The Gates of Europe


Book Description

A New York Times bestseller, this definitive history of Ukraine is “an exemplary account of Europe’s least-known large country” (Wall Street Journal). As Ukraine is embroiled in an ongoing struggle with Russia to preserve its territorial integrity and political independence, celebrated historian Serhii Plokhy explains that today’s crisis is a case of history repeating itself: the Ukrainian conflict is only the latest in a long history of turmoil over Ukraine’s sovereignty. Situated between Central Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, Ukraine has been shaped by empires that exploited the nation as a strategic gateway between East and West—from the Romans and Ottomans to the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. In The Gates of Europe, Plokhy examines Ukraine’s search for its identity through the lives of major Ukrainian historical figures, from its heroes to its conquerors. This revised edition includes new material that brings this definitive history up to the present. As Ukraine once again finds itself at the center of global attention, Plokhy brings its history to vivid life as he connects the nation’s past with its present and future.




Fashioning Modern Ukraine


Book Description

The collection Fashioning Modern Ukraine: Selected Writings of Mykola Kostomarov, Volodymyr Antonovych, and Mykhailo Drahomanov presents for the first time in English a number of seminal texts by three major nineteenth-century scholars and leaders of the national movement in Ukraine. The first and third sections of the book feature respectively the writings of Mykola Kostomarov and Mykhailo DrahomanoÑdescendants of the Cossack middle stratum and members of an influential Ukrainian intelligentsia that arose from that stratum. The second section highlights the works of Volodymyr AntonovychÑthe most prominent member of a group of Polish nobles of Right-Bank Ukraine who professed democratic values and in the early 1860s declared themselves Ukrainian. In their day Kostomarov, Antonovych, and Drahomanov were leading Ukrainian historians, political theorists, and intellectuals, but their ideas continued to be significant even later, in the early twentieth century, when the Ukrainian national movement relied heavily on their writings for inspiration and direction.




Ukrainian Women Writers and the National Imaginary


Book Description

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian literary world has not only experienced a true blossoming of women’s prose, but has also witnessed a number of female authors assume the roles of literary trendsetters and authoritative critics of their culture. In this first in-depth study of how Ukrainian women’s prose writing was able to re-emerge so powerfully after being marginalized in the Soviet era, Oleksandra Wallo examines the writings and literary careers of leading contemporary Ukrainian women authors, such as Oksana Zabuzhko, Ievheniia Kononenko, and Maria Matios. Her study shows how these women reshaped literary culture with their contributions to the development of the Ukrainian national imaginary in the wake of the Soviet state’s disintegration. The interjection of women’s voices and perspectives into the narratives about the nation has often permitted these writers to highlight the diversity of the national picture and the complexity of the national story. Utilizing insights from postcolonial and nationalism studies, Wallo’s book theorizes the interdependence between the national imaginary and narrative plots, and scrutinizes how prominent Ukrainian women authors experimented with literary form in order to rewrite the story of women and nationhood.




Survival as Victory


Book Description

Survival as Victory is the first anthropological study of daily life in the Soviet forced labor camps as experienced by Ukrainian women prisoners. Oksana Kis pulls from the written and oral histories of over 150 survivors to bring to life the gendered strategies of survival, accommodation, and resistance to the dehumanizing effects of the Gulag.




Communism and Hunger


Book Description

Examining commonalities and specificities of massive famines produced by the two largest Communist states.




Forging Rights in a New Democracy


Book Description

The last two decades have been marked by momentous changes in forms of governance throughout the post-Soviet region. Ukraine's political system, like those of other formerly socialist states of Eastern Europe, has often been characterized as being "in transition," moving from a Soviet system to one more closely aligned with Western models. Anna Fournier challenges this view, investigating what is increasingly recognized as a critical aspect of contemporary global rights discourse: the active involvement of young people living in societies undergoing radical change. Fournier delineates a generation simultaneously embracing various ideological stances in an attempt to make sense of social conditions marked by the disjuncture between democratic ideals and the everyday realities of growing economic inequality. Based on extensive fieldwork in public and private schools in the Ukrainian capital city of Kyiv, Forging Rights in a New Democracy explores high-school-aged students' understanding of rights and justice, and the ways they interpret and appropriate discourses of citizenship and civic values in the educational setting and beyond. Fournier's rich ethnographic account assesses the impact on the making of citizens of both formal and informal pedagogical practices, in schools and on the streets. Chronicling her subjects' encounters with state representatives and "violent entrepreneurs" as well as their involvement in peaceful protests alongside political activists, Fournier demonstrates the extent to which young people both reproduce and challenge the liberal discourse of rights in ways that illuminate the everyday paradoxes of market democracy. By tracking students' active participation in larger contests about the nature of liberty and entitlement in the context of redefined rights, her book provides insight into emergent configurations of citizenship in the New Europe.




Towards a Political Economy of Ukraine: Selected Essays 1990-2015


Book Description

The essays in this book explore the major developments, both domestic and international, that shaped the first quarter-century of Ukraine’s independence: the simultaneous construction of a nation-state and the privatization of its economy; a formal democratization of the political process alongside the capture of state institutions by big business oligarchs; their efforts to gain social acceptance at home while maneuvering between competing Russian, EU, and American projects to hegemonize the region; the impact of the financial crises of 1997 and 2008 on Ukrainian society and the national economy’s place in the world market; the growing inequality of society, the mass revolts in 2004 and 2014 against corruption and injustice; and the beginning of Russian military intervention in Ukraine.




Гора І Квітка


Book Description

Machine generated contents note:I.Kisses in the Alley --Remind Me for the Road --Rainy Day Mood --By the River --At Home --To Visit Mother --A herd of red horses --Speckled evening --Crows --You didn't come, autumn happens --A maple tree cut with a golden saw --Autumn. Pick an apple --Cold Hands --Flatland like anguish --At night I dreamed about --A rustle -- a silky flower ... --Leaves shine --Snow fell --No matter how many times you write the word death on sand --You can do it or not --Melancholy --I haven't even managed to buy peonies --Evening -- a shattered mirror --A Kiss in the Alley --Our Conversations --The day was spent --Big shadows squeezed a path --I sit in a cafe ... --Are you yourself? --In the evening I carry white butterflies --Death of a Blue Butterfly --A Pile of Silence --Pale Face --A ray coming through the window --I never had a watch --You've been telling me again you're on vacation --That autumn we did not go anywhere --We emigrated --We got old and tired --Autumn sun --Red flowers scattered on the road ... --II.Letters --1.Where's the mailman? where are the letters? --2.The leaves run --3.Beloved --4.Birds are coming --5.The sky quiets --6.In the stem of the golden hour --7.Above the grass --8.Stars cultivate chasms --9.A sickle shines --10.The furs of shadow grow --11.A hundred doors --12.A bird shrieks in the fog --13.A river will flow --14.The signs on the faces wash away --15.The green clay will be forgotten --16.The red shield turns its rib --17.The oil of the leaves dries up ... --18.A beak gleams --19.Glass won't heal ... --20.I sell instruments ... --21.Just now --22.A maple tree all dressed up --23.Empty nests --24.Things get flattened --25.Cold air scatters --26.Blue hammers --27.Out of the white mountains --28.I hear the song about the ring --29.A silvery dream for all the fields --III.Once Upon Now --Are we to see light --What time is it? --Leaves are falling --I haven't met myself yet --When you don't hear right --I painted with all --It's so interesting to live --Since life has no end --It gets dark so quickly --Someone punctured a maple leaf --The reflection of something unknown.




The Voices of Babyn Yar


Book Description

With The Voices of Babyn Yar—a collection of stirring poems by Marianna Kiyanovska—the award-winning Ukrainian poet honors the victims of the Holocaust by writing their stories of horror, death, and survival by projecting their own imagined voices. Artful and carefully intoned, the poems convey the experiences of ordinary civilians going through unbearable events leading to the massacre at Kyiv’s Babyn Yar from a first-person perspective to an effect that is simultaneously immersive and estranging. While conceived as a tribute to the fallen, the book raises difficult questions about memory, responsibility, and commemoration of those who had witnessed an evil that verges on the unspeakable.




The Future of the Past


Book Description

Ukraine is in the midst of the worst international crisis in East-West relations since the Cold War, and history itself has become a battleground in Russia-Ukraine relations. The Future of the Past shows how the study of Ukraine's past enhances our understanding of Europe, Eurasia, and the world--past, present, and future.