Yaroslav Dashkevych has passed away. One wants to add: “the great Ukrainian historian.” But such an addition would diminish his significance. He was Ukrainian—and Ukrainian to the marrow of his bones, sincerely and steadfastly. But of him, as of Franko, one wants to say: he was a light for all of Ukraine, but his light shone much further.
Biographical Note
Yaroslav Dashkevych was born on December 13, 1926, in Lviv. In 1944, he graduated from the Academic Gymnasium in Lviv, studied for a year at the Lviv Medical Institute, and received his higher education at the Faculty of Philology of the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, majoring in “Ukrainian Language and Literature.”
He worked as a librarian and bibliographer at the Lviv Library of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. In December 1949, he was arrested by the KGB on charges of political disloyalty and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Thus began his trials: transit prisons in Lviv, Kharkiv, Petropavlovsk, and other cities, and the so-called correctional labor camps in Spassk and Karaganda. After his release, he could not find work due to the stigma of being “politically unreliable.” His forced unemployment lasted for 23 years. It was during this time that Yaroslav Dashkevych became a world-renowned Ukrainianist, an expert on the history of the East, primarily Armenia, and the author of scholarly works on historical science, source studies, and archeography.
In Lviv, he only managed to find work in his field from time to time: as a senior researcher, acting head of the department at the Museum of Ethnography and Crafts of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, head of the auxiliary historical disciplines department, and senior researcher at the Central State Historical Archives of the Ukrainian SSR in Lviv from 1974-1978.
After the restoration of the Archeographic Commission at the Academy of Sciences in Kyiv, he headed its Lviv branch, and after the creation of the M. S. Hrushevsky Institute of Ukrainian Archeography and Source Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, he headed the institute’s Lviv branch. For the aggregate of his scholarly works, “The State and Directions of Source and Historiographical Studies of the History of Ukraine (Second Half of the 19th-20th Centuries),” he was awarded the academic degree of Doctor of Historical Sciences (1994). The Academic Council of the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv awarded him the title of professor (1996). From 1998, he headed the newly founded Department of Oriental Studies.
The scholarly legacy of Ya. R. Dashkevych includes more than 900 academic works on Ukrainian historiography, source studies, special historical disciplines, Oriental studies, Ukrainian-Armenian, Ukrainian-Turkish, and Ukrainian-Jewish relations, etc. Lvivska Gazeta
He was one of the few Ukrainian historians known throughout the world—like Omelian Pritsak, Roman Rosdolsky, Ihor Ševčenko. They achieved global success because they were experts in other fields—Oriental studies, Byzantinology, and so on. Because there was trust in what they did in their own domain, they were believed in what they wrote about Ukraine. And conversely: in Ukraine, they were believed and listened to because they knew and wrote about much more than just Ukraine. In a word, their Ukrainianness was not provincial—it was cosmopolitan. The kind of quality Ukrainianness that ought to exist.
Among this list of names, Yaroslav Dashkevych stands apart. Most of those listed became great because, after the war, they managed to emigrate to the West and create there in conditions of intellectual freedom. Yaroslav Dashkevych never left. Not even in the 1970s, when Omelian Pritsak made active attempts to bring him to Harvard as a world-class Orientalist. He stayed, and for that, he had to pay with imprisonment in Siberia and long years of forced unemployment. But at this price, he created an island of his own intellectual freedom, of which no one could deprive him—and which was the object of envy for the many others who made a mediocre career under Soviet conditions but were never free.
Another series of names comes to mind: brilliant intellectuals of Central European origin but world rank—Leszek Kołakowski, John Paul II, Jan Patočka. This was a breed of men cut from a different cloth. The foundation of their erudition was a good gymnasium education, which gave them knowledge of several living and dead languages and taught them about Europeanness at its very roots, in ancient Greece and Rome. Their worldview was broader because its roots went much deeper—deeper than what an ordinary secondary or higher school could provide. Their minds were sharpened by the mortal danger that Nazism and communism posed to Central Europe. And this was yet another university—or even a doctorate, which they had to pass as a test of being truly great.
This breed is called Central European gentlemen. And Yaroslav Dashkevych was perhaps its only representative among us. The title of gentleman suited him perfectly. Always impeccably dressed, with aristocratic manners and a deliberate way of speaking, long hair—a symbol of independence—and a keen sense of his own dignity. This is how I first saw him somewhere in the late 1970s, when I was standing behind him in the cloakroom line at the Stefanyk Library—and, not yet knowing who he was, I wanted to be like him. I was fortunate to know him more closely from the late 1980s, when the Shevchenko Scientific Society was being revived, and by the late 1990s, to even collaborate with him quite closely.
Anyone who knew him more closely can confirm: for all his outward sharpness toward opponents—pity the one who fell prey to his criticism!—he was an exceptionally gentle, delicate, and magnanimous person. This was most evident in his attitude toward younger people who gathered around him. And, it must be emphatically stressed, Yaroslav Dashkevych was one of the few great men who genuinely and daily mentored the young. That is why he left behind a whole school of people who are now reaching middle age and, one must think, will take on the burden of leadership and responsibility for the state of the Lviv historical school.
Personally, I loved him very much—almost unreservedly. And I once even confessed it publicly. For some time, we did not agree on political views, and he criticized me more than once—not always deservedly, I think. But in the face of his death and his own greatness in life, I hold no grudges against him. On the contrary: I was and will always be grateful to him—as I am to the chance in life that once brought me into the orbit of this great and noble man.
Since the time of Yaroslav the Wise, we have been lucky with our Yaroslavs. The time of his rule is the only time Kyiv was among the ten largest cities in the world, and the history of his children’s marriages shows how he was reckoned with throughout Europe. From the mid-19th century, a fashion emerged among educated Galicians to name their children not with Christian names from the New Testament, but with the names of Kyivan princes—Volodymyr, Olha, and Yaroslav. From the 1930s, this fashion even spread to the villages—which is why I, born in a village, also became a Yaroslav. Look in “Who’s Who in Ukraine,” and you will see that most Yaroslavs are of Galician origin. The same trend, by the way, is noticeable in the American and Canadian diasporas in North America. But it is especially noticeable among Ukrainian historians in Ukraine. To name a child Yaroslav was a certain challenge and a rejection of tradition: this name is not Christian; it dates back to Indo-European, pagan times. Its closest and most famous equivalent is the Greek “Hercules,” a symbol of great and untamable (“yara,” or fierce) strength. By giving their child this name, parents seemed to want to say: “we rebel against our fate. We want us and our children to be greater than our enemies think of us or make of us.”
In our modern history, there was no better embodiment of this dream than Yaroslav Dashkevych. As with Hercules, I refuse to think and write about him in the past tense. I am happy to be his contemporary. And I want to thank him for this on behalf of our entire generation.
Yaroslav Dashkevych. Memoirs. The Intellectual versus the State