” Mykola Hohol and the Battleground of Ukrainian Culture”

by Stephen Komarnyckyj

Paper Presented at the International conference on Hohol in Kyiv from the 23rd to the 28th September

In the 1841 portrait by F Muller Hohol looks at us with a gaze that is both contemplative and amused against a sky where the last sunlight is fading into a leaden dusk. The portrait captures an ambivalence in the man who lived, it seems, in an amorphous twilight where outlines blur and where his work drifts over the borders between Russia and Ukraine. He even has a Russian name, Nikolai Gogol, and a Ukrainian name, Mykola Hohol, but both these identities shared the same aquiline nose and soft sensuous mouth. Mykola Hohol, the author of Evenings on a Farm near Dykanka, which reeks of the fecund soil of Ukraine is the same man as Gogol, the chronicler of provincial Russian towns the grotesque revelation of a nose concealed in a piece of bread. Read the rest of this entry »

And the Ukrainian Dynamic Duo continues to make boxing history.

On this forum.

“…women who experienced famine while in the womb, had paternal granddaughters who died on average far earlier.”

This new study means that there are millions of victims who are suffering in Ukraine and elsewhere because of the food that was stolen by the Kremlin.

When does the trial start?

More is being published re: the one million plus Mennonite, Amish, and other German colonists who made the mistake of accepting Tsarina Catherine’s offer to settle in Ukraine.

These deaths peaked in the winter of 1933 and as the letters of murder victims reached the west, it is easy to imagine that the communists that had taken over parts of Germany would do the same thing, and the Nazis took advantage of these fears.

Who knew that the first concentration camps festooned with barbed wire and occupied by Ukrainians was in Canada, the ultimate nanny state.

Now their stories can be told (and note that all the reparations went to education).

This unprecedented tragedy would be surpassed by the Holodomor 15 years later…and then repeated by the 8 million Ukrainians lost in WWII. Let’s hope this century is much better to Ukraine.