Thomas Prymak

onoré de Balzac (1799-1850) is well-known among students of literature as a French writer who produced an enormous number of novels and short stories depicting the French society of his days, which he collectively called La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy). Recognised as a founder of the " realist " tradition in European literature, he is generally considered to be one of the greatest novelists of all time. What is less well-known about him, however, at least among the general public, is that for many years he dreamed of moving eastward to the Slavonic world and eventually spent almost two full years of his life on an estate in Ukraine about a hundred kilometers or so from Kiev, on the western or Right Bank of the Dnieper River near the town of Berdychiv. The story of how this happened is a dramatic one and constitutes the real " novel of his life, " as more than one of his biographers have put it. Balzac himself was actually of very modest origins. His grandfather had been a peasant from the south, his father a minor bureaucrat in revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and he himself added the " de " to his surname to make it sound more aristocratic. A spendthrift and poor businessman all his life-his unsuccessful ventures included mass market publishing, Sardinian silver mines, and Ukrainian lumber-he ran up enormous debts and had to work day and night, literally in a monk's robe, with pen in hand, and endless cups of coffee before him, to pay off these debts and keep afloat, though he never quite succeeded in this. But he was an acute observer of the emerging bourgeois world around him and described its inhabitants in great detail in his extremely penetrating stories and novels. In these, he described the internal side of things, but also well understood their causes, social and otherwise. He himself appeared to be driven by some unseen and unrelenting hand, much more than by simple ambition for love, money, or glory, and this seemingly caused him to attempt an ambitious and comprehensive description of the manners and morals of the entire society in which he lived. This was even reflected in many H

The word "maidan" briefly entered the western European and American vocabulary with the Kiev events of 2014, but it has a very old lineage going back to the ancient Near or Middle East. This illustrated essay traces it back as far as ancient Aramaic or Persian, through Turkish, to the modern Ukrainian language and to other languages of eastern Europe such as Polish and Russian, and discusses a variety of later meanings for the word in those tongues.

This paper is a study of Voltaire's treatment of the Ukrainian Cossack Hetman, Ivan Mazepa, in Voltaire's two histories dealing with eastern Europe, his 'History of Charles XII' and his 'History of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great,' with some reflections upon that famous author's method of "philosophical history" and his use of both oral and printed sources.