Peter Jacyk Centre

The late Peter Jacyk and his daughter, Nadia

The Peter Jacyk Centre for Ukrainian Historical Research was established in 1989 through the generosity of its founding benefactor, Peter Jacyk. Impressed by the Institute’s work, Mr. Jacyk endowed CIUS with $1 million, matched two-to-one by the government of Alberta. Dr. Frank Sysyn, a renowned specialist in early modern Ukraine, was appointed the Centre’s director.

The Jacyk Centre’s major project has been the translation of Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s monumental History of Ukraine-Rus' into English. Published in ten volumes between 1898 and 1937, this authoritative work has held up well with the passage of time. Neglected in Soviet times, the history has enjoyed a popular revival in Ukraine since independence. The entire work was reprinted by the Institute of Ukrainian Archeography of the National Academy of Sciences in Kyiv, together with an index to all its volumes.

Translating and editing Hrushevsky is a complex undertaking. Besides translating the text into English, it is necessary to verify and update thousands of footnotes and consult sources in a variety of languages, including Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and Latin. The challenging task of compiling a bibliography for the project became the responsibility of the Jacyk Centre’s associate director, Dr. Serhii Plokhy. The project employs several scholars and editors in its Toronto and Edmonton offices, in addition to freelance translators, subject editors and specialists hired for specific volumes.

Great interest in Ukrainian history of the Cossack period has prompted the Jacyk Centre to issue volumes 7-10 ahead of other volumes. In addition to volume 7 and 8, and book 1 of volume 9, work has been completed on book 2 of volumes 9, which will be published in 2007. Additional funding has been sought to help cover expenses for the Hrushevsky translation. The project received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the U.S., the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies and, most recently, the Ukrainian Canadian Foundation of Taras Shevchenko. A number of individuals have donated $100,000 to sponsor a volume each.

The publication of volumes 1, 7, 8 and book 1 of volume 9, boosted the Jacyk Centre’s visibility not only within the Ukrainian community, but also in North American academia. Book launches were organized at major academic centers such as Harvard, Columbia and Toronto, as well as at annual conventions of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and the Canadian Association of Slavists. Equally important were community-sponsored launches in major Ukrainian centers across North America and at the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa.

The magnitude of the Hrushevsky Translation Project and the resources committed to it have not overshadowed other activities of the Jacyk Centre. The center’s scholars have been regular participants at international conferences, often as panel organizers. The Centre has arranged academic exchanges with universities and institutes of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and awards research grants and doctoral fellowships in Ukrainian history to scholars around the world.

Documents on Ukrainian history are often scattered in archives of numerous states. Locating the material and cataloguing it has been a major concern of researchers and scholars. The Peter Jacyk Centre has supported many archival projects in Ukraine, as well as in Moscow and Warsaw, where many valuable Ukrainian archival collections have been unearthed.

Publications Series

The Peter Jacyk Centre sponsors two publications series: Ukrainian translations of Western works on Ukrainian history and an English-language monograph series. The “Ukrainian Historiography in the West” series is being published in cooperation with a number of scholarly institutions in Ukraine. The first book in the series, Istorychni ese (Historical Essays) by the late Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky, was edited by Yaroslav Hrytsak of Lviv. The second publication, Rosiis’kyi tsentralizm i ukraïns’ka avtonomiia: Likvidatsiia Het’manshchyny, 1760-1830 roky (Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy: Imperial Absorption of the Hetmanate, 1760s-1830s) by Zenon Kohut, appeared in 1996.

Since then the Centre published three more volumes in its Ukrainian-language series, including Serhii Plokhy's Nalyvaikova vira. Kozatsvo ta relihia v raniomoderni Ukraini (Nalyvaiko's Faith: The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine) (2005). The first book in the English-language monograph series, Ihor Ševèenko’s Ukraine between East and West: Essays on Cultural History to the Early Eighteenth Century, was also published in Ukrainian translation.

List of Volumes, Translators, and Editors

• Volume 1, From Prehistory to the Eleventh Century: trans. Marta Skorupsky; ed. Andrzej Poppe and Frank E. Sysyn, with Uliana Pasicznyk. Published, 1997.
• Volume 2, From the Eleventh to the Thirteenth Century: trans. J. Ian Press; ed. Paul Hollingsworth and Frank E. Sysyn, with Tania Plawuszczak-Stech.
• Volume 3, To the Year 1340: trans. Bohdan Strumiński.
• Volume 4, The Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries: Political Relations: trans. Andrij Wynnyckyj
• Volume 5, Social and Political Relations and the Church Order in the Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries: trans. Marta Skorupsky.
  Volume 6, Economic, Cultural, and National Life in the Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries: trans. Leonid Heretz, ed., with Uliana Pasicznyk.
• Volume 7, The Cossack Age to 1625: trans. Bohdan Strumiński, ed. Serhii Plokhy and Frank E. Sysyn, with Uliana Pasicznyk. Published, 1999.
• Volume 8, The Cossack Age, 1626 to 1650: trans. Marta Daria Olynyk, ed. Frank E. Sysyn, with Myroslav Yurkevich. Published, 2002.
• Volume 9-1, The Khmelnytsky Era, 1651 to 1653: trans. Bohdan Strumiński, ed. Serhii Plokhy and Frank E. Sysyn, with Uliana Pasicznyk. Published, 2005.
• Volume 9-2, The Khmelnytsky Era, 1654 to 1657: trans. Marta Daria Olynyk, ed. Frank E. Sysyn, with Myroslav Yurkevich. To be published in two parts.
• Volume 10, From the Death of Khmelnytsky to the Union of Hadiach: trans. Marta Daria Olynyk

Reviewers comments:

“Hrushevsky’s History is simply indispensable to all students of early East Slavic History.... One can only applaud its dissemination and look forward eagerly to the continuation of this project”

Charles J. Halperin,
Kritika: Explorations in Russian
and Eurasian History 1, no. 1, 2000

“[Volume 1] is a magnificent annotated translation...of Hrushevsky’s magnum opus...Frank Sysyn’s twenty-page general introduction to the translation project is almost enough on its own to justify purchase of this book”

David Saunders,
European History Quarterly 28, 1998

“The realization of this handsome volume [7] is a major achievement. The scholarly apparatus accompanying Hrushevsky’s text is exemplary and highly informative; the references are updated to provide the researcher with a state-of-the-art bibliography; the translation reads as though it had originally been written in English”

Caroline Finkel,
Bulletin of the School of Oriental
and African Studies 62, pt. 2, 2001

“This book [vol. 8] is nothing less than a monumental work.... It is of fundamental value in tracing the history of modern Ukrainian identity”

Brian J. Boeck,
Russian Review 63, no. 4, 2004

“For contemporary scholarship, one of the great contributions of Hrushevsky’s text is that he utilized and quoted extensively from sources now lost... The publication of this volume [8] in English translation—indeed, the whole multi-volume project—is both a historiographic and a cultural landmark”

Paul W. Knoll,
The Polish Review 49, no. 2, 2004

“No one can fully understand Ukraine today without an appreciation of Hrushevsky’s work. It remains indispensable reading”

Hugh D. Hudson Jr.,
Sixteenth Century Journal 32, no. 1, 2001