Since the very moment of its emergence in North America, Ukrainian historiography has adopted a dual mission as a “Kulturträger.” On the one hand, it strove to open the eyes of western academia to the existence of an entity called Ukraine with its own history. Whilst, on the other hand, it sought to offer an alternative to the ideologically-loaded variants of historiography dominating the historiographical landscape of Ukraine in the Soviet and post-Soviet times. Today, the first goal appears to be no longer relevant, especially after the revolutionary events of recent years. However, the second goal is supposedly even more urgent than ever. The volume under review is a selective publication of materials from the conference “Quo Vadis Ukrainian History” (Harvard University, 2013). The conference participants were invited to discuss relations between Ukrainian historiography and the main trends in “global” historiography.

The contributions to the volume are organized in four sections. The first – “Toward a New Narrative” – is devoted to finding an alternative to the national paradigm of Ukrainian history, which is an issue that can also be defined as the main theme for the whole volume. In terms of structure, this initial section consists of three articles: Firstly, Georgiy Kasianov and Oleksii Tolochko share their thoughts about a concept of a multivolume history of Ukraine; secondly, Alfred J. Rieber offers a version of a narrative for Ukrainian history in its didactic use; finally, Liliya Berezhnaya compiles an exhaustive review of literature in which Ukraine and its different regions are de-scribed and analyzed as products of their borderland status.

Under such a large-scale formulation, the question of re-conceptualization of the narrative framework for the history of any country is extremely difficult. Intellectual innovations of post-modernism, to which Kasianov and Tolochko in their critique of the national narrative appeal (p. 73), in fact not only brought mistrust for any master narrative but exposed general problems associated with the narrative form of the representation of history. Awareness of the universality of these restrictions hardly leaves the historian any choice but to live with a polyphony of narrative forms and analytical languages. Among the narrative constructs, national history obviously has no reason to be the only possible form of writing history. However, the structuralist assumption of Kasianov and Tolochko, that national history is by definition epistemologically unproductive and socially toxic because of its narrative form, appears to be too radical.

With all its shortcomings, national history can nevertheless be intellectually productive and still seeks possible answers to many important questions. If history does not transmit “a sense of be-longing, a place in the world, and deep-seated traditions”, how shall it be able to transfer feelings of shame and regret? If synthetic history of territories, which have not yet founded a national state is absurd – as Kasianov and Tolochko note, referring to the history of Belgium before 1830 (p.79) –, why should current Ukrainians care about the decimation of thousands of Jews by Cossacks and peasants of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Khmelnytsky Uprising? Or feel morally responsible and regret that Soviet citizens, who inhabited territories that only formed Ukraine in 1991, participated in the Holocaust?

The alternatives proposed in this section aim to change the territorial perspective for Ukrainian history and emphasize its peripheral or “frontier” nature. Alfred Rieber suggests embedding the history of Ukraine into the broader "geo-cultural" context, which he calls Eurasia. The interpretation of the history of Ukraine as a frontier history (whether Ukraine is described as the eastern frontier of Europe or as the western frontier of Eurasia) has considerable potential. Yet, when concerning historical didactics, such a Eurasian perspective (as Rieber proposes) can hardly be adopted in modern Ukraine.

In the next section "Transnational Turn", the contributors continue to discuss the heuristic opportunities that a change of context may provide for the history of Ukraine, and how studies of Ukrainian history can enhance the understanding of historical processes at a global or regional level. Hiroaki Kuromiya focuses on how the “Ukrainian question” became global in the context of the rivalry of colonial empires. Andrea Graziosi and George O. Liber suggest placing Ukraine's history into the context of European and global processes of state-building and modernization. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern focuses on several controversial issues regarding the history of Ukrainian Jewry and Jewish-Ukrainian relations, including the Khmelnytsky Uprising and the revolutionary events of 1917 – 1921, but emphasizes the need for a more nuanced picture of such relations, which would include not only conflict but also cultural, political and economic interactions.

The texts of this section moreover focus on defining new methodologies and analytical languages, which can be applied to the study of Ukrainian history. Steven Seegel, based on the biography of a prominent Ukrainian geographer – Stepan Rudnyts’kyi, suggests an interesting bio-graphical approach to the analysis of imaginative geography. Mark von Hagen aims to bring the achievements of a "colonial turn" in world historiography to the analysis of Ukrainian history, and to look at the key events in Ukrainian history through a colonialist perspective. By contrast, Mayhill C. Fowler does not believe that the dichotomy "colony vs. metropolis" defined the process of cultural production in Ukraine. Her approach, however, fails to fully consider the structural factors that created and supported a situation in which Ukrainian culture remained subordinated to Russian culture and played the role of a folk variation of imperial culture. The lack of attention to these structures of power and prestige represents a tendency to idealize the imperial situation, which is often present in recent literature.

The third section of the volume, titled "The Return to the Region", contains texts that propose a narrower territorial perspective as an alternative to the national paradigm. The attention to spatial aspects of historical representation is one of the most characteristic features of the volume under review in general. Ten out of twenty contributions, in one way or another, focus on the issue of space and the importance of spatial context for Ukrainian history. Larry Wolf and Iryna Vuschko analyze the historiographical construction of the historic region of Galicia. Zenon Kohut analyzes the current historiography of the Cossack elites of Left-Bank Ukraine. Faith Hillis describes the interesting phenomenon of the growth of Russian nationalist organizations in the Right-Bank Ukraine, a region in which almost no ethnic Russians lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The biography of an Orthodox priest and local historian Petro Lebedyntsev, analysed by Heather Coleman, connects to the same region, and demonstrates the heterogeneity of what Hillis calls the "Little Russian lobby.” The last two cases demonstrate the complexity of relations be-tween regional patriotism, national identity, and political loyalty in the Russian Empire during the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Yet if one looks at these processes in a longer chronological perspective, one sees how problematic changing political fluctuations are if used as a marker for analyzing national identity.

In his own contribution, the editor of this volume, Serhii Plokhy, demonstrates how attention to the regions as ecological zones can enhance our understanding of the causes, spread, and consequences of the Holodomor. In his analysis, Plokhy relies on data organized into the Geographic Information System-based Digital Atlas of the Holodomor. This atlas belongs to Digital Map of the Ukraine Project, which is the most promising and innovative interdisciplinary project in the field of Ukrainian studies of the past few decades.1

The fourth section of the volume, "Representations of the Past", is devoted to public representations of history. In this section, Tatiana Tairova-Yakovleva offers an overview of Ukrainian studies in Russian historiography for the last 20 years, whilst Paul Robert Magocsi shares his rich experience of teaching the history of Ukraine in North America. Given the fact that memory studies have been experiencing a genuine boom over the last two decades, collective memory and social work with the past occupy unexpectedly modest places among the other issues discussed in the volume under review. Marta Dyczok and Volodymyr Kravchenko focus mainly on the perception of the Soviet past by modern Ukrainian society. Kravchenko claims that in current-day Ukraine "the problem of attitudes to the recent past is existential in its significance" (p. 462). It is difficult to correlate such a dramatic assessment with the very passive reaction of the Ukrainian population on the so-called politics of “decommunization". The discussions of history and memory are traditionally rather elitist discourses and we still do not know much about their significance beyond the realm of public contestations.

To summarize, the volume provides a good means to understand the development of Ukrainian historiography in North America and beyond. Being rather skeptical regarding national history overall, the contributors suggest a wide range of alternative approaches, most of which can be considered not only as a substitute, but also as an enhancement of the national narrative. In this sense, the editor's idea to put on the academic agenda the need for a “new national history”, a genre “that would take advantage of the opportunities presented by global, transnational, multiethnic, and regional approaches” (p. 23) appears to be very productive.

Note:
1http://gis.huri.harvard.edu/ (11.08.2018).