The topic of the relationship between Ukraine and Europe could not be more relevant. Young people gathered on Independence Square in Kyiv in 2013 because then-President Yanukovych refused to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union. Since then, the concept of Europe, as symbol, destination, and ally, has transformed in the discourse of scholars, activists, and politicians in Ukraine. An examination of the history of these varied “encounters and negotiations” in greater context is therefore a welcome achievement.

The greatest contribution of this conference volume is compiling essays from scholars who have been working on Ukraine for their entire careers. The scope is longue durée, from the early modern period to (almost) the present day. The geographic range of the contributors is vast, including scholars from Europe, North America, Australia, and Ukraine itself. The volume is missing contributors from Russia (sadly), or significant representation of the younger generation, but the essays offer an entrée into the research of many senior scholars of Ukrainian culture.

An introduction lays out the collection's goals, which include reframing the question of Ukraine and Europe, so often focused solely on contemporary issues in a social science framework. This collection, by contrast, is explicitly cultural, focusing on literature, art, and linguistics to explore the “complexity and contingency of cultural and national identities” (5). The editors suggest that Ukrainian culture emerged in dynamic relationship with Europe, while assuming that both Europe and Ukraine are themselves constructed categories.

No reviewer could speak to all the contributions, but let me offer a brief sketch of the volume. George Grabowicz's “prologue” frames the entire collection by discussing the “aporia” in Ukrainian literature and “asymmetries” in its relations with European literature. His essay situates “Europe” for Ukraine in geographic terms, highlighting the influence of not only Polish, but also Russian literature. For example, the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko appropriated Lord Byron through Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov. Yet Grabowicz argues that ultimately, while the connection with Russian literature was crucial for the development of a Ukrainian literary tradition, “Ukraine's connection to Poland is arguably as central as the Russian-Ukrainian interface” (22).

This connection with the world of Polish letters is developed further in Part One, consisting of seven essays on the “common cultural space of the baroque” (45) in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Highlights include Giovanna Brogi Bercoff's argument that what made seventeenth century literature “Ukrainian” was its linguistic pluralism, especially marked in the writings of Ukrainian churchmen, and especially in those who moved to Peter I's Moscow. Contributing to the scholarship on the history of reading (often focused on western Europe) Natalia Yakovenko uses Kyiv Mohyla Collegium elite Ioannikii Galiatovskyi's marginal references to trace the shift in his understanding of the European space: from a threat to Orthodoxy to part of his own cultural world. Continuing exploration of the Kyiv Mohyla Collegium, Natalia Pylypiuk examines European Humanism's influence through one play, The Speech of Catherine's Guardian Spirit. On a broader level, Frank Sysyn offers a convincing argument that Ukraine should be included in wider analysis of the European crisis of the seventeenth century because the Bohdan Khmel΄nyts΄kyi “revolution” demands a different paradigm of social and political change that that presented for western Europe.

Part Two's six contributions focus on “Ukraine's romanticisms and modernisms” in the nineteenth century. Noteworthy is Marko Pavlyshyn's welcome focus on Marko Vovchok (pen name of Mariia Vilinskaia) and her conscious choice to use Ukrainian to produce socially engaged literature. Giulia Lami offers the only contribution to examine the question of Europe and Ukraine in the other direction, by analyzing Swiss writer Victor Tissot's “encounter” with the Ukrainian regions of the Russian Empire. Maxim Tarnawsky's and Yaroslav Hrystaks's essays offer windows into their larger work on Ivan Nechui-Levytskyi and Ivan Franko respectively.

Part Three reads as the most catch-all section, with seven essays covering the late imperial to the post-Soviet period, including an epilogue by Serhii Plokhy. Oleh Ilnytskyj uses Nikolai Gogol΄ as an example of how the idea of Europe helped Ukrainians writing in the Russian Empire create their own literature. Three contributions tackle the experimental flourishing of modernism in the twentieth century: Tamara Hundorova shows how Berlin as a topos offered a variety of options for Ukrainian modernist writers; Alexander Kratochvil reads Mykola Khvylovyi's Ia—Romantika as a trauma narrative typical of the post-World War I period; Halyna Hryn argues that the journal Literaturnyi iarmarok broke free of imitating European models by mixing European high culture with traditional forms and tropes. The section then leaps forward to Oxana Pachlovska's analysis of how the 60-ers (shistdesiatnyky) interpreted Europe, and then again to Ola Hnatiuk's essay on the world of Ukrainian intellectuals anxious for European engagement on the eve of Maidan. Serhii Plokhy's epilogue argues for a new map of Europe that includes Ukraine.

This wide-ranging volume does have some gaps of note. Specifically, it often seems like an exploration of “Ukrainians” and Europe, missing anything about “encounters and negotiations” with Jewish culture, for example, so rich in the region and also engaged in dynamic relationship with Europe. The Soviet section lacks any reference to World War II or how writers beyond the 1920s engaged with Europe (the capitalist west? Wartime allies? Cold War enemies?). The volume further raises the question of Ukrainian culture's engagement with Europe's darker side, such as fascism or the challenges of today's EU. Finally, readers would appreciate biographical information on the authors and clarity on when they wrote contributions (Hnatiuk notes she wrote her piece in 2011, before Maidan).

Despite these gaps, the volume will be extraordinarily useful for scholars interested in acquainting themselves with some of the major names in Ukrainian culture, and will be a useful compendium for scholars already well-versed in the debates. The collection could easily work for a course on east European culture and should become a classic reference work for scholars in the fields of Ukrainian studies, Slavic literatures, and east European history.