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ESSAY*Ukraine between East and WestIHOR SEVCENKOІ зрозумій, який ти Азіят мізерний.—Pantelejmon KuliS (1882)Да, скифы - мы! Да, азиаты - мы,С раскосыми и жадными очами!—Aleksandr Blok (1918)In Kiev it is easy to illustrate the topic of my paper. 1Thus, to give an example,those among us who have had the time to visit the Cathedral of St.Sophia have again realized that the eleventh-century church, with itsByzantine mosaics and Greek inscriptions in the interior, is almost totallycovered on the outside by architectural accretions in the style of theWestern Baroque. To give another example, when we open the latest bookby Hryhorij Nikonovyc Lohvyn concerning the etchings in early Ukrainianprinted books of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, 2we will findthere an etching from Pocajiv, dating from 1768; that etching represents theApostle Luke in the act of painting the portrait of the Virgin Mary. The VirginMary is depicted as a purely Byzantine icon, while the evangelist is sittingin a Western, Baroque and dramatic, attitude. These two examplesshould suffice here to show that in Ukrainian culture—at least in the artisticone—influences coming from the East and from the West followed uponone another or coexisted between the eleventh and the eighteenth centuries.Here, however, a certain difficulty arises: Byzantium, or, if you will,Constantinople, lies not east but south, or even south-west, of Kiev. It followsthat in the case of Byzantium we should not speak of the influenceWith this essay, the editors of Harvard Ukrainian Studies initiate a section of the journal inwhich broad topics will be discussed with a minimum of scholarly apparatus. The editors invitefurther contributions of this nature.1This essay is a slightly enlarged text of a paper read at the First Congress of the InternationalAssociation of Ukrainianists, held in Kiev in August 1990. Except for its postscript andan occasional allusion in the text, the English version does not attempt to take full account ofthe rapid changes that have occurred in Eastern Europe and in the Balkans since late 1990.2Z hlybyn. Hravjury ukrajins'kyx starodrukiv XVI-XVIII stolif (Kiev, 1990).