Vid Mistiki do Politiki

Toronto: Spilka Vizvolennia Ukraini, 1957. Softcover. First edition; 5 3/4 x 8; pp. [2], 5-61, [1]; illustrated beige wraps; minor wear to tips of spine and corners; faint age-toning and dust-dulling to margins of wraps; two closed cuts to half-title page radiating outwards from upper staple; very good. Title and publisher's imprint in both Ukrainian and English on facing pages. Tipped-in sheet with a summary in English.Dmytro Dontsov (1883 – 1973) was a Ukrainian author, journalist, and a radical political thinker with great influence over the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Born in a Cossack officer's family, Dontsov joined the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1905, was arrested shortly after for being an instigator in "Socialist politics," and was forced to move to Vienna in 1909. After the Revolution, he returned home and was appointed Head of Pavlo Skoropadsky's Government's official news agency. By 1922 Dmytro had rejected the Nationalist ideas of his youth and had increasingly become immersed in radical Nationalism. In 1939, right before the takeover of Western Ukraine by the Soviets Dontsov fled his country for Bucharest, then Prague, Germany, Paris, and the United States until he finally settled in Toronto where he taught Ukrainian literature at Universite de Montreal.The summary of his current book, one of his most pronounced anti-Semitic works, reads: "Muscovite Communism and Zionism are two forces that on the basis of their mysticism...consider their nations to be "higher," to be "chosen peoples"...If Ukraine is to be victorious in its age old struggle against Muscovite messianism, she must turn to the mysticism of ancient Christian Kiev..."