James Boyko

"The independence of Ukraine is indispensable. A Russian-Ukrainian confrontation would make Bosnia look like a Sunday-school picnic. Moscow should be made to understand that any attempt to destabilize Ukraine - to say nothing of outright aggression - would have devastating consequences for the Russian-American relationship. Ukrainian stability is in the strategic interest of the United States." Richard Nixon, Former U.S. President. New York Times, March 25, 1994 "Ukraine is a very vast, very fertile, and very beautiful country that does not exist. The name does not appear upon any modern English map. It is not recognized by diplomats; it was banned by Russians and Austrians alike. But, ladies and gentlemen, the word [Ukraine] does exist, buried in the hearts of nearly 36,000,000 people and what is more alive than the thoughts of 36,000,000 people?" Bedwin Sands (George Raffalovich) 1914. The Ukraine: Reprint of a lecture delivered on Ukrainian history and present day political problems. London: Francis Griffiths, 1914. "Ukrainian was to Gogol "the language of the soul," and it was in Ukrainian songs rather than in old chronicles, of which he was not a little contemptuous, that he read the history of his people. Time and again, in his essays and in his letters to friends, he expresses his boundless joy in these songs: "O songs, you are my joy and my life! How I love you. What are the bloodless chronicles I pore over beside those clear, live chronicles! I cannot live without songs; they reveal everything more and more clearly, oh, how clearly, gone-by life and gone-by men….All of Ukraine took on its colour from the Cossack, and if I have drawn largely on Gogol's own account of the origins of this race, it was because it seemed to me that Gogol's emphasis on the heroic rather than on the historical…would give the reader a proper approach to the mood in which he created "Taras Bulba," the finest epic in [Ukrainian] literature." Introductory comments from Taras Bulba and Other Tales by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol