a very important gap and, as a result, he has extensively broadened and changed prospects for research.I will not focus in detail on the book's other achievements such as the incorporation of new sources, for instance, texts that are deposited in Canadian libraries and archives and Dontsov's archive, which remains unexplored. However, I would like to emphasize other aspects that make his book different from other works. First of all, Shkandrijanalyzes in depth the attitudes of the Ukrainian nationalists towards the Jewish question. Secondly, he tries to examine whether this attitude was based on a racial approach and, as a result, whether it is possible to consider interwar Ukrainian nationalism to be a variety of fascism or Nazism. …