Using primarily ethnographic materials derived from face-to-face interviews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the author's fieldwork in Eastern Europe, the social role of the blind peasant minstrels of Ukraine (kobzari and lirnyky) and aspects of their economic status in the village are analyzed as elements of broader cultural norms among peasants. Their repertory, with its emphasis on songs of Christian content and secondarily on Cossack themes, is described as providing the minstrels with a moral authority in the village before collectivization. With the repression of the 1930s, the minstrels' moral authority declined as peasant society lost its distinctive social organization. With the regimentation of rural life, the minstrels' social role was forcibly altered and their economic norms destroyed. They all but disappeared from most regions by the 1950s. Sighted, urban born national bandurists, who perform a secularized and standardized repertory, are often mistakenly regarded in popular culture as continuing the music practices of the blind peasant minstrels of Ukraine.

The accounts of the 1661 Diet reveal that a sum of 76,532 zlotys 15 gr -- the largest single outlay in the diplomatic expenditures -- was spent by the Crown Treasury for the purpose of securing the ratification of the Hadiach Treaty of Union. Ratified on 22 May 1659, the Treaty aimed, by the addition of Ukraine, which was renamed the Grand Duchy of Rus', to transform the dual Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth into a triune state. Apart from providing some new information with regard to this unique Eastern European constitutional-political experiment, the author also reveals, by using hitherto unknown primary sources, interesting details pertaining to the characteristics of the Commonwealth's diplomacy. He has determined, by using detailed analysis and calculation that, at the Diet of 1659, the official diplomatic representatives from the Grand Duchy of Rus' and the Zaporozhian Host comprised 521 persons. Moreover, he has identified many of them, showing that, as a group, they received gifts in cloth valued at 20,140 zlotys 15 gr; and has disclosed that an additional sum of 56,392 zlotys in cash (which includes in it an error of 3 zlotys made by the Crown Treasury) was spent in order to cover the expenses of various diplomatic missions--those expedited to, or received from, Het'man Ivan Vyhovs'kyi.

Cultural change at the time of the decline and fall of the U.S.S.R. involved liberalization in all spheres of previously restricted discourse. In literature, the challenge to sexual taboo often interacted with the challenge to colonial structures of cultural domination on the one hand, anticolonial myths enshrined in the Ukrainian romantic literary canon on the other. In the light of this interaction, the paper discusses five features of the contemporary Ukrainian literary situation: the "eroticization" of the older and middle generation of writers (Shevchuk, Hutsalo, Zahrebel'nyi); the emergence of erotic literature in the Ukrainian-Russian surzhyk (Zholdak); the exploration of the carnivalesque dimension of the erotic, especially by the "Bu-ba-bu" group (Andrukhovych, Neborak, Irvanets'); the construction of a myth of L'viv as a focus of the erotic (Vynnychuk); and the dominance of the male perspective in the new erotics, even in the writing of women (Tsvyd).

Review of: THE DYNASTY OF CHERNIGOV 1054-1146. By Martin Dimnick. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1994. xxiv, 485 pp.

Martin Dimnik's monograph THE DYNASTY OF CHERNIGOV 1054-1146, is dedicated to the history of the early reign (1054-1146) of the Sviatoslavichi dynasty of Chernihiv (Chernigov). The city ranked third in terms of significance in Rus' after Kiev and Novgorod. The author examines in detail the genealogy, dynastic ties, biographies, and reigns of three generations of this ruling house. He also describes the urban topography of medieval Chernihiv and the monumental building of its princes in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

This review article focuses on several interesting issues raised in the book concerning the princely patronage of the churches' construction, the origins of their master builders and fresco artists, and the Byzantine, Balkan Slavic, and Central European Romanesque influences on this city's architecture and its mural paintings. The discussion demonstrates that Dimnik's monograph represents a major contribution to the hitherto little-studied history and culture of the Chernihiv principality and the historiography of Kievan Rus' in general.

Review of: FLORENTINE ECUMENISM IN THE KYIVAN CHURCH. By Ihor Moncak. Rome: Editiones Universitatis Catholicae Ucrainorum S. Clementis Papae, 1987. 366 pp.

Review of: MYKHAILO TUHAN-BARANOVS'KYI. By S. M Zlupko. L'viv: Kameniar, 1993.192 pp. POLITYCHNA EKONOMIIA. By M. I. Tuhan-Baranovs'kyi. Introduction, "Mykhailo Ivanovych Tuhan-Baranovs'kyi -- myslytel', vchenyi, hromadianyn," by Larysa Horkina. Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1994. 262 pp.

As a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the contributions of the well-known Ukrainian economist Mykhailo Tuhan-Baranovs'kyi are becoming increasingly accessible to scholars and the public at large in Ukraine and belatedly also in the West. Both books under review, by Larysa Horkina and Stepan Zlupko, provide Tuhan's selected works and competent analysis of his oeuvre. Tuhan's range of interest in economics was quite broad. It included business cycles analysis, the theory of value, distribution theory, various issues related to socialism, the history of economic thought, economic history, monetary theory, the cooperative movement, and economic sociology. In addition, his pedagogical, political, social (cooperatives), and publishing activities were remarkable. Such a fullness of life was only possible for 19th century scholars.

Both authors succeeded in analyzing these areas, of course, in varying degrees of coverage and thoughtfulness. Including the Western research on Tuhan in addition to Russian and Ukrainian sources would have extended their contributions beyond parochial importance. Nevertheless, both Horkina and Zlupko provide a good stepping stone for the younger generation of researchers, who should now devote their attention mainly to those of Tuhan's contributions which coincided with similar research in the West, but for which he has not received deserved recognition, and to acquainting the profession with the lesser-known ideas of this outstanding scholar.

The author analyzes all the works on Ukrainian culture that appeared in Italy between 1920 and 1990. In the 1920s, the few studies on Ukraine were for the most part of an historical-political nature. There were few literary studies; among them, those of Palmieri and Giusti are prominent. With the increasing interest in Ukraine from the end of the 1920s through the 1930s came an intensification of studies dedicated to this subject. Among these works, historical, political, and economic research continued to prevail. The breadth and variety of the topics treated by Onatskyj make his works particularly important (Studi di storia e cultura ucraina, 1939). In the 1940s, the figure of Salvini came to the fore. His most memorable works are the introductions to two anthologies published by him in 1941 and 1949, in which he demonstrates, by way of a subtle analysis of authors of various literary currents, the existence of a globally unitary literary phenomenon. In the postwar years, almost nothing was produced in the field of Ukrainian studies, with the exception of the works of Fedoronczuk, for the most part in a popular and anti-Soviet vein. Of great importance, on the other hand, are the historical-ecclesiastical collections which began to be published in the 1950s (Documenta Romana Ecclesiae Catholicae..., 1952-53) and 1960s (Monumenta Ucrainae Historica, 1964). Only recently, thanks to the particular interest of a group of scholars, Ukrainian studies have received a new and determinative impulse. Various initiatives and congresses have taken place and many more are planned: an Italian Association of Ukrainian Studies has been organized, and in December 1995 the First National Congress of Ukrainian Studies, dedicated to twentieth-century Ukrainian culture, will take place in Venice.

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