BOOK NOTES (07/18/99)

BOOK NOTES

New study examines religion and nationality in western Ukraine

MONTREAL - The Greek-Catholic Church has been described as a hybrid of Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism that combines the heritage of Byzantine Christianity with submission to the Roman papacy. The Eastern and Western elements of the Church have often collided, but perhaps never so dramatically as in the Austrian province of Galicia in the late 19th century.

Using Soviet archival materials declassified in the 1980s, John-Paul Himka, a professor of history and classics at the University of Alberta, examines a period during which the Greek-Catholic Church in Galicia was involved in a protracted, and at times bitter, struggle to maintain its distinctive, historically developed rites and customs. He focuses on the way differing concepts of Ruthenian nationality affected the perception and course of church affairs, while showing the influence of local ecclesiastical matters on the development and acceptance of these divergent concepts of nationality.

The implications and complications of the Galician imbroglio are engagingly explained in this latest addition to Prof. Himka's work on nationality in late 19th century Galicia. His analysis of the relationship between the Church and the national movement is a valuable addition to the study of religion and the national movements in Eastern Europe and beyond.

Richard Greenfield of the department of history at Queen's University, said of the book, "By thus seeking to reconstruct and detail the immensely complex and constantly changing situation in Galicia Prof. Himka attempts to provide an insight into realities of construction of a national identity. At the same time he demonstrates clearly the impossibility of disentangling religious and political developments in this context."

According to Andrew Sorokowski of St. Basil College, "'Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine' is engaging, entertaining and not without humor. [John-Paul Himka's] style is suitable for the educated non-specialist and non-scholarly reader. He tells a good story."

The book, at $65 (cloth), may be ordered from: McGill-Queen's University Press; 3430 McTavish St., Montreal, Quebec, H3A 1X9 Canada; telephone, (514) 398-2555; fax, (514) 398-4333.

Analysis of Slavonic biblical work

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - The Old Testament Book of Esther in Slavonic Translation is known from East Slavic manuscripts of the late 14th to late 16th centuries. Working from the Masoretic Hebrew texts and Greek translations, in "The Slavonic Book of Esther: Text, Lexicon, Linguistic Analysis, Problems of Translation," Horace G. Lunt and Moshe Taube examine textological clues to the circumstances of Esther's translation, sources and redactions.

This study creates a solid basis from which scholars can now discuss the particulars of this important translation, the nature of East Slavic biblical translating activity, and the relationship of old East Slavic bookmen to Hebrew and Greek.

This book will be of interest to philologists and cultural religious historians alike. The edition contains a full redaction with variants and received translation, a full word index, grammatical analysis, verse-by-verse commentary, and discussion of vocabulary of selected semantic fields, not only of the Book of Esther, but of comparable texts.

The price of the 324-page book, published by the Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies in 1998, is $39.95 (hardcover). It is available from: Harvard University Press, 79 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138; telephone, 1 (800) 448-2242; fax, 1-800-962-4983 (from the U.S. and Canada); telephone, (617) 495-2480; fax, (617) 495-8924 (international).

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