CIUS celebrates release of first volume of Hrushevsky translation (11/23/97)

CIUS celebrates release of first volume of Hrushevsky translation

by Andrij Kudla Wynnyckyj
Toronto Press Bureau

TORONTO - Right on schedule and less than a year after the manuscript was handed over for publication to the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, the first volume of Mykhailo Hrushevsky's "History of Ukraine-Rus'" in English translation was officially launched in North America this fall.

The inaugural book launch took place in Edmonton at the University of Alberta's Timms Center for the Arts on September 18, where the univesity's president, Dr. Roderick Fraser, and CIUS Director Dr. Zenon Kohut praised the efforts of the team assembled by Dr. Frank Sysyn, director of the CIUS's Peter Jacyk Center for Ukrainian Historical Research (PJCUHR), under whose auspices the 10-volume history is being translated and edited. Also in attendance were Marta Skorupska, the first volume's meticulous translator, and Dr. Marko Stech, managing director of the Peter Jacyk Educational Foundation.

The keynote speaker was Prof. Thomas Noonan, a prominent specialist in medieval studies from the University of Minnesota. Prof. Noonan spoke of the difficulties teachers of all levels have with the fact that "several generations of North Americans have been indoctrinated to believe that East Slavic history was, in fact, Great Russian history."

Prof. Noonan said the Great Russian model is not inclusive and ignores or marginalizes many peoples, adding that "informed citizens in [the U.S. and Canada] must understand that what is commonly called Russia ... always has been a multi-ethnic state."

"If we are to replace the old, outmoded 'Russian history' with a more inclusive history, we must start with Ukraine and Ukrainian history," the Minneapolis-based scholar said, "and this is where Hrushevsky's 'History' becomes crucial."

New York City was the locale of the next book launch, where on September 26 Columbia University hosted an evening that featured addresses by Ukraine's former Ambassador to the United Nations Anatoli Zlenko, Dr. Paul Hollingsworth of the U.S. State Department and Harriman Institute Director Prof. Mark von Hagen. On the following day, La Salle University's Prof. Leo Rudnytzky and Prof. Maxim Tarnawsky, CIUS Press director, joined the itinerant celebrations at Philadelphia's Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Center.

Two launches were held in Toronto - the first, conducted in Ukrainian, on September 28 at the Old Mill; the second, in English, on September 29 at the University of Toronto's Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies.

The keynote address at both events was delivered by Prof. Ihor Sevcenko, Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine Studies, emeritus, Harvard University.

On September 29 Dr. Kohut led off the event by pointing out that Hrushevsky's approach was "still new" for Eastern European historians because the Soviet-enforced proscription of his opus and the availability of his work primarily in Ukrainian had kept his ideas "out of the mainstream of intellectual discourse."

The CIUS director added that Hrushevsky "provided the intellectual tools for the separation of Ukrainian historiography from the Russian," and that he managed to replace the accepted historical paradigm "in which Ukrainians played virtually no role in history, even on their own territory, with one in which they had an ancient past."

"The CIUS is very proud of having undertaken the daunting task of translating into English, editing and providing an updated scholarly apparatus of all 10 volumes (11 books) of this fundamental work", he said.

Project director Dr. Frank Sysyn

Next up was the project's editor-in-chief, Dr. Sysyn, who provided a sketch of the efforts to render Hrushevsky's magnum opus in a language accessible to all international scholars. At the outset, "as early as 1903" according to the project director, Hrushevsky himself sought to make his work available in German, then academia's lingua franca. This effort was headed by scholar-writer Ivan Franko, but after one volume the effort stalled.

In the 1920s Hrushevsky corresponded with various groups in Canada in a vain effort to find a translator into English, and following World War II, the Shevchenko Scientific Society began to translate it, but this attempt also foundered.

"When in 1989 Mr. Peter Jacyk of Toronto decided to fund a Ukrainian historical studies center at the University of Alberta, he hoped that the center would undertake the translation and editing of Hrushevsky's work," Dr. Sysyn related.

The PJCUHR director commented wryly on the optimism of former CIUS Director Bohdan Krawchenko, who opined at one point that one or two translators should be able to do it all in a few years. "By now," Dr. Sysyn said, "six translators have labored for more than eight years to render more than 6,000 pages of difficult scholarly prose accurately and readably."

Dr. Sysyn said the volume being launched justified Mr. Jacyk's faith in the project.

The Harvard-educated editor-in-chief offered thanks to the five donors who have endowed the publication of the first few volumes in the series with donations of $100,000, and to countless others in the community who have made smaller, but equally important, financial contributions to the effort. Petro and Ivanna Stelmach sponsored the production of volume one.

Dr. Sysyn praised the librarians of the universities of Alberta and Toronto, and said the Pontifical Institute's library "has proven to be a great treasure for our project," in part because the 1871 edition of the Hypatian Chronicle used by Hrushevsky was found here. "Even Harvard doesn't have a copy," he added.

"In its early phase, the project was dependent entirely on the skill of the managing editor, Uliana Pasicznyk, and now we are very fortunate to have a talented and dedicated editorial staff, consisting of [PJCUHR] Associate Director Serhii Plokhy, translation project senior editor Dr. Myroslav Yurkevich, and CIUS research associates Dr. Andrij Hornjatkevic and Dushan Bednarsky," Dr. Sysyn said.

In conclusion, the project director said the first volume is the most difficult and challenging, given its extensive time frame (from prehistory to the 11th century) and the many scholarly disciplines encompassed.

"I am hard put to think how it could have been accomplished," Dr. Sysyn said, "without the experience and skill of the translator, Marta Skorupska."

Translator Marta Skorupska

A former editor of the journal Suchasnist, Radio Liberty commentator and literary scholar, Ms. Skorupska then provided an engaging account of her travails in "Englishing" Hrushevsky's prose.

Ms. Skorupska echoed Dr. Sysyn's memory of Dr. Krawchenko's élan, by relating that the former director asked her if she would agree to translate all 10 volumes of "Istoria Ukrainy Rusy." She rejoined that her decision only to undertake the translation of the first "was the right approach."

The translator said that over the years, colleagues who heard of her work on the project would often offer their sympathies. She was puzzled why anyone thought it was more difficult than work she had done previously and asserted that literature is more difficult to contend with than a scholarly work, although perhaps less demanding on "what the Germans call 'sitzfleisch,' [idiomatically: patience and focus]."

Ms. Skorupska quipped that she usually agreed to take on translations either because she found it difficult to say no, needed money or because "it was for the good of the cause, a phrase that every Ukrainian living in the diaspora is very familiar with, and which usually means 'We're not going to pay you because the fate of Ukraine depends on it, and the exchange of money would be very unseemly.'"

She intimated that while the preface to the current volume deals comprehensively with the complexities of producing an English rendering of Hrushevsky's history, the interesting "process by which we collectively arrived at the many terminological, usage and stylistic decisions" was not revealed.

"There are always tensions between the translator who signs his or her name to the final text," Ms. Skorupska said, "and the various scholars and editors working on a book." When one of the latter introduced a change, for the most part she agreed, thinking, "why didn't I think of that?" At other times, Ms. Skorupska recalled ironically, she "became passionately committed to the original" and a battle royal ensued. She said the correspondence that resulted would make an interesting volume in itself.

In closing, Ms. Skorupska said she found her participation in the project "extremely rewarding."

Harvard's Prof. Ihor Sevcenko

The keynote speaker, Prof. Sevcenko, a former member of Henri Grégoire's seminar in Byzantine history in Brussels, an Oxford University fellow and currently a respected faculty member of Harvard University's department of classics, then added some background information on Hrushevsky and his plaudits for the project.

Prof. Sevcenko said the launch was "an important event in the history of both East European and English-speaking scholarship." To the question "why republish a work written 80 years ago?," he offered the answer: "Hrushevsky is a classic, and one does republish classics."

The Harvard scholar drew a comparison to Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," a late 18th century work that was republished with updated scholarly apparatus in the early 20th century, and many times since.

Prof. Sevcenko also said the appearance and organization of the bibliographies, footnotes and other scholarly apparatus have been brought up to superior, modern standards.

The Byzantinist praised the contributions of Warsaw University's Prof. Andrzej Poppe, who provided summaries of historical theories examined, supplemented or confronted by Hrushevsky. Prof. Poppe and the other editors updated Hrushevsky's bibliography, presented the latest scholarly views on various problems and "were often able to show that Hrushevsky's hunches were very often correct."

Finally, he said, the current edition of Hrushevsky's work "provides the outside observer with an excellent tool with which better to observe the uses and abuses, for political purposes, of historical writing."

Hrushevsky the man

Putting Hrushevsky in context, Prof. Sevcenko said the scholar was born in 1866, the year of the Battle of Sadova, an event that led to the relaxation of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy's internal controls in Galicia, thus indirectly enabling Hrushevsky to teach there in the 1890s. The historian died in 1934, the same year that Sergei Kirov was assassinated. "While this event ushered in Stalin's Great Terror, Hrushevsky's own fate, temporary arrest in 1931, exile to Moscow, death in unclear circumstances, reminds us that the Great Terror years had their prehistory" he said.

Since he was a "child of Romanticism," Hrushevsky espoused the conception that "simple people rather than their rulers are the proper subjects of historical research," Prof. Sevcenko said. "It followed that he considered the historian's task to be that of retracing as far back as possible the vicissitudes of the territory on which a given people lived."

The Byzantinist said that while such a plan sounded innocent and straightforward enough, it clashed with the accepted view of Russian history (established in the 16th century), which took the exact opposite view, concerned as it was with the notion of ancient Rus' "as a large undifferentiated entity" and its ruling dynasty.

"Since this dynasty left Kyiv and moved on to other centers," Prof. Sevcenko continued, "in order to establish itself in Moscow with a short interval in St. Petersburg, there was no point in focusing on a given territory whose importance would wane as the ruling dynasty would leave it."

In the 19th century Russian historians were influenced by Romanticism as Hrushevsky was, the Byzantinist said, and this also led them to focus on the people, but it also produced the somewhat fanciful notion that ethnic Russians were the original inhabitants of Kyiv, who then moved along with their rulers.

Paradoxically, Prof. Sevcenko said the political implications of Hrushevsky's model of history were less of a source of confrontation in tsarist times than they were after the revolution of 1917. At first, Hrushevsky merely participated in a scholarly, "professional" debate with his colleagues. Later, the fact that Hrushevsky was the first UNR president and the realities of the Soviet nationality policy until 1988 spelled trouble for both him and his works.

"[Hrushevsky's] history was banned," the Harvard historian said, "its volumes put in 'reserved' sections of libraries, quoting from it was forbidden, the manuscript of the last volume of his history disappeared in unclear circumstances in the 1970s, and he himself was arrested, exiled and died, also in unclear circumstances."

Prof. Sevcenko warned that "trouble around the historian seems to be brewing again in official Russia of today." The Harvard scholar said a 1966 book attacking Hrushevsky as a Ukrainian separatist and racist was ordered republished at the behest of Russian President Boris Yeltsin's chancery in 1996, and that earlier this year a section director of the Moscow-based Institute for Canada and the U.S. published a "friendly warning to his counterparts in the United States, in which he showed that Ukraine was not a nation, that it had never been really independent until 1991, and that Hrushevsky got all of his ideas from the 'Russia-hating Poles.'"

Hrushevsky the positivist

Prof. Sevcenko said that although a Romantic in worldview, Hrushevsky was a positivist and German historicist in method. "His documentation is so thorough and complete that it overawes the modern researcher," he said, adding that Hrushevsky "exercised a sovereign command of the secondary literature available in his day."

The leading Byzantine scholar said Hrushevsky was in the forefront of his discipline in that he summoned the help of such neighboring fields of study as archeology, anthropology, the nascent science of sociology, paleontology and geology. "No wonder that he was viewed with respect by his fellow historians, and that it was difficult to raise believable objections to his general conception, as long as the scholarly discussion obeyed the rules of the professional, rather than political, game."

According to Prof. Sevcenko, other characteristics of Hrushevsky's were his penchant for warning readers about what was fact and what was hypothesis ("Hrushevsky never tried to kid either himself or his public") and "an uncanny flair for what was grain and what was chaff in historical evidence."

In closing, Prof. Sevcenko noted that in 1992, a first-grade primer was published in Kharkiv that contained a poem listing Ukraine's heroes. Among them were Hetmans Petro Sahaidachny, Ivan Vyhovsky, Ivan Mazepa and, also, Mykhailo Hrushevsky. "As the primer appeared in 500,000 copies, there is hope that Hrushevsky will find his place in the hearts of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children," the historian said.

Prof. Sevcenko then neatly segued into a gracious expression of thanks to the project's principal patron, Peter Jacyk.

On October 16 in Regina, Saskatchewan, Drs. Plokhy and Yurkevich presented Hrushevsky's Volume 1 to the Ukrainian community at the Saskatchewan Center for the Arts.

Similar festivities are planned to be held in Seattle, Washington, on November 21, during the convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (the U.S. association of scholars in Slavic studies). Launches of the volume to be held in Kyiv and Lviv are still in the planning stage.

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