New Book: Ukraine’s Many Faces: Land, People, and Culture Revisited

Ukraine’s Many Faces: Land, People, and Culture Revisited, Olena Palko, Manuel Férez Gil (eds.). 25 July 2023, 402 pages
ISBN: 978-3-8376-6664-9. transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

Full text (pdf)

The book series New Europes aims to provide a new understanding of Europe’s past and present in the face of current crises such as Russia’s war against Ukraine, climate change, the post-pandemic recovery, and the rise of new forms of authoritarianism. These challenges call for multidisciplinary, transnational, historical and critical approaches to existing paradigms for thinking about Europe. The series is edited by
The University of New Europe, a network of academic solidarity, creativity, and institution building.

Overview Chapters:

Timeline of Ukrainian History

Foreword. Where is Ukraine?

Introduction. Ukraine’s Many Faces

I. Modernity at the Crossroads of Empires

Primary Sources:

  • Ukrainian Draft Treaty of 1654
  • To My Fellow-Countrymen, In Ukraine and Not in Ukraine, Living, Dead and as Yet Unborn
  • Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s Entry to Kyiv in 1649 (1912)

Conversation Pieces

  • Revealing Pan-Slavic Russian Imperialism
  • Ukrainian History through Literature

Analytical Articles

  • Between East and West: Understanding Early Modern Ukraine
  • Between Empires: Ukraine in the Nineteenth Century
  • Jews in Habsburg Galicia: Challenges of Modernity
  • Grain, Coal, and Gas. Ukraine’s Economy since the Eighteenth Century

II. Ukrainian Selfhood in the Soviet Era

Primary Sources:

  • Ukrainian Declaration of Independence (1918)
  • Letter from the Collective Farmer Mykola Reva to Joseph Stalin about the Famine of 1933 in Ukraine
  • Fedir Krychevsky, Life Triptych (1925)

Conversation Pieces

  • Ukraine: Between Empires and National Self- Determination

Analytical Articles

  • The Ukrainian Revolution, the Bolsheviks, and the Inertia of Empire
  • The Territory of Ukraine and Its History
  • Constructing Ethnic Identities in Early Soviet Ukraine
  • Street Children in Early Soviet Odesa
  • Selfhood and Statehood in Interwar Ukraine: Inventing the “New Man”
  • Stalinism and The Holodomor
  • Ukrainian Greek Catholics in Search of Ancestry, Belonging, and Identity
  • Crimean Tatars: Claiming the Homeland

III. Sovereignty Regained: Ukraine in the Post-Soviet Age

Primary Sources:

  • Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine (1990)
  • Home is still possible there…
  • Matvey Vaisberg, The Wall [Stina] (2014)

Conversation Pieces

  • Between the Holodomor and Euromaidan: In Search of Contemporary Ukrainian National Identity
  • Ukraine: Between National Security and the Rule of Law

Analytical Articles

  • Society in Turbulent Times: The Impact of War on Ukraine
  • Competing Identities of Ukraine’s Russian Speakers
  • The Donbas: A Region and a Myth
  • Towards Gender Equality in the Ukrainian Society
  • The Art of Misunderstanding
  • The Territory Resists the Map

Afterword. Let Ukraine Speak

  • Integrating Scholarship on Ukraine into Classroom Syllabi