The fourth Saturday of November is Holodomor Memorial Day, which marks the loss of millions of Ukrainians in the man-made famine of 1932/33. Today, of course, the day of remembrance occurs during another man-made horror in Ukraine, as Russia’s war continues to take a terrible toll on Ukraine and Ukrainians.
We marked the 80th anniversary of the Holodomor in 2013 with a blog post about one particular book (here) and wrote again about the Holodomor in 2019, when the libraries put on a pop-up exhibition to tie in with a Cambridge Ukrainian Studies screening of the film ‘Mr Jones’ about the Welsh journalist whose unflinching reports of the horrors he saw were too easily ignored (blog post here). Continue reading “Holodomor Memorial Day : the November 2022 Slavonic items of the month”→
The Liberation Literature Lecture, which has traditionally focused on France, will this focus on Ukraine. This post provides details about the talk and an accompanying exhibition which we warmly invite local Ukrainians to co-curate with us.
As the Russian war against Ukraine continues, I thought it would be useful to highlight some new English-language acquisitions which focus on recent Ukrainian history. While it will obviously take some time for books to be written about the invasion and this new and terrible stage in the conflict between the two countries, there has been a war ongoing in Ukraine since 2014, and we have a number of titles, predominantly ebooks, dealing with the subject. (Click on any of the titles to be taken through to the iDiscover record.)
Last year, Harvard University Press launched the Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature, “a new book series dedicated to publishing outstanding Ukrainian literature in English translation”; we will, of course, be looking to acquire each work in this series as it is released. The very first title to be published was the journalist and writer Stanislav Aseyev’s In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas, a collection of essays originally written between 2015 and 2017: a recent review in the TLS describes it as “a rare and unsettling insider’s account of conditions in the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’”. It ends with his capture and imprisonment, and a subsequent work (The Torture Camp on Paradise Street) detailing his experience of incarceration is due for publication later in the year. Another first-person account of the conflict in Donbas, this time from Glagoslav Publications, is Artem Chekh’s Absolute Zero, based on the diary he kept during his time as a soldier there; and, as a previous blogpost highlighted, we hold A Loss : The Story of a Dead Soldier Told by His Sister, a memoir by Dr. Olesya Khromeychuk.
In my previous post, I made reference to the quite amazing news that we are expecting new book arrivals from Ukraine in the near future. This brief post draws the attention of our Ukrainian-reading followers to some of the last books we had received from our supplier.
This short blog post marks the death a few days ago of Leonid Kravchuk, who was the last Communist leader of Soviet Ukraine and the first president of the post-Soviet state. Kravchuk’s time in power saw the newly independent Ukrainian economy crippled – in part by corruption – and he lost the 1994 presidential election to his own original prime minister, Leonid Kuchma. But Kravchuk’s impact on Ukraine was huge. He had taken it into independence, as one of the co-signatories of the Belovezh Accords which ended the USSR (his Belarusian counterpart at Belovezh, Stanislaŭ Shushkevich, died earlier this month). He also signed the Budapest Memorandum which saw Ukraine give up its enormous nuclear arsenal in return for security assurances from the UK, the US, and – Russia. Particularly since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February (and also since 2014, with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its significant involvement in the separatist war in East Ukraine), the Budapest Memorandum has sadly been worth little or nothing to Ukraine in practice, although practical help from the US and UK for Ukraine to defend itself from its other ‘assurer’ has intensified of late.
Kravchuk was recognised as a canny and dedicated operator in terms of foreign policy in his presidential term, and in 2020 he was invited to join the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine (replacing Leonid Kuchma, as it happens), which had been set up in 2014 to try to resolve the war in East Ukraine. It feels incredibly sad that Kravchuk died during the current invasion, without living to see a final Ukrainian victory. He had been very ill in the last year, but presumably was painfully aware that the independent Ukraine he had helped bring into being was now having to fight so fiercely for its future.
Yesterday evening, Cambridge Ukrainian Studies hosted a showing of the film ‘Mr Jones’. Directed by award-winner Agnieszka Holland, the film tells the story of Gareth Jones, the journalist who reported on the Holodomor, the appalling famine which killed millions in Ukraine. A pop-up exhibition of books from the UL and MMLL libraries was provided after the film, and the exhibits and captions are shown below. Each title is linked to the item’s iDiscover record. Please click on each image to enlarge it. Continue reading “Gareth Jones and the Holodomor : the November 2019 Slavonic items of the month”→
Each August for the last couple of years, we’ve drawn attention to recently received Ukrainian books. Amongst this year’s titles is a wonderfully and mind-bogglingly detailed list of biographical details gleaned, chiefly from obituaries, from a newspaper printed in the city of Lemberg/Lwów/Lʹviv from 1880 to 1939. Four sizeable volumes in, we have only reached 1904.
The fourth Saturday of November is Holodomor Memorial Day, which marks the loss of millions of Ukrainians in the man-made famine of 1932/33. Today, of course, the day of remembrance occurs during another man-made horror in Ukraine, as Russia’s war continues to take a terrible toll on Ukraine and Ukrainians.
Languages across Borders 