Some courses have already started in the University, but the majority commence next week, with students in the process of travelling to Cambridge and their lecturers in the process of completing preparations for them. We are therefore currently in a relative lull in terms of book borrowing, but I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what Ukrainian/Ukraine-related books Cambridge’s readers have got out on loan. (Note that the data is only about print books, not ebooks)
For the Cambridge libraries that use the Alma library management system (most, but certainly not all), there are 38 books currently on loan that are fully or partly in Ukrainian. Among them are several titles by a Ukrainian poet who is the focus of the work of a visiting Ukrainian researcher I met for a UL induction a few weeks ago – it is very nice to see this kind of cause and effect, from new library membership to books borrowed. Literature and history are the main topics of the Ukrainian books on loan, with major authors Oksana Zabuz︠h︡ko and Serhiĭ Z︠H︡adan among those whose books have been borrowed, but so too is the Ukrainian language. Since the results I can see include books from the MMLL Faculty Library, where such books are borrowable, there are quite a few language-learning titles in the list. Ukrainian has grown and grown in popularity as a tripos subject and through its open conversation classes, and these borrowing statistics will doubtless rocket when term gets fully underway.
Looking at books on loan that have “Ukraine” as a Library of Congress subject heading, there are currently 55 books out with readers. One of the more recent publications on loan is MMLL’s Professor Rory Finnin’s 2022 book Blood of others : Stalin’s Crimean atrocity and the poetics of solidarity, which recently won two prizes administered under the auspices of ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies). Blood of others was the winner of the University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies for “an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia in the fields of literary and cultural studies” – and a co-winner of the Omeljan Pritsak Book Prize in Ukrainian Studies for “a distinguished book in the field of Ukrainian studies”. Happily we also have Rory’s celebrated title as an ebook. Another book on the list of books on loan received an honourable mention from the 2021 Pritsak committee: Superfluous women : art, feminism, and revolution in twenty-first-century Ukraine by Dr Jessica Zychowicz. Again, we happily also have this as an ebook.
The “Ukraine” books on loan cover a wide range of subjects from Ukraine’s past to Ukraine’s present, covering centuries of the country’s history up to and including the current Russian war. Quite a few books about Chernobyl are on the list. I can also see books about music and art, as well as other books about Crimean Tatars. Most of the books are in English, but there are several titles in Ukrainian too, and a few in Russian.
Hopefully readers will understand why I’m not going to list all of these books: the days before term would be an unkind time for encouraging others to recall books out on loan. My first ever library job was in a college where we essentially had permission to break into students’ and academics’ college rooms to find overdue or recalled books. I rather doubt that is widely allowed nowadays, but I could be wrong.
Mel Bach
Languages across Borders 