CIUS Professor Marks Anniversary of Lypynsky Institute

On March 17, 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of the W. K. Lypynsky East European Research Institute was marked by a grand celebration at the institute’s headquarters in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This was also the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of one of the institute’s founders, Eugene Zyblikevych. Participants included Dr. Zenon Kohut, director of the Kowalsky Program for the Study of Eastern Ukraine at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), and Dr. Tetiana Ostashko, a senior researcher at the Institute of History, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv).

Dr. Kohut gave a presentation in memory of Zyblikevych titled “Habent sua fata libelli: The Long Road of Two Monographs Devoted to Herman Petro Doroshenko.” He presented an intriguing history of two biographies of Herman Doroshenko (1665-76), one written by a distant relative, the famous Ukrainian historian and political figure Dmytro Doroshenko (1882-1951), the other by the Polish scholar Jan Perdenia (1898-1973).

As Dr. Kohut pointed out, Dmytro Doroshenko was a historian of the “statist school” in Ukrainian historiography. He saw the elites of the early modern Ukrainian Cossack Hetmanate as having the political acumen required to build a state. This was in direct contrast to Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who insisted on the critical importance of mass-based national movements in the development of statehood. For the historian Doroshenko, Hetman Petro Doroshenko was something of an ideal statesman. He argued that Petro Doroshenko was totally committed to a united Ukraine, but he also candidly described the devastating effects of the pro-Turkish policies that the hetman was forced to adopt after Poland and Muscovy partitioned the Ukrainian lands in the Truce of Andrusovo (1667).

Dmytro Doroshenko’s monograph was the result of assiduous research on printed sources and archival materials from depositories in Warsaw, Cracow, Poznari, and Lviv. His citations and references are of exceptional value today, as many documents held in Polish archives were destroyed during World War II.

Jan Perdenia’s monograph focuses on the relationship between the Cossack hetman and the government of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Unable to access Doroshenko’s work, he used numerous sources from both Polish and Soviet (Moscow and Leningrad) archives and libraries. Thus the two monographs complement each other.

Even though Perdenia worked in Poland under the communist regime, which censored historical and other literature, his conclusions about Hetman Petro Doroshenko as a political actor were generally similar to those of Dmytro Doroshenko. His main argument was that all the hetman’s political activity concentrated on ensuring the unity and independence of Cossack Ukraine. A notable difference, however, is Perdenia’s contention that Doroshenko was a treacherous politician who bore responsibility for the failure of Polish-Cossack negotiations. Perdenia also presented an idealized portrait of King Jan III Sobieski. It is difficult to determine whether these were Perdenia’s own views or observations imposed by the censors.

The texts of both monographs barely survived and were not published until decades after the deaths of their authors. Dmytro Doroshenko’s monograph reached the West after the Prague Spring of 1968. It was presumably sent by a Ukrainian scholar and public figure from Czechoslovakia, Orest Zilynsky, to the president of the Ukrainian Free Academy of Sciences in the U.S. (UVAN), Professor Oleksander Ohloblyn, and finally published in 1985 with the support of UVAN. Jan Perdenia completed his work in 1971, but the Polish authorities did not consent to the publication of his controversial book. Shortly before his death, Perdenia passed on his manuscript to Dr. Frank Sysyn, who smuggled it to safety in the West. The book was finally published in 2000. Both monographs provided a basis for the most recent study of the life and work of Hetman Petro Doroshenko, issued in 2011 by the Ukrainian historians Valerii Smolii and Valerii Stepankov.

The W. K. Lypynsky East European Research Institute was founded in 1963 at the initiative of Ukrainian activists in Philadelphia: Vasyl Kostrubiak, Dmytro Levchuk, Oleksander Lototsky, Volodymyr Chuma, and Eugene Zyblikevych. The purpose of the institute is to acquire, preserve, and publish works and materials from the personal archives of Viacheslav Lypynsky and to conduct research related to Ukrainian nation-building and intellectual history. The institute’s archive also houses documents of Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky and his family, Prince Mykhailo Kochubei, the historians Dmytro Doroshenko and Volodymyr Zalozetsky, the writers Vasyl Stefanyk and Bohdan Lepky, a member of the Directory of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, Opanas Andriievsky, the Ukrainian military figures Oleksander Shapoval and Varfolomii Yevtymovych, the Ukrainian scholars Levchuk and Lototsky, the artists Vasyl Avramenko and Viktor Tsymbal, and others. There are also materials from the Committee for Famine Relief in Ukraine (1932-42), which was founded by Yelysaveta Skoropadska in Berlin. The institute supports the publishing programs of North American universities, including the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University and CIUS at the University of Alberta. Currently the Lypynsky Institute is planning further research on Ukrainian martyrology, primarily the Holodomor of 1932-1933.

PHOTOS

1 - Zenon Kohut delivering his presentation

2 - Unique historical artifacts from the institute archives