Yevhen Zarudny

For Ukrainians, the ancient name of Aeneus is like a kick starter of an efficient engine; they are instantly reminded of these opening lines: “Aeneas was a lively fellow, Lusty as any Cossack blade, In every kind of mischief mellow, The staunchest tramp to ply his trade.” (Trans. by C. H....

Whenever Taras Shevchenko is described as a prophet, this epithet carries the implication of some general and abstract characteristics of prophesying. By the same token, Ukraine’s national bard has been called a mythmaker and even shaman (for example, “Shevchenko the shaman, Shevchenko the prophet...

(Conclusion; for beginning see No. 27) What a difference between these words and the prophetic lines of Shevchenko! His Ukraine is not ossified or besieged but open to the future. Shevchenko presents bitter contemporaneity and the vicious circle of a profane time (“Day by day, night by night, you...

Until recently I was inclined to claim that, as soon as Ukrainebegan to live a normal cultural and political life, Shevchenko wouldcease to be an icon and a prophet and be “just” one of humanity’sgreatest poets. This may be so. Yet he will remain to some extent aprophet because it is...

All three sobriquets were attributed to this centerpiece of Ukrainian intellectual history by Nikolai Ulianov, author of a much-publicized work titled The Genesis of Ukrainian Separatism , published in New York in 1966 and republished three decades later in Moscow as “a guide to action” and...

Encyclopaedia Britannica reads that in 1648, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, whom contemporaries compared to Oliver Cromwell, “organized a rebellion among the Zaporozhzhian Cossacks and, with the support of the Crimean Tatars, marched against the Poles in April 1648.” Such comparisons were popular in Europe...

Two paired sculptures have been standing for almost fifty years near the Kharkiv Bridge constructed in 1954: a Cossack with a strelets (Russian rifleman —Ed.)on the left and a collective farm woman with a coal miner on the right. The communist history and communist prospects are gone, collective...