NEW YORK – A scholarly forum on one of Ukraine’s historically most important educational and cultural centers, as well as on one of its most distinguished intellectual figures was recently held in New York City.
Presented by the Ukrainian Studies Program at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute over the course of two days, March 12-13, the academic event was titled, “Kharkiv – City of Ukrainian Culture: An International Conference in Honor of Yuri Shevelov.”
Given the fact that Yuri Shevelov was not only one of Kharkiv’s greatest native scholars, but also a renowned professor of Slavic philology at Columbia University for over two decades, the conference’s inaugural panel was dedicated entirely to the extraordinary pedagogical, linguistic, literary, cultural and administrative legacy of this giant of Ukrainian studies.
The conference’s subsequent three panels were concentrated on three distinct chronological periods (the Romantic, the early Soviet and the post-Soviet) in Kharkiv’s history as a leading center in the development of Ukrainian culture and identity – both past and present. More specifically, each periodic panel featured three experts; one panelist provided his/her expertise on the social, historical or political aspects of Kharkiv’s contribution towards Ukrainian culture, while the remaining two panelists focused on the city’s Ukrainian literary and artistic legacies per specific period.
During his introductory remarks, Prof. Mark Andryczyk. administrator of the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute and lecturer in Ukrainian Literature at Columbia University, described the impetus that compelled him to organize an academic conference on Kharkiv’s Ukrainian cultural heritage – two events which occurred within the last 18 months in Ukraine’s second largest city, namely the violent destruction of a memorial plaque honoring Mr. Shevelov on September 25, 2013, and the beating of prose writer and poet Serhiy Zhadan at a pro-Maidan rally on March 1, 2014.
“As far as stereotypes regarding Kharkiv are concerned, I think people have underestimated the Ukrainian identity of the city. It’s a very specific Ukrainian identity. It’s not an abrupt change and society is attempting to negotiate this change with Kharkiv’s previous identity,” said Prof. Andryczyk. “And with the current political situation, it seems the fate of the city, at someone’s will, could be affected abruptly and, therefore, Kharkiv remains tense,” he added.
As professor emeritus at Muhlenberg College and current president of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S., Inc. (also known by its Ukrainian acronym as UVAN), Prof. Albert Kipa provided an insightful and detailed overview of his predecessor’s important scholarly contributions and administrative achievements as president of UVAN. It was under Shevelov’s leadership and as a result of his fund-raising efforts that UVAN located and acquired suitable premises in 1961 for its academic activities and archives, which continue to serve as a permanent center of Ukrainian scholarship to this day, according to Dr. Kipa.
By citing Shevelov’s proclamation on the occasion of UVAN’s 50th anniversary, Prof. Kipa underscored UVAN’s direct influence on scholarship in Ukraine during its Soviet period: “The very existence of the academy and its publications had a major constructive influence on its counterpart in Kyiv. UVAN’s numerous publications compelled Kyiv (i.e., the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences) to undertake and publish studies which would most likely not otherwise have seen the light of day. Directly and indirectly, the academy-in-exile dictated Kyiv’s scholarly repertoire in Ukrainian studies. Kyiv felt challenged and provoked by UVAN, but it was UVAN which led the way.”
As a world-class scholar dedicated to the pursuit of truth and integrity in academe, Shevelov set out to not only engage Ukrainian scholars and professors of the post-war generation at American universities, but also to attract leading non-Ukrainian scholars to “address the perils and potentials of Ukrainian studies from their perspectives,” stated Dr. Kipa. As a result, such eminent intellectuals as Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Dr. Oskar Halecki had lectured at UVAN already in 1960.
In addition, Shevelov was also well aware of the importance of academic research and publishing. He considered these endeavors as UVAN’s most important tasks and this institution’s publications as a significant achievement. Once again, by directly referencing Shevelov, Dr. Kipa emphasized how highly his predecessor valued UVAN’s scholarly output: “They are formidable guardians towering in the defense of the Ukrainian political movement and Ukrainian culture. Not due to journalistic outburst, but based on truthful facts and thoughtful analyses.”
First published in 1951, UVAN’s Annals are today considered to be its most significant English-language publication, underscored Dr. Kipa. Undoubtedly, Shevelov’s academic fortitude and vision greatly contributed to the Annals’ success over the years. In 1959, as he assumed the leadership of UVAN, Shevelov initiated a new editorial approach for the journal by dedicating each volume to a specific field of scholarship in order for it to evolve into an international forum involving scholars from around the world for “the objective examination and elucidation of Ukrainian and East European topics,” added Dr. Kipa.
Finally, in summing up Shevelov’s UVAN legacy, Dr. Kipa suggested that Shevelov’s administrative leadership style can best be understood by referring to the scholar’s own memoirs, in which he mentions living and working according to “the second bench complex,”, i.e. setting aside personal ambitions, receding into the background, but not completely.
In her retrospective presentation, Prof. Tatiana Shestopalova, professor of Ukrainian Literature at Luhansk Taras Shevchenko National University, focused her attention on Dr. Shevelov’s multifaceted interconnectedness with Kharkiv.
By citing examples of Shevelov’s relationship with his native city on a physical, psychological, spiritual and creative level, Prof. Shestopalova demonstrated how Kharkiv played an influential role in and became such an indivisible part of Shevelov’s entire life.
For Shevelov, Kharkiv was the source that drew him into what Prof. Shestopalova refers to as “a state of activated consciousness.” Directly or indirectly, Kharkiv became the subject of many of Shevelov’s articles, including his excursions to Ukraine after 1990.
Moreover, in a broader context, for Shevelov, according to Prof. Shestopalova, “Ukraine is the problem of his being and existence, intrinsically connected to his beloved ‘irrational’ Ukrainian Kharkiv. The city discloses to him its Ukrainian essence… in the tragic literary discussion of 1925-1928 and the debates about the future of Ukrainian culture.” At the same time though, according to Prof. Shestopalova, “politically,” Shevelov did not consider Kharkiv Ukrainian, but “psychologically and subconsciously” Kharkiv to him was Ukrainian.
Thus, themes of Kharkiv, Ukraine and Ukrainian culture heavily influenced Shevelov, “precisely because they were consistently the subjects of his own existence,” emphasized Prof. Shestopalova.
Furthermore, it was the city of Kharkiv that Shevelov regarded as “a metonym for Ukraine in its history and contemporary situation,” based on Prof. Shestopalova’s academic research.
As a visionary intellectual with a keen sense of the future, it’s interesting to note – especially when taking into account the current turmoil in Ukraine – that Shevelov “predicted new threats from Russia unless Ukraine accepted itself and set out to fulfill its colossal modern potential of what he called ‘unity in variety,’” Prof. Shestopalova continued. Shevelov did not believe in a conflict between Ukraine’s east and west, and was convinced that the country should progress only as a modern and united nation. “Ukraine to him was indivisible, just as his being was indivisible from Kharkiv and from Ukraine,” concluded Prof. Shestopalova.
The presentation by Dr. Yuri Shevchuk, lecturer of Ukrainian language at Columbia University’s Department of Slavic Languages, focused on examples of Russian aggression against Ukraine through the prism of Shevelov’s life on the frontlines in defense of Ukrainian culture.
Dr. Michael Moser, professor of Slavic Linguistics and Philology at the University of Vienna, Ukrainian Free University in Munich and Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Budapest, provided an in-depth analysis of the complex evolutionary process of Shevelov’s adoption of a Ukrainian identity.
By focusing on specific linguistic, literary, theater-related and political aspects of Shevelov’s biography, as well as his memoirs, Prof. Moser also demonstrated how and why Shevelov rejected both the Soviet and Nazi ideologies during the brutal occupations of his native Kharkiv and Ukrainian homeland by these two regimes.
The son of ethnic Germans who spoke Russian, Shevelov probably realized early on that national identity – which is often connected with linguistic identity – is to some extent a matter of personal choice, as Prof. Moser underscored during his presentation. At the same time, according to Prof. Moser, Shevelov concluded that this choice was not completely arbitrary, but instead based on one’s convictions.
“Shevelov ultimately adopted a Ukrainian identity only after he had acquired an excellent command of the Ukrainian language. As Shevelov reports, the decisive factor [behind such a choice] was not the more or less successful Bolshevik policy of Ukrainianization but rather the Bolshevik persecution of the Ukrainian language and culture and the ongoing treatment of Ukrainian speakers as ‘underdogs,’” Prof. Moser noted.
Similarly, Prof. Shestopalova also had earlier on referred to the term “underdog” when she cited Shevelov in order to exemplify the shock he experienced as a witness of the barbaric Soviet attack on Ukrainian culture in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, which in turn caused a “shift” in his consciousness. “Now Ukrainians were turned into what the English-speaking people define with the word ‘underdog’ and now – to retreat from that which I admired in the ’20s would have been both a disgrace and a crime,” he had written.
As a result, it was precisely when the Bolsheviks persecuted Ukrainian culture that Shevelov gradually evolved from “a person of two cultures” into someone who, according to Prof. Moser, “fully adopted a Ukrainian identity and indicated Ukrainian as his nationality in his Soviet passport.”
When Kharkiv’s foreign occupation changed from Soviet to German, Shevelov rejected the possibility of being designated a Volksdeutscher, which could have translated into considerable privileges, because, according to Prof. Moser’s reference of a quotation from Shevelov’s memoirs, he was not willing to “change his skin and soul.”
In his presentation, Prof. Moser also underscored the fact that Shevelov refused to employ the label “Jewish-Bolshevik regime” instead of the former “Bolshevik regime” in his articles, as had been demanded of him by the Nazis. As a result, in spite of the fact that he was in desperate need of funds, Shevelov did not publish anything for months.
As the underlying theme of the conference’s inaugural panel, the latest reassessment and celebration of Yuri Shevelov’s legacy reaffirmed the notion that this was an individual of staunch convictions who abided by his decisions once he reached them, no matter what the consequences, and was therefore true to himself. Finally, in direct correlation to this axiom, perhaps one of the most poignant references that encapsulate Shevelov’s persona and essence can be found in his memoirs, which Prof. Shestopalova cited during her presentation: “He preferred to remain himself; he preferred to remain with the underdogs. He was proud of this choice because it was his free, unforced, unconditional choice.”
Assessing Kharkiv’s role
Three scholars representing Canada assessed Kharkiv’s geopolitical, literary and cultural role before and during the Romantic period of the early 19th century.
Prof. Volodymyr Kravchenko, an alumnus of Kharkiv State University and current director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, discussed the importance of Kharkiv’s strategic location since the days of its establishment as a cosmopolitan urban center of borderland culture influenced early on by Muscovy, Poland and Crimea. At the same time, according to Prof. Kravchenko, “Kharkiv’s Ukrainian self-identification was a widespread phenomenon since the founding of the city.”
As the cradle of the Ukrainian Renaissance, Kharkiv was the city where “multiculturalism, multi-ethnicity and polyphony constantly challenged the issue of any national identity. That is why Russian-speaking Kharkiv appeared to be not the same as Russian Kharkiv,” asserted Prof. Kravchenko.
By providing specific examples throughout his presentation, Dr. Serhiy Bilenky, a research associate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto, offered a historical analysis of the political, academic and cultural rivalry between Kharkiv and Kyiv as Ukraine’s two largest urban centers of the 19th century. “Kharkiv University remained the most significant center of Ukrainian studies in the Russian Empire and its academic milieu was much more liberal than that of Kyiv,” declared Dr. Bilenky.
Dr. Taras Koznarsky, associate professor of Ukrainian, Russian and Slavic literatures and cultures at the University of Toronto, focused his presentation on Kharkiv’s role as a leading literary and publishing center of the early and mid-19th century.
Following the establishment of Kharkiv University in 1805, the city witnessed a proliferation of publications – “more than 210 over a decade,” according to Prof. Koznarsky. By 1816, the organizational efforts and writings of such Kharkiv-based literary figures as Petro-Hulak Artemovsky and Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko, among others, managed to produce a number of important periodicals, namely: Ukrainsky Vestnyk (1816-1819), the satirical journal Kharkovsky Demokryt (1816) and Ukrainsky Zhurnal (1824-1825). Although these publications were short-lived, they did offer “a forum for local cultural, intellectual and literary endeavors,” underscored Prof. Koznarsky.
By enhancing his presentation with detailed charts that provided statistical data on Russian- and Ukrainian-language publications of the said period, including a list of subscribers, Prof. Koznarsky demonstrated how and why Kharkiv’s role in the establishment of “the Ukrainian literary canon” paved the way for the city to be considered the capital of Ukrainian literature during the Romantic period.
The panel on the early Soviet period covered such topics as the Ukrainian literary discussion of the mid-to-late 1920s in Kharkiv during the policy of Ukrainianization, Modernism in Ukrainian literature and art, Kharkiv’s over-all role and achievements during the Cultural Renaissance of the 1920s, as well as the devastating ramifications of Soviet repression and Stalin’s Terror in the 1930s against the intelligentsia in Kharkiv and throughout Ukraine.
Dr. Olga Bertelsen, a 2014-2015 postdoctoral fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, chose Kharkiv’s famed House of Writers and its tragic fate as the focal point of her broader presentation on Soviet state terror of the 1930s. Known as the Slovo Building, the House of Writers was a co-op apartment complex established by the Slovo association of writers that opened its doors in 1930 as a home for Kharkiv’s literary and cultural elite. Originally conceived as an oasis of intellectual freedom and artistic expression aimed at forging a certain identity for Ukrainian intellectuals, the House of Writers, according to Dr. Bertelsen, was soon transformed from a haven of creativity to a structure symbolizing fear, mistrust and the “art” of surviving under state terror.
“From the very beginning, the authentic meaning of this building was very different. For the writer it was an intellectual space in which Ukrainian culture was being produced, and for the state and the secret police the building was characterized as a nest of nationalist transgressions,” stated Dr. Bertelsen.
In addition, Dr. Bertelsen said that the pattern of terror against the Slovo writers correlated directly with Stalin’s national terror in Ukraine. Furthermore, Dr. Bertelsen suggested the necessity to reconsider the time period of Soviet repression against the Ukrainian population during the inter-war era. More specifically, in her opinion, the periodization of contra-Ukrainianization should be dated to as early as 1926 and the Great Terror in Ukraine should be dated to 1933 (as opposed to 1937-1938), “when the entire social base of Ukrainian society was destroyed, including both the peasantry and intelligentsia,” asserted Dr. Bertelsen.
“Most importantly, an analysis of the cultural disruption which occurred in the 1930s in Ukraine helps us to better understand the current pernicious trend in contemporary Ukrainian society. I believe that in the mid-1930s, the intellectual potential of the nation was irreversibly damaged, if not lost – a negative condition for the nation-building project,” concluded Dr. Bertelsen.
In her presentation on the impact of Modernism and the pivotal year of 1929 in Kharkiv’s literary legacy, Dr. Halyna Hryn, editor-in-chief of the journal Harvard Ukrainian Studies, put forth the argument that Modernism is the essential paradigm by which Ukrainian culture of the first half of the 20th century should be examined. “It is only with Modernism that Ukrainian culture enters in sustained engagement with the West. This question was vital throughout the 1920s,” stated Dr. Hryn. Moreover, she asserted that Kharkiv’s literary and cultural movement of the 1920s was a natural progression and continuation of various avant-garde trends that had already reached their peak in Western Europe prior to World War I.
By 1929, Kharkiv was not only a political capital, but a mecca where a group of Ukrainian artists achieved an amazing accomplishment “by creating a completely modern cultural nexus by appropriating the Soviet Ukrainian identity in creating a more attractive alternative to the cultural product offered by Russia by virtue of its inherent post-colonial dimension,” concluded Dr. Hryn.
Dr. Myroslav Shkandrij, professor of Slavic studies at the University of Manitoba, focused on the multi-level creative process in Kharkiv by providing specific examples of the city’s dynamic and unprecedented cultural achievements in literature, art, theater and film in the 1920s. Each of these achievements, at one time or another during the 1920s, according to Prof. Shkandrij, were the result of three distinct dimensions or, what he referred to as three “revolutionary enthusiasms.” Although certain aspects of these enthusiasms still require further scholarly interpretation, they all shared one thing in common – avant-gardism, as “the pursuit of the new and visionary,” added Prof. Shkandrij.
At the same time, by citing a statement written by then Commissar of Education Mykola Skrypnyk in 1927, Prof. Shkandrij concluded that it was the third, Stalinist enthusiasm, in which the notion of the avant-garde became “twisted into something infantile and robotic” at the height of the Cultural Renaissance and Literary Discussion: “The issue is not to discover and correctly build the link between cultural work and the economy but to now view cultural-educational work as the industrialization of man’s brain, the industrialization of qualified human material.”
The conference’s final panel focused on Kharkiv’s contribution to Ukrainian literature during the post-Soviet period, and featured presentations by three panelists: Dr. Tatiana Zhurzhenko, research director of the Russia in Global Dialogue Program at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna; Prof. Vitaliy Chernetsky, associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Kansas, and current president of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies; and Dr. Tanya Zaharchenko, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Historical Research of the Higher School in Economics in St. Petersburg, Russia.
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The conference was co-organized in collaboration with The Ukrainian Museum in New York and the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S. As a result, following the completion of the panel presentations and subsequent discussions, those interested had the opportunity to witness an in-person presentation at The Ukrainian Museum by prose writer and poet Serhiy Zhadan titled “Kharkiv-Mesopotamia.”
The standing room only audience was afforded the chance to personally acquaint itself with the literary works of one of Ukraine’s best and most renowned writers. While Mr. Zhadan engaged the enthusiastic public by reading excerpts of his poetry in Ukrainian, Prof. Shkandrij and the Yara Arts Group offered the listening audience English translated excerpts of the writer’s publications.
“Serhiy Zhadan is important in all of Ukrainian literature and he is especially important because he has always represented Kharkiv,” articulated Prof. Andryczyk. “I think he has been very influential in making Kharkiv a city of post-Soviet Ukrainian culture. For the last couple of conferences I have organized at Columbia, I have followed a series of academic panels at the university with a thematically related cultural event downtown. Ending this conference with an evening of poetry by Zhadan has given the conference a real sense of completeness,” concluded Prof. Mark Andryczyk.
For more information on the Ukrainian Studies Program at Columbia University, readers may contact Prof. Andryczyk at 212-854-4679 or [email protected].