24 February 2025
Kharkiv
Today, on the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we continue to stand with Ukraine. Kharkiv was one of the first places in Ukraine affected by the war in the first hours of the invasion, and this blog is about Kharkiv and its people.
In 2010, Viacheslav Babeshko (1941-2010), a Kharkiv-born poet, wrote a poem ‘Our Kharkiv’:
Our Kharkiv has risen a long time ago
For peace, goodness, and love.
It’s constantly working and doing research
And looks as beautiful as delightful spring.
And indeed, Kharkiv is a city of students and scientists: almost half of its population have university degrees, and the Kharkiv University, founded in 1804, is the oldest in Ukraine. Three Nobel Prize laureates – biologist Elie Metchnikoff, economist Simon Smith Kuznets and physicist Lev Landau – lived in the city at various times. Photographer Alfred Fedetsky put Kharkiv on the map of cinematography when he shot his documentaries in 1896.
Page from V. Myslavs’kyi, Istoriia ukrains’koho kino 1896-1930: fakty i dokumenty. T. 1. (Kharkiv, 2018)
The first Ukrainian literary magazines – Khar’kovskii Demokrit (‘The Kharkiv Democritus: The Thousand and First Magazine’, 1816), Ukrainskii vestnik (‘The Ukrainian Herald’, 1816-19), and later Ukrainskii zhurnal (‘The Ukrainian journal’, 1824-25) – were also published in Kharkiv. These titles are not held at the British Library, but they have been digitised by the Central Scientific Library of the Kharkiv National University named after V.N. Karazin.
One of the main contributors to The Ukrainian Herald was a writer whom Ukrainians consider the ‘founding father’ of Ukrainian prose. Hryhorii Kvitka (1778-1843) wrote under the pen name Osnov’ianenko, which referred to the name of his birthplace, Osnova, a village near Kharkiv.
Stamp featuring Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko (Image from Wikipedia)
As a young boy, Hryhorii knew his namesake Hryhorii Skovoroda, a famous Ukrainian philosopher, poet, and musician who was a frequent guest at his father’s estate. Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko tried a military career and even wanted to be a monk, but found his vocation in social activities and writing: he became one of the founders of the first private professional theatre in Kharkiv and the Institute for Noble Maidens.
Kharkiv Institute for Noble Maidens (Image from Wikimedia Commons)
Although he published essays and ‘letters to the editor’ in various periodicals, Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko started his literary career relatively late in life. He was 56 years old when his collection of novellas in Ukrainian was published in 1834. Nevertheless, the book garnered much acclaim. In an immediately published extensive review, the prominent Ukrainian poet, ethnographer, and philologist Osip Bodianskii proclaimed a toast to Kvitka suggesting to praise ‘Pan Hrytsko’ for his bold and picturesque entry to literature “on a dashing Ukrainian horse”.
Apart from Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko, many Ukrainian writers lived and worked in Kharkiv in various periods of their lives. Among them were Petro Hulak-Artemovs’kyi (1790-1865), who laid the foundations of Ukrainian fables and ballads, and Mykhailo Starytsky (1840-1904), famous for his librettos for Ukrainian folk operas, translations, plays and poems.
In the 1920s and early 1930s, Kharkiv was a place where the Vilna Akademia Proletarskoi LITEratury (‘Free Academy of Proletarian Literature’) was established. Young writers and poets aimed to create a new independent Ukrainian literature and culture. They believed that the Soviet state would adopt a radically different approach from the old Russian policy of cultural imperialism. They belonged to the so-called Executed Renaissance – the generation of Ukrainian writers and educational and cultural figures who were executed in Stalin’s purges. One of the leading figures of the generation was Mykola Khvylovy.
Cover of M. Khvylʹovyĭ, H. Kosynka, O. Slisarenko, Opovidannia (Haĭdenav, [1946]) RB.23.a.33896
Cover of M. Khvylʹovyĭ, Zlochyn (Kharkiv, 1928) YA.1995.a.24647
Contemporary authors from Kharkiv have also made their mark on Ukrainian literature. One of the most translated Ukrainian writers is Serhiy Zhadan who, of course, is writing about the war today.
Cover of S. Zhadan, Sky above Kharkiv: Dispatches from the Ukrainian Front, translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler (New Haven CT, [2023]) DRT ELD.DS.761929
Among our most recent acquisitions is a new book by Daria Bura ‘The Heroic city of Kharkiv: 28 Stories of the Unbreakable’.
D. Bura, Misto-heroi Kharkiv: 28 istorii nezlamnosti (Kharkiv, 2024) Awaiting cataloguing
I would like to take this opportunity to send our support to our colleagues who work at the Central Scientific Library of the Kharkiv National Karazin University, all librarians, academics, the people of Kharkiv and all Ukrainians wherever they are at this moment.
Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead Curator Slavonic and East European Collections
19 February 2025
For the Love of Books: European Collections at the British Library Doctoral Open Days
On February 14, European Collections featured at Doctoral Open Day themed ‘Global Languages, Cultures and Societies’. Marja Kingma, Curator of Germanic Collections, delivered a presentation introducing PhD students from across the UK and beyond to navigating the collections and identifying resources to support their research. In the afternoon, our curators hosted a show-and-tell session, offering the students a glimpse into the Library's unmatched holdings from continental Europe. The selections ranged from a quirky bottle-shaped Czech book to a Russian glossy LGBT magazine and a modern illuminated manuscript from Georgia. Spoiler alert – love-themed curatorial picks proved crowd pleasers. For those who could not make it, here is a taster of what you might have missed.
Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead Curator of Slavonic and East European Collections, Olga Topol and Hanna Dettlaff-Kuznicka, Curators of Slavonic and East European Collections, turned the spotlight on minority languages and cultures, giving voice to the Evenks, Sakha, Kashubians, Silesians, and the Gagauz people of Ukraine. It was a revelation to many of the students to learn that Eastern Europe was both linguistically and culturally diverse, with a plethora of languages, ethnicities, and religious traditions across the region.
V. A. Dʹiachenko, N. V. Ermolova, Evenki i iakuty iuga Dalʹnego Vostoka, XVII-XX vv. (St. Petersburg, 1994) YA.1997.a.2298.
Marcin Melon, Kōmisorz Hanusik: we tajnyj sużbie ślonskij nacyje (Kotōrz Mały, 2015) YF.2017.a.20547. An interesting example of a crime comedy written in the Silesian ethnolect.
Milan Grba, Lead Curator of South-East European Collections, highlighted a groundbreaking work by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpski rječnik (‘Serbian Dictionary’), which proved very popular among researchers with an interest in linguistics.
Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpski rječnik (Vienna, 1818) 12976.r.6.
It was the first book printed in Karadžić’s reformed 30-character Cyrillic alphabet, following the phonetic principle of "write as you speak." The dictionary contained over 26,000 words and was trilingual, with Serbian, German, and Latin entries. It standardised Serbian orthography but also preserved the nation’s oral tradition. The dictionary’s encyclopaedic entries encompassed folklore, history, and ethnography, making it a pivotal text in both linguistic reform and cultural preservation.
Anna Chelidze, Curator of Georgian Collections, showed the students a contemporary illuminated manuscript created in 2018 by the Georgian calligrapher Giorgi Sisauri. The Art Palace of Georgia commissioned the work especially for the British Library to enrich our Georgian collections. The poem Kebai da Didebai Kartulisa Enisa ('Praise and Exaltation of the Georgian Language') was written in the 10th century by John Zosimus, a Georgian Christian monk and religious writer. It is renowned for its profound reverence for the Georgian language, employing numerological symbolism and biblical allusions to underscore its sacredness.
(Giorgi Sisauri), John Zosimus, Kebai da Didebai Kartulisa Enisa, (2018) Or. 17158
Sophie Defrance, Valentina Mirabella and Barry Taylor, Curators of Romance Language Collections, treated the students to some ... romance.
Sophie Defrance took a tongue-in-cheek approach to the theme by suggesting another way to look at (some) love letters with Le rire des épistoliers.
Cover of Charrier-Vozel, Marianne, Le rire des épistoliers: XVIe-XVIIIe siècle (Rennes, 2021) YF.2022.a.9956
The volume gathers the proceedings of a 2017 conference at the University of Brest on the expression, manners, and importance of laughing and laughter in 16th- and 17th-century correspondence, with examples from Diderot’s letters to his lover Sophie Volland, or from the exchanges between Benjamin Constant and his confidante Julie Talma.
Valentina Mirabella decided to revisit the Boris Pasternak’s timeless love story ‘Doctor Zhivago’. Turns out, the history of the novel’s publication in Italy was nearly as turbulent as the story itself! It was first published in Italian translation as Il dottor Živago in 1957 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Although an active communist, Feltrinelli smuggled the manuscript out of the USSR and resisted pressure against its publication. The demand for Il dottor Živago was so great that Feltrinelli was able to license translation rights into 18 different languages well in advance of the novel's publication. The Communist Party of Italy expelled the publisher from its ranks in retaliation for his role in the release of the book they felt was critical of communism.
Cover of the 34th (in the space of just two years!) edition of Il dottor Živago by Boris Pasternak translated from Russian by Pietro Zveteremich (Milano : Feltrinelli, 1959) W16/9272
Barry Taylor drew attention to the epistolary relationship and an electric bond between the Spanish author Elena Fortún (1886-1952) and the Argentine professor Inés Field (1897-1994) with the book Sabes quién soy: cartas a Inés Field (‘You know who I am: letters to Inés Field’).
Elena Fortún, Sabes quién soy: cartas a Inés Field (Seville, 2020) YF.2021.a.15259
Fortún was the author of the popular Celia books, which followed the heroine from a seven-year-old in well-to-do Madrid to a schoolteacher in Latin America. The books give a child’s-eye-view of the world. They were censored by Franco and the author was exiled, but the books have been re-published by Renacimiento of Seville in the 2000s. Fortún’s novel Oculto sendero (‘The hidden path’) published in 2016 is seen as a lesbian Bildungsroman.
Fortún met Inés Field in Buenos Aires. Now that both women are dead, critics feel free to read the correspondence through the prism of the Bildungsroman.
Ildi Wolner, Curator of East and South-East European Collections, explored the representations of love in art with Agnes’s Hay Sex : 40 rajz = 40 drawings.
Agnes Hay, Sex: 40 rajz = 40 drawings ([Budapest, 1979]) YA.1997.a.2586
Ágnes Háy is a Hungarian graphic artist and animation filmmaker, who has lived in London since 1985. Her unique experimental style of drawing uses simple lines and symbols to convey complex meanings and associations, and this booklet is no exception. Considered rather bold in Communist Hungary at the end of the 1970s, this series of sketches explores the diverse intricacies of gender relations, without the need for a single word of explanation.
Page from Sex : 40 rajz = 40 drawings [Budapest, 1979] YA.1997.a.2586
Susan Reed, Curator of Germanic Collections, shared a fascinating collection of essays examining aspects of the love letter as a social and cultural phenomenon from the 18th century to the present day.
Cover of Der Liebesbrief: Schriftkultur und Medienwechsel vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, herausgegeben von Renate Stauf, Annette Simonis, Jörg Paulus (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008) YF.2010.a.14652
The authors scrutinised letters from historical and literary figures including Otto von Bismark, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rainer Maria Rilke. The book ends with a consideration of how online messaging forms might transform the way we write love letters.
Ela Kucharska-Beard, Curator of Baltic Collections, displayed a mysterious metal box containing a booklet in English and Lithuanian, some photographs, posters and letters.
Vilma Samulionytė, Liebe Oma, Guten Tag, or The Pact of Silence (Vilnius, 2018) RF.2019.a.120
Liebe Oma, Guten Tag, or The Pact of Silence is a moving tribute from the Lithuanian photographer Vilma Samulionyė to her grandmother, a Lithuanian German Elė Finkytė Šnipaitienė. When Vilma’s grandmother took her own life in her 70s, Vilma and her sister Jūrate decided to delve into the family history. Their research resulted in a documentary film, an exhibition, and an artists’ book. Along the way the sisters face taboos, one of them being a chain of suicides in the family.
The journey into the family’s German history and their post-war life in Lithuania left them with some unsettling questions. Who was Kazimieras and was he the reason why Ella Fink left her family behind? Throughout the story letters and photographs create a link between the family in the West and in the East, between the living and the dead.
We hope you have enjoyed this virtual show-and-tell of highlights in our European collections. We look forward to welcoming you to the next Doctoral Open Days in 2026!
22 January 2025
Silenced memories: the Holocaust Narrative in the Soviet Union
Monument to children murdered in Babi Yar, Ukraine (image from Wikipedia)
‘Field of Burial’ where the ashes of murdered and cremated prisoners were scattered, Maly Trostenets, Belarus (image from Wikipedia)
In 1961, a young Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko visited the Babi Yar ravine in Kyiv. He was taken there by a fellow writer Anatolii Kuznetsov. A native of Kyiv, Kuznetsov experienced Nazi occupation as a child and knew about the tragedy in Babi Yar firsthand. Both authors were shocked to see that there was no sign in memory of 33,771 Jews who had been murdered by the Nazis just in two days in September 1941. Possibly over 100,000 more people, among them prisoners of war, Soviet partisans, Ukrainian nationalists and Roma people, were killed there in the following months. However, the Soviet authorities were reluctant to collect and disclose records of those crimes. On the same day, Yevtushenko wrote a poem:
No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A drop sheer as a crude gravestone.
I am afraid.
Today I am as old in years
as all the Jewish people.
Cover of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, The collected poems 1952-1990 (Edinburgh, 1991) YC.1991.b.6558
The poem was published in the influential Moscow newspaper Literaturnaia gazeta (‘The Literary Newspaper’) but was severely criticised by the authorities and Communist Party officials for presenting Jews as the main victims of the fascist Germany.
Immediately after the end of the Second World War, Stalin designed his own antisemitic campaigns such as the prosecution of members of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee and the Night of the Murdered Poets, the campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitans’and the so-called ‘doctors’ plot’. Although the campaigns stopped with the death of Stalin, antisemitism in the Soviet Union was strong, and the official party line was not to accept the Holocaust as a concept. Instead, all victims of genocide and atrocities were put together under the ideologically loaded term ‘peaceful Soviet civilians’.
However, in the time of the Khrushchev Thaw artists were hopeful that their voices would be heard in the new political climate. In 1962, Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his Symphony No 13 for bass soloist, bass chorus, and large orchestra with lyrics by Yevtushenko. Although the symphony does not have an official title, it is known as ‘Babi Yar’. Anatolii Kuznetsov tried to publish his autobiographical book also under the title of Babi Yar. The book was seriously cut by censors but was eventually published in 1967. After defecting to the West, Kuznetsov managed to publish the book in full in 1970.
Anatolii Kuznetsov, Babii Iar: roman-dokument (Frankfurt am Main, 1970) X.900/6037
However, neither Yevtushenko, nor Kuznetsov were the first to write about Babi Yar. Probably the first poem (lost and rediscovered only in 1991) about the murder in Babi Yar was written by a Jewish-Ukrainian poet Liudmila Titova in 1941:
The order was supported by the threat of execution,
They obeyed but were shot.
Not a single candle was lit that night,
Those who could, left and hid in the basement.
The stars and the Sun hid in the clouds
From our world that is too cruel.
Liudmila Titova (image from Wikipedia)
In 1943, another Ukrainian poet and at that time a Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers (Commissars) of the Ukrainian SSR, Mykola Bazhan,wrote his response:
The grave wind blew from those ravines —
The smoke of mortal fires, the smoking of burning bodies.
Kyiv watched, angry Kyiv,
As Babi Yar was thrown into flames.
There can be no atonement for this flame.
There is no measure of revenge for this burning.
Cursed be the one who dares to forget.
Cursed be the one who tells us: “forgive me...”
Only in 1991 was a Ukrainian Jewish poet, Yurii Kaplan, able to compile a small anthology – Ekho Bab’ego IAra (‘The Echo of Babi Yar’) where he managed to include other pieces of contemporary poetry.
Page from Literatura ta Zhittia, N 2, zhovten’, 2007.
Cover of Ekho Bab'ego Iara : poeticheskaia antologiia (Kyiv, 1991) YA.1996.a.9243
In 1946, Ilya Ehrenburg, a prominent Soviet writer, published a poem under the title of ‘Babi Yar’ about the genocide of his people:
My child! My blush!
My countless relatives!
I hear how you call me
from every hole.
Together with another Jewish Soviet writer Leonid Grossman, Ehrenburg compiled and tried to publish a volume of eyewitness accounts documenting the atrocities during the Holocaust on the Soviet territories occupied by the Nazis.
During the war, frontline soldiers sent Ilya Ehrenburg a huge number of documents found in the territories liberated from the occupiers and told in their letters what they had seen or heard. Ehrenburg decided to collect the diaries, suicide letters, and testimonies related to the Nazis’ extermination of Jews and to publish the ‘Black Book’. A couple of extracts from the book were published in a magazine in 1944. However, after the end of the war, the publication was delayed several times. In November 1948, when the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was closed, the set of the ‘Black Book’ was scattered, the galleys (printer’s proof) and the manuscript were taken away. Ehrenburg’s daughter later gave the manuscript and other documents to the Yad Vashem archives and the book was published in Russian in 1980. However, that was not the full text. The first full Russian edition appeared only in 1991.
The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry : [prepared by] Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, translated and edited by David Patterson ; with a foreword by Irving Louis Horowitz and an introduction by Helen Segall. (London, 2002) YC.2002.b.953
The book documents atrocities that were committed on all occupied Soviets territories, such sites as Fort IX in Kovno (Kaunas), the Rumbula and Bikernieki Forests in Riga and Maly Trostenets near Minsk and Zmiyovskaya Balka near Rostov-on-Don.
Analysing the policy of ‘forgetting the specificity of Jewish suffering’, Izabella Tabarovsky of the Kennan Institute, points out that “by 2006, Yad Vashem, the world’s leading Holocaust Museum and research institution, found it had barely 10-15% of the names of the 1.5 million Jews who had died in Ukraine (in contrast to 90% of European Jews whose names were known)”.
At the Holocaust Memorial Day Fragments of the Past: Holocaust Legacies and Commemoration, Professor Jeremy Hicks will give a talk on ‘ Representations of the Holocaust in Soviet Cinema’, which will examine further the creation of silences and gaps in memories of Holocaust.
Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead Curator, East European Collections
References/Further reading:
Maxim D. Shrayer (2010). ‘Poets Bearing Witness to the Shoah’ in Studies in Slavic Languages and Literature (ICCEES Congress Stockholm 2010 Papers and Contributions), edited by Stefano Garzonio. PECOB: Portal on Central Eastern and Balkan Europe. University of Bologna. Pp. 59-119.
Ekho Bab’ego IAra: poeticheskaia antologiia, [sostavlenie i vstupitelʹnaia statʹiia IU.G. Kaplana]. (Kyiv, 1991). YA.1996.a.9243
A. Anatoli (Kuznetsov), Babi Yar: a Document in the Form of a Novel, translated by David Floyd. (London, 1970) W67/8178
Izabella Tabarovsky. Don’t Learn from Russians about the Holocaust. Published: February 2, 2017
06 January 2025
Fragments of the Past: Holocaust Legacies and Commemoration. Holocaust Memorial Day 2025
Join us on Monday 27 January 2025 for the event ‘Fragments of the Past: Holocaust Legacies and Commemoration’ and explore how the Holocaust has shaped memory, identity, and culture. Bringing together scholars, historians, and artists, this conference examines the Holocaust’s profound and enduring impact, as well as the varied methods used to preserve its legacy.
From antisemitism in post-First World War Hungary, the Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust, and the commemoration of hidden killing sites in postwar Poland, to Soviet depictions of the Shoah in film and contemporary counter-monument approaches, the programme offers insights into Holocaust memory and its ongoing significance.
‘Fragments of the Past: Holocaust Legacies and Commemoration’ event poster
The conference is organised by the European Collections section of the British Library in partnership with the Polish Cultural Institute. The event is open to all, and attendance is free, but registration is required. Booking details can be found here.
Programme:
Date: 27 January 2025
Location: Eliot Room, Knowledge Centre
Time: 2 pm – 5 pm
- Antisemitic versus Jewish Humour in Budapest Post-WWI
Prof. Dr Béla Bodó, Department of East-European History, University of Bonn - The Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust
Dr Halik Kochanski, Writer and Historian, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society - ‘The grave […] has been planted over with potatoes’: Transnational Jewish Fight to Commemorate Holocaust Killing Sites in Poland in the First Postwar Decades
Dr Janek Gryta, Lecturer in Holocaust History, University of Southampton - Representations of the Holocaust in Soviet Cinema
Prof. Jeremy Hicks, Professor of Russian Culture and Film, Queen Mary University of London - There and Not There: (Im)Possibility of a Monument
Paulina Pukyte, Interdisciplinary Artist, Writer, Curator, and Critic, Vilnius Academy of Arts - Poetics of the Archive in Marianne Rubinstein’s ‘C’est maintenant du passé’ and Ivan Jablonka’s ‘Histoire des grands-parents que je n'ai pas eus’
Dr Diane Otosaka, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Holocaust Literature, University of Leeds
02 January 2025
New Year, Old Years: a Look Back
Usually around the start of a new year we look back over our previous year’s blogging before turning our faces to the future. This time we’re actually looking back over 2023 as well as 2024 because BL blogging activity was suspended for a while following the cyber-attack on the Library in October 2023, so we couldn’t do a review of that year at the time. And to break up the prose, we include some wintery scenes from the BL’ s Flickr stream.
Reindeer from Sophus Tromholt, Under Nordlysets Straaler. Skildringer fra Lappernes Land (Copenhagen, 1885) 10280.eee.13.
Both years saw our usual excitement over the annual European Writers’ Festival held in May. In 2023 we featured an interview with Greek Cypriot writer Anthony Anaxagorou, winner of the 2024 RSL Ondaatje Prize, while in 2024 we published a series of posts, beginning with this one, profiling some of the authors featured in the festival. As usual, literature featured in many other posts. We celebrated the award of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature to Norway’s Jon Fosse and mourned the death in 2024 of Albanian author Ismail Kadare. We were proud to learn that our Curator of Italian, Valentina Mirabella, was one of the judges of the 2024 Premio Strega, a major Italian literary prize, and she wrote about her experience for us.
A theme that ran through both years was the work of the Endangered Archives Project to preserve cultural heritage from Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Our coverage included posts on the indigenous peoples of Siberia, minority communities in Bulgaria, an important Serbian family archive, and material relating to the Ukrainian writer Taras Shevchenko, who was also the subject of a small display in our Treasures Gallery.
Polar scene from Die zweite Deutsche Nordpolarfahrt in den Jahren 1869 und 1870, unter Führung des Kapitän Karl Koldewey, edited by Alexander Georg Mosle und Georg Albrecht (Leipzig, 1873-4) 10460.ff.11.
Events in the library are a regular source of inspiration for our blog posts. In 2023 we highlighted events commemorating two colleagues who died in recent years: a symposium on Italian Futurism was dedicated to the memory of Chris Michaelides, former curator of Italian and Modern Greek, who did much to build our collection of Futurist books. The Graham Nattrass Lecture, in memory of the former Head of Germanic Collections is an annual event, and in 2023 marked the 80th anniversary of the arrest and execution of members of the German resistance group ‘Die Weisse Rose’. A conference on European political refugees in Britain generated posts on the same topic, including one on how the then British Museum Library became ‘a lifeline of books’ for Polish refugees from Soviet and Nazi occupation. On a lighter note, we celebrated the BL’s annual Food Season in May 2024 with a post introducing a selection of cookbooks from around the continent.
In summer 2024 we went a bit sports mad with both the European Football Championships and the Summer Olympics taking place. We highlighted the world-beating football tactics of the Hungarian ‘Golden Team’ in the early 1950s and the ‘Miracle of Bern’ that saw them unexpectedly beaten by West Germany in 1954’s World Cup, as well as exploring why the Dutch fans show symptoms of ‘orange fever’ at international matches. Our Olympic posts included explorations of the political side of the supposedly apolitical games in Czechoslovakia and the two German states during the Cold War, and a look at the Baltic States’ love for (and proud record in) basketball.
The northern lights, from Emmanuel Liais, L’Espace céleste et la nature tropicale, description physique de l’univers (Paris, 1866) 10003.d.10.
But not all our blog posts are driven by events and unifying themes. As ever, we continued to write about items from our vast and varied collections, from Georgian manuscripts to contemporary Queer writing in Poland, via a Russian Braille edition of The Hobbit, French caricatures from the Franco-Prussian War, and pamphlets from the Cypriot independence campaign. We also explored stories of the Slovenian Enlightenment and the first Professor of Spanish in Britain, and discovered the hidden but crucial role played by women in underground publishing under the Polish Communist regime.
As we head into 2025 we would like to wish all our readers and contributors a very happy new year. We look forward to bringing you another year of stories and discoveries from the Library’s European Collections.
Susan Reed and Hanna Dettlaff-Kuznicka, European Studies Blog Editors
Ice-skating, from A.J. van der Aa, Ons Vaderland en zijne Bewoners (Amsterdam,1855-57) 10270.f.5
24 December 2024
Devil in the details: Nikolai Gogol's ‘Christmas Eve’
With Christmas fast approaching, I thought I would share one of my favourite seasonal reads, Noch’ pered Rozhdestvom (‘Christmas Eve’, also known as ‘The Night Before Christmas’, 1832) by Nikolai Gogol'. This whimsical and uproarious folk tale comes from a collection of eight short stories written in Russian and collected in two volumes, Vechera na khutore bliz Dikan’ki (‘Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka’, 1831-1832), which catapulted the author to fame almost overnight. If you like the sound of a winter story featuring flying dumplings and a witch hiding her suitors in rubble sacks, then read on, you are in for a treat. This delightfully eccentric and cliché-free narrative is certain to put you in a festive mood.
Cover of Vechory na khutori bilia Dykanʹky by Nikolai Gogol' (Kyiv, 2008) YF.2009.b.2030
Opening pages of Noch’ pered Rozhdestvom by Nikolai Gogol' (Kyiv, 2008) YF.2009.b.2030
However, you may wonder how the author of Mertvye Dushi (‘Dead Souls’, 1842) came to write such a lighthearted and, dare I say it, frivolous piece. To answer that question, we need to travel back to December 1828 when a young aspiring writer hailing from the small Cossack town of Sorochyntsi arrives in the metropolitan St. Petersburg to seek his fortune. Unable to secure a decent paying job in the civil service, Nikolai soon becomes disillusioned with life in the capital and the workings of the Russian bureaucracy. The disappointment with St. Petersburg coincides with his newfound appreciation of the homeland he left behind and the craze for all things “Little Russian” sweeping the capital’s literary scene at the time. Gogol' is quick to capitalize on this trend and eager to bring the beauty of Ukraine to the Russian reading public. Yet for all the enthusiasm with which the liberal circles received Gogol’s work, the nation reflected in Vechera was not Russia but Ukraine. Far from smoothing over this difference, the author deliberately accentuated it.
There is undoubtedly more to the joyous and seemingly carefree tone of Vechera than first meets the eye. The Ukrainian-Russian glossaries appended to each volume clearly underline Ukrainian linguistic separateness and cultural uniqueness, creating a boundary between the Ukrainian and imperial cultures. The narrator, Rudy Pan'ko, regularly engages in intense self-descriptions, offering equivalents for what his Russian audience may find unfamiliar. This is evident in Noch’ pered Rozhdestvom when he attempts to explain the tradition of house-to-house caroling: ‘‘Among us it is the custom to sing under the window on Christmas Eve carols that are called kolyadki. The mistress or master or whoever is left in the house always drops into the singer’s bag some sausage or bread or a copper or whatever he has plenty of (...) They often sing about the birth of Christ, and at the end wish good health to the master, the mistress, the children and all the household’’, or when he elucidates on the meaning of the word ‘German’: ‘‘By ‘German’, we mean any foreigner, be it a French, Austro-Hungarian, or Swedish subject - no matter, we will still call them ‘Germans’.’’ (English translations by Constance Garnett, ‘Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka’ (London, 1926), 12266.g.2. and Anna Summers, ‘The night before Christmas’, (New York, 2014), YKL.2016.a.6326; emphasis mine). Pan'ko clearly wants his Russian readers to be mindful of the divisions between the two worlds.
Glossary listing popular Ukrainian terms and their Russian equivalents
The great success of Gogol's work also owed much to its Romantic handling of folklore and the perfect balance of the familiar and exotic in depicting Ukraine. As a number of scholars have pointed out, Noch’ pered Rozhdestvom contains many staples of the traditional Ukrainian nativity play, vertep. It opens with the devil swimming through the starry sky and burning his hands on the moon he had just stolen. As the story is set on the night before Christmas, the evil spirit is allowed to roam freely around the Ukrainian village of Dykanka and torment its denizens before he must return to hell on Christmas Day. He unleashes a blizzard hoping to thwart the village blacksmith's advances on the beautiful Oksana as he resents him for producing a painting depicting the devil's defeat. However, Vakula is determined to win the village belle over, even if it means battling Satan himself. Amid carol singing, holiday gluttony (think kutia, varenyky, palianytsia, varenukha) and drunken revelry, he manages to trick the devil into flying him to St. Petersburg, where he hopes to get a pair of empress’s heels for Oksana, who has promised to marry him on this condition. Without giving too much away, Vakula finally makes it to St. Petersburg and is immediately overwhelmed by the hustle and bustle of the city. He seeks refuge in the company of Zaporozhian Cossacks, who reluctantly take him along for their audience with the empress...
Too busy to read this Christmas? Gogol’s Ukrainian folk tales have been adapted into numerous films and operas. The most renowned adaptations of Noch’ pered Rozhdestvom include the eponymous 1961 film directed by Alexsander Rou and the 1913 silent movie by Władysław Starewicz. The 1951 Russian animated feature film directed by Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg is also available in the public domain.
Official poster for the 1961 Noch’ pered Rozhdestvom film by Alexander Rou (Image from Wikipedia)
Gogol's Noch’ pered Rozhdestvom celebrates Ukraine and its rich heritage. It is fun and edifying but also mischievously subversive. Will the pious Cossack Vakula manage to win the affection of the most beautiful girl in town? Or will the devil reign supreme on this holy night? A perfect tale for the holiday season, this wonderfully bizarre work will leave you with a sense of warmth and quiet wonder long after the last page is turned. Z Rizdvom! Merry Christmas!
Hanna Dettlaff-Kuznicka, Interim Curator of Slavonic and East European Collections
References:
Edyta M. Bojanowska, Nikolai Gogol : between Ukrainian and Russian nationalism (Cambridge, 2007) YC.2007.a.11089
Christopher Putney, Russian devils and diabolic conditionality in Nikolai Gogol's Evenings on a farm near Dikanka (New York, 1999) 5761.407700
24 August 2024
A short selection of new Ukrainian books to mark the Independence Day
On this day, Ukraine celebrates the 33rd anniversary of its independence. On August 24, 1991, the Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine was adopted by the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR. Following international recognition and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukraine became de facto a sovereign state in December of that year.
Today, on the 914th day of the full-scale Russian invasion, Ukraine is still bravely defending its independence and existence. Against all odds, publishing in the country is getting stronger. Only in 2023, 270 new publishers appeared on the Ukrainian book market, and book production increased by 73% in 2023 compared to 2022. According to the Ukrainian Book Chamber, as many as 6,951 monographs and brochures were published in the first half of 2024. In this blog, I would like to mark Ukrainian Independence Day by featuring a small selection of books that we received in the latest consignment from our vendor in Ukraine.
One of the most striking titles we have acquired is a posthumous edition of Viktoriia Amelina’s poetry Svidchennia (‘Testimony’) (Lviv: "Vydavnytstvo Staroho Leva", 2024). In April 2023, Viktoriia visited the British Library and took part in a panel discussion on the role of writers during times of war. Some readers of this blog might remember her passionate and emotional presentation. Viktoriia Amelina died on July 1, 2023, as a result of injuries received in a Russian missile attack on Kramatorsk. You can watch a recording of the event in her memory organised by the Ukrainian Institute in London and the British Library here.
Cover of Svidchennia by Viktoriia Amelina
In her short interview with the Ukrainian online media Chytomo.com, the head editor of the publishing house Vydavnytstvo Staroho Leva Sofiia Cheliak commented on their decision to choose illustrations to complement Viktoriia’s poetry: “we wanted [the illustrations to convey] sacredness, for me it was the only possible option for the illustration, so that it sounded in unison with the poetry. Looking at the layout, we realized how much it was the right decision <...> This book is what my broken heart looks like."
One of the poems in this book is titled A word in the dictionary (Future), and it reads:
Future – is what we ask
each other about in silence:
Do you see it?
Can you see it?
Here she asks and explains:
because I don’t see it, I don’t.
She squints.
Recently – she says, –
I’ve started seeing a little bit of
“tomorrow”, and beyond that – nothing.
And all the way to the end of her darkness we are walking through the sunny
Obolon: two women
and a dog.
(Translation: Katya Rogatchevskaia)
In 2021, Viktoriia organised the first literary festival in the small town of New York in the Donetsk region. She suggested the theme “De-occupation of the Future” for the following one, but it appears to be even more relevant for the post-war times. Apparently, today the town is under Russian occupation. We strongly believe that the festival will soon return to Ukrainian New York, where people will rebuild their future and remember Viktoriia's life and legacy.
Another book that stood out to me is Pisnia vidkrytoho shliakhu (‘Song of the Open Road’) by Artem Chekh (Chernivtsi, 2024). At the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion, the author, who took part in the war in Donbas in 2015-16, joined the Ukrainian army. The new book was presented at the International Literary Festival Meridian Czernowitz held in Chernivtsi.
Cover of Pisnia vidkrytoho shliakhu by Artem Chekh
As literary critics tell us in their reviews, the book is about a war, but not about the current war, as readers might expect. The action takes place in the 19th century, and the main character is a former serf from the Russian Empire who is trying to escape from his master. His adventures take him through Europe, Great Britain and eventually to America, where he finds himself just before the start of the Civil War. Critics agree that the symbolic meaning of the novel is a long, difficult, bloody, but open road to freedom and identity.
Among research publications, I would like to single out a new fundamental chronological overview of Ukrainian visual arts by two prominent Ukrainian art historians, Paola Utevs’ka and Dmytro Horbachov, Budynok iz levamy: Narysy istorii ukrains'koho vizual'noho mystetstva XI–XX stolit' (‘The House with Lions: Essays on the History of Ukrainian Visual Arts, 11th -20th centuries’) (Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo "Dukh i Litera", 2024).
Cover of Budynok iz levamy: Narysy istorii ukrains'koho vizual'noho mystetstva XI–XX stolit' by Paola Utevs’ka and Dmytro Horbachov
The monograph focuses on the formation of the main artistic movements and techniques and touches on all visual arts, from architecture to book illustrations and graphic design. It is also important that the authors analyse primarily artworks located in Ukraine, among them works by Taras Shevchenko, Petro Levchenko, Mykola Pymonenko, Oleksandra Ekster, Oleksandr Bohomazov, Anatol Petrytskyi, Oleksandr Arkhipenko, and Kazimir Malevich. This book is especially timely now as the world is making the acquaintance of Ukrainian art from a new perspective, for example, through the current exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts ‘In the Eye of the Storm’.
In this blog, I have highlighted just three titles out of over 300 received in the last five months. The books are being processed, and we are working hard to make them available to our readers as soon as possible.
Ukrainian books awaiting processing by our cataloguing team
Meanwhile, I would like to draw your attention to a recent publication by Vernon Press. In June 2024, they released a volume edited by Lada Kolomiyets and titled Living the Independence Dream: Ukraine and Ukrainians in Contemporary Socio-Political Context. We will make sure to add this important contribution to our collections.
Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead Curator East European Collections
17 June 2024
Ukraine: A Life in Football
The history of Ukrainian football starts with the establishment of the Odesa British Athletic Club in 1878 by British workers of the Indo-European Telegraph Company. For a number of years, the club functioned as exclusively British. According to the archival documents, the first Odessites – Piotrovskii and Kryzhnovskii, and later a well-known aviator and athlete Sergei Utochkin – joined the club only in 1899. Artem Frankov, a Ukrainian sports journalist, believes that amateur footballers in Odesa actively played outside the official OBAC structure, but the participation of Ukrainians had not been recorded. The first big match, however, was reported in the local press (Odesskii Vestnik).
Lviv became the official birthplace of Ukrainian football. In 1892, with active support from Archduke Franz Ferdinand, it became an integral part of annual fairs aiming to demonstrate achievements in economic and social life. On 17 July 1894, Gazeta Lwowska, in an article about the fair, tried to explain this gymnastic activity as a game where players bounce a ball with their feet.
Screenshot of an article on football in Gazeta Lwowska (Image from https://jbc.bj.uj.edu.pl/dlibra/publication/22161)
The article focuses on the ‘Sokol’ rally, or demonstration of sports competencies by members of a newly formed athletic society. Vasyl’ Nahirnyi, a Ukrainian Galician architect and public figure, was its founder and head, while another educator, publisher, and promoter of sports in Galicia, Volodymyr Lavrivs’kyi, published the first rules of the game in Ukrainian.
It was probably at that time that the term ‘kopanyi m’iach’ started being used to name this game. Abbreviated as ‘kopanka’ (the stress is on the first syllable) – a kicked ball – the term existed in Galicia until the end of the Second World War but never spread to other Ukrainian lands and did not enter the Ukrainian literary language. In a scholarly article on Ukrainian national football terminology of the late 19th and early 20th century, Iryna Protsyk of the National University ‘Kyiv-Mohyla Academy’ comes to the conclusion that “Despite the fact that Ukrainian system of football terminology during the investigated period was in the process of formation, there was certain domination of national football terminology over foreign terms: 75 per cent football names themselves, 23 per cent – loanwords from different languages and 2 per cent hybrid special names.”
Page from Volodymyr Lavrivs’kyi's Kopana
School students started playing football in Uzhhorod (Zakarpattia) in 1893, and the first official match took place on 15 August 1901. The game attracted an audience of 1,000 spectators – a significant part of the town’s population of 14,000 people. The local team lost 0 : 3 to one of the strongest Hungarian teams, the Buda Athletic Club.
Historians think that Czech workers from the machine factory Grether and Kryvanek in Kyiv introduced local workers to football. The first games were recorded on a football pitch opposite the factory in 1900, at present – a site of the National Cinema Studio of feature films named after Oleksandr Dovzhenko.
It is not surprising that football remains popular in today’s Ukraine. Not only is it widely played, but it also is the subject of academic research. The Geographical Faculty of the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv offers a course in the History and Geography of Football.
Even if one is not big on football, it is impossible not to have heard about Valeriy Lobanovskyi (1939-2002), Oleh Blokhin (b. 1952), Ihor Bielanov (b. 1960) and Andriy Shevchenko (b. 1976). All three prominent Ukrainian footballers, at various points trained by Lobanovs’kyi, were honoured with the Ballon d'Or (the Golden Ball), the most prestigious and valuable individual award in football.
Cover of Futbol po-ukrainski by A. Frankov (Kharkiv, 2006) YF.2008.a.10294
In preparing this blog, I have been searching the catalogue for footballers’ memoirs. Unfortunately, our holdings in this area are not strong, and it would be good if we could cover these gaps retrospectively.
Cover of My Life, My Football by Andriy Shevchenko and Alessandro Alciato translated from Italian by Mark Palmer (Glasgow, 2023). Awaiting legal deposit copy
Having said that, I have made an interesting discovery. For the Euro 2012 Championship, Ukrainian writers published a collection Pys'mennyky pro futbol, with contributions from Serhiy Zhadan, Yurii Andrukhovych, Yuriy Vynnychuk and Artem Chekh, among others.
Cover of Pys'mennyky pro futbol (Kharkiv, 2011) YF.2012.a.9453
Artem Chekh joined the Ukrainian army at the beginning of the war in 2015. When the full-scale invasion began, he went back to the front line. Several weeks ago, we learned that Serhiy Zhadan also joined ZSU.
Stories of Ukrainian footballers after a year of war were published in the Guardian in February 2023: ‘The military call and I deliver’: voices from Ukraine's football after a year of war’. A list of names of coaches, players and referees who are still fighting and those who have tragically lost their lives in this war can be found here.
Despite the ongoing war, the Ukrainian national football team is taking part in Euro-2024. They will play Romania on Monday 17, Slovakia on Friday 21, and Belgium on Wednesday the 26. We wish them only beautiful goals and the best of luck!
Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead Curator, East European Collections
Further reading:
Volodymyr Banias, Lopta : futbolʹni istoriï, zhyttiepysy, statystyka. (Kyiv, 2017). YF.2023.a.2955
Dynamo (Kyïv) : 1927-2007 [ed. Mykola Neseniuk]. (Kyiv, 2008). LF.31.b.5023
Andy Dougan, Dynamo: defending the honour of Kiev. (London, 2001). M01/22988
Oleksandr Kabanets, Piramida : futbolʹni turniry Ukraïny 1910-1940-kh rokiv. (Kyiv, 2022). YF.2023.a.687
Kalendar’ Sokol na rok 1895. (Lvov, 1894) (https://geography.lnu.edu.ua/en/course/history-and-geography-of-football )
Ivan Iaremenko, 100 futbolistiv Lʹvova : persony lʹvivsʹkoho futbolu. (L’viv, 2021). YF.2013.a.23444
Denys Mandziuk, Kopanyi m'iach : korotka istoriia ukraïnsʹkoho futbolu v Halychyni : 1909-1944. (L’viv, 2016). YF.2017.a.23960
Iryna Protsyk, ‘“Kopanyi m’iach uchyt’ boronyty i zdobuvaty”: tematychna klasyfikatsiia ukrains’koi terminoleksyky kintsia XIX – pochatku XX stolittia.’ Visnik Natsional’noho universytetu “L’vivs’ka politekhnika.” Problemy ukrains’koi terminolohii. 2016. N 842. Pp.151-157. (http://tc.terminology.lp.edu.ua/TK_Wisnyk842/TK_wisnyk842_4_procyk.htm )
Valentin Sherbachev, Lobanovskii. (Kyiv, 1998). YA.2000.a.1865
03 May 2024
In a whirlwind of change. The European Writers’ Festival returns to the British Library
25 April 2024
“The hands want to see, the eyes want to caress”. Braille books in Slavonic collections 1
The British Library is committed to creating an inclusive reading experience. We collect audiobooks and braille materials in various languages and forms and are always on the lookout for new and exciting titles. This post and a second one will feature rare and first-edition braille books in our Slavonic collections. Here we hope to shed some light on the extraordinary life of a largely unknown blind Ukrainian author often likened to such literary giants as Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde. The second post will touch on the publishing history of a book by a writer who needs no introduction. Without further delay, we invite print and braille readers, children and adults alike, to embark with us on a fascinating journey beginning in the sleepy village of Obukhovka, across vast swathes of Asia and Russia, all the way to Middle-earth, and back again.
The story begins on a frosty January day in 1890 when a third child is born into a family of a wealthy Ukrainian landowner in imperial Russia, Iakov Eroshenko and his Russian wife. The boy, later known to literary enthusiasts in Japan and China as Ero-san and Ailuoxianke respectively, is christened Vasilii. Four years later, tragedy strikes the Eroshenko family when little Vasia loses his vision to measles. Later in life, he would remark: “I hazily remember seeing only four things: the sky, pigeons, the church where they roosted, and my mother’s face. Not too much…But that always inspired and inspires me to seek out pure thoughts - thoughts as pure as the sky - and always made me remember my homeland as well as my mother’s face, in whichever corner of the world Fate cast me.”
Vasilii Eroshenko. (Image from http://pmu.in.ua/nogroup/eroshenko/)
The Church of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul in Obukhovka. Built circa 1842, it burned down in 1946. It must have been the silhouette that was etched in Eroshenko’s memory (Image from https://sokm.org.ru/vystavki/virtualnye-vystavki/782-obuhovskie-remesla#)
Young Eroshenko proved precocious throughout his schooling. Blindness had taught the future anarchist and anti-imperialist to take everything with a pinch of salt and to question authority. In 1900, he started attending the prestigious Imperial Moscow School for the Blind, where he received training in arts, music and sciences. While there, he also mastered braille and conceived his first literary pieces, painstakingly pricking words into paper with a needle. After graduating in 1908, Eroshenko decided to try his hand at music. He started to earn a living playing second violin for a blind orchestra in Moscow. Rumour has it that he paid a substantial part of his income to a poor actor who would read him books unavailable in braille script.
Eroshenko playing the violin (image from http://pmu.in.ua/nogroup/eroshenko/)
Vasilii’s life took a sharp turn when he crossed paths with the sister-in-law of Leo Tolstoy’s biographer and disciple, Pavel Ivanovich Briukov. Anna Sharapova, who was one of the pioneers of Esperanto in Russia, decided to teach the language to the gifted violinist. Esperanto was invented in 1873 by the Polish ophthalmologist L.L. Zamenhof, who believed that a universal, politically and culturally neutral language would erase communication barriers and relieve international tensions. Eroshenko found Zamenhof’s ideas compelling and soon became a devout Esperantist. Having learnt from Anna about the prospect of continuing his education at the Royal National College for the Blind in England, Vasilii pinned the green Esperanto star onto the lapel of his jacket and set out to London. From then on, the star would guide him, often quite literally, to his distant destinations.
In London, Eroshenko learned about the respect blind people enjoy in Japan. Intrigued, he soon started planning his next trip. He returned to Moscow, where he began taking Japanese classes. In April 1914, he boarded a ship in Vladivostok and headed to Tokyo. Once settled in the Japanese capital, he supported himself by teaching Esperanto and lecturing on Russian literature and women’s emancipation. He also wrote short stories for major Japanese magazines. However, it was not long before he became active in revolutionary circles seeking to undermine Japan’s colonial efforts in East Asia. In 1921, he was accused of threatening national security and social order and was expelled from the country. His stories Vuz’ka klitka (The Narrow Cage) and Orlyni dushi (An Eagle’s Heart) appeared in print in the same year.
Cover of Vasilii Eroshenko, Vuzʹka klitka: kazky (Kharkiv, 2016). YF.2016.b.1727
Eroshenko’s stories reflect his view that social ills result from colonial oppression, marginalization of the poor and disabled, and racial inequality. Vuz’ka klitka ponders the question of freedom and free will. The image of an enraged tiger killing and wreaking havoc in the name of freedom and brotherhood is disturbingly familiar. Orlyni dushi juxtaposes the human and natural worlds and offers a sharp critique of imperialism. Its opening: “There once was a mountain kingdom that was ruled by its larger, more powerful neighbour”, is also a chilling one in the context of the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Cover of Vasilii Eroshenko, Orlyni dushi: kazky (Kharkiv, 2016). YF.2016.b.1726
As I flick through the milky pages, I cannot help but admire the author’s vivid storytelling and simple yet evocative language. Both stories were written in Japanese, but for various political and ideological reasons, the Ukrainian translations have always relied on earlier Russian translations. Those, in turn, were based on Chinese versions. Inevitably, Eroshenko’s voice got muffled and distorted along the way, making it hard to disentangle his legacy from that of his translators. The copies we hold, proudly adorned with blue-and-yellow ribbon bookmarks, are the first Ukrainian translations made from the Japanese originals. The translator and scholar of Eroshenko’s work, Iuliia Patlan’, makes a valid point in the preface, arguing that this makes them much more faithful to the author’s voice. The Ukrainian text translated from Eroshenko’s original Japanese was titled Vuz’ka klitka to distinguish it from Tisna klitka, Nadiia Andrianova-Hordiienko's 1969 translation from Russian. Both books have print on one side and braille on the other so that a sighted person can read to a child and they can follow along.
Opening from Vuz’ka klitka showing parallel printed and braille text
Before settling in the Soviet Union in 1924, Eroshenko had a brief stint in Europe and spent a couple of years in China, where he befriended the modernist author and radical thinker Lu Xun. The blind globetrotter was not met with much fanfare in his homeland. Soviet Esperantists were deemed a threat to the Communist Party, mainly for their transnational networks, which were believed to be swarming with spies. Eroshenko’s refusal to cooperate with the Soviet Secret Services came with a hefty price, as most of the author’s personal archives were confiscated and destroyed. The author, whose life resembled a fairy-tale quest for meaning, departed on his final journey on December 23, 1952. He was buried in his native Obukhovka, unrecognised as a storyteller in Ukraine and Russia. It was not until a translator, Vladimir Rogov, learned about a mysterious ‘Ailuoxianke’ in Lu-Xun’s The Comedy of the Ducks that the dots finally connected, and Eroshenko started to gain the recognition he deserved.
Vasilii Eroshenko did not let his disability limit or define him. Although his short stories may lack the happy endings that we all look for in fairy tales, his fascinating life reads as a beautiful ode to hope and resilience and carries a heart-warming message that light will always prevail over darkness.
Hanna Dettlaff-Kuznicka, Interim Curator of Slavonic and East European Collections
Andrew F. Jones, Developmental fairy tales: evolutionary thinking and modern Chinese culture (London, 2011). YC.2011.a.7404 (Includes an English translation (from Chinese) of Vuz’ka klitka)
Julija Patlanj, ‘Vasilii Yakovlevich Eroshenko’, Kontakto (March, 2005)
Adam Kuplowsky, The Narrow Cage and Other Modern Fairy Tales (New York, 2023)
European studies blog recent posts
- Kharkiv
- For the Love of Books: European Collections at the British Library Doctoral Open Days
- Silenced memories: the Holocaust Narrative in the Soviet Union
- Fragments of the Past: Holocaust Legacies and Commemoration. Holocaust Memorial Day 2025
- New Year, Old Years: a Look Back
- Devil in the details: Nikolai Gogol's ‘Christmas Eve’
- A short selection of new Ukrainian books to mark the Independence Day
- Ukraine: A Life in Football
- In a whirlwind of change. The European Writers’ Festival returns to the British Library
- “The hands want to see, the eyes want to caress”. Braille books in Slavonic collections 1
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