Preface

it was in October 1971, while Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin's Cold War visit to Canada was provoking furious protests, that I suddenly grasped the close ties between my ancestral Ukrainian homeland and the Lands of Islam - the Dar al-Islam (House or Abode of Islam).

My Polish-Canadian uncle and I rented a car in Vienna, and, halfway to Poland, we stopped overnight in Prague, which was still rather dark and dismal after the shocking Soviet invasion of August 1968. In the parking lot of the Hotel International I spotted a sizable “Winnebago”-style van with a large sign: “From Alaska to Samarkand or Bust!”

I went up to the van and spoke with the owners, an elderly couple from Alaska. They had spent a year or so travelling in an enormous circle across western Europe, eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union to the legendary city of Samarkand in Uzbekistan, then crossed the mountains to Afghanistan, and over more, even higher mountains to Iran. From there, they motored across Turkey, and then through the Balkans back to central Europe and Prague to visit friends they had made along the way. They had taken warm clothing, camping gear, and extra gas tanks, and they had known about the new Soviet-built road across otherwise-impenetrable Afghanistan. They said the trip had not been too difficult. From that day forward, I dreamed of doing that same journey myself.

It was not to be - yet. My firm dedication to scholarship, and five de­cades of wars, revolutions, and related turmoil throughout most of those countries, have prevented such an ambitious undertaking.

This book is a parallel journey of sorts, and consists of a mosaic of var­ious elements, most rather colourful, and each revealing in its own way. My chapters deal with what I call “Oriental” and “Occidental” aspects of Ukrainian history and culture that have long fascinated me, but receive little attention in conventional treatments of the country.

During the Soviet period of Ukrainian history, which for most of the country lasted seventy years, from 1920 to 1989, contacts with the outside world were minimal, impeded by an almost-impenetrable “Iron Curtain” separating the Soviet sphere of influence from other parts of central and western Europe - and the rest of the world - and extremely thorough cen­sorship, which tightly controlled contacts even among the “republics” of the sprawling Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (ussr, or Soviet Union). Although the USSR collapsed in 1991 and an independent and democratic Ukraine arose from its ashes, the isolation eased only gradually. Chronic political and economic problems made it difficult for Ukrainian academic, cultural, and scientific institutions to take up the new freedoms and estab­lish productive relations with kindred institutions elsewhere. Moreover, it took a number of years for interested Ukrainians to learn foreign languages such as English, slowing efforts at exchanges and cooperation with col­leagues and institutions abroad. This situation deeply affected my areas of scholarship, especially cultural and political history, but also related fields such as biography, art history, literary studies, folklore, even philology.

In a modest way, I seek to address certain lacunae in the scholarly liter­ature with the chapters in the present volume.

East and West are major themes in Ukrainian history, and, as the read­er will soon discover, contacts were varied and often ancient, some dating back to pre-history, long before the nations that we see today formed out of the earlier Slavonic or Slavic peoples (Europe tends to use “Slavonic,” and the United States, “Slavic”; we Canadians use both, and our professional journal is titled Canadian Slavonic Papers). Ancient and medieval times saw Slavonic contacts with both Iranian peoples to the east and Germanic peo­ples from the west. During the High Middle Ages pilgrims and adventurers of various sorts travelled to the Middle East and wrote about their journeys. Early modern times saw close and repeated contacts with both the Turkic world and with the expanding West. The periods of the Reformation and the Baroque experienced an increase in religious travellers to the Holy Land and adjacent countries, and the Enlightenment and modern times added scholars and scientists, emigres and exiles.

Meanwhile, other notable figures tightened relations with western Eu­rope and spread Western influences throughout the lands that are today known as Ukraine. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, even some major western European intellectuals and writers took up their pens to describe “Ukrainians,” calling them usually “Cossack,” “Ruthenian,” or “Lit­tle Russian,” but also often simply “Russian.” All these themes - Ukrainian contacts with the outside world, and outside influences on Ukraine - are “fragments” of a much larger story, and are touched on here. It is my sin­cere hope that these contacts, and these varied influences back and forth, will interest both readers concerned with Ukrainian history and culture and those interested in international history and cross-cultural contacts, and that they will find something of unexpected value in this unusual and quite original collection that I title Ukraine, the Middle East, and the West.

Thomas M. PRYMAK, Toronto

January 2019