In Search of a New Home: From Andrii Yakovliv’s Letters to Lev Okinshevych

Abstract

The Shevchenko Scientific Society Archives in New York houses the correspondence between Ukrainian jurist Lev Okinshevych and various figures of science, culture, and politics. Among them are letters from the famous lawyer and historian of law Andrii Yakovliv, whose life in the postwar years is mostly unknown. We can partially fill those gaps using the eight letters from Yakovliv to Okinshevych, written in 1947-1949. After leaving his job at the Ukrainian Free University (UVU) in Prague, Andrii Yakovliv moved to the part of Germany occupied by the Western Allies, worked at the Ukrainian Technical and Economic Institute in Regensburg, and maintained ties with UVU, where he received the honorary doctorate in 1947. He later moved to his family in Belgium, gave lectures to Ukrainian students at the Catholic University of Louvain and was actively involved in research. Among other things, at this time, Yakovliv was engaged in arranging papers of Viacheslav Prokopovych and preparing for publication his unfinished book The Seal of Little Russia: Sphragistic Etudes, which was published in 1954 as a separate volume of Memoirs of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. In parallel, the scholar prepared for publication his monograph Ukrainian Code of 1743 “Rights on which the Little Russian people are judged,” its history, sources, and systematic presentation of content, took an active part in preparing the section “Law” for the Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Studies, worked on Memories, or The Tale of the Bygone Years of My Life. Besides sharing the academic interests, Yakovliv and Okinshevych had quite a friendly relationship. In his letters, Yakovlev discussed his scholarly plans, the publication of his research, the work of Ukrainian educational and research institutions in exile, as well as issues related to the work on the Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Studies, and the problems of his family’s relocation to the United States. This correspondence sheds light on the last stage of Yakovlev’s life in Europe, his activities and relations with colleagues during this period. From these letters, we learn many interesting details about the private and academic relations of the scholar with many members of the Ukrainian scholars’ emigration group, about the circumstances of founding and activity of Ukrainian scientific institutions in Western Europe, about the fate of the Ukrainian Museum in Prague. This epistolary heritage is of exceptional value not only for the study of the intellectual biography of Andrii Yakovliv but also for the prosopographical study of the Ukrainian scientific emigration of the 1940s and 1950s.