Born during the Ukrainian-Polish War in Galicia (western Ukraine), Omeljan Pritsak grew up in a world of collapsing empires and changing governments. His academic journey started at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lviv, which Pritsak entered in 1936. There, he studied Semitic, Iranian, and Altaic languages and developed an interest in the history of the steppe world.

Several times, the KGB tried to recruit him for intelligence work. His case file was named “Linguist” and stated that “Pritsak is a professor at the University of Hamburg, speaks eighteen languages, [and] has great connections among the Ukrainian emigration in the West.”

Pritsak’s academic rise was remarkable, especially given his social and ethnic background. After wartime upheavals and German captivity, he resumed his studies at the University of Göttingen, where he specialized in Turkology and Iranistics. In 1957, at the age of thirty-eight, he was appointed professor of Turkology at the University of Hamburg; later, he worked at the University of Washington in Seattle as a professor of Turkic and Central Asian History.

In 1964, Pritsak was appointed as a professor of Linguistics and Turkology at Harvard, where he would later co-found the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Pritsak’s life reflects the intellectual and political dramas of twentieth-century Europe—and the making of Ukrainian Studies as a global academic field.

A remarkable two-book volume: Diary of A Hunger Striker, the first-hand account of celebrated Ukrainian filmmaker Oleh Sentsov, jailed unfairly as a political prisoner, during his 145-day-long hunger strike in a Russian prison; and Four and a Half Steps, his newest collection of short stories. Sentsov’s prison diary begins three days into his indefinite hunger strike, as he calls for the release of all political prisoners in Russia. Frank, sharp, and detailed, the diary recounts day after day of observations and thoughts about his daily life, from interactions with guards, police officers, good and bad, to his thoughts on fellow writers and the world outside his cell.

This book brings Shums’kyi’s legacy out of the shadows into the light of today’s struggle and provides a new perspective on the causes of Soviet repression and Russian pathologies regarding Ukrainian independence, helping us to understand Russia’s current war against Ukraine. It reveals a tragic, complex figure who fought for Ukraine from within the Soviet system.

Oleksandr Shums’kyi, a Marxist and staunch opponent of the imperialist notion of Ukraine as “Little Russia,” believed in an equal, sovereign, and socialist Ukraine, not a subordinate appendage of the Russian Empire.

Despite torture, paralysis, and the murder of his wife, Shums’kyi never confessed to Stalin’s fabricated crimes, sustaining for over a decade a massive protest against his repression and the Stalinist attack on Ukraine. He died for the idea of a free Ukraine, refusing to surrender his dignity or his homeland.

His refusal to surrender, a sense of dignity, and a love for his homeland—echoes in Ukraine’s battle today.