Preparation of General Part of ‘Encyclopedia of Ukraine’: Texts and People

Abstract

The process of preparing the general part of the ‘Encyclopedia of Ukraine’ (EU), the influence of the human factor on that process, the interaction of authors, reviewers, and the editorial board, the solving of financial problems, the peculiarities of the social and cultural environment, and the living conditions of Ukrainian researchers in the late 1940s – the early 1950s in displaced persons camps in Europe are studied in the paper based on a wide range of sources.

The purpose of the study is the analysis of correspondence and other sources to establish the peculiarities of the interaction of the EU creators in the work process.

Scientific novelty. Based on sources that are first introduced into scientific circulation, the social and cultural environment of post-war Germany and other countries, the problems of contemporary scientific heuristics and the source base of research, conceptual approaches to creating the general part of the ‘Encyclopedia of Ukraine’, and the peculiarities of the work organization of a group of researchers are studied.

Conclusions. Despite the difficult material and living conditions, difficult financial situation, lack of proper material and technical base, and even the most necessary scientific literature, the editors and authors managed to publish the general part of the ‘Encyclopedia of Ukraine’, performing its preparation in displaced persons camps in Germany, and after the moving of the Shevchenko Scientific Society center to Sarcelles – in France. The EU became the first purely Ukrainian encyclopedic project on Ukrainian studies. It started the tradition of national encyclopedic publications in emigration, which was continued in the EU dictionary part and its English-language versions.

The creators of the EU applied the experience of other countries in creating national encyclopedias in their native languages, and the EU-1 met its time and world standards. In addition, the appearance of the EU contributed to the resumption of work on the ‘Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia’ in the 1950s. The appearance of the encyclopedic reference in emigration made it possible to achieve the goals set by the Shevchenko Scientific Society to create a publication that made it possible to get acquainted with important information about the history, geography, population of Ukraine, about the traditional culture of Ukrainians, ethnology, law, art, literature, etc. to both Ukrainian emigrants and potentially interested foreigners.

Work on the encyclopedic project of the Shevchenko Scientific Society consolidated Ukrainian researchers in emigration, who were members of different, and sometimes several, emigration scientific institutions, could have various political preferences, belonged to different generations of researchers, and came from all regions of Ukraine and emigration centers of the interwar period. Despite a certain difference in methodological approaches due to the above-mentioned reasons, they mostly reached an agreement on the final versions of the text and almost all worked with a sense of responsibility for the project. After the emigration of some of the authors, editors, and reviewers to different countries, including outside Europe, most of them did not stop working on the EU.