Ivan L. Rudnytsky, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History, 1987.
Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky, Scholar and "Communicator" Omeljan Pritsak
Harvard Ukrainian Research InstituteIt is no easy task to evaluate the work of Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky, a colleague and friend whose fortunes I often shared over the course of half a century. This is especially true as he departed so very unexpectedly, without completely fulfilling his creative potential. Shortly before his death I received a letter from him concerning the publication of papers from the successful conference that he had organized to mark the centennial of Viacheslav Lypynsky's birth. This was a strange coincidence: we first met inJhe 1937-8 academic year in Lviv, which at that time was the centre of the Ukrainian nationalist student movement. Our friendship arose through our mutual interest in the works and ideas of Viacheslav Lypynsky, a rare phenomenon at that time. Thus our relationship began and was interrupted under the aegis of Viacheslav Lypynsky.
By nature, Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky was not an ivory-tower scholar. Had he lived and worked in an independent Ukrainian state, he would surely have been a leading scholar-publicist, an organizer of cultural-political events, and an ambassador of Ukrainian intellectual creativity. He might even have carried out such duties not as a university professor but possibly as a member of a council of ministers.
Yet to a great extent he did carry out all the above activities from the relatively humble position of university professor. It would therefore be unfair to limit this evaluation to his published works, and to omit his unique intellectual role in our society as (to use a contemporary American term) a "communicator" of Ukrainian intellectual values in Ukrainian, American, Canadian, and even world forums.
Ivan was a rare phenomenon in Ukrainian life. There is no doubt that he was born under a lucky star. It is difficult to imagine a more stimulating environment than that engendered by his parents and maternal uncles. His place of birth was symbolic -- Vienna of 1919 --one of Europe's most cosmopolitan intellectual centres. Between 1919 and 1921 the Viennese home of the attorney and politician Pavlo Lysiak and his wife, the educator and socio-political activist Milena Rudnytska, was, as Ivan Kedryn-Rudnytsky writes, a meeting place for the leaders of the Ukrainian political emigration. Ivan, whose intellectual interests were nurtured by his mother, probably listened to political debates before he could walk.
After his parents had returned to their homeland and subsequently separated, Ivan grew up under the intellectual tutelage of the Rudnytsky clan in Lviv. This was an unusual family. The matriarch, Olha Rudnytska, nee Spiegel (1864-1950), was widowed when her husband, the notary Ivan (1855-1906), Ivan's grandfather, died prematurely, leaving her with five children on her hands. Although she was not Ukrainian and evidently never mastered the Ukrainian language, out of devotion to her late husband she reared her children as Ukrainians and ensured that they all received a higher education in Ukrainian schools. The children later became known as the Ukrainian "group of five," whose talents were occupied in various spheres. The eldest, Mykhailo (1889-1975), became a leading literary scholar and aesthetician who demanded that Ukrainian scholars judge Ukrainian literature by world standards; he also specialized in English, French, and Italian literatures. Volodymyr (1891-1975) was a notary by profession (like his father) and a respected civic leader both at home and in the emigration. Ivan's mother Milena (1892-1976) distinguished herself as the head of the Ukrainian women's movement and as a political leader who defended the Ukrainian cause both in the Polish Sejm and at the League of Nations in Geneva. Ivan Kedryn (b. 1896), the only survivor of the group, is the elder statesman among Ukrainian publicists. A longtime correspondent and later editor of Dilo, he provided valuable political reports and memoirs. The youngest of the Rudnytsky brothers, Antin (1902-75), was a musician, composer, and director of the Kiev and Kharkiv operas.
One can understand why Ivan was so possessed by the Rudnytsky charisma that he decided to use his mother's maiden name as his main surname. This was painful to his father, who took care of Ivan's material needs until his death in 1948. In Gottingen in the late 1940s, Pavlo Lysiak showed me the correspondence in which father and son declared their respective views, and found no common denominator. Until he was thirty, Ivan was the darling of fate. Because his parents were intellectuals, he perused books as a matter of course. Under the tutelage of the Rudnytsky clan, he became an intellectual gourmet. Until 1953, his material needs were provided for, and he was able to study whatever he liked, as well as to attend public lectures, concerts, and other cultural events. Even the war did not disturb him. He left Lviv University in the autumn of 1939, and in 1940 he was able to continue his studies, first in Berlin; then, from 1943 to the autumn of 1945 at Charles University in Prague; and finally, after the collapse of Germany, in Geneva, Switzerland (1946-50) and Columbia University in New York (1951). This period provided the basis of his intellectual liberalism and cosmopolitan attitude to scholarly work.
Ivan's first intellectual interest was philosophy, especially German transcendental philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a result, the chief interest of his subsequent academic career was historical cognition. Ivan was basically in agreement with the evolutionary outlook of idealism, which was characteristic of German historicism. On this basis he viewed the structure of Ukrainian history within the framework of Western intellectual development, with which he was well acquainted. He applied the concept in particular to the Middle Ages, which, as far as East European history is concerned, was more or less terra incognita to Western authorities. Ivan was influenced by Stepan Tomashivsky, who felt that the medieval period in Ukraine was a unique but still integral part of West European development.
Ivan, for example, could not accept the presence of a patrimonial system in the history of Ukraine-Rus' before the Union of Lublin (1569), and he did not fully appreciate the strength of pre-secular thought in Ukraine before the first decades of the nineteenth century. Ivan gave a systematic outline of his views during the round-table discussion on 31 May 1978 at the Ukrainian historical conference in London, Ontario. Economic, social, and even religious problems (the first two in particular) were alien to him, as he divulged both publicly and privately. He used political history, on the other hand, to establish a chronological framework. Ivan focused his attention on the study of Ukrainian sociopolitical thought, which had captured his interest during his student days. For Ivan, in other words, history was neither a point of departure nor an end in itself, but rather a means of understanding the development of socio-political thought. This is reflected in the title he gave to his own work published by Suchasnist in 1973, Mizh istoriieiu i politykoiu. Statti do istorii ta krytyky ukrainskoi suspilno-politychnoi dumky (Between History and Politics. Essays toward the History and Criticism of Ukrainian Social and Political Thought).
Since Ukrainian socio-political thought dates from the mid-nineteenth century, Ivan's independent research covered the period from that time to the 1930s. Although he had studied at faculties of political science in Berlin and Geneva, he never became a "Kremlinologist." This was in keeping with Ivan's logical preconditions for his work: after 1933 in central and eastern Ukraine, and after the Second World War in western Ukraine, official socio-political thought had ceased to develop, so there were insufficient bases for research.
Ivan's basic interests also determined the form of his expression. His temperament was unsuited to the writing of a monograph that required many years of "manual labour" in archives, the inclusion of lengthy explanatory material in footnotes (difficult to systematize logically), and several parallel foci. He required a quick response to his thoughts, and he needed to react quickly, in writing or orally, to interesting intellectual phenomena. He found the scholarly-publicistic essay, with its clear philosophical foundation and faultless logical structure, to be more appropriate. This factor also determined the length of his works. His most important range from ten to forty pages, and only two works exceed this limit. The first of these, his study of Mykhailo Drahomanov as a political thinker, published in the Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S. in 1952, was sixty pages long. This essay was a revision of his dissertation, defended in Prague in the spring of 1945, shortly before the end of the German occupation. Secondly, he wrote an eighty-three-page silhouette of the Galician politician and journalist Osyp Nazaruk (1883-1940), which appeared in 1971 as an introduction to the well-known volume of the correspondence between Nazaruk and Lypynsky. Incidentally, Ivan knew Nazaruk, a political friend of Ivan's mother, in Lviv and had many conversations with him.
Ivan's largest work, a history of Carpatho-Ukraine begun during his studies at Columbia University (1951-3), remains unfinished. A typescript of 175 pages is in his archive. Over a period of four decades (1943-84), Ivan thus published a relatively small amount of work. His bibliography of over 100 titles, including reviews and encyclopaedia entries, could probably be contained in a three-volume collection of 500 pages each. But the number of pages is of less significance than the quality of what he wrote. Despite the absence of large monographs, Ivan was far removed from any pettifoggery. He chose major themes, specifically between history and politics, and made them interesting both to the specialist and the intelligent lay reader. A good philosophical background (under the influence of Vasyl Rudko), acuteness and a broad perspective, intellectual honesty, and civic courage rendered his essays exceptional.
Since he understood the outlook of the Western reader, most of his works could be presented in two parallel versions -- English and Ukrainian. It would be interesting to ascertain the number of his English-language and Ukrainian-language readers. It is probable that the former outnumbered the latter. Similarly, the scholarly discussions provoked by Ivan's essays have been conducted on the pages of English-language publications such as Slavic Review and Harvard Ukrainian Studies. Approximately ten of Ivan's English-language essays have become firmly established in international historiography and are required reading for both students and lecturers on East European history, especially in North America. In this respect Ivan did more to spread information about the most important problems of Ukraine, and Ukrainian socio-political thought in particular, than any of his colleagues.
Ivan's works can be divided into two categories: studies of Ukrainian socio-political thinkers and activists and selected problems in the history of Ukrainian socio-political thought.
There is a dichotomy in the first category: Ukrainian political thinkers who were in the centre of Ivan's research, and those on the periphery. The central figures include (in chronological order): the Polish trinity with a Ukrainian program, Michal Czajkowski (Sadyk Pasha) (1804-86), Hipolit Terlecki (1808-88), and Franciszek Duchinski (1816-93); Mykhailo Drahomanov; Viacheslav Lypynsky; and Osyp Nazaruk. On the periphery of his studies were the following: Ivan Franko; Mykhailo Hrushevsky; Volodymyr Vynnychenko; Serhii Mazlakh and Vasyl Shakhrai; Dmytro Dontsov; and Mykola Khvylovy.
He studied the following questions:
1. The concept and problem of "historical" and "non-historical" nations;
2. The intellectual origins of modern Ukraine and the structure of nineteenth-century Ukrainian history;
3. The problem of the intelligentsia and intellectual development in Ukraine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries;
4. Galicia under the Habsburg Empire and its contribution to the Ukrainian struggle for statehood;
5. The Ukrainian revolution of 1917-21 and the Fourth Universal in the historical context of Ukrainian political thought, or autonomy vs. independence;
6. Ukraine within the Soviet system;
7. Galician Ukrainian inter-war nationalism;
8. Ukrainians and their nearest neighbours, the Poles and the Russians;
9. 1848 in Galicia: an evaluation of political pamphlets.Ivan conscientiously studied printed (and partially manuscript) primary sources of the history of Ukrainian socio-political thought from 1848 to 1940. As noted earlier, Ivan "grew up" on West European intellectual currents and followed their development throughout his creative life. In fact, he tended to view the world through the prism of a West European observer. He felt equally at home in Polish intellectual circles and cultivated close personal ties with Polish scholars. The Russian world, on the other hand, whether Imperial or Bolshevik, remained psychologically alien to him.
Ivan declined to evaluate the patrimonial base of the political creativity of the Slavia Orthodoxa (to use Riccardo Picchio's term), whether the subject was Kievan Rus', Galician-Polish Rus', Lithuanian Rus' until 1569, the Grand Duchy (Tsardom) of Muscovy, or the Russian Empire. Likewise, he approached East European phenomena with Western criteria, whether the subject was medieval feudalism or the intelligentsia of the nineteenth century.
Ivan's contribution to the study of Drahomanov's legacy has been dealt with elsewhere. It did, however, contain one fundamental defect. Ivan isolated the world of Drahomanov's ideas from the latter's imperial Russian milieu. It was left not to Ivan, but to our mutual friend Ievhen Pyziur (unfortunately also deceased), a talented scholar of Ukrainian and Russian politics and thought, to place Drahomanov into an appropriate framework within the structure of imperial Russian constitutionalism.
If someone were to ask which of Ivan's essays best sums up his intellectual achievements and historical perspective, and at the same time is an important contribution to historiography, I would not hesitate to name the English-language version of his study on "The Fourth Universal and Its Intellectual Antecedents," published in the volume on the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-21 edited by Taras Hunczak. Ivan was the first to establish the place of that great revolution in the thinking of Ukrainian political activists and theorists between March 1917 and January 1918, and to demonstrate its effect both on champions of autonomy and on those who sought independence.
One of Ivan's first printed works was his "Conversation on the Baroque," which appeared in the journal Novi dni (1943) in the form of a dialogue and was reprinted in the collection Mizh istoriieiu i politykoiu. The dialogue and Ivan's role of "communicator" of free thought remained the chief facets of his life to the end. His dialogue took on various forms, five of which were fundamental.
First, he used personal encounters with friends, old and new, native and alien. He continued these encounters in the second form of the dialogue: correspondence. Throughout his life Ivan corresponded extensively in Ukrainian, Polish, and West European languages. There, as in personal conversations, he dealt with intellectual questions. Further, he exchanged information about new books, persons, and events. He treated his correspondence very seriously, almost pedantically retaining copies of his most important letters and those of his correspondents. In his archives, donated to the University of Alberta, there are fifty volumes of letters in alphabetical order according to the correspondents' surnames. Covering forty years, this correspondence is an invaluable source for future historians not only of Ukrainian socio-political thought but of all Ukrainian cultural life on this continent.
A third form of dialogue cultivated by Ivan was public discussion. He tried to attend all international congresses of historians or Slavists, and participated in many scholarly conferences and symposia. Usually he would deliver a paper, but if not he would take an active part in discussions. His deliveries were often remarkable. He spoke on subjects he knew well, his formulations were characterized by clarity and logic, and although he could be polemical, he never descended to abuse. I always listened to his presentations with delight, whether or not we were in agreement.
The fourth form of dialogue consisted of conferences, symposia, and consultations that he himself initiated and carried out. When he lived on the eastern seaboard of the United States he organized most of the historical conferences of the Ukrainian Free Academy of Arts and Sciences. One of the last conferences he organized was the Ukrainian historical conference in London, Ontario, the fruit of which was the seminal collection of essays and discussions edited by Ivan under the title Rethinking Ukrainian History. He organized the conference while serving as associate director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, where he was also a member of the editorial board responsible for publications in history and to which he willed his large library, including numerous rarities.
Finally, his last and perhaps most important form of dialogue: no matter where Ivan lived, whether it was Berlin, wartime Prague, Philadephia (La Salle College and Bryn Mawr), Washington or Edmonton, he always located interesting intellectuals. He had a talent for securing access to such a private club and for organizing intellectual symposia. Furthermore, he never missed an opportunity to attend presentations by distinguished representatives of the humanities or social sciences, especially those of guests from Europe.
But Ivan did not limit himself to existing forms. An inspired teacher, he always gathered around himself young talents, often his own discoveries, and initiated them into the arcana of the kingdom of the intellect. Several of his former disciples, for example, Orest Subtelny and Zenon Kohut, have become respected Ukrainian historians.
Death took Ivan precisely at the time when his private and professional affairs had found a positive resolution and he had the opportunity to devote all his energies to bringing his scholarly ideas to fruition in monographic format. He left us prematurely, survived by his wife, the poet and literary critic Alexandra Chernenko; his children, Peter Rudnytsky and Elizabeth Roslosnik; and two grandchildren. But his legacy -- his published works and the various forms of dialogue -- assure him a worthy place in the pantheon of both Ukrainian and world sociopolitical thought.