Suchergebnisse

Book review of Natalia Kliashtorna. Narodne vbrannia zakhidnoi Boikivshchyny: Litovyshchi ta okolytsi[Folk Clothing of the Western Boiko Region: Litovyshchi and Vicinity]. Translated by Adam Stec' et al., Drukarnia "Foliant," 2017. 84 pp. Map. Illustrations. Glossaries. Bibliography. $34.95, cloth.

Ukraine Alive is a digital resource built to support elementary education and available at http://ukrainealive.ualberta.ca. The site features contemporary cultural material from Ukraine and is rich in interactive units where students can explore content, play games, and perform tasks online. Google Analytics shows that Ukraine Alive (and its related Alive sites) are popular with teachers and used throughout Alberta and beyond. The creators of Ukraine Alive are working on more sophisticated games to test if gaming can teach culture effectively.Ukraine Alive is also used to teach students at the university level. By generating content for the Alive series of sites, university students learn how to write for publication online, producing formal text and combining it with visuals and audio. Teaching university students the humanistic aspect of formal composition for presentation online is an area of instruction that is only now being recognized.

<p><strong>Galina I. Yermolenko, ed. <em>Roxolana in European Literature, History and Culture.</em></strong> Franham, Surrey, England and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2010. xi, 318 pp. Illustrations. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. Cloth.</p><p> </p>

The blind mendicant in Ukrainian folk tradition is a little-known social order, but an important one. The singers of Ukrainian epics, these minstrels were organized into professional guilds that set standards for training and performance. Repressed during the Stalin era, this is their story.

Dumy, the oral epic songs of Ukraine, like other heroic poetries, have a military subject matter. One duma cycle tells of battles with the Turks and Tatars in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries; another sings of the Khmel'nyts'kyi uprising against the Poles that began in 1648. In addition to the expected narratives about armed conflict, the duma tradition also contains a group of songs, usually called the cycle about everyday life, that deals with topics only tenuously connected to war. These songs tell of such problems as filial ingratitude and sibling disloyalty. The popularity of this "unheroic" body of dumy relative to the other cycles suggests a powerful nonmilitary influence on the Ukrainian epic tradition at some point in its development. Other content features, some unusual elements in duma form, and many unique characteristics of duma performers likewise indicate such influence.