"An unrivalled collective effort by the finest scholars in the field, from Ukraine, Russia, USA, Germany, Austria and Canada, superbly written to a high academic standard. The various chapters are methodologically innovative and thought-provoking. The biggest country located in Eastern Europe has ancient roots but also the birth pangs of a newly independent state. Its historiography is characterized by animated, debates, in which this book lakes a definite stance." "The history of Ukraine is not. written here as a linear, teleological narrative of ethnic Ukrainians but as a multidimensional history of a diversity of cultures, religious denominations, languages and historical experience. It is not presented as causal explanation of "what has to have happened" but rather as conjunctures and. contingencies, disruptions, and episodes of "lack of history.""--BOOK JACKET.