Ukrainians who did not side with the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War, instead supporting the creation of an independent Ukrainian state, faced a difficult predicament in the 1920s and 1930s. Several newly created states partitioned the lands that are Ukraine today—the Soviet Union captured the country's south, east, and center; the Second Polish Republic took eastern Galicia and Volhynia in the west; the Kingdom of Romania annexed northern Bukovina; and Czechoslovakia incorporated Subcarpathian Rus΄. Ukrainian intellectuals scattered across Europe and as far as the Americas during the wave of westward emigration that followed the defeat of the short-lived Ukrainian National Republic. Many dreamed of someday returning to their native land, ideally after the anticipated downfall of communist rule, to resume construction of a free Ukraine. Forced into exile and out of politics, they set about preparing the ground for a triumphant homecoming through education, scholarship, and diplomacy.

In Scholars in Exile, Nadia Zavorotna argues that of all the countries in which Ukrainians took refuge in interwar Europe, Czechoslovakia was by far the most welcoming and generous host. Under the leadership of Tomáš G. Masaryk, the Czechoslovak state sponsored the enlightenment and democratic development of all the Slavic peoples, expressly including Ukrainians. Czechoslovakia opened its borders to uprooted Ukrainians, offering them substantial funding to create universities, libraries, publishing houses, and museums. Zavorotna describes the emergence of Prague and Podĕbrady as hubs of Ukrainian intellectual life where a new generation of Ukrainian teachers, engineers, lawyers, artists, writers, geographers, and historians—many of them veterans of the struggle for independence—continued educations interrupted by war and revolution. Some of the leading Ukrainian scholars of the day eschewed better-paid positions elsewhere, instead devoting themselves to the cultivation of science, art, and humanities at newly founded Ukrainian institutions. Zavorotna's book is rich in biographical details about figures such as Dmytro Doroshenko, Dmytro Antonovych, Sofiia Rusova, Oleksandr Shul΄hyn, Oleksandr Kolessa, Ivan Horbachevs΄kyi, Stanislav Dnistrians΄kyi, Stepan Smal-Stots΄kyi, Stepan Rudnyts΄kyi, and Dmytro Chyzhevs΄kyi. The book also surveys the academic achievements, student life, finances, publishing activities, international networks, local milieus, and internal culture of the various centers of Ukrainian learning and scholarship in Czechoslovakia.

A collection of institutional histories, the book is divided into nine short chapters. The first covers the Ukrainian Free University, which offered instruction in a wide variety of subjects to Ukrainian students. The second, third, and fourth chapters are devoted to the Ukrainian Economic Academy, the Ukrainian Higher Pedagogical Institute, and Ukrainian School of Plastic Arts, respectively. Chapter six covers scholarly and professional organizations, such as the Ukrainian Historical-Philological Society, the Union of Ukrainian Doctors, and the Ukrainian Pedagogical Society, while chapter seven examines libraries, archives, and museums, especially the Museum of the Struggle for the Liberation of Ukraine. The final two chapters describe Ukrainian-language scholarly publishing in Czechoslovakia and efforts to forge ties with the international academic community, including in Soviet Ukraine.

Many of the Ukrainian scholars and institutions of interwar Czechoslovakia met a tragic end in the 1930s and 1940s. Their initial optimism gave way to pessimism as the Great Depression took hold, state funding dried up, the rise of Nazism changed central Europe irrevocably, and the Stalinist regime ruthlessly consolidated power in Ukraine. Most of the Ukrainian intellectuals who returned to Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s perished in the terror of the following decade, while many of those who stayed in Prague during the Soviet occupation of 1945 vanished into the Gulag. Nevertheless, the extraordinary collective labor of this community of scholars laid the foundations for Ukrainian scholarship and education to flourish outside of the Soviet Union throughout the twentieth century.

Scholars in Exile is the first English-language book to encapsulate this critical time and place in Ukrainian intellectual and institutional history. Zavorotna displays an encyclopedic knowledge of the relevant sources and depositories, making the volume a wonderful point of departure for researchers interested in the Ukrainian diaspora after the First World War. The book will also interest historians of interwar Czechoslovakia concerned with the country's foreign and domestic policy toward other Slavic nations. I would have liked to see more treatment of the diverse political convictions of the émigré Ukrainian scholars—beyond their generally unifying opposition to the Soviet state—but appreciate that this subject is beyond the scope of the work and would have required many more pages. While Scholars in Exile does not make any major historiographical interventions, it is a valuable contribution to our understanding of a heretofore little-known entanglement of Czech and Ukrainian history.