BOOK NOTES (11/10/96)

BOOK NOTES

Anthology of critical essays about the work of Skovoroda

EDMONTON -"Hryhorij Savyc Skovoroda: An Anthology of Critical Articles," edited by Richard H. Marshall Jr. and Thomas E. Bird, is a collection of essays by many of the leading specialists on Skovoroda outside Ukraine. In it, the 18th century philosopher and poet is examined from a number of perspectives: historical, social, literary, pedagogical, linguistic, theological and philosophical.

The volume contains essays by Dmytro Cyzevs'kyj, Stephen Scherer, Joseph Black, George Y. Shevelov, Karen Black, Bohdan Rubchak, Mikhail Weiskopf, Aleksandr Lavrov, Bohdan Struminski, George Kline, Taras Zakydalsky and Petro Bilaniuk, and an exhaustive bibliography of Skovorodiana by Richard Hantula.

Hryhorij Skovoroda (1722-1794) is a major figure in the history of Ukrainian and Russian literature and philosophy. Educated at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, he served variously as music director of the Russian imperial mission in Hungary, private tutor, and instructor of ethics and poetics at the Kharkiv Collegium. The last decades of his life, which he spent wandering about eastern Ukraine, were devoted to writing and contemplation.

Skovoroda's writings - verse, fables and philosophical dialogues - are profoundly steeped in biblical tradition and characterized by the striking use of symbol and metaphor, as well as sophisticated linguistic experimentation.

His influence on Ukrainian and Russian writers began in his own lifetime and has continued and grown ever since. Skovoroda is an indelible presence in the realms of philosophy, literature, religion and linguistics. Yet he is inadequately appreciated, particularly in the West.

The book, a publication of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, may be ordered from: Ukrainian Academic Press, P.O. Box 6633, Englewood, CO 80155; telephone: 1-800-237-6124; fax: (303) 220-8843. The price is $44.95 (cloth).

Study of Soviet-era repression of the Ukrainian Catholic Church

EDMONTON - "The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State (1939-1950)" by Bohdan R. Bociurkiw is a pioneering study of the suppression of this Ukrainian Church under Stalinist rule.

Dr. Bociurkiw has judiciously pieced together the disparate and scattered bits of information to narrate the planning, realization and immediate consequences of the Soviet liquidation of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. The book carefully analyzes Soviet policy towards the Church from the first occupation of Galicia by the Red Army in 1939 through the liquidation of the visible structures of the Greek Catholic Church in Galicia, Poland, and Transcarpathia in the mid and late 1940s.

The study shows what Soviet authorities sought to achieve through their policy toward the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church in the context of preceding and contemporary Russian and Soviet nationalities policy, and reveals the mechanism through which the Stalin regime sought to meet its objectives regarding Ukrainian Greek-Catholics. In doing so the author identifies the main executors of the Kremlin-ordered "reunion" of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church with the state-controlled Moscow Patriarchate, including the NKGB/MGB state security agents, officials, propagandists, often hiding behind pseudonyms plausibly deciphered in the book, and ecclesiastical figures.

Given the sensitivity of the subject matter, the perfidy of some actors on the stage, the heroism of others, and the difficulty of separating the well-intended fiction and deliberate disinformation from documented facts, Dr. Bociurkiw's solid, well-informed and balanced analysis of the Soviet attempt to liquidate the Greek-Catholic Church in Ukraine is a major accomplishment.

Dr. Bociurkiw's book is the fruit of a lifetime of painstaking research. The study takes into account all the most important publications on the subject. It is one of the first works in Ukrainian studies written after the collapse of the USSR to effectively bridge the Soviet and non-Soviet bodies of source material. It draws on publications that have appeared in a great variety of religious, Ukrainian underground, Soviet and non-Soviet, especially émigré, journals, newspapers, propagandistic pamphlets and leaflets.

Much of the Soviet archival materials from the Communist Party and government, including KGB, repositories used by the author had been classified and have hitherto remained unknown to scholars and analysts. These sources have been supplemented by documents from ecclesiastical archives in Rome and Ukrainian Church repositories in the West.

Furthermore, the author has availed himself of a number of oral informants, both living and deceased, including victims and eyewitnesses of Soviet repressions against the Greek-Catholic Church in Ukraine, thereby including in his considerations vital insights that otherwise would not have been preserved.

Dr. Bociurkiw received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1961) and taught political science, with special emphasis on Soviet politics, Soviet Ukraine and church-state relations, at the University of Alberta in Edmonton (1956-1969) and at Carleton University in Ottawa (1969-1972), where he founded the Institute of Soviet and East European Studies and served as its first director. Since his retirement he has been an adjunct research professor at Carleton.

In many respects the book is a model for post-1989 scholarship and should be of great interest to political scientists, Slavists, and historians of religion, state and society. The timely appearance of this book on the 50th anniversary of the so-called Lviv Sobor of March 8-10, 1946, (where the church was suppressed) enhances its appeal to a broad readership.

This is a must read for anyone interested in the history of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church or in the suppression of religion under Soviet rule.

The book is a publication of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press at the universities of Alberta and Toronto. Cloth: $39.95 (+ GST = $42.75, outside of Canada GST does not apply); plus $4 for shipping and handling. Credit card orders (VISA and MasterCard) may be faxed to (403) 492-4967.

The book may be ordered from: CIUS Press, 3352 Athabasca Hall, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E8 Canada.