«Hard ground: sketches of Ukrainian self-knowledge»

Description

This volume offers a reprint of George Y. Shevelov’s (1908–2002) littleknown polemical contributions dealing with a topic that may be subsumed under the general label scholarship and culture in their relation to politics (within the triangle Ukraine — Russia — the West).
These publications first appeared during a period stretching over more than half a century: from 1944 to 1996; thirty-nine among them fall under the category of articles and reviews in periodicals, two under that of press interviews. The original texts were mostly published in Ukrainian; five pieces have been translated (from English, German and Swedish). Their arrangement in the volume follows the chronological pattern (within each
of its two parts entitled Sketches and Interviews respectively).

The Ukrainian-language publications, initially issued in a dozen of periodicals scattered over several countries (Germany, Belgium, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Ukraine), display perceptible variation with regard to the spelling. In the present volume, these discrepancies have been done away with by using as guideline the official Orthographic Rules as of 1929, to which the author himself chose to stick during his lifetime. The transcription of foreign proper names has been made uniform in keeping with the principle of phonemic equivalence; the designations of some political entities have been made consistent. The same approach holds for the translations, as well as for the foreword, the commentaries and the notes.