Omeljan Pritsak and the Intellectual Origins of the Ukrainian "Harvard Miracle"

Omeljan Pritsak and the Intellectual Origins of the Ukrainian “Harvard Miracle” is the first English-language intellectual biography of Omeljan Pritsak, the co-founder of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and the first professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard. Andrii Portnov places Pritsak’s life and legacy in the context of Ukrainian and world historiography and illuminates the development of his scholarly interests, which emerged in interwar Poland and developed through the Sovietization of Western Ukraine and the perturbations of World War II. His scholarship ranged from German Oriental Studies in the 1940s and 1950s to North American Slavic studies to the international studies of the origins of Rus´. Pritsak’s trajectory unfolds as he faces the challenges of establishing the field of Ukrainian studies in North America while engaging with influential scholars such as Dmytro Čyževskyj, Roman Jakobson, Ivan Krypiakevych, Oleksandr Ohloblyn, and Natalia Polonska-Vasylenko.

Based on unique materials Portnov uncovered in several German archives, this concise study serves as an invitation to reassess the intellectual history of Ukrainian history. Containing unique, previously unpublished photographs from Pritsak’s personal collection at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, this book sheds light on the life and work of the enigmatic figure of Omeljan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.