The Ukrainians
Unexpected Nation, Fourth Edition
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
The most acute, informed, and up-to-date account available today of Ukraine and its people, now in its fourth edition.
“An interesting and provocative read, which will, one hopes, contribute to the Western understanding of what Ukraine is and why it matters.”—Volodymyr Kulyk, Harvard Ukrainian Studies
“A spirited and eminently learned investigation of who Ukranians say that they are, how they came to be so, and how others view them. . . . If you re add only one book of Ukraine, this should probably be it.”—Elizabeth Luchka Haigh, H-Net Reviews
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Since the 1990s, journalists, academics, politicians and the public have groped for some sense of the history, culture and politics of emerging, post-communist independent states--Croatia, Macedonia, Slovakia, Belarus, Slovenia and the like. In 1991 Ukraine joined the ranks of these new states and emerged as a pivotal player in the new alignment of Eurasian politics. Wilson, a lecturer in Ukrainian studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of University College in London, provides a comprehensive overview (more scholarly than popular) of Ukraine's history, focusing on questions of national identity and describing Ukraine as a recent invention as a nation. For Ukraine, he suggests, national identity revolves around the complex and fluctuating relation between Ukraine and Russia, from the contested views of medieval Kievan Rus and its national origins (Ukrainian or Russian or both?), to the troubles faced by a modern Ukraine with a significant Russian and Russian-speaking population. Wilson presents Ukraine as a cultural construct, a creation of both Ukrainian and Russian imagination and politics; as a result, the book will displease those who dismiss poststructuralist views of national identity. Still, thorough, rigorous and informative, Wilson's survey promises to sharpen Westerners' perceptions of the surviving East-West divide along the European and Russian border. Because it is "a vital `swing' state" in Eastern Europe, Ukraine's past and future, Wilson convincingly argues, should very much concern us. Illus. not seen by PW.