BOOK NOTES: Memoirs describe Ukrainian revolution and cultural renaissance of the1920s (03/13/05)

BOOK NOTES

Memoirs describe Ukrainian revolution and cultural renaissance of the1920s

"The Ever-Present Past," by Tatiana Kardinalowska. Edmonton-Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2004. Softcover, 180 pp., $22.95.

The most recent publication of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press - Tatiana Kardinalowska's memoirs, "The Ever-Present Past" - is an extraordinary and extremely readable testimony of the author's childhood as the daughter of a tsarist general in pre-revolutionary Russia, the Caucasus and Kyiv, and of the cataclysmic and exceptional times she later lived through during the Ukrainian revolution, the subsequent civil war and Ukrainian-Soviet War, the Soviet Ukrainian rebirth of the 1920s and the Stalinist terror.

While a post-war refugee in the United States, toward the end of her life Ms. Kardinalowska (1899-1993) undertook to tell the story of her interaction with major Ukrainian political and literary figures as the young wife of Vsevolod Holubovych, a prominent member of the Ukrainian Central Rada of 1917 and the prime minister of the Ukrainian National Republic from January to March 1918, and later of Serhii Pylypenko, the leader of the Pluh association of Ukrainian peasant writers and an influential cultural activist in Soviet Ukraine during the 1920s. Like thousands of other members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, both Holubovych and Pylypenko were arrested and perished during the terror of the 1930s.

The chief qualities that permeate Ms. Kardinalowska's memoirs are honesty and human kindness. They acquaint the reader with well-known Ukrainian politicians and writers as individuals. Holubovych, Pylypenko, Mykola Khvyliovy, Volodymyr Sosiura, Valeriian Polishchuk, Vasyl Ellan-Blakytny, Ostap Vyshnia and Andrii Holovko come alive with all their faults and virtues.

Ms. Kardinalowska's accounts of less noted persons - particularly her depiction of the NKVD interrogators and state prosecutors who persecuted Pylypenko and with whom she tried to intercede - provide some of the most revealing material in the volume. Her recollections of the Soviet Ukrainian Famine-Genocide of 1932-1933 are among the most moving passages in the text.

"The Ever-Present Past" was published with generous support from the Michael Kowalsky and Daria Mucak-Kowalsky Endowment Fund at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies.

The price of this paperback edition, illustrated with numerous photographs, is $22.95. It may be purchased by credit card (VISA, MasterCard, American Express and Discovery) from CIUS Press's secure online ordering system at www.utoronto.ca/cius; or by check or credit card by contacting CIUS Press, 450 Athabasca Hall, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E8; fax, (780) 492-4967; telephone, (780) 492-2973.

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