The beginning of the 20th century was a turbulent time in the history of Ukraine, and indeed, all of Europe. The Great War of 1914-1918 convulsed the continent, and was followed by the nearly complete collapse of the Old Order. The German, Austrian and Russian empires were no more. The Ottoman Empire was soon to follow. New states and new nations were being born. Others were indeed born, but their statehood killed in their infancy. Revolutions and more wars followed. Nation fought nation, and one social class confronted another. Various forms of nationalism were opposed by various forms of socialism, and the new and frightening specter of militant Communism raised its scarlet head. Amidst it all, individuals and families strove merely to survive.
Omeljan Pritsak (1919-2006)
Into this political and social chaos were born three children of the new age: Omeljan Pritsak (1919-2006), George Luckyj (1919-2001) and Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky (1919-1984). All three were born in the very same year into relatively advantaged families in western Ukraine (formerly Austrian Galicia), and the latter two were also fairly well off for that time and place. All three were privileged with a higher education in Europe before migrating to North America, where they were to make their careers and their indelible mark upon the intellectual and political life of the Ukrainian emigration.
George Luckyj (1919-2001)
These three future Ukrainian intellectuals were all raised in the interwar Republic of Poland, which had annexed Ukrainian Galicia that same fateful 1919. Pritsak was educated at the Polish University of Lwów, while Luckyj and Lysiak-Rudnytsky were classmates at an elite Ukrainian high school in that same city and later on also studied elsewhere. Luckyj went to England, where he arrived as the second world war was just breaking out, and Rudnytsky to Berlin, where he studied history as the war progressed. Both Pritsak and Luckyj did further studies during the post-war period: Pritsak in Germany, where he focused on the Central Asian field, specializing in the history of the various Turkic peoples, and Luckyj on Slavonic and Ukrainian literature at Columbia University in New York City. So by profession, Pritsak was an “orientalist,” Luckyj a literary scholar and Rudnytsky a historian of modern Europe.
Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky (1919-1984)
All three were politically speaking “democrats” with a small “d,” if not “liberals” in the American sense. For example, Rudnytsky was a firm supporter of the Vietnam War, Pritsak an enthusiastic admirer of Ronald Reagan, and Luckyj a fierce critic of the Liberal Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau and his new policy of multiculturalism. Nevertheless, throughout the Cold War, all three became inspirational to young folk with varied political views, who were of Ukrainian background or ancestry and wished to learn more about their national heritage in Europe. Many of these younger folk, especially among the children of the post-1945 immigrants, had been turned off by the authoritarian and militant nationalism of their parents’ generation and saw in the firmly democratic principles of Pritsak, Luckyj and Rudnytsky a new and more realistic way forward.
Equally important, the three scholars attracted the youth through their intellectual prowess and leadership in major North American universities. Pritsak, in many ways the foremost, was a medievalist, who was brought to Harvard University by the specialist in medieval Persia, Richard Frye. He made a special mark by founding the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) and its journal Harvard Ukrainian Studies (HUS), which won a coveted new prestige for the field. In part, Pritsak achieved this by keeping his institute as far as possible from active politics and by stressing that Ukraine was a definite “territory” as well as an aspirant nation.
In this way, he could claim that his institute’s subject was not so much “ethnic” or national history as the history of a well-defined territory, the existence of which could not be disputed. Non-Ukrainians were welcomed into the work of the institute, and this included both Jews and Poles, some of whom came from communities that for a long time had been at loggerheads with Ukrainians. Pritsak’s foremost students or junior associates, all historians in one way or another linked to America’s most prestigious university, included Orest Subtelny (later) of York University, Zenon Kohut and Frank Sysyn of the University of Alberta, and Victor Ostapchuk and, in another way, Paul Magocsi, of the University of Toronto. So, all of the scholars named here eventually immigrated to Canada and taught at Canadian universities.
Luckyj took a different tack. Upon graduating from Columbia, he immediately got a job at Canada’s premier university, the University of Toronto, where he pioneered the study of Ukrainian literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Luckyj actually chaired this department for many years and helped to found the Canadian Association of Slavists and its journal Canadian Slavonic Papers (CSP), of which he was the first editor.
Of these three scholars, Luckyj was definitely the most prolific, authoring or editing or translating about 40 monographs, translations, or collections of materials, many of them in English. He was aided in this formidable task by his talented English wife, Moira, who checked his language and grammar, and smoothed out his prose. Over the years, Luckyj trained a whole new generation of young Ukrainian Canadians in the study of Ukrainian literature. His students included the folklorist Robert Klymasz (later) of the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa (who was a child of the older, interwar immigration), the literary scholars Danylo Struk of the University of Toronto and Myroslav Shkandrij of the University of Manitoba, and the professional editors Halyna Hryn of Harvard and Roman Senkus of Toronto and Alberta (all with post-1945 antecedents).
Rudnytsky’s destiny was again different. Although he had completed his university education (receiving his degree in Prague with the Soviets already at the gates of the city) before both Pritsak and Luckyj, he taught at various institutions in the U.S.A. before winding up at the University of Alberta in western Canada. But once in Alberta, Rudnytsky’s ability to effectively communicate complex political and ideological positions, and his intellectual sophistication and scholarly rigor, lent prestige to the effort of the Ukrainian Canadian community to establish the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), which was founded by Manoly Lupul and others at about the same time as the HURI in the U.S.A. However, the Canadian institute soon went its own way.
So while the HURI mostly limited itself to the study of Ukraine in Europe, especially in the fields of history and literature, the CIUS, from the start, also took seriously the study of Ukrainians in Canada and elsewhere. In fact, during Lupul’s tenure as director of the CIUS, Ukrainian Canadian studies flourished as never before and were quite the equal of Ukrainian studies focused on Europe. (The simultaneous proclamation of “Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework” as official Canadian government policy certainly played some role in the enthusiasm of CIUS scholars for this effort.) The Canadian field, however, seems to have experienced a steep decline after what Lupul later called “the American takeover of the institute” by his successors from the U.S.A., and neither Rudnytsky nor Luckyj ever took any interest in these Canadian developments.
On another level, over the course of several decades, the CIUS published a greater number of titles than did the HURI, and most of them were more or less HURI’s equal in scholarly rigor, if not in layout and physical beauty. Moreover, the Alberta/Toronto-based Journal of Ukrainian Studies (JUS), the Canadian institute’s journal, came out much more regularly, with more book reviews, and with far fewer delays and complications, than did Harvard Ukrainian Studies’.
As to the next generation, Rudnytsky’s most distinguished junior associate (if not exactly student) was the specialist in the history of Galicia John-Paul Himka. Rudnytsky also served as external critic of the Ph.D. thesis on Mykhailo Hrushevsky by the writer of these lines, who received his degree from the University of Toronto.
Moreover, while during the Cold War HUS stressed primarily the less directly political (older medieval and Kozak) periods of Ukrainian history and culture, the JUS attacked all periods, while concentrating upon the most contemporary. There can be no doubt that Pritsak’s influence (and partly that of his Byzantine-area colleague, Ihor Sevcenko) was at work in this particular aspect of Harvard’s interests, while Rudnytsky’s (and partly Luckyj’s) were primary in the JUS.
As to the personal publications of these scholars, certain facts are beyond dispute. Luckyj’s legacy is stamped by two outstanding titles. “Between Gogol and Sevcenko: Polarity in the Literary Ukraine 1798-1847” (1971), which treated the Ukrainian national awakening of the 19th century, and “Literary Politics in the Soviet Ukraine 1917-1934” (1956), which mostly dealt with the varied Ukrainian cultural movements of the 1920s. By contrast, Rudnytsky produced no big monographs. He was, however, an influential essayist, and his posthumous collection of essays titled “Modern Ukrainian History” (1987) stands as his most important legacy in English. (A two-volume edition came out in Ukrainian a few years later.)
Meanwhile, in even greater contrast, aside from a few valuable but very specialized “Oriental” studies, Pritsak left no major respected monograph in the English language. The first volume of his “Origin of Rus’ ” was weighty, but hard to read, and was mostly panned by the critics, and his Ukrainian-area essays, some of which were respectable, and documented the early years of his institute, have thus far never been collected together and published in English in the way that Rudnytsky’s have. (Pritsak did, however, publish a volume of his “Eurasian” essays in the Variorum series of reprints.)
Indeed, on occasion, Pritsak’s startling revelation that “history is an exact science” like the natural sciences, came as no little surprise to many of his learned peers, while his colleague at Harvard, Richard Pipes, marveled at how he urged his students to study various languages that went far beyond their major East European interests and backgrounds. This bore some fruit when it came to “Oriental” studies, where his effervescent intellectual personality and often bold hypotheses greatly inspired some of his students. But in the eyes of other observers, this appeared to miss the mark with regard to several of the most burning questions of Ukrainian history.
In this respect, the Cold War “Harvard Miracle,” as historian Frank Sysyn dubbed the Harvard project at San Francisco in 2019, while a very positive development, had some real limitations. During the Cold War, the achievements of Alberta and Toronto could in some ways be said to have been no less “miraculous.”
But if Pritsak was criticized for his original but sometimes far-fetched hypotheses and theories, and Rudnytsky for the ostensible paucity of his scholarly output, Luckyj too has occasionally come under some criticism.
For example, the Toronto scholar Marko Stech, speaking at that same San Francisco gathering, considered Luckyj’s books to have been “unoriginal” and perhaps even derivative. Indeed, it is difficult to argue that the subjects of all forty or so books were entirely new to the most experienced and well-read Ukrainian scholars, and, as Dr. Stech pointed out, many of them lack the authority and depth of the great European Ukrainianist Dmytro Chyzhevsky.
However, they were indeed original to North American scholarship in general and were well appreciated by many Ukrainian scholars in the West throughout the Cold War. In fact, it was Luckyj himself, who was primarily responsible for the translation of Chyzhevsky’s great “History of Ukrainian Literature” into English. Many of Luckyj’s books, written in plain English and with a personal, biographical touch, addressed questions that were indeed terrae incognitae to the English-speaking world, and so they were original in their own way, as well as easily read. And unlike the case of Pritsak, their scholarly rigor and usefulness to the field have never been seriously questioned.
In sum, in spite of their limitations, Pritsak, Luckyj and Rudnytsky were all productive in their own special ways. Pritsak was the great visionary, innovator and organizer of higher learning, Luckyj the great writer and author of scholarly books, and Rudnytsky the great thinker, who could both clearly and concisely put it all together. Today, more than 100 years after they were born in 1919, we may safely conclude that the influence of all three is being widely felt to this very day.
Thomas M. Prymak, Ph.D., a historian, is a research associate at the Chair of Ukrainian Studies, Departments of History and Political Science, University of Toronto. He is the author of over 165 titles, including four scholarly monographs, numerous research articles and many lesser works of popularization. These include essays and articles on political and cultural history, language and etymology, ethnic studies, folklore and art history.
This article was inspired by and written in response to the centenary discussion on “The Generation of 1919: Omeljan Pritsak, George Luckyj and Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky,” held at the great American Slavic Studies conference (ASEEES) in San Francisco in November 2019. Frank Sysyn of the University of Alberta spoke on Omeljan Pritsak, Marko Stech of the University of Toronto on George Luckyj and Yaroslav Hrytsak of the Ukrainian Catholic University of Lviv on Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky.