Piotr S. Wandycz, Bradford Durfee Emeritus Professor of History at Yale University, the foremost American specialist in Polish and Central European history, died at the Connecticut Hospice, Branford, Connecticut, on July 28, 2017, aged 93. He was born on September 20, 1923, in Kraków, Poland, into a prominent intelligentsia family. Wandycz's father was a legionary of Piłsudski's First Brigade, a leading chemist with a decisive role in interwar Poland's oil industry. His mother wrote children's books; other close relatives were painters and art historians. Wandycz himself remembered that the “tradition of Young Poland weighed heavily on my parents and to some extent was passed on to me. So was an attachment to the past—perhaps a romanticized vision of it.” He noted, too, that historical novels became his gateway to history. By the end of the 1930s, the Wandycz family became increasingly critical of the sanacja regime and pinned its hopes in the democratic opposition. Nevertheless, the memory of Piłsudski never faded. A small photograph of the Marshal in the legionary uniform of 1914 graced the wall of Wandycz's large office at the top of the second-floor steps in Yale's Hall of Graduate Studies.

Wandycz belonged to the twice betrayed generation. The German invasion commenced just as he passed his mała matura in Lwów, where he spent most of his early years. On 17 September 1939 his family crossed into Romania together with the other Polish refugees. Remembering that fateful day, he wrote much later that “it did not occur to me that we would never return to Poland.” But such it was. In the spring of 1940 Wandycz witnessed the German invasion in France, where he studied at the Polish lycée (Villard-de-Lans) and then at the University of Grenoble. From 1942 he was in Britain, where he served in the Polish army and, after the war, continued his studies at Cambridge on a veterans’ stipend that the British government extended to Polish servicemen. Wandycz remembered that he started considering himself a political emigré: “the idea of going back to the communist-ruled Poland, a Soviet satellite never seriously entered my mind.” He also confessed that “he shared with my fellow ex-soldiers some bitterness toward the British for the way they let us down.”

During his three years at Cambridge Wandycz increasingly gravitated toward diplomatic history. In 1948, he was admitted into the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. After two years of study he defended a Ph.D. dissertation, completed under the mentorship of Charles Manning, titled Liberal Internationalism: The Contribution of British and French Liberal Thought to the Theory of International Relations. It was remarkable for the almost total avoidance of any reference to Polish history. This was not for the want of interest in Polish affairs. Wandycz was drawn to the Polish emigré contingent of European federalists and, connected with that, was among the Polish students admitted to the newly-founded Collège d'Europe in Bruges, Belgium. One of his early articles, in Cahiers de Bruges was titled “The Polish-Lithuanian Union as an Example of a Regional Federation” (1951).

In December 1951, for family reasons, Wandycz emigrated to the United States. His entrance into American academia was rocky, but ultimately very successful. In New York he worked as an assistant to Feliks Gross at the Free European Committee's Mid-European Studies Center. Gross, too, sympathized with European federalism and recommended Wandycz for a research grant on the Sikorski-Beneš negotiations for a postwar union between Poland and Czechoslovakia. After Wandycz, in 1954, started teaching at Indiana University, Bloomington, at the recommendation of Norman Pounds, his Cambridge tutor, his project manuscript was published under the title Czechoslovak-Polish Confederation and the Great Powers 1940–43 (Indiana University Publications, 1956).

In the academic world that considered Eastern Europe a luxury field, Wandycz was initially obliged to teach courses in general European history. This was helpful as he persisted in pursuing the “Polish (and East Central European) ties with the West not East,” contrary to the going geostrategic trends. Aware that the lack of “formal training in Polish and East European history” was a handicap, he doggedly taught himself to be able to become a commanding teacher. Always more comfortable with graduate students than with undergraduates, he compensated for the deficiencies in crowd pleasing with prodigious research. His masterful France and her Eastern Allies 1919–1925: French-Czechoslovak-Polish Relations from the Paris Peace Conference to Locarno (U. of Minnesota Press, 1962) won the George Louis Beer Prize. The follow-up The Twilight of French Eastern Alliances 1926–36: French-Czechoslovak-Polish Relations from Locarno to the Remilitarization of the Rhineland (Princeton U. Press, 1988) also won the Beer prize, as well as the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize. These meticulously researched monographs bookended Wandycz's reputation as the indispensable authority on the international relations of interwar East Central Europe.

In the meanwhile, during the two years as a fellow at the Russian Research Center at Harvard in the early 1960s, Wandycz completed the research for his impressive Soviet-Polish Relations 1917–1921 (Harvard U. Press, 1969). Before the book was published he accepted, in 1966, the professorship in the Department of History at Yale, where he spent the rest of his professional life until retirement in 1997.

During the Yale years Wandycz vastly expanded his academic contacts and engagement, but also continued prodigious research. He contributed an important volume in the University of Washington History of East Central Europe: The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795–1918. Vol. VII. (U. of Washington Press, 1974). This book, which demonstrated his mastery of a period and themes that were outside his usual area of research, is a classic in English-language scholarship. In addition to several books in Polish, which were published in London and Paris, his interest in diplomatic history was confirmed in the pioneering work The United States and Poland (Harvard U. Press, 1980.) Wandycz's last major work, The Price of Freedom: A History of East Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present (Routledge, 1992), was published after the collapse of communism and the restoration of national independence in East Central Europe. Its inner message—for all comers—is not just that freedom always came at a great cost to East Central Europe, but that the cost included the marginalization of the region's genuine spiritual contributions to the overall European civilization.

Piotr Wandycz was not only an outstanding scholar and teacher, but a prominent lecturer at a vast number of academic institutions, committed participant in various international projects and exchanges, member of several honor societies, recipient of various fellowships, four doctorates honoris causa, most notably of the Sorbonne, and of two Festschriften. Protective of the field of East Central European studies, he was aware of the danger of becoming an advocate and of seeing slights even when none were intended. He protected himself from these pitfalls by a self-deprecating and an ironical sense of humor. But he could be firm on matters of political preference. I asked him some ten years ago whether he revisited L'viv after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He turned serious: “No,” he said, and then added: “As you know, I am a great supporter of Polish-Ukrainian friendship and reconciliation.” Indeed, he was. He was active in the meetings of Lublin's Institute of East Central Europe dedicated to dialogue among the Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Belorussian intellectuals. “But, I want to remember the Polish Lwów, as it was in 1939.”

On September 23, 2018 Bohdan Rubchak, a giant of Ukrainian poetry, Ukrainian studies, and comparative literature died at the age of 83. I remember first meeting Bohdan and his wife Mariana at the annual University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana conference in Ukrainian studies in 1991, which he, Ukrainian librarian Dmytro Shtohryn, and later Prof. Leo Rudnytzky of La Salle University organized for many years. I attended the extraordinarily successful summer workshops in Ukrainian studies there several times, taking advantage of the university's amazing Slavic library collection as well as the great coffee shop a few blocks from the library where I would often meet with Ukrainian colleagues including Bohdan and Mariana. That particular conference in 1991 was the largest in its history and was the first opportunity for me to meet numerous younger Ukrainian writers and scholars, who had come thanks to funding from the Ukrainian Research Program, which Bohdan cofounded with Dmytro Shtohryn at the University of Illinois. Nearly a decade later I translated several of Bohdan's poems for my 100 Years of Youth anthology that I compiled with Olha Luchuk. I found his poetry to be emotional and refined with a plethora of literary and cultural allusions to works of classical and comparative literature that mirrored the depth and wide variety of his scholarly interests.

Bohdan was an avid reader who kept informed about everything happening in Ukraine and actively interacted with numerous writers and scholars from there. He received an extremely positive reception as a poet in his homeland where he was treated with great respect by his new reading public. In evidence of that, he received the prestigious Pavlo Tychyna Prize for his poetry in 1993.

Bohdan was very proud of the fact that he was born in the small city of Kalush, Ukraine in 1935. The city of about sixty thousand inhabitants is located in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. In 1943, eight-year-old Bohdan ended up in Germany with his parents during the Nazi invasion of western Ukraine. His father died soon after, and he and his mother remained in a displaced persons camp after the war in Germany until their emigration to the US in 1948. He lived in New York from 1948–52, after which he moved with his mother to Chicago where he completed his secondary education at Harrison Technical High School in 1953. Bohdan had an incredibly close relationship with his mother, who sacrificed much to help him complete his education. After high school, he matriculated at the University of Illinois at Navy Pier (a temporary branch of the university created to serve returning GIs) where he majored in English with a minor in German. He published his first book of poetry Kaminnii sad (Orchard of Stone) in 1956. After the two-year program at the Navy Pier campus, he completed his BA degree at Roosevelt University in 1957 where he majored in English Literature with a minor in Philosophy. His further education was interrupted by two years of military service in South Korea from 1958–60. Upon returning stateside he released his second book of poetry, Promenysta zrada (Radiant Betrayal; 1960), which exhibited great philosophical depth and feeling in a mature and assured lyrical voice that became the hallmark of his poetry. He worked in the publishing field at The Commerce Clearing House from 1960–62. The collection Divchyni bez krainy (To the Girl without a Country), his third book of poetry, appeared in 1963. At the University of Chicago, he worked as a tutor from 1962–63. He took a position as an Instructor at the University of Manitoba in 1963–64 and following that worked at the Evanston branch of Harper and Row Publishers. He moved to the New York metropolitan area to become the Director of the Ukrainian Desk of Radio Liberty from 1966–68. He published his fourth book of poetry, Osobysta Klio (A Personal Clio), in 1967, which was dedicated to his wife Mariana. He worked at Rutgers University as an Instructor of Russian from 1968–73 and began to write his dissertation there on a comparative literature topic under the title “Man is a Metaphor: Poetic Knowledge as Grounded in Perception, Imagination and Language,” which he defended in 1977. He took a position at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle (UIC) in 1973, where he taught Ukrainian, Slavic, and comparative literature until his retirement in 2005. His collection Marenu topyty (То Drown Marena) appeared in 1980 and was reissued in Ukraine in 1991. He also published his collection Krylo Ikarove (The Wing of Icarus) in 1983, which also was republished in Ukraine in 1991 in an expanded edition. Following his retirement, he and his wife Mariana, a professor of anthropology at Valparaiso University, retired to Boonton, New Jersey.

Bohdan's poetic sensibility was shaped by his membership in the New York Group of Ukrainian poets, which arose in the mid-1950s. Besides Bohdan, the initial members of the group included Bohdan Boychuk, Yuri Tarnawsky, Patricia Kylyna (now better known as Patricia Nell Warren), Emma Andijewska, Zhenia Vasylkivska, and Vira Vovk. Their youthful energy, their love of poetry, the common émigré experience of growing up as bicultural, bilingual Ukrainians in a foreign land, their personal friendships, and common western literary influences united them. They were, however, less of a literary movement or school per se and more of a group (as their name denotes) of like-minded friends with lofty literary tastes.

Bohdan published over 300 poems during his lifetime. His scholarly writings consisted of more than thirty articles, over twenty chapters and introductions in books, and more than thirty minor articles and reviews. His essays, mostly written in Ukrainian, are all thoughtful, thought-provoking, and wide-ranging in scope. Besides writings on his fellow New York Group poets and individual writers such as Taras Shevchenko, Bohdan Ihor Antonych, Bohdan Kravtsiv, Evhen Malaniuk, Vasyl Barka, Vasyl Makhno, and many others, topics of his essays included experimental Ukrainian poetry, contemporary American poetry, Ukrainian Modernism, new Ukrainian poets of the 1980s and 1990s, and the philosophy of Gaston Bachelard. I consider his annotations of and lengthy introduction to Marco Carynnyk's translation of Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky's Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Ukrainian Academic Press, 1981) a must read for Ukrainianists, a brilliantly-researched analysis of indigenous Carpathian folklore upon which Kotsyubynsky based his famous novella. It was published under the title “The Music of Satan and the Bedeviled World: An Essay on Mykhailo Kotsyubynsky.”

Anthologizing Ukrainian poetry in the diaspora comprised one of the most passionate areas of Bohdan's publication activity. With Bohdan Boychuk and John Fizer he co-compiled and co-edited the handsome two-volume collection of émigré Ukrainian poetry Koordynaty: antolohiia suchasnoi ukrainskoi poezii na zakhodi (Coordinates: An Anthology of Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry in the West, Suchasnist Publishers, 1969) that included biocritical sketches authored by Bohdan of all the poets.

Bohdan was on the editorial board of the prominent Ukrainian journal Suchasnist from 1962–92 when it was based in Munich and New York, before it moved back to Ukraine after independence. He served on the editorial board of several other journals including the Journal of Ukrainian Studies, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Slovo, and Svito-vyd. He often refereed articles for major North American Slavic journals including Slavic Review, Slavic and East European Journal, and Canadian Slavonic Papers.

Bohdan's collected literary essays appeared in Ukrainian in Vasyl Gabor's Private Collection series with Piramida Publishers in Lviv, Ukraine in 2012 under the title Mity metamorfoz, abo poshuky dobroho svitu: Eseï (Myths of Metamorphoses, or In Search of a Good World: Essays). Most recently with Bohdan Boychuk and Eleonora Solovey, he published a bilingual edition of translations of twentieth-century Ukrainian poet Volodymyr Svidzinsky's poetry under the title Evasive Shadow of Life: Selected Poems (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2017). He kept actively working despite increasing infirmity nearly to the very end of his life.

Bohdan was totally devoted to his students at the UIC, whom he extensively supported and nurtured. His former students speak highly of him as a professor. His former graduate student Anna Bohoniuk-Golash made the following observations about him: “Participation in dialogue with students mattered most to Professor Rubchak. He had a real gift for teaching. And his literary discoveries were brilliant. His humor sparkled at frequent gatherings at his and his wife Marian's home in Ravenswood Manor in Chicago.” Another of his former graduate students, Yelena Zotova, added: “In Bakhtin's philosophy Dr. Rubchak most cherished the concept of answerability among the generations of his own students, of responding with one's entire life to everything one experienced and understood in art and literature.”

On a personal note, I particularly enjoyed Bohdan's irascible personality. Discussions were never dull with him, and he never refrained from speaking his mind in friendly, scholarly, or political disputes. I will greatly miss taking part in those lively verbal exchanges with him as well as observing others who engaged him in similar ways, particularly his old friends and fellow displaced persons such as Bohdan Boychuk and John Fizer. All three of these men (along with others from that generation including Assya Humesky, George Shevelov, Omeljan Pritsak, Vasyl Barka, Leo Rudnytzky, and George Luckyj) served to support my own interest in Ukrainian studies when I was a fledgling scholar in the field. They are all of a generation that promoted Ukrainian literary culture in North America in times when Ukraine was submerged under Soviet rule and largely unknown in the west. Eternal Memory (Vichnaia pamiat΄) to Bohdan! His good legacy will live on in those whose lives he touched and in his outstanding contributions to the field of Ukrainian studies and to Ukrainian poetry.