Books by John-Paul Himka
Diyaloh, no. 11, 1987
This was our last issue. Shortly after it was published Ukraine opened up and moved towards indep... more This was our last issue. Shortly after it was published Ukraine opened up and moved towards independence.
Diyaloh, no. 10, 1984
The chief editor of this publication was Bohdan Krawchenko, but we were a group of about a dozen ... more The chief editor of this publication was Bohdan Krawchenko, but we were a group of about a dozen people.
Diyaloh, no. 09, 1983
Analyses by Ukrainian Canadian anti-Stalinist leftists.
Diyaloh, no. 07-08, 1982
How the Ukrainian Canadian new left understood what was happening in Eastern Europe and the Sovie... more How the Ukrainian Canadian new left understood what was happening in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
Diyaloh, no. 05-06, 1981
I was just a member of the editorial board, not the actual author.
Ukrainian Canadian anti-Stalinist left.
We believed in "Socialism and Democracy in an Independent Ukraine."
Diyaloh no. 1, 1977
Publication of Ukrainian Canadian leftists. Actually, I was not involved in this first issue, but... more Publication of Ukrainian Canadian leftists. Actually, I was not involved in this first issue, but I was on the editorial board for all the other issues and usually managed to write something, either under a pseudonym or anonymously.
This is a classic study on Marxism and the national question, now out of print.
Zakhidno-kanadskyi zbirnyk, 10 (Shevchenko Scientific Society), 2022
Ukrainian Canadian Visual Art features contributions by outstanding Canadian writers and art hist... more Ukrainian Canadian Visual Art features contributions by outstanding Canadian writers and art historians. It also contains interviews with photographers and other visual artists, both established and up-and-coming. The concept of Ukrainian Canadian art is discussed and problematized in the introduction and afterword, with insights strewn throughout the contributions as well. The time frame encompassed is from the early twentieth century to the first decades of the twenty-first.
Icons and murals depicting the biblical scene of the Last Judgment adorned many Eastern-rite chur... more Icons and murals depicting the biblical scene of the Last Judgment adorned many Eastern-rite churches in medieval and early modern Ukraine. Dating from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries, these images were extraordinarily elaborate, composed of dozens of discrete elements reflecting Byzantine, Novgorodian, Moldavian, and Catholic influences, in addition to local and regional traditions. Over time, the details of the iconography evolved in response to changing cultural resources, the conditions of material life at the time, and new trends in mentality and taste.
The World to Come lists and describes more than eighty Last Judgment images from present-day Ukraine, eastern Slovakia, and southeastern Poland, making it the largest compilation of its kind. Photographs show overviews and details of the images, and most are printed in full color. The icons and murals provide a valuable source of knowledge about the culture in which they were created: what was meant by good and evil, what was prophesied for the future, and what awaited in the afterlife.
Papers by John-Paul Himka
The Carl Beck papers in Russian and East European studies, 1993
<p>This chapter sketches the relationships between the three major nationalities of Austria... more <p>This chapter sketches the relationships between the three major nationalities of Austrian Galicia — Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews — with respect to social and political intercourse, religion, and culture. The discussion is restricted to the problem of interaction between these nationalities. Within these limits the chapter presents an account of the Galician triangle. It shows that while three nationalities constituted different socio-economic communities, with different cultural levels and interests, their interactions involved more than mere difference. These were antagonistic societies — communities whose economic interests frequently collided. The main axis of this antagonism was the landlord–peasant relationship. The Polish-style serfdom that existed in Galicia until 1848 was based on the coercion of labour rents from the peasantry. Like any system of forced labour, it depended on the systemic exercise of violence against the labourers and inspired profound hatred of the landlord class among the peasantry.</p>
Nationalities Papers, 2020
Tarik Cyril Amar’s The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv is well written and researched, published by a p... more Tarik Cyril Amar’s The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv is well written and researched, published by a premier university press, and conveys to readers the real complexity of Ukrainian history. As such, one may hope it stands a chance to pierce the sound-proof wall that now stands between the critical and mainstream historiography of modern Ukraine. It belongs to the relatively young, critical trend within Ukrainian historiography, joining several other recent monographs that work outside the mainstream, loosely nationalist paradigm, notably Kai Struve’s Deutsche Herrschaft, ukrainischer Nationalismus, antijüdische Gewalt: Der Sommer 1941 in der Westukraine (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015) and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe’s Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist; Fascism, Genocide, and Cult (Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2014), as well as numerous articles by a wider circle of authors. So far, the results of the new research have notmade a dent inmainstreamUkrainian studies. For example, Serhii Plokhy’s survey The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (New York: Basic Books, 2015), in discussing the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) during World War II, fails to mention that the organization’s militias were complicit in the wave of anti-Jewish violence that engulfed Western Ukraine in the summer of 1941, even though this has been well documented. (Amar discusses the Lviv pogrom and OUN involvement in it on pp. 93–101.) And Plokhy’s claim that the Bandera faction of the OUN “went overnight from the Germans’ loyal ally to their enemy” (The Gates of Europe, 267) ignores research that shows both that the abandonment of the German alliance was far from instant and that the alliance was pragmatically restored as the Red Army closed in. Amar’s monograph confronts the rather more complicated reality. He shows, on the basis of the transformation of Lviv in the late 1930s and 1940s, that the Nazis, Soviets, and OUN all pursued policies of “ethnic unmixing” (145). And this implies something about the city that is his subject. Lviv, as the informal capital of Western Ukraine, is considered by many to be the most nationally conscious city in the country, the most pro-Western, as well as the most democratically oriented. Yet, as Amar rightly notes in his conclusions, “If Lviv and what it stands for in Ukraine is special, as often claimed, it is rash to assume that it is especially liberal. If it is a window on theWest, thatWest cannot be reduced to civil society, democracy, pluralism, and individualism. In fact, historically, its darker side from fascism and ethnic nationalism to the perversions of Enlightenment rationality that fed into Stalinism, has been at least as important” (319). There is one feature of Amar’s book that particularly deserves highlighting: his sensitive exploration of the meeting of Western and Eastern Ukrainians in 1939–41 and 1944 and after. Emphasis on regional divisions is decidedly out of favor in mainstream analysis of Ukraine, which tends to present the Ukrainian idea, and—I think recklessly—the Ukrainians themselves, as a unity, a coherent whole, sometimes even a monolith. This protestation of unity has become more
Nationalities Papers, 2019
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Books by John-Paul Himka
The World to Come lists and describes more than eighty Last Judgment images from present-day Ukraine, eastern Slovakia, and southeastern Poland, making it the largest compilation of its kind. Photographs show overviews and details of the images, and most are printed in full color. The icons and murals provide a valuable source of knowledge about the culture in which they were created: what was meant by good and evil, what was prophesied for the future, and what awaited in the afterlife.
Papers by John-Paul Himka
The World to Come lists and describes more than eighty Last Judgment images from present-day Ukraine, eastern Slovakia, and southeastern Poland, making it the largest compilation of its kind. Photographs show overviews and details of the images, and most are printed in full color. The icons and murals provide a valuable source of knowledge about the culture in which they were created: what was meant by good and evil, what was prophesied for the future, and what awaited in the afterlife.