Dear Editor:
I read with interest Dr. Thomas Prymak’s article about the conference session “The Generation of 1919: Omeljan Pritsak, George Luckyj and Ivan Lysiak Rudnytsky” (May 24). I would like to make two corrections to this article.
Firstly, Dr. Prymak mentions me as affiliated with the University of Toronto. I am affiliated with the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta.
Secondly, Dr. Prymak suggests that I expressed a view that Prof. Luckyj’s books were “ ‘unoriginal’ and perhaps even derivative.” I have not expressed such a view. I stated that, by choice, Prof. Luckyj did not write literary scholarship per se; he did not provide analyses of literary texts but focused on the personalities of writers and the general evolution of Ukrainian literary culture. Thus, his books did not make the kind of contribution to Ukrainian literary scholarship that Dmytro Chyzhevsky’s writings did. This, however, does not diminish their importance.
In fact, Prof. Luckyj’s books were exactly what was needed by the emerging field of Ukrainian literature studies in the English-speaking world of the time. In the field of Slavic studies in North America that was dominated by Russian specialists with Russo-centric views, it was necessary to define and legitimize the very concept of a Ukrainian literature as a cultural phenomenon worthy of a serious study. And George Luckyj managed to do just that.
All three papers presented at this conference session have now been published in the 1/2020 issue of the journal Ab Imperio.
Marko Robert Stech
Toronto