Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky, Scholar and “Communicator”

It 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.

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.

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.

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 OfWestern 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, 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 ³ politykoiu. Statti do istorii ta krytyky Iikrainskoi 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.

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 IOO 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.

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-Ianguage 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), FIipolit 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 istoriieiιι ³ 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 Rud- nytsky 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.

Omeljan Pritsak

Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute