UCRAINIAN RESEARCH IN CROATIA IN THE PERIOD 1939-1945.

Abstract

Ukrainian issues have been interesting to intellectuals in the area of pre-war and war time Croatia. Different standpoints and influences are visible in its elaboration. Representatives of Russian emigration expressed mainly negative attitudes. By efforts to find a compromise, the editorial board of Nova Evropa invited for Slavic solidarity, but Ukraine under the Soviet regime experienced devastating interventions exactly from the Slavic (Russian Bolshevik) side. August Cesarec, in his travel pieces from the Soviet Union, brings elements of socialist realism in the presentation of reality. In Croatian intellectual circles, a youth group was formed that worked on the familiarisation with Ukrainian issues –through representation of history, literature, social research, translations. Due to them, Ukrainian language was introduced in classes at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. This presentation of Ukraine was void of extremist characteristics of dominant ideologies. Ukrainian classics were translated, and also for the first time, representatives of Ukrainian modernism. Interest of Croatian intellectuals in the life and work of Taras Ševčenko reaches its culmination in the work of Stanko Gašparović, the leading representative of Croatian Ukrainian studies of the war time period. In this war time period, Croatian Ukrainian studies were on the rise, which was cut off by the new regime in 1945.