Ukraine Between East and West: Essays on Cultural History to the Early Eighteenth Century

Myroslav Shkandrij is head of the Department of German and Slavic
Studies at the University of Manitoba, and editor of The Cultural
Renaissance in Ukraine: Polemical Pamphlets, 1925–1926.

This is the first volume to be published in the monograph series by the
Peter Jacyk Centre for Ukrainian Historical Research. The essays
originated in a series of lectures given by Professor Sevcenko at
Harvard University in the years 1970–74.

A prominent Byzantinist, Sevcenko devotes several essays to the
influence of Byzantium on early Rus-Ukraine. He synthesizes an enormous
amount of material and ranges over large time frames with confidence.
“Ukraine Between East and West,” “Byzantium and the Slavs,”
“The Christianization of Kievan Rus,” “Religious Missions Seen
from Byzantium” and “The Policy of the Byzantine Patriarchate in
Eastern Europe” present concise and eminently readable accounts of key
issues.

The ensuing essays demonstrate the cultural-national divide between
Ukrainians, on the one hand, and Russians and Poles on the other. Among
the essays that fall into this category are “Rival and Epigone of
Kiev: The Vladimir-Suzdal Principality,” “The Rebirth of the Rus
Faith,” “The Many Worlds of Petro Mohyla,” and “Poland in
Ukrainian History.” This last essay is particularly informative in its
description of the intimate Polish-Ukrainian cultural relationship that
gave rise to a Ukrainian school in Polish literature and to numerous
19th-century works that saw Ukraine as an integral part of the Polish
literary landscape.

The book concludes with an essay entitled “The Rise of National
Identity to 1700.” Here Sevcenko points out that written records
suggest that the vernacular spoken “in the last quarter of the
sixteenth century, let alone the last quarter of the seventeenth, was
practically identical in form with the Ukrainian spoken today.” The
language was considered a separate entity in Muscovy into the 18th
century. More important, by 1700 a Ukrainian culture and consciousness
had evolved from separate origins. As a result, not only Ukrainians
themselves but also their Polish, Lithuanian, and Muscovite neighbors
recognized their linguistic, cultural, and at times political
distinctiveness. Sevcenko’s purpose is to examine the gradual
evolution of this consciousness from various strands in the civilization
of Byzantium, Kievan Rus, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.