Hundorova Delivers 10th Annual  Danylo Huzar Struk Memorial Lecture

CFUS Announces Transfer of Struk Fund to CIUS

The Tenth Annual Danylo Husar Struk Memorial Lecture was held on Friday, May 15, 2009 on the University of Toronto campus. The event consisted of a lecture by Tamara Hundorova entitled “Ukrainian Literary Populism Unveiled: The Question of Popular Literature” and a reception at which a brief tribute to Danylo H. Struk was presented.

 The Struk Memorial Lecture is an annual event sponsored by the Danylo Husar Struk Programme in Ukrainian Literature of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS). It was instituted at the Toronto office of CIUS in 1999, shortly after the sudden and unexpected death of Danylo H. Struk, professor of Ukrainian literature at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures of the University of Toronto and assistant director of CIUS, where he was the editor-in-chief of the Encyclopaedia of Ukraine. The Programme and Lecture honour his memory and his dedication to the study of Ukrainian literature.

The first Memorial Lecture was delivered by Marko Pavlyshyn of Monash University in 2000. Over the years, such prominent scholars as George Grabowicz of Harvard, Oleh Ilnytzkyj of Alberta, Myroslav Shkandrij of Manitoba, Vitaly Chernetsky of Miami University (Ohio), Taras Koznarsky and Maxim Tarnawsky (both from Toronto) have delivered this prestigious lecture. This year’s lecture, the tenth, marked a decade of the Lecture’s existence and was, appropriately, delivered by one of the leading figures in Ukrainian literary scholarship, Tamara Hundorova, director of the division of literary theory at the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Science in Ukraine and a member of the faculty of Kyiv’s Taras Shevchenko University. She travelled to Toronto from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is currently the Petro Jacyk Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University.

In her lecture, Hundorova attempted to reconstruct the concept of literary populism as a constructivist idea and an intellectual project by tracing the evolution of its development. This history of the idea of populism also leads to an analysis of the national, social, cultural, and political self-perception that determined the nature of the populist identity. Since populism, or more accurately, narodnytstvo, insofar as the word “populism” in English has it’s own peculiar understanding, can have a variety of meanings in different contexts, Hundorova focused on three essential arguments: 1) populism is not an organic phenomenon but a construction of the Ukrainian elite, 2) the essential notion of the populist project is popular culture, 3) the populist movement was an attempt at cultural and social modernization and thus played a peculiar role in the development of aesthetic modernism in the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Therefore, the role of populism in Ukrainian literary and cultural development is best understood as a deliberate and expansive embrace of popular culture rather than a rejection of culturally and socially sophisticated culture.

After the lecture the audience was invited to a reception. The reception included a brief tribute to Danylo Husar Struk. After a brief personal recollection about Struk by Maxim  Tarnawsky, the director of the Struk Programme, Frank Sysyn, director of the CIUS Toronto Office, spoke about Struk’s role in shaping the CIUS and its Toronto office, and in particular about his dedicated work on the Encyclopaedia of Ukraine, one of the major projects of Ukrainian scholarship in the Diaspora. A video tribute to Struk was played for the audience and then Maxim Tarnawsky spoke about Struk’s literary scholarship and announced the creation of a website featuring all 37 of Danylo H. Struk’s literary essays, in English, Ukrainian, and French.

The website is the first step in a larger project to publish these essays, and those of other diaspora scholars of Ukrainian literature. These projects will become possible as a result of the new funding available for the Struk Programme, which was the subject of the final presentation by the president of the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies (CFUS), Olga Kuplowska. Kuplowska announced that the Struk Fund, initiated by the Foundation together with family and friends shortly after Struk’s death, was being transferred to the University of Alberta to take advantage of the University’s Matching Funds Program. Currently valued at approximately $85,000, the Fund capital would be doubled under this program. The annual interest from this Fund would be used for the exclusive support of the CIUS Struk Programme in Ukrainian Literature. Members of the audience were encouraged to support the Fund with donations to increase the total that would then be doubled by the University of Alberta.

Donation cards were distributed at the reception and were met with a generous response from the audience. Donations from supporters are still welcome for the next two months and can be made directly to the CFUS Office at 620 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 2H4 or by telephone at 416-766-9630, email: admin@cfus.ca . Those who were unable to attend may listen to the lecture which is available on the Struk Programme website: http://www.utoronto.ca/elul/Struk-mem/mem-lect-archive.html . The video tribute to Danylo H. Struk is available on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeSdUgIyKRc).

For more information contact: Maxim Tarnawsky tarn@chass.utoronto.ca or the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies by e-mail: admin@cfus.ca .