OBITUARY: Omeljan Pritsak, scholar of Ukrainian, Turkic studies, 87 (06/11/06)

OBITUARY: Omeljan Pritsak, scholar of Ukrainian, Turkic studies, 87

by Peter T. Woloschuk

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Prof. Omeljan Pritsak, internationally noted scholar of Ukrainian and Turkic studies, died of complications from heart disease on Monday, May 29, at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston at the age of 87.

An eminent historian and linguist, Dr. Pritsak maintained that Ukrainian studies were crucial to a true understanding of Western culture and history because Ukraine straddled the fault line between European and Eastern cultures, philosophies, religions and world views, and events that transpired in Ukraine impacted all of Europe and the world.

As a result, he continually pushed for the inclusion of Ukrainian studies as a legitimate field of academic endeavor in Western higher education, particularly in light of Soviet tendencies to subsume all things Ukrainian as a subset of Russia.

Beginning in 1968 and continuing for a period of six years, Dr. Pritsak, working in conjunction with noted Harvard Byzantinologist Prof. Ihor Sevcenko, oversaw the establishment of endowed chairs of Ukrainian history, philology and literature at Harvard University and the founding of Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI). These moves came after more than 10 years of intensive fund-raising work within the Ukrainian American community co-sponsored by the Federation of Ukrainian Student Organization of America (SUSTA) and a national fund-raising committee.

Dr. Pritsak not only served as the institute's first director for almost 20 years but was the first Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History, taking over the chair in 1975. In 1977 Dr. Pritsak helped to launch the journal Harvard Ukrainian Studies. He was instrumental in organizing a weekly seminar series, building up the Ukrainian library collections, and developing a new series of publications that made primary texts, facsimile editions and translations of important works of the Ukrainian past available to scholars worldwide. He also organized Harvard's Ukrainian Summer Institute.

Through his inspired teaching and energetic example, Prof. Pritsak helped to train and influence several generations of students who have gone on to fill important academic posts in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia.

As a result of the academic activities and publications at Harvard inspired by Prof. Pritsak, the Soviet academic establishment was forced to confront issues such as the concept of Kyivan Rus' as the proto-state for Ukraine and not Russia, and even the Ukrainian Famine, which it had chosen to distort or suppress.

Born on April 7, 1919, in Luka (now Ozerne), Sambir Region, Lviv Oblast, Ukraine, Prof. Pritsak was a son of Boykivschyna. Although his parents, Osyp Pritsak and Emelia Kapko Pritsak, lived in Sambir, they opted to have their child born in his maternal grandparents' home in Luka. His parents were Ukrainian patriots, and his father served in the army of the Western Ukrainian Republic after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was captured by the Poles and was incarcerated in Bereza Lytovska, where he died in September 1919.

Prof. Pritsak's mother married again in 1920 and with her new husband, Pavlo Saramaha, moved to Ternopil. Mr. Saramaha was also a veteran of Ukraine's war for independence and had seen action in eastern Ukraine. He returned to Halychyna suffering typhus and infected his first wife and son, who died a short time later.

Because both families had been actively involved in the independence movement, they suffered the confiscation of all their property by the new Polish government. As a result, they decided that their son shouldn't be penalized for their activities and elected to raise him Polish. He attended grammar school in Ternopil and then was sent to Polish Gymnasium No. 1 in Ternopil, where he completed his secondary education. He was the only student of Ukrainian ancestry attending the school and, although thinking of himself as Polish and speaking Polish, he found it strange that he attended the local Greek-Catholic Church.

Prof. Pritsak attributed his conversion to Ukrainianism and the Ukrainian cause to a Polish physics teacher who went out of his way to belittle him as a bandit, a Kozak and a potential murderer on a regular basis in front of his classmates. He also said that talks with the many Ukrainian villagers who came into Ternopil to protest the Polish pacification of Halychyna in 1930 had a profound impact on him. At that time he went into the Buduchnist Ukrainian bookstore and purchased books on Ukrainian history and language, as well as a Ukrainian-Polish dictionary. He also changed his name from the Polish Emil to the Ukrainian Omeljan.

His higher education - with a concentration in Ukrainian and Ukrainian history, and also, increasingly over time, Turkic history and philology - took place at the University of Lviv, then under Polish control. With the Soviet occupation, the university was closed, but his professor, Ivan Krypyakevych, took him as a secretary for the newly created affiliate of the Institute of Ukrainian History, which was part of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv and which was located in the Basilian Monastery of St. Onufrius. For almost a year he lived in the building and conspired with the professor and the ihumen to save the monastic library housed there.

In 1940 he was invited to the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine by Prof. Ahatanhel Krymsky where he continued his studies. After a short time he was drafted into the Red Army and saw service in Central Asia. Escaping from the Red Army, he made his way back to then-German-occupied Kyiv and found that the academy was closed and the professors scattered. He returned to Halychyna and soon wound up in Berlin as an "ostarbeiter." A German professor, Richard Hartman, with whom he had previously corresponded, took an interest in him and was able to get him legal documents that allowed him to continue his studies at the Oriental Institute of the University of Berlin.

With the fall of Berlin, professors and students scattered and it was some time before he learned that his professors had been given positions at the University of Goettingen. He matriculated there and he received his doctorate in 1948.

Prof. Pritsak's dual interests in Ukrainian history and Eastern, primarily Turkic, linguistics came about because during the course of his studies, he had noticed that historical work dealing with the emergence of the east Slavs and the first east Slavic state of Kyivan Rus' relied largely on Slavic and Byzantine materials with minimal reliance on the rich Norse and Middle Eastern source materials.

Working with these virtually untapped Oriental sources became one of the major focuses of Dr. Pritsak's professional endeavors for his entire academic career, resulting in the ongoing publication of a multi-volume work on the various existing sources dealing with origins of Rus'.

Upon receipt of his doctorate, Prof. Pritsak started teaching at the University of Goettingen and in 1952 became a docent and then professor (1957) of Turkology at the University of Hamburg. In 1954 he spent a year at Cambridge University as visiting professor, in 1959 at the universities of Krakow and Warsaw, and in 1960 at Harvard University. In 1961 Dr. Pritsak moved to the United States, eventually becoming a naturalized citizen, and became a professor of Turkology at the University of Washington at Seattle. In 1964 he joined Harvard University as a professor of linguistics and Turkology.

At Harvard Dr. Pritsak quickly became known for his exuberant energy. He was called the "tornado" by his devoted staff. His protégé and current associate director of HURI, Lubomyr Hayda, said, "his attitude was always one of 'if that's impossible let's do it.' " His successor as professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard, Roman Szporluk, emphasized that in addition to enormous energy and drive Dr. Pritsak was "a scholar, an organizer and a statesman."

In pursuing his scholarly research Prof. Pritsak regularly used dozens of languages and was fluent in 12 of them. When Harvard was considering creating a graduate program in inner Asian studies, and the faculty was considering the inherent difficulties of getting such a project up and running, Dr. Pritsak was quoted as saying, "there are no real problems. Most of the scholarly literature is in English, German, French and Russian texts, but every educated person already knows these languages so that the only thing still necessary is the acquisition of the knowledge of Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Tibetan, Armenian, Georgian, Chinese and possibly Japanese to be able to deal with the original sources. The whole process should take a minimum amount of time."

One of Dr. Pritsak's classmates at the Ternopil Gymnasium was Wladislaw Rubin, who later became a Polish cardinal, prefect of the Congregation for Oriental Churches, and close personal friend and advisor to Pope John Paul II. At Cardinal Rubin's request, Dr. Pritsak hosted the then Cardinal Karol Wojtyla at the newly established HURI in 1976 and the two became fast friends. Over the years Dr. Pritsak was regularly invited to the Vatican to brief Pope John Paul II on developments in Central and Eastern Europe and particularly Ukraine.

Dr. Pritsak retired in 1989 as the Soviet Union was disintegrating and quickly became immersed in revitalizing higher education in the humanities in Ukraine, spending three months of each year in Kyiv. He pushed for the reintroduction of Near, Middle and Far Eastern studies which had been eliminated by Stalin in Ukraine and in 1990 founded the Ahatanhel Krymsky Institute of Oriental Studies in Kyiv with a branch in Crimea. The institute was named in honor of Krymsky who headed the institute in the 1930s and 1940s and who was Dr. Pritsak's mentor, and who had disappeared in the Soviet gulag.

Dr. Pritsak also became the first holder of the chair of historiography at the University of Kyiv, insisting that it follow traditional academic norms and totally break with Marxist Leninist academic conceptions that had been forcibly imposed in the 1930s. In 1997 Dr. Pritsak became the first foreigner to be named to the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He also received numerous academic awards and government honors, most notably from both Ukraine and Turkey. He took particular pride in receiving honorary Turkish citizenship from the president of the Republic of Turkey.

Former Ukrainian Prime Minister and Orange Revolution leader Yulia Tymoshenko, commenting on Dr. Pritsak's death said, "Prof. Pritsak contributed so much to furthering our understanding of early Ukrainian history and the appreciation of the multi-cultural aspects that continue to forge the identity of modern Ukraine. The nation is indebted to his academic achievements and enduring legacies."

"I include myself as one of the many beneficiaries of his scholastic endeavors," Ms. Tymoshenko concluded, "as several of my closest advisors benefited from studying at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute."

Prof. Pritsak was a prolific writer and during the course of his career penned more than 500 books, articles and scholarly works.

Prof. Pritsak is survived by his wife Larysa Hvozdik Pritsak; his daughter, Irene Pritsak, by his late first wife Nina Moldenhauer Pritsak; and two grandchildren, Lailina Eberhard and Michael Wissoff.

A divine liturgy was celebrated at Christ the King Ukrainian Catholic Church in Boston, and it was followed by a memorial gathering of friends and colleagues presided over by HURI's current director, Prof. Michael S. Flier, Oleksandr Potebnja Professor of Ukrainian Philology. Prof. George Grabowich, one of Prof. Pritsak's students and a former director of HURI, also made remarks. A memorial liturgy was celebrated by the papal nuncio to Ukraine, Archbishop John Yurkovich, for the academic community of Ukraine at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv.

Donations in Prof. Pritsak's memory may be made to the publications fund of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. Checks should be made out to the Ukrainian Studies Fund, 1583 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138. (When making out checks, indicate on the memo line that the donation is in memory of Omeljan Pritsak.)

A memorial service for Dr. Pritsak, and a celebration of his life and scholarly achievements, is planned by the Ukrainian Research Institute to take place at Harvard University in the fall.

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