Book Release — Omeljan Pritsak and the Intellectual Origins of the Ukrainian "Harvard Miracle" by Andrii Portnov
HURI Books is pleased to announce the release of Omeljan Pritsak and the Intellectual Origins of the Ukrainian "Harvard Miracle" by Andrii Portnov, a professor of Ukraine and East-Central Europe.
This is the first English-language intellectual biography of Omeljan Pritsak, the co-founder of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) and the first professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard. This book is available in print (paperback and hardcover), ebook, and online rental formats.
About the Book
Based on newly uncovered archival materials from German collections (Hamburg, Berlin, Tübingen, Munich, Heidelberg, and Bremen) and featuring previously unpublished photographs from personal collection at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, this book sheds light on life and work of the enigmatic figure of Omeljan Pritsak—one of the most prominent, controversial, and multifaceted historians of Ukraine, Central Europe, and the Turko-Osmanic and Mongol worlds.
Andrii Portnov traces the development of Pritsak’s intellectual journey, beginning at Jan Kazimierz University in Lviv, where he studied Semitic, Iranian, and Altaic languages, and following it through interwar Poland, the Sovietization of Western Ukraine, and the turbulent times of World War II, to German Oriental Studies in the 1940s and 1950s, North American Slavic studies, and to international scholarship on the origins of Rus’.
Pritsak’s life reflects the intellectual and political dramas of twentieth-century Europe, along with the making of Ukrainian Studies as a global academic field and engaging with influential scholars such as Dmytro Čyževskyj, Roman Jakobson, Ivan Krypiakevych, Oleksandr Ohloblyn, and Natalia Polonska-Vasylenko.
About the Author
Andrii Portnov is a historian who graduated from Dnipro University (History) and the University of Warsaw (Cultural Studies) and earned his PhD at the Ivan Krypiakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Lviv. Since 2012, he has been based in Germany—teaching at institutions including Humboldt University, the Free University of Berlin, and the Universities of Basel and Potsdam. From 2018 to 2025, he was Professor of Entangled History of Ukraine at the European University Viadrina (Frankfurt/Oder).
He is the author of more than 10 books and over 250 academic publications on the intellectual history of East Central Europe, Ukrainian historiography, the history of Polish-Ukrainian relations, German-language Ukraine studies, historical urban research, genocide, and memory studies. For his Ukrainian-language book “Histories for Home Use”, Portnov was awarded the Yuri Shevelov Prize in 2013, and for “Dnipro. An Entangled History of a European City” he received an Ab Imperio Book Prize in 2023. In 2022 Prof. Portnov was awarded the DIALOG Prize of the German-Polish Society.
Excerpt from Chapter 5 “To Understand UkraineAccording to Pritsak”
Pritsak’s scholarly conscience was determined not only by his intense desire to be intellectually provocative but also by his commitment to presenting Ukrainian history in a global context, with a variety of entangled histories of other cultures and peoples. This approach is clearly expressed in Pritsak’s Harvard lectures, the notes of which have been partially preserved and are available on the website of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. Pritsak considered not only the origin of Rus ́ or the spread of Magdeburg law but also the history of the Cossack uprising led by Bohdan Khmel ́nyts ́kyi against the broad background of European and Eurasian history of the time. In particular, the beginning of Khmel ́nyts ́kyi’s wars against Poland in 1648 coincided with the end of the Thirty Years’ War and the release of many experienced officers and soldiers who were later hired by the Polish king to fight the rebellious Cossacks. The same year saw the political upheaval in the Ottoman Empire that forced Khmel ́nyts ́kyi to abandon his original plan for a political protectorate from the sultan and seek the patronage of the "one-faith" Moscow tsar. In demonstrating the unexpected logic and trajectories of historical development, Pritsak did not hesitate to use current analogies or show the potential of alternative history. Regarding the Turkish factor in Eastern Europe, he said: “Had the Ottomans been Christian, they would have had supremacy over [Kyiv] and Eastern Europe. If the Cossacks had accepted Islam, which was not impossible, the Ottomans would have had supremacy over [Kyiv] and Eastern Europe. The Polish Drang nach Osten created a reversal of Rus ́ which made such plans impossible.”