FOR THE RECORD: Remarks by Frank Sysyn
Following are remarks by Dr. Frank E. Sysyn, Peter Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine, on the publication of the book "The Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism: Galicia as Ukraine's Piedmont" delivered at the University of Toronto Press book launch of Prof. Robert Magocsi's books.
For the past quarter century, Bob Magocsi has contributed greatly to the study of the group known in the 19th-century as the Ruthenians of Austrian Galicia and the Kingdom of Hungary, the speakers of various western Ukrainian dialects. With this statement, I have brought to the fore some of my conceptual and terminological differences with Bob that go back over 30 years to when he was a graduate student and I an undergraduate at Princeton.
As I turned to "The Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism: Galicia as Ukraine's Piedmont," I found some of these resurfaced. I would have preferred Ukrainian identity or national consciousness to the nationalism in the title, but then nationalism, like nation, has so many meanings and uses in English. I find the statement on the back of the dust jacket that a century ago Ukrainians in most Ukrainian lands "considered themselves a branch of the Russians and their speech merely corrupted dialects of Russian or in some cases Polish" far too categorical. But then such differences are the lifeblood of academic discussion and they have never stopped me from profiting from Bob's writings.
As I read "The Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism," containing so many of the articles I have valued in earlier publications, I was reminded of the many strengths of Bob's contributions to the field. He has been an assiduous bibliographer and researcher, as his article on resources to Ukrainian studies in Vienna, listing so many journals he has microfilmed for the U. of T., reminds us. In an age where many academics cloak their findings in abstruse verbiage, he writes with clarity and persuasiveness. Without resorting to cliches about counterfactual and alternative history, he has long studied neglected phenomena, above all the Russophile movement and what he sees as an old Ruthenian orientation, so well represented in the articles assembled. Long before Anderson's imagined communities, Bob Magocsi carefully examined the world of Galician Ukrainians' ideas and self-conceptions and how they were transmitted to mass movements. In this volume he shows such processes in his discussions of the language question and by examination of the Kachkovskyi society.
Indeed, through the essays gathered here and his bibliographic work, Bob Magocsi has contributed greatly to the transformation of studies on Austrian Galicia and its Ukrainians from an exotic field with little literature in English to the hot topic it has become at international scholarly conferences. Now, of course, we have the benefit of new research in western Ukraine and the opening of the libraries and archives that have allowed a new generation of historians to pursue many of the topics Bob develops in this volume, some of which has appeared in Ukrainian.
At the same time, the importance of the Galician oblasts in achieving Ukrainian independence and in the political life of contemporary Ukraine has interested many political scientists and a wider circle of readers in the region. All will be pleased to see Bob's essays collected and joined by newly written general discussions of Galicia, presenting its multicultural world and its development down to the present. I congratulate the author and University of Toronto Press on this important accomplishment.
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, February 23, 2003, No. 8, Vol. LXXI
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