Author: Thomas M. Prymak Publisher: McGill-Queen’s University Press Country: Canada Language: English
Prior to the Soviet period, Ukraine enjoyed diverse contacts with its Islamic neighbours: the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire and, likewise, with its central and western European neighbours, especially Poland and France. This book reintroduces Ukraine’s long-overlooked connections beyond Eastern Europe and smashes old stereotypes about Ukrainian isolation. The author provides insight into Ukrainian travellers in the Middle East, from pilgrims to the Holy Land to political exiles in Turkey and Iran; Tatar slave raiding in Ukraine; the poetry of Taras Shevchenko and the Russian war against Imam Shamil in the High Caucasus. The book explores Ukrainian themes in relation to French writers Honoré de Balzac and Prosper Mérimée, as well as Rembrandt’s mysterious painting The Polish Rider; and Ilya Repin’s legendary work depicting Zaporozhian Cossacks writing their satirical letter to the Turkish sultan.
Світлий Шлях. Історія одного концтабору [The Torture Camp on Paradise Street]
Author: Stanislav Aseyev Publisher: Видавництво Старого Лева [The Old Lion Publishing House] Country: Ukraine Language: Ukrainian
Abducted by Russian security forces in 2017, journalist Stanislav Aseyev survived the hell of imprisonment in a concentration camp operated by Russia’s military proxies in eastern Ukraine. This intense book recounts the author’s mental and physical struggle to survive imprisonment in a camp where horrific torture was employed to destroy countless lives. There are no laws behind the prison fence. Here, life consists of humiliation, unending fear, and agony— where wounds from electrical shocks and broken bones destroy a man’s desire to live and distort one’s ability to distinguish between faith, forgiveness, and hatred. By recounting his struggle to remain human in the most inhuman conditions, we come to understand how the darkness of his captivity forever altered the author’s outlook on life.
Лицарі голодного Ренесансу [Knights of the Hungry Renaissance]
Author: Dmytro Horbachov Publisher: Дух і Літера [Spirit and Letter Publishing House] Country: Ukraine Language: Ukrainian
One of Ukraine’s leading art historians examines the phenomenon of the “Ukrainian avant-garde” art movement, which the Western art world discovered relatively late, thanks to the 1973 exhibit in London known as “Tatlin’s Dream.” The art of the Ukrainian avant-garde was exceptional since it was produced during a relatively short period of profound historic turmoil — World War I, followed by the Bolshevik Revolution, the collapse of the Russian Tsarist empire, the birth of the Ukrainian Republic, revolutionary war, the destruction of religious institutions, brief Ukrainianization, followed by a forced famine and Stalinist political repression. The book profiles the leading artistic figures of the Ukrainian avant-garde and notes its profound influence on the nonconformists of the 1960’s, including the Ukrainian cultural and political anti Soviet dissident movement of the sixties.
The book’s Jewish Ukrainian author analyzes the most painful events in the history of the Ukrainian and Jewish peoples and focuses on the systematic efforts of Russia’s tsarist and Soviet empires to sow interethnic conflict, employing disinformation and historical fabrications to create hatred and disfunction. Relying on recently declassified KGB archives from the Security Service of Ukraine (СБУ), as well as CIA and OUN archives, the author seeks to uncover buried facts about several 20th-century Ukrainian and Jewish historic figures, some of whom are connected to the most contentious moments in the history of Ukraine and Israel. The author views the common aspirations of the Jewish and Ukrainian peoples to preserve their own identity and fight for their independence — the will to survive — as the mutual bond that ties both nations together.
Editor-in-chief: Larysa Ivshyna Publisher: День. Українська прес-група [The Day. Ukraine Press Group] Country: Ukraine Language: Ukrainian
This volume of articles, edited by the Kyiv-based Editor-in-Chief of Ukraine’s newspaper Den (The Day), strives to shatter the image of the Ukrainian people as chronic victims. The book traces the thread of Russian chauvinism from the Romanovs to Putin’s Russia, as it presents the unknown stories behind an array of vastly different historical figures, including Ivan Mazepa, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mykola Skrypnyk, General Petro Grigorenko, and Mikhail Gorbachev. As alluded to by the book’s title, readers are challenged to detoxify themselves from the imperialist myths imposed on the Ukrainian psyche by centuries of toxic Russian authoritarianism and destructive colonialist policies.
Author: Taras Kuzio Publisher: Taylor & Francis/Routledge Country: United Kingdom Language: English
This timely and relevant book places imperial nationalism and chauvinism at the centre of Putin’s Russia and identifies them as the driving pretext for the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The book highlights a Tsarist White Russian imperial denial of the existence of a distinct Ukrainian nation, as reflected in Putin’s obsession with Ukraine. The author traces the intensification of Russian chauvinism towards Ukraine and Ukrainians through three critical junctures in Putin’s political career. The book investigates nationalism within the Russian Orthodox Church and pinpoints the dangerous rise of the red-white-brown (Soviet-Tsarist-fascist) nationalist coalition under Vladimir Putin.
