Jurij Szewelow: wybór ukraińskości i stosunek do "obcych" we wspomnieniach Ja - mnie - mi ... (i wokół)

Abstract

Reflections of the outstanding scholar-Slavicist Yuriy Shevelov about his paradoxical experience of ethnic-identification, on the background of this problem as a general human and fundamental one, have a lot of weight. The escape of a young Ukrainian scientist from occupied Kharkiv to the West was driven by conscious aspirations to self-fulfillment and freedom. The path from Ukraine to Europe, and later to America, saved him from war and physical destruction, which threatened not only him but also a significant part of his people. Thinking of this path as salvation, he soberly and quite tolerably showed the environment of the Ukrainian and foreign intellectuals. He was a close acquaintance with them in pre-war and occupied Kharkiv and Lviv, in the German DP camps for Ukrainian refugees, in the research centers of Western Europe, and later in the United States. Openness and sincerity, as well as the scale of experience and depiction, the depth and self-criticism of comprehension of his own experience, make the book ofY. Shevelov particularly valuable in the Ukrainian culture of the twentieth century.