Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute offers enrichment for students from six countries (09/08/02)

Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute offers enrichment for students from six countries

by Yuri Shevchuk

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Intensive studies, cultural enrichment, new friends from all over the world - these were the mottos of the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute 2002 (HUSI) that concluded on August 16. Thirty-four students from six countries studied Ukraine-related disciplines this year.

Students from North America and Ukraine constituted the majority, yet the traditional international flavor of HUSI was enhanced by students from other, sometimes quite distant corners of the world. Miki Kameda, who took the history course "20th Century Ukraine," was from Japan, and her classmate Jurate Stanaityte was from Lithuania. Federigo Argentieri from Italy took "Beginning Ukrainian"; Anton Mirashnichenka from Belarus, Mariusz Zajaczkowski and Anna Müller from Poland enrolled in "Ukraine as Linguistic Battleground."

This summer's program in Ukrainian studies was exceptionally rich in innovation. The already intensive language training was further beefed up by an additional fourth hour of instructor-supervised laboratory work at the state-of-the-art Lamont Library Language Resource Center.

Novelty was manifest not only in the fact that there were new faces among the HUSI faculty - for example, Serhy Yekelchyk of the Ukrainian history course, or Maria Rewakowicz of beginners, Ukrainian - but above all by two pioneering courses that focused on conceptually new areas of Ukrainian studies and were presented for the first time in the history of HUSI and of Harvard. Thus, HUSI became a testing ground for the course "Images of Ukraine in Western Culture" (Lubomyr Hajda and Ksenia Kiebuzinski) and "Ukraine as Linguistic Battlefield" (Michael Flier). (For detailed descriptions of these courses visit the HURI website at www.huri.harvard.edu/husi.)

Students' educational horizons were further broadened by the program of cultural events. This year the program was exceptional. Lectures included: "An Intimate Insularity: The Triangular Framework of Jewish-Ukrainian History" (Henry Abramson, Florida Atlantic University), "The Forbidden Art of the Ukrainian Avant-Garde, 1910-1935" (Myroslav Shkandrij, University of Manitoba), "Ukraine's Challenges and Choices at the Intersection of Past and Present" (Yuri Shcherbak, ambassador to Canada), "The Sacher-Masoch Founda-tion: Ukrainians, Russians and the Masoch Legacy" (Vitaly Chernetsky, Columbia University) and "Solomea Pavlychko: Literary Critic, Author, Feminist. A Tribute" (Oksana Zabuzhko, poet, Kyiv).

For those who like literature and arts, the cultural program offered such events as the Evening of Literary Readings and Conversations with the participation of authors Ms. Zabuzhko, Ms. Rewakowicz (New York) and Volodymyr Dibrova (Kyiv-Cambridge), the concert of the Experimental Bandura Trio - Julian Kytasty, Michael Andrec and Jurij Fedynskyj (New York) and the Ukrainian Folk Concert presented by Mariana Sadovska (Kyiv) and Virlana Tkacz (New York),

By far the most important event of the HUSI cultural calendar was the screening of "A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa," the latest film by the world-renowned Yuri Illienko - a film that had caused an uproar in Ukraine even before its release for the general viewer. The Harvard screening was in fact the film's North American premiere. Covered in the Ukrainian media of North America (Svoboda, The Ukrainian Weekly, New Pathway, Brama.com) and in Ukraine (the Kyiv daily Den), the premiere became an authoritative forum for an open discussion of the film at the same time that its creators were subjected to scathing and often politically motivated criticism in Ukraine.

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