Description

A book launch to mark the appearance of Serhiy Bilenky, editor, Fashioning Modern Ukraine: Selected Writings of Mykola Kostomarov, Volodymyr Antonovych, and Mykhailo Drahomanov recently published by CIUS Press.

Dr. Bilenky will speak on “How ‘Nationalist’ was Ukrainian Nationalism? The Nineteenth-Century Ukrainian National Movement”

Professor Paul R. Magocsi, Professor Piotr Wrobel, and Professor Taras Koznarsky of the University of Toronto will discuss the significance of the new collection for the study and teaching of nineteenth-century Eastern European intellectual history

New Book Features Founders of Modern Ukrainian National Idea

Book description:
*Fashioning Modern Ukraine: Selected Writings of Mykola Kostomarov, Volodymyr Antonovych, and Mykhailo Drahomanov. Edited by Serhiy Bilenky.*

A new book, published by the CIUS Press as part of the Monograph Series of the Peter Jacyk Centre for Ukrainian Historical Research, is a collection of selected works by leading Ukrainian scholars whose academic writings became the founding pillars of Ukrainian national ideology in the 19th century and were the driving force behind Ukrainian national movement in the early 20th century.
Mykola Kostomarov was the founder of the populist trend in Ukrainian historiography and national movement. Cofounder of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood in the 1840s and the author of its programmatic text The Book of Genesis of the Ukrainian People, Kostomarov took a moderate stance in national politics and regarded proliferation of culture and education as the best way of promoting the Ukrainian national idea. Apart from its vivid description of life in the mid-19th century, Kostomarov’s “Memoirs” represents one of his best known works on Russo-Ukrainian cultural and political relations from the 1840s to the 1860s. His essay on the “two Rus’ nationalities” is an in-depth analysis of the cultural and societal differences between Ukrainians and Russians.
Volodymyr Antonovych was born into a Polish family in the Right-bank Ukraine. His life and works exemplify the creation of a modern Ukrainian national identity. His transformation from a Pole into a Ukrainian began with his discovery of the Ukrainian culture and folklore. This journey of discovery and identity-formation is described in his “Memoirs” and in “My Confession.” Antonovych switched his loyalties and his identity from Polish to Ukrainian and became the leader of the Old Hromada in Kyiv. He founded the so-called Kyiv school of historians and had a direct influence on the ideas and works of the renowned Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky.
Mykola Drahomanov was born in Poltava to a family of Ukrainian Cossack nobles. He was an uncle of a famous Ukrainian poetess Lesia Ukrainka (Larysa Kosach). Drahomanov’s writings are regarded as positivist and liberal, and he considers individual freedom to be the highest goal to be achieved regardless of one’s nationality. He studied relations between an individual and a state and lobbied for a federal state system that would acknowledge freedoms and autonomy of cultural minorities. Drahomanov was the author of the first Ukrainian modern political program (presented in his introduction to the journal Hromada), which had a profound effect on the political parties in Western Ukraine and on the later policies of the Ukrainian Central Rada in 1917.
The book’s editor Serhiy Bilenky provides an informative introduction, in which he explains the historical context of the writings presented in the book, and provides numerous explanatory footnotes.