Abyss Of Despair Book

Highly laconic and emotive. The text renders itself unreliable and historically inaccurate through its clear overestimation of Jewish casualties, as the eminent historians Shaul Stampfer, Edward Fram, Paul Robert Magocsi and Petro Mirchuk all testify. The text neglects to acknowledge the role of Jewish leaseholders, who collected duties, administered estates and revenue-producing establishments and acted as an intermediary for the oppressive Polish feudal system in Ukraine. The text seems preoccupied with slandering the Ukrainian nation and using the writing as a sort of bawdy retort/revenge. The reliability of historiography relating to the Khmelnytsky Uprising and the Ukrainian National Liberation of the 17th century has been contingent on the group from which it derives. Polish Rawita-Gawroński's work on the topic is almost unusable, testifying that Bohdan was himself Jewish, the work is better utilised for the study of Polish nationalism. Likewise, 'The Abyss of Despair' condemned itself to yet another one sided version of the events determined by the feelings and emotions of those that wrote it. The work of Velychko and Hrabianka are the most reliable on the event, neither over glorifying the heroism of the Ukrainian Cossacks or ignoring the sufferings of the Jewish nation. They are inspired and in some ways copies of the Ukrainian Hetmanate's Archives destroyed on the order of Catherine II and so can be considered contemporaneous with the events. Despite its focus on martyrdom and its attempts to ignore the context of the Insurrection and the suffering of the Ukrainian people, I suppose its literary qualities and passionate language are the only commendable aspect of the book.