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by Peter Woloschuk
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - More than 200 people attended a special lecture, exhibit opening, and reception on Monday, April 7, 2008 celebrating the completion of the Bohdan and Neonila Holovatska Krawciw Map Project. The event was co-sponsored by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI), the Boston Map Society and Pusey Library, Harvard University's map repository. The guests included members of of the extended Krawciw family who came from all over the country.
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| The Krawciw Family and faculty of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute: (front row, from left) George Krawciw and his wife, Oksana Dragan, Steven Seegel, Maria Dzwenyslawa Jawny (daughter of Bohdan Krawciw), Lubomyr Hajda, George G. Grabowicz, (back row) Paul Krawciw (son of Gen. Nicholas Krawciw and grandson of Bohdan Krawciw), Tymish Holowinsky, Michael S. Flier, Lubomir Jawny (husband of Maria D. Jawny), Roman Jawny (son of Lubomir and Maria) and Serhii Plokhii (HURI). |
The project included the full cataloguing of the collection of almost 900 maps, books, research files and notebooks in nine different languages thai comprise the Bohdan and Neonila Krawciw Ucrainica Map Collection and have an aggregate value estimated at almost $500,000; and the publication of the catalogue "Ukraine Under Western Eyes: The Bohdan and Neonila Krawciw Ucrainica Map Collection." featuring a full description of the collection, as well as commentary on and illustrations of the rarest and most significant maps. The complete catalogue of the holdings of the collection and detailed review of all of the items in it are the work; of Assistant Prof. Stephen Seegel of the history department of Worcester State College, who spent almost two years working on the project.
Seegel earned his Ph.D. in history in 2005 at Brown University. After graduation, he was a lecturer at the University of Tennessee. He spent the spring semester of 2007 as a Eugene and Daymel Shklar Research Fellow researching the topic "Cartography and the Representation of Modern Ukraine." His work looked at the strategic use of the discourse of historical/geographic science and racial/ethnolinguistic categorization to represent a modern Ukraine between the Russian and Habsburg empires, as well as the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He also received a special grant from HURI for the period from August to December 2007 to review the maps of the collection and prepare the text for the catalogue which HURI would publish.
In discussing the collection, Prof, Seegel said, "In the context of other scholarship in history, geography and the history of cartography, the collection is one among several similar collections in a larger East-Central international and international context. It parallels those of the three most famous independent Polish nation- and state-building gatherers of maps, that of the 19th-cen-tuiy historian Joachim Lelewel, now housed at the University of Vilnius, hi Lithuania; the Austro-Polish nobleman and philanthropist Jozef Maksymilian, founder of the original Ossolineum in Lviv in 1817, following the partitions of Poland-Lithuania; and the contemporary "Imago Poloniae" collection of the Polish physicist Tomacz Niewodniczanski, assembled during the Cold War, which has been on traveling exhibition in Poland and Germany in the first decade of the 21st century.
"Krawciw thought of his work as a project in preservation for future research and, of course, a commemoration of Ukraine as nation and stale," Prof. Seegel continued. "Krawciw wanted to ground and publicize Ucrainica - all things Ukrainian - to cement Ukraine's past and present recognition in North America, and on the European international scene. The Ukraine he visualized in maps naturally had a literary dimension as well - a point exemplified not only by his poetry, love of languages, encyclopedic and bibliographical work, and study of folklore and mythology, but by his attention to geography and the technical and aesthetic aspects of the maps in his collection."
"Krawciw's principal motive as a Ukrainian poet, journalist and translator in gathering the maps," Prof. Seegel pointed out, "was to seek, maintain and promote the integrity of Ukraine. To put it more bluntly, in the words of his daughter, 'He wanted to prevent Ukraine From being obliterated. That is why he collected any book, any map, he could find on Ukraine.'"
The Krawciw Collection was donated to the HURI and the Pusey Library in November 2005 by the Krawciws' daughter Maria Dzenyslawa Jawny and her husband, Dr. Lobomyr Jawny, in fulfillment of her parents' wishes that the collection neither be sold nor remain private but be made available to students and scholars. The Krawciw donation increased Harvard's Ucrainica holdings by more than twelvefold and has made them the largest single collection of Ukrainian maps in the world
The donation of the map collection was actually the second deflation of Krawciw's material to HURT. In 1975, after the death of her husband. Neonila Krawciw donated his personal archive and library of Ucrainica which numbered some 12,000 volumes to the institute and the Harvard University libraries. They covered the fields of geography, cartography, history, anthropology, literature, art history, onomastics and linguistics.
The papers included newspaper clippings, correspondence, photographs of artists and literary figures, materials on the Ukrainian press and community organizations since the late 1940s, and notes for an intends bibliographical survey of major and minor figures in modern Ukrainian literature.
Krawciw was an amateur enthusiast of cartography. He began his collection after his arrival in the United States in the old bookstalls and shops of Philadelphia, later expanding his search to New York City. He started his collection to disprove Polish state claims to Galicia that had been enunciated in the 1920s and 30s and against the threat of total Soviet amnesia after the annexation of western Ukraine in 1945. He attempted to seek, maintain and promote the integrity of Ukraine and he hoped to draw attention to the complexity of Ukraine's cultural, linguistic, political and religious traditions. He wanted to ensure recognition and debate about the history of its peoples.
For Krawciw, the maps verified the existence of Ukraine and Ukrainians, and constitute a monument in Ukrainian cultural preservation. They id I the story of Ukraine as a territory caught amid shifting borders, and provide a record of different ways in which Ukrainian history might be conceptualized and display Ukraine's many political trajectories.
Krawciw divided his collection into two parts: maps produced in the years 1500-1800 and organized by cartographer, and 19th and 20th century maps arranged by geographical category. He intended to write a general history of Ukraine in maps, to be called "Monumenta Cartographica Ucrainae" (Cartographic Monuments of Ukraine). However, at the time of his death, be had not even completed a catalogue of his map collection. His wife did so, using his notes.
Bohdan Jurij Krawciw, a member of a Ukrainian Catholic priestly family, was born in Lopianka, Dolynsky Region, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, in 1904. He completed his secondary education at the Academic Gymnasium in Lviv and then studied philosophy at the Lviv Ukrainian Secret University. In 1925 be continued his study of philosophy with additional courses in literature, bibliography and archaeology at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lviv and in 1928-1930 he studied law at the same university.
While in school, Krawciw edited Plast's newspaper Molode Zhyttia and he served as both an editor and contributor to a number of Ukrainian newspapers and literary journals published in Lviv and Peremyshl, including Visti, Holos Natsii, Holos, Dazhboh and Obrii. In 1929 his first volume of poetry "Doroha" (The Road) was published.
At the same time Krawciw became active in the Ukrainian national movement and served as president of the Ukrainian Student Hromada, administrator of the Ukrainian Academic Home in Lviv and the head of the Union of Ukrainian Nationalist Youth. He participated in the first president of Ukrainian Nationalists in Berlin in 1927 and was one of the founders; of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN)in 1929.
Because of his nationalistic activity, Krawciw was arrested by The Polish police in 1930 and sentenced to three years in jail In 1934 he was re-arrested and sentenced to the notorious Polish concentration tamp for Ukrainian political prisoners at Bereza Kartuzka.
During World War II Krawciw worked in Berlin. At the end of the war he and his family fled to West Germany, emigrating to the United States in 1949. He initially settled in Philadelphia and served as the editor of the Ukrainian daily newspaper Ameryka. Later he moved to Rutherford, NJ., and became an editor of Svoboda, the Ukrainian-language daily published by the Ukrainian National Association.
Krawciw also served as an editor of "Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopedia," published by the University of Toronto Press, and contributed to the large, multi-volume "Entsyklopedia Ukroinoznavslva." From 1970 until his death in 1975 he served as editor-in-chief of the monthly Ukrainian literary journal Suchasnist.
In addition to "Doroha," Krawciw's poetry was published in numerous periodicals and individual collections: "Promeni" (Rays, 193(1), "Sonety I Strofy" (Sonnets and Strophes, 1933), "Ostannia Osin" (The Last Autumn, 1940), "Pid Chuzhymy Zoriaitiy" (Under Foreign Stars, 1941), "Korabli" (Ships, 1948), "Zymnozelen" (Wintergreen. 1951), "Dzvenyslava" (1962), "Hlosarii" (Glossary, 1974), "Kvitolit" (1974) and others.
Krawciw regularly critiqued Soviet attempts to censor and suppress Ukrainian writing. He translated Solomon's "Song of Songs" in 1943 and Rainer Maria Rilke's poems titled "Rechy I Obrazy" (Objects and Images, 1947) and edited several anthologies of poetry, including "Obirvani Slruny" (Broken Strings, 1955), "Poety Chumatskoho Shliakhu" (Poets of the Milky Way, 1962), and "Shistdesiat Poetiv Shistdesiatykh Rokiv" (Sixty Poets of the Sixties, 1966).
Krawciw also looked at Ukrainian folklore and mythology, the great Ukrainian authors Taras Shevchenko and !van Franko, Ukrainian literature of the 1920s and 1930s, and Ukrainian Emigre literature. He authored studies of contemporary Ukrainian literature, published bibliographic guides and old maps of Ukraine and old Ukrainian mythology, edited literary anthologies, published works of literary criticism and compiled an extensive bibliography of Ukrainian émigré literature. Three volumes of his collected works were published posthumously between 1978 and 1984.
Work on the project was supported by funds from the Iryna Wulynec Publication Fund in Ukrainian Studies, the Lubornyra and Ihor Kocur Ukrainian Fund in memory of Dr. Lubomyra S. Kocur-Zasula, the Walter Bacad Endowment Fund. the Brothers Iwan and Wolodymyr Smigurowskyj Fund, the Ihor and Oksana Humeniuk Ukrainian Fund, the Ivan and Anaslazia Jurkewych-Kocur and the Wolodymyr and Osypa Rybchuk-Zazula Ukrainian Fund.
The Bohdan and Neonila Krawciw Map Collection Exhibit will be on display at Harvard University's Pusey library, which is located in Harvard Yard, through May 7, Monday - Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. For further information see Harvard Map Collection or call 617-495-2417. |
Listen to the lecture (1hr13min,wma)
