Thomas M. Prymak,
University of Toronto
Nadia Zavorotna, Scholars in Exile: The Ukrainian Intellectual World in Interwar Czechoslovakia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020). 260 + xvi. pp. Illustrated, Tables, Bibliography, Index.
Canada prides itself as a land that welcomes immigrants and refugees. In 2022, as a result of the Russian-Ukrainian war that broke out in February of that year, over 150,000 Ukrainian refugees came to Canada, mostly women and children. During this same period, well over 450,000 Ukrainian refugees came to the Czech state, for a while called “the Czech Republic,” and now officially called “Czechia.” Most of these refugees settled in Prague, the capital city. Of course, Canada is a very big country, while Czechia is very small. So, the large number of Ukrainians that it is presently hosting is quite striking.
But the refugee situation of 2022 is not entirely new for either the Ukrainian or the Czech people. During the interwar period from 1918 to 1939, Czechoslovakia, as their state was then called – it included Slovakia as well and Transcarpathian Ukraine – was host to many Ukrainian refugees. These people were fleeing the chaos and oppression of early Soviet rule in eastern Ukraine, and they were also fleeing the Polish occupation of western Ukraine, especially the old Austrian province of Galicia (Halychyna in Ukrainian).
At that time the new Czech state was led by its founder and first president, Tomas Masaryk, who was as much a scholar as a politician. He had visited and lectured in the United States before 1914 and was a man with strong democratic beliefs, a liberal temperament, and a clear affection for his fellow Slavs. Consequently, he made sure that refugee scholars from other Slavonic lands would be welcome in his new country. Masaryk was especially interested in welcoming political refugees, scholars, and intellectuals from the former Russian Empire, and this included the Ukrainians, with whom he had witnessed much of the Russian revolution of 1917-18. Indeed, he had himself been in Kyiv during some of the most spectacular of these events and had then developed an understanding of Ukrainian affairs. So his welcome of the post-1920 Ukrainian refugees was quite genuine.
In her new book “Scholars in Exile,” Ukrainian bibliophile and librarian Nadia Zavorotna has chronicled this story and has provided us with a road map of the tremendous achievements of the Ukrainian community in Czechoslovakia between the wars. She describes the professors, artists, students, and literati who thronged to Prague during the 1920s and built a whole series of new academic institutions. These included schools, libraries, museums, and art galleries to serve the Ukrainian people while their homeland was occupied by either the Soviets or the Poles. The most important were the Ukrainian Free University, which even survived the war of 1939-45 to be transferred to Munich where it survives to today, and other institutions such as the Drahomanov School of Pedagogy and the Economic Academy in Podebrady. But there were also many others.
The idea behind the founding of such institutions was to preserve the traditions of free scholarship that had begun a precarious existence under the Russian Tsars and the Austrian Kaisers; and then to develop them further, and provide a completely new body of accurate and honest scholarship in the Ukrainian language. That scholarship was meant to serve the Ukrainian state when it should be re-established after the fall of the USSR; and perhaps as well after the reform of the Second Polish Republic into a more decentralized and democratic state. The refugees also wanted to prepare cadres to staff the new, independent Ukraine that they thought would soon emerge. Finally, they also wished to educate young people and soldiers/veterans of the former Ukrainian governments to better prepare themselves for life in general.
Of course, Prague was not the only European capital city to try to do this. In Paris, the followers of Symon Petliura established the Petliura Library and carried on scholarship in Ukrainian and in French; in Berlin, the German Foreign Ministry financed the Ukrainian Research Institute to carry on in the traditions of the pro-German and conservative Ukrainian Hetmanate of 1918; and a bit later, in Warsaw, another Ukrainian Research Institute carried on a wide publication program in cooperation with the government of the Polish leader Józef Pilsudski and his successors. But the variety and successes of the Ukrainian institutions in Czechoslovakia, which were probably the most free-ranging and the most dedicated to political democracy, seemed to have outstripped its competitors in Berlin and Paris. It had more professors, offered more courses, and attracted more students than anywhere else, and it also created the widest variety of scholarly publications. Zavorotna does a good job of describing all these institutions. She even gives us statistics about finances and courses offered.
The Ukrainian émigrés who resided in Czechoslovakia were numerous, and there were many luminaries among them. These included the respected diarist Sofia Rusov, the sociologist Olgerd Bochkovsky, the multi-talented art, drama, and literature specialist Dmytro Antonovych, his wife the artist Kateryna Antonovych, the geographer Stepan Rudnytsky, the literary historian Leonid Biletsky, the church historian Vasyl Bidnov, and the legal scholar Andrii Yakovliv. Many others too came to be at least partly associated with Prague such as the eminent Slavist Dmytro Chyzhevsky and the historian Dmytro Doroshenko. Zavototna profiles or at least mentions all of them.
Of course, the hope of these émigrés about the quick collapse of the USSR did not come to pass. The end of the Second World War brought Communist rule westward as far as Berlin and Prague itself, and many of these émigré scholars had to flee once again, or to face either execution or the Gulag. Thankfully many of them eventually came to Canada or the USA.
In New York and in Winnipeg, these émigré scholars founded the two great branches of the new Ukrainian Free Academy of Sciences (UVAN). Winnipeg in particular benefitted from the presence of Dmytro Doroshenko, Leonid Biletsky and the philologist Jaroslav Rudnyckyj, all of whom had spent much of the war in Prague. Dmytro Antonovych’s son Marko eventually wound up in Montreal where he worked for years for Radio Canada International and contributed to the Ukrainian Historical Association’s journal “Ukrainskyi istoryk”/“The Historian.” Others, including Andrii Yakovliv, went to New York and participated in the founding of the American branch of the UVAN. Yakovliv was joined by numerous scholars from eastern Ukraine, including the historian Oleksander Ohloblyn.
These institutions were active right until the 1991 fall of the USSR and the emergence of an independent Ukrainian national state. So those thoroughly democratic national dreams of so many of the Prague exiles, though long delayed, eventually did come to pass. And their achievements too in both Czechoslovakia and North America could eventually be transferred directly to the Ukrainian people in its European homeland.
Nadia Zavorotna is to be congratulated for her hard work on this detailed study. And everybody who is interested in the Ukrainians in Interwar Czechoslovakia would benefit from reading it.
Thomas M. Prymak, PhD., is Senior Research Fellow at the Chair of Ukrainian Studies, Departments of History and Political Science, University of Toronto.
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