HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

Reviews 259пук was an old Bolshevik whose membership in Russian Social-Democracydated from the turn of the century and whose record of service to the SovietUkrainian government included heading it in the spring of 1918 when it was atwar with the Central Rada led by Hrushevs'kyi. The author is not even awarethat he has used two different systems for transliterating surnames, whilerendering one first name in its Russian and the other two in their Englishequivalents.The fact that such a book could be published perhaps indicates that somepublishers are so determined to satisfy the public's curiosity about the nationalitiesproblem in the Soviet Union that they will issue anything which has anappropriate title and enough jargon.JAMES E. MACEHarvard UniversityDIE UKRAINISCHEN ANDREASBRÄUCHE UND VERWANDTESBRAUCHTUM. By Bohdan Georg Mykytiuk. Wiesbaden: OttoHarrassowitz, 1979, 341 pp.Mykytiuk's publication stems from a Ph.D. dissertation. It is divided into threemain parts: (a) Ukrainian St. Andrew's day customs, (b) related customs, and(c) texts of interviews with his informants. The monograph also contains anintroduction and a number of reference sections, including footnotes, abbreviations,a list of sources and bibliography, an appendix providing the dates ofecclesiastic and secular feast days, the traditional Ukrainian len ten periods, avariant of one of the musical notations and a photograph portraying a group ofgirls gathered for spinning and fortune telling in Ruski Krstur on the eve ofSt. Andrew's in 1941.This monograph demonstrates that the author is familiar with the mainbranches of folklore studies: collecting, classifying, analyzing and formulatingconclusions. On the basis of material he himself collected and on that in earliercollections, he has been able to set up a list of activities that constituteUkrainian St. Andrew's day customs. He has provided an analysis of theseactivities and pointed out kindred customs and rites relating to the seasonswithin the calendar as well as those referring to human transitions. Finally, hehas analyzed the above activities further and has come up with some theoreticalconclusions.Since many Ukrainian folklore publications in the West are based onrehashed secondary sources, Mykytiuk is to be commended for having takenthe trouble to go into the field to collect primary material. The vast majority ofthe field work was carried out in the years 1965,1967, and 1968 in Yugoslavia,where the author obtained forty-three texts from such localities as Andrijevci,