AN APPRECIATION: Omeljan Pritsak, April 7, 1919-May 29, 2006 (10/29/06)

AN APPRECIATION

Omeljan Pritsak, April 7, 1919-May 29, 2006

by Roman Szporluk

A proper appreciation of the life and work of Prof. Omeljan Pritsak would require a team of experts from several departments and research centers from more than one university and more than one country. His interests were not limited to the variety of fields in philology and history, in which he was recognized as an authority, but extended also to the theory and philosophy of history.

The following remarks are personal reflections which focus on just one side of Pritsak's life and work - the connection (as I see it) between Pritsak's ideas on Ukraine in world history, on the one hand, and their relation to his institution building, on the other.

I first met Omeljan Pritsak some 40 years ago, and remember how he told me about his great project, a study of the origins of Rus' that was to be a work in several volumes (six, as I recall) and in which the beginning of Ukrainian history was to be presented in a setting of universal history. It would examine the relevant events taking place in Scandinavia, Byzantium, inner Asia, the Middle East, and Western and Central Europe, and would use the sources originating in those areas that were indispensable for an understanding of the emergence of Rus'.

In short, Pritsak treated the history of Ukraine as part of world history. Later I understood why on many occasions he referred to the work of the Hungarian historian Johann Christian Engel, published in Halle in 1796, as Volume 48 in a series of books on "general world history" (Algemeine Welthistorie), a series that had been created by German and English historians. That work, about 700 pages long, consisted of two parts: the first was titled "Geschichte der Ukraine und der Cosaken" (there was a portrait of Ivan Mazepa facing the title page) and the second "Geschichte von Galizien und Lodomerien." Pritsak believed no histories after Engel had treated Ukraine as part of world history and he wanted to place it in that framework again.

Pritsak was not only a research scholar, and a teacher of generations of students and scholars, he was also the initiator and builder of academic institutions, most notably the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard.

The story of the Harvard project is well known. Everybody who knows anything about the "Ukrainian Harvard" knows about the hundreds and thousands of people, retirees and students, rich and poor, in the United States and in Canada, whose contributions made possible the endowment of three chairs and then of the institute.

But not everybody in the community understood that the Harvard project was to be an institutional application of Pritsak's philosophy, and, I will suggest, of his broader political vision.

Decades ago some people reasonably questioned whether the Harvard plan revealed a lack of appreciation for what such respectable institutions as the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences (UVAN) and the Shevchenko Scientific Society (NTSh) were doing. That was not the case: Pritsak was a member of both NTSh and UVAN, and he also respected the work of Ukrainian scholars in France, Germany and Canada. But he understood that regardless of the objective value of individual diaspora scholars and their work, only institutions functioning within leading Western universities - in this case an American university - would be able to secure a future for Ukrainian studies, from generation to generation, and win international recognition.

The chairs would be responsible for training a new generation of scholars who eventually would enter the world of academia in their own right. The institute would hold seminars and conferences and publish scholarly editions of sources, in the original languages and in English translation, and the journal Harvard Ukrainian Studies would be open to scholars from all over the world, including, of course, those from Harvard, to share the results of their current research.

Among Pritsak's other remarkable initiatives, and, we need to stress this, in collaboration with his colleagues and associates, were an international conference to commemorate the Millennium of Christianity in Rus', held in Ravenna, Italy, and the establishment of the International Association of Ukrainianists. The latter took place in Naples in 1989 and would have been impossible, like the other event, without the support and participation of Italian scholars. The meeting in Naples was also able to bring in participants from several countries, including Ukraine, when it was still the Ukrainian SSR, thereby helping it to break out of its Moscow-imposed isolation.

Pritsak's last engagement in institution building was in Kyiv, where he helped to establish the Institute of Oriental Studies at the Academy of Sciences, reviving a field of study that had been banned in Ukraine since the 1930s.

Now that the 1970s and 1980s are history, it is easier to appreciate the long-term political significance of his scholarly initiatives. Without implying that they were of equal historical importance, I am reminded in this connection of Pritsak's Polish contemporary, Jerzy Giedroyc, whose work is currently being commemorated not only in Poland but also in Ukraine on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Several years after the end of World War II, when it had become clear that Poland would be under Communist rule (and Soviet control), Giedroyc and his closest associate, Juliusz Mieroszewski, launched Kultura, a monthly journal in which they put forward the idea that the struggle for the freedom of Poland required the Poles to accept the loss of Lviv and Vilnius, and to support the Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Belarusians in their own struggle for independence.

When it was first formulated, the "Giedroyc Plan" met with virtually unanimous condemnation among the Polish exile community in the West; by the 1980s, it had been accepted by most Poles in the West and by the democratic opposition in Poland itself. It was in the spirit of Giedroyc that a delegation of Solidarity attended the founding congress of Rukh in Kyiv (September 1989) and that the government of a newly free Poland recognized Ukrainian independence a day after the referendum of December 1, 1991.

The Giedroyc story reminds us that after great historical turning points sometimes the poets, writers and scholars grasp the meaning of the change better than do the politicians, generals and diplomats - and are better qualified to define for their generation the tasks for the future. Pritsak did not claim to be a politician, but his academic program performed a political function because during the Cold War, and even later, in the period of "peaceful co-existence," scholarship was a political battleground - and Ukrainian history especially so.

Since the Soviet system required lies, not only in politics but also in academia, and considered it necessary to impose lies even in works on medieval history, independent research on that period amounted to "anti-Soviet activities" in Moscow's eyes.

In an article titled "An Alternative to Moscow: Ancient Rus', Modern Ukraine and Byelorussia," the Swedish historian Kristian Gerner noted already in 1989 that "the struggle over history" was really "a struggle both over national identity and over the right to decide one's future. The struggle for the future is inseparably linked to alternative interpretations of the past ... The fight over the right to the heritage from Ancient Rus' is not a harmless exercise in historiography but a demonstration of the political potential of historical myths.

"Pritsak, a member of the generation that grew up in Ukraine in the 1930s, understood the need for the study of the 20th century as well. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Holodomor, the Ukrainian Research Institute on Pritsak's initiative invited an internationally known scholar and writer, Robert Conquest, to write a book, and it offered a research fellowship to James Mace, author of a Ph.D. thesis (University of Michigan) on Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s to work in the same area. As was to be expected, Conquest's "The Harvest of Sorrow" had a great impact on the profession, which until then had treated the Ukrainian Famine very reluctantly, if at all. The book also brought the story to a wider reading public. In due course, it was translated into other languages, including Ukrainian.

Reading the basic facts in Pritsak's curriculum vitae, one feels that had a novelist put such a story in a work of fiction, readers would have exclaimed, "your imagination has carried you too far." He was born in 1919, the year his father died as a soldier in the Ukrainian Galician Army during its war with Poland. After his mother's remarriage, he was raised to be a Pole, but he decided, at the age of 15, as a student in the Polish gimnazjum in Ternopil, that he would be a Ukrainian. He was an undergraduate at the Polish university in Lviv, and, after 1939, a graduate student, or aspirant, in Kyiv, working under Academician Ahatanhel Krymsky.

Then he served in the Red Army, was soon taken prisoner by the Germans, and shortly thereafter, after escaping from imprisonment, became a student at the University of Berlin. That was just the beginning of a life that would continue in post-1945 Germany and then the United States, and would end May 29, at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Viewing his biography, one is reminded that in Jose Ortega y Gasset's words, "a man is impossible without imagination, without the capacity to invent for himself a conception of life. Whether he be original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself." Not only was Omeljan Pritsak a great "novelist of himself," he also helped others to develop their own lives.

Roman Szporluk, Ph.D., was the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of History at Harvard University in 1991-2004. He is currently the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Research Professor of Ukrainian History.

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