Acknowledgments
it is my pleasure to thank various people and institutions that helped me to gather the materials for this book and to write it. Over several years, some of my closest friends and colleagues read one or more of the chapters in this volume, or advised me about them.
Foremost among these was Professor Paul Robert Magocsi of the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto. My association with him and his chair has made possible much of the research here and enabled me to use the university's great John P. Robarts Library (one of North America's largest), which holds one of the best collections of ucrainica in the Western world. This also holds true for its substantial collection of materials on the Middle East, and its magnificent collection of French literature and history. At the Robarts Library, Ksenya Kiebuzinski and, before her, Mary Stevens were a great help to me. With Ksenya, in particular, I share a special interest in French-language materials on Ukraine. Halya Ostapchuk of the Saint Vladimir Institute Library in Toronto was also very helpful.Parts of the manuscript were read by scholars at the University of Toronto, including the Ottoman Turkish specialists Professor Victor Ostapchuk and Ms Maryna Kravets. Professor Maria Subtelny of the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, who many long years ago was my first instructor in the Persian language, advised me on Shevchenko's impressions of central Asia; the late Professor Bohdan Budurowycz of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, who was also a noted Latinist, checked parts of the manuscript.
A distinguished but still-anonymous peer reviewer for the International History Review proposed ways for me to improve an earlier version of the chapter on early modern Tatar slave raiding in Ukraine. Other anonymous peer reviewers for McGill-Queen's University Press made extensive and constructive suggestions about the whole text. Years ago, the late Maria Zaputovych kindly typed part of the manuscript into a computer for me, and more recently, my son Cyrus Prymak helped me to negotiate other arcane mysteries of contemporary computers.
I also thank the editors of the Polish Review for their permission to reprint the chapter on “Rembrandt's ‘Polish Rider' in Its East European Context” and the Frick Collection in New York City for permission to reproduce the painting itself. The generous financial support of the James Termerty Family Foundation, the Shevchenko Scientific Society, Toronto Branch, and the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies is also gratefully acknowledged.I should also like to thank my editor pro tem at McGill-Queen's, Richard Ratzlaff, for all his assistance with this difficult manuscript. Managing editor Kathleen Fraser put considerable effort into this volume. It has been many years in the works, and I am glad that they could help me so much further along to the final goal.
As well, I should like to express my gratitude to my close colleagues at the University of Toronto, Roman Senkus and the late Andrij Makuch, editors at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, for many interesting conversations and tips about our field. Finally, I wish to thank my Iranian wife, Yassamine (or Jasmine) Kalhori-Prymak, the descendant of a distinguished Kurdish tribal leader from Gilan-e-garb in the Zagros Mountains of western Iran, not far from the magnificent rock carvings of Darius the Great at Bisitun. A native of Tehran, she helped me with many a translation question and was a constant inspiration to me to continue work on my subjects of interest, still unfamiliar to so many inhabitants of present-day Ukraine. Quite understandably, in recent years they have had other, rather more important concerns on their minds.