This is an excerpt from Understanding Ukraine and Belarus: A Memoir by David R. Marples. Download your free copy on E-International Relations.
I flew initially to Calgary in mid-August 1978 and spent a night in the YMCA. The following day, I took the bus to Edmonton where I was picked up by someone from the University of Alberta’s International Center and provided with temporary residence at HUB (Housing Union Building) Mall, which dates from 1969. HUB Mall was also intended to be the hub of the campus and a means to offset the lack of affordable housing, not least of all for international students. It forms the letter H when seen from above, with stores on either side and a passageway down the middle. At the center the pathway turns to the right to the Rutherford Library.
I was billeted in a two-room apartment with another student arriving from England. Such was my financial plight that I did not have sufficient funds in the bank to pay my registration fees and ran up an overdraft. I received an angry letter from the Manager of the Toronto Dominion Bank warning me not to let it happen again.
After six weeks, I moved into another apartment in the Garneau area and occupied the basement. By now, I had met through organized meetings a number of other foreign graduate students who naturally gathered together. They had all joined a local housing organization called Campus Co-op. We took a trip to the Rockies in early October for Thanksgiving, during which it was suggested that I should also be a member. My basement suite was quite unsuitable. The French Canadian next door, a very lively fellow, was up at all hours playing music and the smell of marijuana would penetrate my apartment. It was like being back at Keele. There was a vacancy at one of the houses in the co-op very close to campus called Laputa. I had to go through a formal interview to be accepted but it proved well worthwhile.
Once there, my life became simpler. Rent was much lower than in my basement suite, and the main obligation was to share the cooking and cleaning in the lounge area. We held monthly meetings with the other units. I suddenly had a new family, which is basically what any new immigrant needs, though I had the obvious advantages of native language and even some history, given the British legacy and Canada’s theoretical allegiance to the Queen.
Some major problems developed on campus, however. In the late 1970s, the Department of History was at its peak in terms of size with about 55 tenure-track or tenured professors. The quip was that most of the professors were tall white guys with beards and called David. It was not far from the truth. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there had been a spate of hiring, especially in Canadian history. Alberta was oil-rich and prices were high. David Hall and Rod Macleod had been hired directly from their residences by phone calls before completing their PhDs at the University of Toronto. David Johnson, who specialized in Latin American history, was hired around the same time. A UK native, David Moss, who focused on British economic history and David Mills, another Canadianist, were later to be added. The Americanist in the department was David Lightner. The East Europeanists, besides Rudnytsky, included Ken Taylor and Martin Katz, who both worked on Russia. The Chair was a Canadianist called Robert Hett.
The graduate students all occupied windowless offices in corridors of the second floor of the Henry Marshall Tory Building, and in pairs. My socializing began in the daytime when there would be discussions in the hallway. The atmosphere was fairly relaxed. The Canadian graduate system is so different from the British one that it was difficult to adjust. In the UK, students are left more or less to their own devices. In Alberta, we had no such freedom. We were obliged to register in several courses as well as sit a language examination in our field of study, something I had undertaken in both French and German as an undergraduate in London.
My Russian class was with Katz, who used to brew Russian Caravan tea and talk about Russian political thought of the 19th century. His hero was his former supervisor, Nicholas Riazanovsky, author of an authoritative textbook on Russian history published in 1963. He taught at the University of California at Berkeley. When anyone arrived on campus to give talks on Russian history topics, Katz would always ask: “Do you know Nicholas Riazanovsky?” The phrase entered my consciousness. Twenty-two years later I was at a conference in Tampere, Finland, listening to a speaker when a distinguished looking man entered the room. On his jacket was a name tag revealing that he was Nicholas Riazanovsky. I felt honored and somewhat disbelieving to have finally seen this legendary figure. Katz, in short, was somewhat eccentric, but extremely knowledgeable. He was also the easiest of these professors in terms of workload and allowed me time to read.
One of the professors, Helena Liebel-Weckowitz, another eccentric and extroverted woman who taught European history, had little time for the British educational system that permitted students to move from a BA to a PhD and insisted that I must first register for an MA and write a thesis. I protested, but Rudnytsky saw no harm in such a sidestep. It would be natural to divide my research topic on Western Ukraine into two parts: the MA covering the years 1939-1941 and subsequently the PhD, covering the years from 1944 to 1953. Liebel-Weckowitz, with whom all graduate students were obligated to take a Philosophy of History course that rarely ventured into either discipline, also began to insist that I sit for the German language examination, even though my topic was Ukraine. She was ultimately overruled by Rudnytsky, and I was allowed to take the Ukrainian exam.
Rudnytsky was also my supervisor, both of my thesis and my Teaching Assistantship. He was quite demanding. I would be asked to attend his lectures on 19th and 20th century Ukraine and take full notes. He needed texts in English that he could read in future lectures. Sometimes I would take up to 70 hours per week to transcribe them rather than the required 12 to turn his notes into adequate prose.
In class, he would often smoke a cigarette, and pause for effect mid-sentence. His sentences were slow and deliberate. On one occasion he remarked:
The English Prime Minister at this time was Lloyd George and the French Prime Minister was Poincare. I do not recall the name of the Italian Prime Minister…. However, I do not consider that to be the greatest gap in my historical knowledge.
I learned a lot from him. He liked nothing better than to sit in his office chair, pipe smoking, and discuss some nagging question, usually but not always about Ukrainian history. He was not a nationalist but felt that in the 1930s, choices for politically active Ukrainians were very limited – notably he had studied in Berlin after leaving Poland as a child in the 1930s, and between 1943 and 1945 worked on a PhD at Charles University in Prague, also under Nazi rule. But he never spoke of these times. He told me that some of his compatriots looked to Germany (or Italy) in the 1930s because these countries offered the best hope for future changes in Europe, both for those in Poland (Eastern Galicia) and those in the Soviet Union. Rudnytsky also had a fascination for Chinese literature. He took an unusual interest in all my activities, including a soccer team I had organized, which he mentioned specifically when writing me a letter of reference.
At CIUS, I met Himka again, as well as a coterie of young scholars at the beginning of their careers, all of whom would make a significant impact in different ways in Ukrainian studies. University students of Ukrainian background frequented CIUS. Rudnytsky’s wife, the poet Alexandra Chernenko, was a regular visitor. She was a formidable figure, usually clad in a fur coat and hair in a bun, and provided a contrast to her mild-mannered husband.
In the summer of 1979, when Rudnytsky went on holiday, he and Alexandra asked me to look after their house for two weeks, which I accepted with alacrity as it would allow me access to the remarkable library he kept in his study in the basement. I spent a contented period poring through his books, which equaled in their scope any library I had seen on interwar Galicia. Admittedly, my housekeeping was an unmitigated disaster, since I managed to kill Aleksandra’s prize plant through overwatering, and then I ran over the power cord with Ivan’s lawnmower attempting to cut the lawn before they returned. The machine exploded leaving hundreds of pieces of orange cord scattered around the lawn.
In 1979-1980, I wrote a regular column for The Gateway, the student newspaper of the University of Alberta. I named it “Quixote,” since I always seemed to be tilting at windmills, and I covered any topic I pleased, mostly to do with events and life on campus. The Editor was Gordon Turtle, an easygoing man with dark black hair, ably assisted by a good-humored and very talented student, Lucinda Chodan. On one occasion I scoffed at Engineering Week, which started an avalanche of protest letters. I wondered if the column would survive but Turtle was delighted. We were making headlines. Also on the editorial board was a devout Communist called Brian Mason, earnest and thin, with whom I engaged in some discussions. By this time, I was no longer the London radical and had moderated my views though I was still well to the left of the political spectrum.
Their future careers were different but all quite prominent. Turtle became personal spokesperson for Ralph Klein, Premier of Alberta from 1992 to 2006, an early populist, social Conservative politician. I was shocked at first to read statements from Turtle defending Klein’s more outrageous actions. Klein cut public spending by more than 20% when the world oil prices dropped to $10 per barrel, but offered little sympathy to the unemployed despite his own impoverishment in his youth. Lucinda became Editor-in-Chief of the Edmonton Journal, then took the same position at the Montreal Gazette. Mason became a member of the legislative assembly, offering a leftist rather than Communist voice in the Alberta Legislature, and Minister of Transport in the New Democratic Party government after its surprise victory in 2014.
In the spring of 1980, I defended the MA thesis, with an examining committee that consisted of Rudnytsky (chair), Bohdan Krawchenko, another CIUS Research Associate who was formally an associate professor of Political Science, and Kenneth Taylor, mentioned above, an historian of Modern Russian military history. I recall one of Taylor’s questions, which was “Mr. Marples, if interwar Poland was as bad as you paint it, why did your country and mine go to war in 1939 to defend it?”
About a decade later, Taylor left the department very suddenly. Evidently, he had fabricated publications for his annual report for a number of years, claiming they were classified documents written for the Canadian Department of National Defence (DND). The claim was dispelled by a member of DND who happened to be visiting the campus, and provided this information to the Chair, David Hall. Taylor’s career ended abruptly there and then, but he went on disability leave, probably to avoid a more serious scandal.
After the MA was complete, I learned that Lupul was seeking an editorial assistant for CIUS Press. I made some inquiries and was informed initially that I did not meet the job criteria. Lupul, however, gave me a chapter of a manuscript and asked me to come back after I had edited it. At first, I was quite tentative, but it occurred to me that he would want something quite rigorous, and I went to town on the awkward non-native English text, filling the pages with red ink and margin comments. That edit – the author was in fact, and to my regret, Iwan Koropeckyj – changed my career path. Lupul was elated. He then took it upon himself to ensure that when the position was advertised, I would be the clear candidate and no Canadian would be qualified for the role. Rudnytsky was taken aback by the news and that the PhD thesis was no longer my key priority. I had to return to England to apply for permanent residency in Canada, with no indication of how long that might take.
My second stint in Edmonton began in August 1980. Lupul wanted to start me on $10,000 per year, but the University informed him that this sum was $5,600 below the minimum salary so he had to readjust his budget. The atmosphere was friendly, but the work was arduous. I have always felt since that editing manuscripts – alongside translation – is the most thankless and unrewarding of tasks, particularly when the authors are all non-native speakers. Out of frustration, I started up a satirical monthly journal called Beztaktnist’, which focused on the Ukrainian academic community in Canada, ably assisted by two other CIUS employees, Andrij Hornjatkevyc, who served as the Ukrainian-language interpreter for Lupul and was a professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies (MLCS – it went through several appellations so I am using the current one), and Myroslav Yurkevich, a new Research Associate.
It was intended to be good humored and no one was spared. I think it survived because of the support of Lupul, who would read it in his office, door closed, with loud guffaws emanating from within. It was genuinely popular and distributed widely among the Ukrainian academic community. Some people took it too seriously. Paul Robert (Bob) Magocsi, Toronto’s Chair of Ukrainian Studies, thought the issue in which he featured was part of a coordinated campaign against him led by Lupul. That stemmed from events around Magocsi’s hiring in 1980, about which I knew nothing – Rudnytsky later provided me with some details. I discovered Magocsi’s concerns about Beztaktnist’ only when I read his memoirs in 2019.
The noted Edmonton author Myrna Kostash also objected to a sarcastic portrayal of Edmonton feminists as pot-smoking misandrists, though her partner Jars Balan, took it in very good humor. No doubt today such a pamphlet might not survive because campuses are much more sensitive, but it was only ever intended to be an internal affair.
After six months or so in my new position, I started to communicate once again with Everett Jacobs. I had almost abandoned the PhD thesis, but he assured me that I was still registered at Sheffield, had completed the necessary course work, and could always suspend my registration for a couple of years before returning to it. I saw plenty of Rudnytsky while at CIUS, and he was a regular attendee of seminars, where he would enter late and noisily fiddle with his briefcase, appear to fall asleep, and then ask some erudite question that threw the speaker off guard. By now, he and Lupul had parted company and were not on good terms. It was evident that Lupul was irritated by the “European” Ukrainians who considered themselves better educated, while Rudnytsky considered him a power-hungry administrator. Perhaps that is a simplification but there was no question about the animosity between them.
Though Rudnytsky would have liked me to continue with my PhD at Alberta, I was happy with a regular wage and daunted by the heavy course work and comprehensive examinations that would surely delay completion. I also felt I owed something to Everett who had been an inspirational supervisor and had provided me with numerous materials about Western Ukraine through his trips to Moldova and Moscow. I began, tentatively, to return to the thesis.
In this same period, I married a former Campus Co-op housemate, Lan Chan, and we had a son, Carlton, born in September 1983. Lan was born in China but had come to Canada as a 12-year old with her family. I was happy at home and frustrated at work, but Everett had left me a loophole should I wish to return formally to academia. In the CIUS main office, I was allowed to use the computer after hours, an ancient affair at that time – one typed green text on a black background onto a huge machine. I would sit in the secretary’s chair typing away, usually with Lupul for company because he kept late hours in his office opposite.
In 1983, CIUS, on the initiative of Krawchenko, was commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Ukrainian famine, with a conference and other events. Since I was one of the closest to the field I was invited to speak in Edmonton City Centre when the Ukrainian Self-Reliance League unveiled a monument outside City Hall, which in shape was like a compact disc with an incision in the top, and read “In memory of the millions who perished in the genocidal famine inflicted upon Ukraine by the Soviet regime in Moscow 1932-1933.” The monument was one of the first anywhere to use the term “genocide.” Krawchenko, together with Roman Serbyn of the University of Quebec, edited a book based on the conference, on which I had worked as the main editor for many hours.
At this time, the Soviet Union still denied the very existence of a famine, let alone a genocide. I had a series of exchanges with the bilingual Kyiv newspaper, News from Ukraine, which was directed toward Ukrainians living abroad, as well as the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, which would admit only that there were some “food difficulties” during these years. In the early 1980s, the Ukrainian Communists were still active, and any group visiting from Ukraine would contact these people first and take part in their events. For others, Soviet Ukraine was a distant alien world.
In March 1983, James E. Mace was asked to come to Edmonton to give the annual CIUS Shevchenko Lecture on the 1932-1933 famine. Mace had written about the subject for his PhD thesis on Ukrainian National Communism and subsequently assisted Robert Conquest, who had been commissioned by the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University to write the first major work in English on the topic (more recently that role has been filled by Anne Applebaum), eventually published in 1986 under the title The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Mace was a brash young man of 31, with slicked black hair and an Oklahoma drawl. He could be entertaining and outrageous at the same time. In 1983, in Ukrainian circles, he was becoming someone of significance. But he was unpredictable.
The morning after his Shevchenko Lecture I came into the CIUS office where there was visible consternation.
“Where is Mace?” I was asked.
“I don’t know,” I responded.
“He is supposed to be in Saskatoon to give a talk tonight but he wasn’t on the plane.”
At some point one of the secretaries opened the door to the CIUS Library. There was Mace, asleep on the sofa. He had not returned to his hotel after a night of socializing. He was soon hustled into a car, taken to the airport and sent to his next destination of Winnipeg, Manitoba.
At Christmas, the Lupuls always held a party at their home, and his wife Natalia would cook roast beef. White wine was generally stored in the snow outside the back door and several trips were made to find it. Lupul loved to sing, and after a martini or two would burst into song, with Hornjatkevyc and others backing him up. In full song, they resembled a Welsh choir and it was moving to listen to. Lupul would hold forth on subjects close to his heart: multiculturalism, visible minorities – by which he meant Ukrainians in Canada – and the Anglo-Celtic establishment. But he was a committed and passionate Canadian, perhaps the key difference between he and Rudnytsky, who never seemed like he belonged on the Prairies. Moreover, I felt at this time very much part of a protected elite, a team of scholars working on an enterprise. Professor of Ukrainian Literature Danylo Struk was the able lieutenant and generally visited from Toronto several times per year.
Lupul’s priorities at CIUS were the Encyclopaedia of Ukraine project, on which Struk took the lead either from Toronto or Sarcelles (Paris), CIUS Press, and the Newsletter. Emphasis in practice was roughly equal. In Edmonton, we had little to do with the Encyclopaedia, which like the Journal of Ukrainian Studies, was edited and published in Toronto. The Press, which concerned my own tasks, was always key. Manuscripts piled up because there were not enough editors to deal with them. Most came to me – those in Ukrainian went to Myroslav Yurkevich. Koropeckyj wrote to me urgently in the early 1980s: “Please take my manuscript off bottom of pile and put on top, or however you make your editorial decisions.”
I complied, feeling that I owed him a lot. Few of the manuscripts would gather much public interest beyond the narrow world of Ukrainian studies, such as a Ukrainian folk tales volume or John Basarab’s authoritative but rather tedious volume on Pereiaslav 1654. An exception was Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak’s Feminists Despite Themselves about the women’s interwar movement among Ukrainians living in Eastern Galicia, which eventually appeared during my second spell at CIUS, in 1988.
Lupul’s chief concern was a manuscript on Ukrainian life in Canada by Vasyl Czumer, translated from the original Ukrainian. The book was ready for printing when I overheard a phone call involving Lupul and the question: “He’s gone and changed his name to what?”
The book had to be recalled at the galley proof stage and reissued under the name William A. Czumer, at the request of the author’s estate. It appeared in 1981 and is still a key text, distributed, for example, at the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village near Edmonton.
We also published several CIUS conference series related to Ukrainian relations with Russians, Jews, and Poles, each in separate volumes and after lengthy editing. I had particular problems with Ukrainian-Jewish Relations, edited by Howard Aster and Peter J. Potichnyj. The Newsletter, which was a bilingual English-Ukrainian affair, caused the most problems. Lupul would go through the English edition, muttering to himself:
“If this ever got out, we would be the laughingstock of the Ukrainian community.” The offending sentence might lack a comma after an introduction such as “In 1981.” Or the dates might be reversed between American and British style. The Ukrainian edition was in the hands of Andrij Hornjatkevyc, and as Lupul could not read that language very well, progress was simpler. The Newsletter, simply put, was CIUS speaking to the community and beyond, whereas errors in books could be attributed to the neglect of individual authors.
I never followed closely the progress of multiculturalism in Canada, which was clearly Lupul’s prime concern. He was always politically active, often angry, but committed, and very determined. Together with his friend Peter Savaryn, his campaign was largely successful, at least in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1982, Savaryn, a city lawyer, was appointed Chancellor of the University of Alberta, a significant achievement in which Lupul and CIUS played important roles as nominators. Savaryn was as active as Lupul, though whereas Lupul politically was linked to the Liberal Party, Savaryn was a Conservative. In his youth he had joined the Ukrainian Waffen SS Division in his native Galicia, and he was more nationalist than most others around in the early 1980s, with one exception, a notable figure named Yar Slavutych.
Slavutych (1918-2011) is best remembered for his book Conversational Ukrainian, which I used myself when my neighbor Halyna Freeland, an Edmonton lawyer, volunteered to work with me to improve my spoken Ukrainian. But much about him remains a mystery, including his real name. In his obituary, published in legacy.com, it states that he was born in Blahodatne in central Ukraine and that many in his family died in the Holodomor. Presumably, he moved westward with the Soviet advance because he became displaced after the war. He moved to the US in the 1940s and ultimately became a Professor in MLCS until his retirement in 1988. He was a well-known Ukrainian-language poet.
After 1983, Slavutych claimed to have been a famine victim and on a mission to tell the story to the world. The Edmonton Journal once carried a vivid narrative of Slavutych fleeing from the German occupants, with one sentence ending “with the Nazis on his tail, Slavutych fled to Berlin.” Slavutych was an imposing figure, balding with large eyeglasses, who would invariably be on one of the front seats of every CIUS seminar. Jars Balan related a story of the time he did some research work for Slavutych, at the end of which the professor promised the student a gourmet meal as payment. When the day duly came, Jars recalled his surprise as Slavutych’s car approached the familiar yellow arches: “Very good food and fast service,” was Slavutych’s comment.
Thus, I was now working in an exclusively Ukrainian environment, in which the Ukrainian language was used daily by most people around me. In some ways it was a stopgap position in that it was never my intention to make a career as an editor. I had a young family and we needed regular wages. To what extent I was part of the community was never made clear, but the atmosphere was cordial. Moreover, CIUS had received a number of endowments, which added to its budget from the university made it a relatively affluent institution. It reported formally to the Associate Vice-President (Research), but the subordination was ritualistic. In practice, no one bothered us. Lupul was free to forge his own path and operated as a sort of benign authoritarian, short tempered, but very considerate of those within his entourage.
Eventually, however, I had a draft of my thesis that was considered defendable by Everett and sent it to the UK. It was well over 600 pages. Later in the year I was invited to the defense in Sheffield. Besides Everett, the examiners were Julian Birch of the Department of Political Science and Peter Wiles of the London School of Economics, a formidable but irascible scholar and one that would not have been my first choice. Initially, only Birch asked questions, all of which were pertinent and to which I was able to respond fully. Wiles burst into life after about an hour, asking about Hutsuls and khutors. How could they be collectivized given their location in the mountains? The discussion seemed endless but I got the impression he was not entirely satisfied with my responses. In truth, I had written very little about the Hutsuls since the focus was on the main grain-growing areas in the Galician regions of Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk (then Stanislav), and Ternopil. After three hours, I received a “pass” but with revisions.
Before sending Wiles my thesis I had bound it in a brown cover and sent it to him via a visiting friend also working on a PhD from the University of Sheffield, who was able to take it to him personally. As we descended the elevator he remarked: “There I was staggering around London with this ruddy great brown fucker under my arm.” Thus, all my labors were encapsulated in one phrase, “brown fucker.” There was still much work to do. Shortly thereafter, Everett Jacobs left academia and moved into business with his wife. The Department of Economic and Social History was soon merged with History; thus I was one of its last PhDs. During the period of making final changes, Anthony Sutcliffe, an urban historian far from my field, was assigned as my supervisor.
In the spring of 1984, I received a phone call from Roman Solchanyk, who was working at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) in Munich. He was seeking a Research Analyst on Ukraine and I seemed like a possible choice. I flew to Munich shortly afterward for an interview at the tightly guarded former psychiatric hospital on the edge of the beautifully laid out Englischer Garten. The situation seemed ideal. The wages were outstanding, RFE/RL would pay to transport my family and all our belongings to Munich and I could work full-time on contemporary Ukraine. Thus, it was an easy decision to make the move. With my thesis almost completed, I felt in a good position to support my small family and broaden my knowledge of Ukrainian topics. Moreover, I was weary of editing other people’s manuscripts.
During this same period, Ivan Rudnytsky died. I do not recall where I was precisely at the time other than that I was not in Edmonton. He had suffered a heart attack at the age of 64, a tragic loss of a scholar who was to become better known after his death – especially in Ukraine – than he was during his lifetime. His protégé, John-Paul Himka, wrote the following about him in a tribute, which was published in the Kyiv journal Krytyka in November 2014:
I had seen him a day or two before his death, visiting him in the University of Alberta Hospital, where he seemed to be recovering successfully from a heart attack. He had at his bedside a volume of ancient Chinese stories in German translation. He had loved belles lettres his whole life. And his interest in Oriental literature had been sparked by lectures on the subject he had heard as a student in wartime Berlin. He often told me that his professor of Orientalistik used to lecture about Eastern despotisms, while actually voicing a critique of the Nazi regime. He thought this exposed the difference between national socialist and communist totalitarianism. No such Aesopian lectures would have been possible to deliver at a university under Stalin; in the Soviet Union the space for intellectual independence was much more restricted.
In 2019, Rudnytsky’s diaries, belatedly discovered, were published by CIUS and ran to over 2,000 pages though they contained little about his life in Edmonton. Thus, it became evident that most of his thoughts were laid out on paper in privacy and for posterity. I think it evident in hindsight that he considered Stalinism a greater evil than Nazism, at least in terms of the continuation of intellectual life. I learned from my PhD student, Ernest Gyidel, that Rudnytsky had never formally completed his thesis in Prague. All registered students were awarded the PhD, regardless of level of progress, when the university was evacuated prior to the arrival of the Red Army. Rudnytsky’s chief problem throughout his life was his failure to finish his many projects. Those that were completed were through the labors of his colleagues and students, particularly John-Paul Himka.
Thus, John-Paul worked painstakingly on a book entitled Rethinking Ukrainian History, published in 1981 by University of Alberta Press. It was a collection of essays on various aspects of Ukrainian history by leading scholars, edited by Rudnytsky and Himka, the work divided equally. As the book went through the editing process, under my direction, Rudnytsky wrote me that he should be cited as the editor, followed by “with the assistance of John-Paul Himka.” Then he requested that the phrase be in smaller typeface than that of his own name. It might be perceived as petty, but I think he was only too aware of the paucity of his own publications, especially in the English language.
