From May 7-11 an international conference entitled “Ivan Mazepa and his Followers: State Ideology, History, Religion, Literature, Culture” was held at the conference centre of the University of Milan at Gargnano del Garda, Italy. Sponsored by the Slavic and Ugro-Finnic Section of the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Philological Studies, the conference included papers by 11 Ukrainian scholars from Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv and Chernihiv (Iurii Mytsyk, Viktor Brekhunenko, Oleksii Sokyrko, Nataliia Iakovenko, Oleksander Kovalenko, Larysa Dovha, Myroslav Trofymiuk, Serhii Iakovenko, Serhii Vakulenko, Oleksandra Trofymuk, Volodymyr Kravchenko), 4 from Canada (Volodymyr Mezentsev, Natalia Pylypiuk, Serhii Plokhy and Frank Sysyn), 4 from Poland (Teresa Chyczewska-Hennel, Ewa Glbicka, Ioanna Partyka, Ewa Rybalt), 3 from Italy (Giovanna Brogi-Bercoff, Oxana Pachlovska, Luca Calvi), 2 from Russia (Lidiia Sazonova, Marina Fedotova), 2 from France (Daniel Beauvois, Iryna Dmytrychyn), 1 from Germany (Hans Rothe), 1 from Estonia (Ielena Pogosian, soon to be at the University of Alberta), and 1 from Israel (Wolf Moskovitch).

The organizer, Professor Giovanna Brogi-Bercoff of the University of Milan, opened the conference with a call that the time had come to discuss the multifaceted figure of Mazepa and his age divorced from the political and ideological polemics that have dominated for the last three centuries. She maintained that her own fascination with Mazepa had come through her examination of the Baroque literature of the age.

That a conference on Ukraine’s hetman was convened in Italy can be attributed to his renown and to the growing role of Italy in the field of Ukrainian studies. The opening of a chair of Ukrainian philology at the University of Rome held by Oxana Pachlovska and the activities of the Italian Association of Ukrainianists are signs of this development. Conference participants were pleased to witness that the student volunteers from the University of Milan assisting at the conference could speak Ukrainian.

The conference was interdisciplinary in its approach, with literary texts used as sources for political thought and philosophy and historians addressing cultural issues of the age. Considerable attention was paid to the roots of Mazepa and Ukrainian culture in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and to their importance for Russia of the Petrine Age.

The conference dealt both with the person of Ivan Mazepa and with his political followers in exile, Pylyp and Hryhor Orlyk. Problems such as the church, the army, and history writing in the age of Mazepa were dealt with. Iconography and the archaeological remains of Baturyn were discussed. Attention was also paid to subsequent historiography on Mazepa. During the three days of the conference, the international group of scholars had ample opportunity to exchange views and information. The volume that will be produced from the conference papers should mark a major event in focusing scholarly attention on Mazepa and his age. Indeed, the presentation by Ukrainian scholars of a volume of the universals of Mazepa, just published in Ukraine, demonstrates, how after the long neglect and tendentious treatment of Mazepa and his age in the tsarist and Soviet periods, scholarly examination of Mazepa by using sources has become possible in independent Ukraine.

The conference, funded primarily by the University of Milan, also received support from the Peter Jacyk Centre for Ukrainian Historical Research and the Kowalsky Program for the Study of Eastern Ukraine of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, as well as the Soros Foundation.