Remembering Prof. Bohdan Budurowycz

By Thomas M. Prymak

On March 8, 2007, Bohdan Budurowycz, Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto, quietly passed away at Runnymede Hospital in west-end Toronto. He was eighty-six years of age (born September 8, 1921) and is survived by his wife Jean (Strazdaz).

I first heard of Professor Budurowycz when I was a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Toronto in the late 1970s. I was told something about him by my fellow students from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures with whom I attended some language classes. I remember, in particular, one female student of Yugoslav background, who spoke to me in glowing terms about Professor Budurowycz’s course in ancient and medieval Slavic civilization and urged me to take it if I should have the opportunity.  Unfortunately, this opportunity never arose, but I soon acquired an interest in this Ukrainian professor whose classes were so popular and about whom I only heard good things.

In the spring of 1977, I was trying to decide whether to proceed to a doctorate in Russian and East European history at the U of T, or to go elsewhere. I was interested in Ukrainian history, but at that time, there was no one teaching it at this institution. I therefore decided to consult Professor Budurowycz about what I should do.

I met him at his office in the “Slavics” building across from the Robarts Library. He was a small, delicate man with dark hair, peculiar-looking eyes, and a somewhat nervous though accommodating manner. He was dressed in a dark suit and tie. We discussed various universities and their offerings in Russian and Ukrainian history, including the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. His views struck me as moderate and balanced, but together we decided that I had better do some further research into the matter before making any final decision.

In the end, I decided to remain at the U of T and under the supervision of the Polish area specialist, Peter Brock, wrote a thesis on the Ukrainian historian, Mykhailo Hrushevsky. When it came time to assemble an examination committee, an examiner from the “Slavics” department was required. The most famous “Ukrainianist” in that department, Professor George Luckyj, was unavailable for reasons to do with the Chair of Ukrainian Studies controversy which had been boiling up shortly before that time, and Professor Brock, who was one of Professor Luckyj’s adversaries in this controversy, jumped at the chance to have Professor Budurowycz, who had actually written on Hrushevsky, join the committee.

The thesis defence went well and Professor Budurowycz took an active part in the discussions. I recall that he and the examiner from outside the university, Professor Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky of the University of Alberta, engaged in a sharp discussion of some point in the history of Kyivan Rus’ which, I thought at the time, had little bearing upon Hrushevsky’s life and work. At any rate, I passed the exam and received my degree, and thereafter Professor Budurowycz and I became colleagues and eventually friends.

Professor Budurowycz was a stickler for details.  He was very careful about spelling, translation, transliteration from the Slavic languages, grammar, and minor points of detail.  These were excellent characteristics for a reader of manuscripts being prepared for publication and over the next years, more and more, I turned to Professor Budurowycz to read my manuscripts before I submitted them to a publisher.

It helped that we shared a great many interests. I remember how excited he was about my article on “Ivan Franko and Mass Ukrainian Immigration to Canada” a first version of which I published in 1984. He also liked my book on the Ukrainian Canadians during the Second World War and found it useful for the course he was teaching on the Slavs in Canada.

As to his own publications, two particularly stand out.  First, there is his book on Polish-Soviet Relations 1932-1939 (1963) which was a reworking of his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University in New York City, a project partly undertaken under the inspiration of the famous Polish historian, Oskar Halecki, with whom Professor Budurowycz studied at that time. Second, there is his book on Slavic and East European Resources in Canadian Academic and Research Libraries (1976), which Professor Budurowycz produced during his maturity. This latter volume, a survey of literally dozens of libraries and hundreds of books, played an important role in Professor Budurowycz’s life, for to write it, he had to travel extensively across Canada visiting all of the major universities and all of the provinces to survey their libraries. This was a big job for a man who did not like flying or driving and had to take the train right across the country. But he did it, often meeting important scholars and Ukrainian cultural activists along the way. I remember him telling me how delighted he was at meeting Forvyn Bohdan, a Ukrainian bibliophile in Vancouver who was trying to build up the Ukrainian collection at UBC. The final product of all these travels and all these meetings was a book that is now a classic in Canadian library studies.

Indeed, despite the popularity of his courses, Professor Budurowycz was by character and taste much more a librarian than a teacher. He loved going through books and manuscripts, describing them, and recommending them. After graduating from Columbia, he actually worked for a time as a librarian at the old humanities library at U of T. But eventually, he heeded the call of duty, and accepted a professorship in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. He remained at the U of T until his retirement at the end of the 1980s.

Although Professor Budurowycz was a quiet and timid man, he turned truly bold and expressive when he was lecturing. I remember a lecture he once gave at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the U of T. It was about 1982. International tensions were high because of the Solidarity Crisis in Poland and the recent military crackdown there. We gathered for the lecture in the Upper Library of Massy College. The subject was the hot topic of “Poland and the Ukrainian Problem, 1921-1939.”  The room was packed with students, professors, and prominent members of the Ukrainian and Polish communities who did not always get along. The crowd was hushed and tense with anticipation as Professor Budurowycz began. He spoke in a lively, direct manner, taking a moderate position on the intense Ukrainian-Polish conflict of that time, evenly balancing the most difficult problems and looking at them from different angles. He concluded by saying that the whole Ukrainian-Polish conflict of those days benefited no one but the Russian chauvinists who wished to annex “Galicia,” as western Ukraine was then called, to the Soviet Union or to Russia. The tension was immediately relieved. The audience, Ukrainians, Poles, almost everyone, burst out in laud and sustained applause. I still remember the stunned look on the faces of Professor H. Gordon Skilling, the founder of the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, and Mr Benedykt Heydenkorn, the prominent Polish journalist, as they tried to take in what Professor Budurowycz had said and why the crowd had reacted so strongly.

Professor Budurowycz was a specialist on Polish-Ukrainian relations. But he was also very well versed in Ukrainian and  Polish literature in general, Slavic bibliography, the ancient and medieval Slavs, the history of the Second World War, Church history, the Christian calendars both East and West, the Slavs in Canada, and many other subjects. He was also an expert Latinist, and on occasion, would translate Latin documents for his Slavist colleagues whose knowledge of this language was less expert than his own. Thus he translated the famous Bendery Constitution of Philip Orlyk from the Latin original for George Luckyj’s Intellectual History of Ukraine.

In his political views, Professor Budurowycz had some very mixed opinions. He had lived through Polish, Soviet, and Nazi regimes in western Ukraine and definitely thought the Polish one the least harmful. He simply abhorred the Communists for what they did during their brief rule from 1939 to 1941. He knew the Nazis were terrible, but was grateful to the Germans for helping him and his family to escape from the USSR; he fled westward with them before the advance of the Red Army. In local Canadian politics, like most members of the DP immigration, he tended to be rather conservative, but after the end of the Cold War he had no sympathy for right-wing American foreign policies which entailed large-scale bombing of targets in Serbia or Afghanistan. He was opposed to the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. He remembered with horror a great American bombing raid on Galicia during the war and this experience defined many of his later attitudes on international politics.

Professor Budurowycz was a religious man, but he never imposed his religious views on others. He was a member of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church of Canada, Saint Nicholas Parish, in downtown Toronto. But he married a Roman Catholic and always respected both rites. He was a loyal Catholic but retained a respect for all other faiths, including non-Christian ones like Islam which he did not know well but with which he became somewhat acquainted through personal contacts in his later years. Somehow, he always managed to balance the local and the ecumenical in his general outlook.

Bohdan Budurowycz was a quiet, mild-mannered man who tried to get along with everyone.  He was liked and well respected by his colleagues, admired by his students, and cherished by his friends. For me, he was an esteemed mentor, valued colleaque, and dear friend. He will be greatly missed.

Thomas M. Prymak is Research Associate, Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto.