Orest Subtelny (b. 1943 in
Kraków),
Poland - is a
Canadian historian of
Ukrainian descent. He received his Ph.D. from
Harvard University in 1973. Since 1982 he has been a professor in the departments of History and Political Science,
York University,
Toronto,
Canada.
Subtelny's major work is the general textbook
Ukraine: A History (1988), a work of Ukrainian historiography. During the
Gorbachev reforms, the book was quickly translated into both Ukrainian and Russian and affected the growth of Ukrainian historical and national consciousness during the initial years of Ukrainian independence.
Under the influence of his mentors, the
orientalist Omeljan Pritsak and the
Ivan Mazepa specialist
Oleksander Ohloblyn, Subtelny's earlier work dealt with the
Cossack era, especially the revolt of
Hetman Ivan Mazepa against Tsar
Peter the Great. In this work, he sought to avoid the extremes of labeling Mazepa either an evil traitor to Russia or a heroic defender of Ukrainian national independence and portrayed him as a typical partisan of aristocratic local autonomy before the encroaching absolute monarchies of his time.
In his history of Ukraine, Subtelny took a more traditional approach, like his predecessors
Mykhailo Hrushevsky,
Dmytro Doroshenko, and
Ivan Krypiakevych, writing a national history, primarily the history of the Ukrainian people. However, unlike these predecessors who wished to stress aspirations to statehood, Subtelny stressed "statelessness." In his view, modernization of the country was largely sponsored by outside powers and thus not exactly favourable to the rise of a Ukrainian national consciousness.
Selected books and publications
- The Mazepists: Ukrainian Separatism in the Early Eighteenth Century (1981).
- The Domination of Eastern Europe, Foreign Absolutism and Native Nobilities (1986)
- Ukrainians in North America (1991)
- "Cossacks", in The World Book Encyclopedia (1997)
- "Ukraine", in Encarta Encyclopedia (1997)
- "Ukraine: The Imperial Heritage", Briefing Papers of the Canadian Bureau of International Studies (1996)
