The ninth volume of Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s History of Ukraine-Rus' is by far the longest in the 10-volume series. Written in the late 1920s, after Hrushevsky had returned to Ukraine from exile, the volume is dedicated to a crucial period of Ukrainian history—the rule of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky.
In the English translation of the History prepared by the Peter Jacyk Centre for Ukrainian Historical Research at CIUS and published by CIUS Press, this large volume appears in three separate books. Book 1 of volume 9 was published in 2005; book 2, part 1, appeared in 2008; and in 2010 book 2, part 2 was made available to readers and scholars.
This book was translated by Marta Daria Olynyk, a Montreal-based translator, editor, and broadcaster. It was edited by the director of the Jacyk Centre, Dr. Frank E. Sysyn, and the consulting editor for the book, Dr. Yaroslav Fedoruk, a senior scholar at the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Institute of Ukrainian Archaeography and Source Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv, with the assistance of CIUS Press senior editor Myroslav Yurkevich. Other scholars who advised on terminological and historical issues include Victor Ostapchuk, Sándor Gebei, Eduard Baidaus, András Riedlmayer, Vasil Varonin, Pavlo Sodomora, Erika Banski, Vera Chentsova, and Bert Hall.
The preparation of this volume for publication was funded by a generous donation from the prominent physician and philanthropist Dr. Maria Fischer-Slysh (Etobicoke, Ontario) in memory of her parents, Dr. Adolf Slyz and Olha Slyz. Dr. Fischer-Slysh was born in Kolomyia in western Ukraine in 1922 and spent her childhood in the historic town of Belz before moving with her family to Lviv in 1933. She attended the Ukrainian Academic Gymnasium in Lviv, but after the Soviet occupation of western Ukraine she fled with her family and finished her secondary education in Kholm.
She completed her medical studies in Munich in 1949 and emigrated with her family to the United States in 1950. She practiced as a pediatrician in Kankakee, Illinois. In 1959 she married Dr. Rudolf Fischer, who was born in Straubing, Bavaria, and completed his medical studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Dr. Fischer passed away in 1982. Dr. Fischer-Slysh now resides in Toronto. She is a long-time member of the board of directors of the Ukrainian Medical Association of North America in Chicago, head of the Friends of the Academic Gymnasium in the Diaspora, and a board member of the Canadian Society of the Friends of Ukraine. She is also a member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society and the League of Ukrainian Philanthropists. A generous donor to numerous scholarly undertakings in Ukraine and Canada, she has made the largest donation in the history of the Ukrainian Catholic University, an institution that is cooperating with CIUS in the new Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Modern Society and History. In addition to this volume, Dr. Fischer-Slysh is sponsoring the publication of volume 5 of the History.
This tome, in which Mykhailo Hrushevsky analyzes the last two yearsof Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s rule, consists of the final chapters (10–13) of volume 9. Hrushevsky presents the most comprehensive discussion to date of Khmelnytsky’s foreign policy in the aftermath of the Treaty of Pereiaslav (1654), a topic closed to research in Soviet Ukraine from the 1930s to the 1980s. He also discusses Khmelnytsky’s renewed efforts to annex the western Ukrainian territories and to control the Belarusian lands conquered by the Cossacks. He concludes with an assessment of the hetman and his age that has long been controversial in Ukrainian historiography.
The volume shows how Ukraine’s relations with Muscovy were strained by the Muscovites’ failure to help fend off devastating Polish and Crimean attacks, which promptedUkrainian leaders to seek support elsewhere. Tensions were exacerbated by the Ukrainian-Muscovite dispute over Belarusian territory. When Charles X of Sweden attacked the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1655, while Khmelnytsky was seeking to recover the western Ukrainian lands, a Swedish-Ukrainian alliance seemed to be in the making. A military convention was concluded, but Charles, under pressure from his allies among the Polish nobility, would not cede western Ukraine to the Cossacks. After the Vilnius accord between Muscovy and the Commonwealth (November 1656), Khmelnytsky sought to form a Swedish-Transylvanian-Ukrainian league and supported the abortive effort by György Rákóczi II of Transylvania to gain the Polish throne. Hrushevsky’s exhaustive discussion of diplomatic affairs greatly advances understanding of the role of Ukraine and the countries of East Central Europe in the political crisis of the mid-seventeenth century.
In a comprehensive introduction to the volume, Yaroslav Fedoruk considers issues of foreign policy, as well as the larger problem of national historiographies and their limitations with regard to the highly complex European situation. Frank Sysyn analyzes Hrushevsky’s assessment of Khmelnytsky’s rule in chapter 13 as a polemic with the conservative historian Viacheslav Lypynsky (1882–1931).
Volume 9, book 2, part 2 of the History is available in a hardcoveredition for $119.95(plus taxes and shipping; outside Canada, prices are in U.S. dollars). The full set of the History is available at a subscription price of $1,100. Volumes 7 to 10 (insix books), representing the History of the Ukrainian Cossacks, are available at a subscription price of $600. Submit your order today and automatically receive available volumes and the remaining ones as they are published.Orders can be placed via the secure on-line ordering system of CIUS Press at www.ciuspress.com or by contacting CIUS Press, 430 Pembina Hall, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6G 2H8; tel.: (780) 492-2973; e-mail: [email protected].
