HURI congratulates Andriy Zayarnyuk for winning this year's Omeljan Pritsak Book Prize in Ukrainian Studies, announced by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) ahead of the annual ASEEES convention.
The winning book is L’viv’s Uncertain Destination: A City and Its Train Terminal from Franz Joseph I to Brezhnev (University of Toronto Press, 2020).
Lviv’s Uncertain Destination examines the city’s tumultuous twentieth-century history through the lens of its main railway terminal. Whereas most existing studies of eastern European cities centre their stories on discrete ethnic groups, milestone political events, and economic changes, this book’s narrative is woven around an important site within the city’s complex spatial matrix. Combining architectural, economic, social, and everyday life history, Andriy Zayarnyuk shows how different political regimes created dissimilar social spaces even on the same streets and in the same buildings. His narrative leads us to rethink how the late imperial Habsburg and Romanov, Stalinist and post-Stalinist Soviet, interwar Polish, and Nazi German regimes produced, structured, and controlled urban space. Focusing on railway workers, the book also draws attention to the history of Lviv’s wage earners, who constituted the majority of the city’s adult population.
The Pritsak Prize was established in 2018 as part of the prestigious ASEEES Book Prize program. It recognizes a noteworthy book in any discipline on any aspect of Ukrainian affairs that was published in the previous calendar year. HURI sponsors the cash award for the prize, while the judging is managed entirely by ASEEES.