 | a bibliographical newsletter Issue 25 April 2022  |
Solidarity with Ukraine
The growing horror of the situation in Ukraine means that we should have some understanding of the background to this latest threat to the peace of Europe and be more aware of the rich heritage and culture of a country that houses two cities of literature, Lviv designated in 2015 and Odesa, like Exeter, designated in 2019. As a bibliographer I am aware that the community memory and a region's sense of itself is enshrined and recorded in the written literature housed in major libraries within and outside the country. Might a little investigation in catalogues and bibliographies show whether Ukraine is a separate nation state or simply, as Putin insists, a ragbag of decadent neo-nazi oblasts that is yearning to be liberated by the Russian Federation?
Politics and print weave a complex web in the east of Europe. In the mid-sixteenth century, when printing reached the area now forming the nation of Ukraine, the region was split between Lithuania (from 1648 transferred to Poland), Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and their vassal Khanate of Crimea, with Russia only laying claim to a minor part in the north-east, a situation that continued with some changes until the final partition of Poland in 1794. In fact the Soviet Union only acquired all of the western part of Ukraine in 1939 after their joint invasion of Poland with Nazi forces following the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, territorial acquisitions that were confirmed after the German occupation of the entire region from 1940 to 1944. I remember that, when I visited the Museum für Deutsche Geschichte in East Berlin in the 1960s, they were very coy about showing this change in Soviet borders on the maps and hid it carefully under the explanatory text.
Taking an even longer view, perhaps Russia should now be seeking to rejoin Ukraine as, from 882 to 1132, Kjiv was the capital of Kjivski Rus', a confederation that extended from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, before a certain insignificant settlement on the Moscow River was recorded. The confederation fragmented into individual independent princedoms in the 12th century. In the south Kjiv itself, Volodymyr and Galych in 1199 merged into what became known as Rus' or, in its Latinised form, Ruthenia. The Mongol invasions of the 1230s put the east and south of Ukraine into the hands of the Golden Horde succeeded by the Khanate of Crimea and the Ottoman Empire. Between 1349 and 1362, the remaining western Ukrainian princedoms became part of Lithuania.
So it is not surprising that the earliest items in the Ukrainian and Belarusian variants of the Church Slavonic language were printed further to the west. In the Cyrillic alphabet, the Orthodox hymnal (Octoechos) and Book of Hours (Chasoslovets’), were produced in 1491 by Szwajpolt Fiol, in Cracow. These were followed by liturgical books produced in Lithuania on short-lived presses by Frantsisk Skoryna in Vilnius, Lithuania in 1525, Ivan Fedorovych and Piotr Mstislavets Zabłudów in Poland, 1568–70 and Vasyl Tsiapinsky probably in Tyapino, Belarus around 1565–80. When early presses were set up on Ukrainian territory the most remarkable feature to the western European observer is the important role played by the church as opposed to secular printers.
The first printing press on Ukrainian ethnic territory was founded by Ivan Fedorov in Lviv in 1573. He had previously worked in Moscow. His first work, an Apostol was printed at the at the Saint Onuphrius Monastery. in 1573–4. He died in Lviv in 1583 and his equipment and assets were used to found the Dormition Brotherhood Press which endured from 1591 to 1788 and played a key role in the history of early Ukrainian printing.
Printing in Kyiv began with the founding of the Kyivan Cave Monastery Press in 1615. The output of the press, apart from liturgical literature, included sermons, poems, original works on philosophy and theology. In the mid-17th century, the press was managed by Innokentii Gizel’ (1620-1688), a prominent scholar and public figure. He was an author of a Synopsis, the first popular history of the East Slavonic nations. The Monastery of the Caves became the city's official press and remained the largest printing press in Ukraine until the mid-19th century. The Monastery of the Caves, founded in 1051, today houses a book and print history museum, a museum of Ukrainian folk art, a theater and film arts museum and the state historical library.
In western Ukraine, administered by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, most printing presses were owned by Catholic monasteries. The presses of the Orthodox monasteries at Pochaiv (1734-1914) and Univ (1660-1770) were the most productive centers of Ukrainian book publishing in the 18th century. The Pochaiv press is credited for using Ukrainian vernacular in some of its publications. There were also Jewish presses publishing in Hebrew and Yiddish. After 1772 many German books were also printed in Lviv.
The eastern areas of Ukraine became part of the Russian Empire and from 1667 Ukrainian presses became subject to Russian Imperial censorship carried out by the Holy Synod. From the 1720s, the Russian government issued several decrees completely banning the publication of anything except liturgical texts identical with those already printed in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Ukrainian language publications and publications in an Ukrainian version of Church Slavonic were strictly prohibited. This contributed to the decline of book publishing in Kyiv and Chernihiv. Ukrainian culture became subject to enforced russification, so the formation of a modern Ukrainian literary language was delayed till the beginning of the 19th century. The first book in literary Ukrainian – Eneida Ivan Kotliarevskii’s mock-heroic version of Virgil’s Aeneid – was published in St Petersburg in 1798. From the late 18th century state printing offices were established in towns across Russia.
A state printing office (Gorodskoĭ tipografia) was established in Odesa in 1814. It specialised in literary almanacs and scholarly works and several of its publications in the 1830s were in French or German. In 1839 the Odesa Society for History and Antiquities set up a press to publish their proceedings and the publishing scene in 19th century Odesa was quite diverse, with newspapers for German settlers and a flourishing Yiddish and Hebrew press.
New private publishing houses became active towards the end of the 19th century. These enterprises aimed to popularise literature among the lower classes, and therefore their books were produced cheaply with small print runs. A private St Petersburg publisher V. Plavil’shchikov produced some books in the Ukrainian language, including a Ukrainian Grammar Grammatika malorossĭskago nari︠e︡chii︠a︡ compiled by A. Pavlovskii. As many Ukrainians moved to the two Russian capitals, works of contemporary Ukrainian authors who later became classics of Ukrainian literature – Taras Shevchenko, Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko (1778-1843), Mykhaylo Maksymovych (1804-1873) – were first published in St Petersburg and Moscow. The first collection of works by the prominent Ukrainian public figure and writer Hryhorii Skovoroda (1722-1794) appeared in St Petersburg in 1861. A short-lived Ukrainian journal Osnova (‘Basis’) was also published in St Petersburg.
The leading academic publisher in Ukraine was Kharkiv University Press which opened in 1805, but its production was primarily in Russian. The press issued several works on Ukrainian studies, original Ukrainian historical documents and some classical Ukrainian authors. Ukrainian modern journalism in Russian and Ukrainian also started in Kharkiv, where 12 periodical titles appeared between 1812 and 1848.
The Kjiv Monastery of the Caves Press kept publishing liturgical and religious texts in Church Slavonic, but also catered for primary schools, seminaries and the general public, publishing calendars and serials. The Kjiv-Mohyla Academy was shut by the Russian authorities in 1817, and Kyiv University was opened instead in 1834. A year later a university press was set up, which supplied textbooks for secondary and higher education institutions and published scholarly works by the university professors.
The liberal reforms of Tsar Alexander II made it possible for Ukrainians to publish in their language, but the period of liberalisation was short-lived, and in 1876 Alexander II issued a decree that prohibited printing in Ukrainian, including lyrics for printed music. The types of material that were exempted were historical documents, ethnographic sources and very selective fiction and poems, subject to censorship. Some works by Ukrainian authors did not pass Imperial censorship and appeared abroad in uncensored editions; for example Shevchenko’s Kobzar’ was published in Prague in 1876. Making books accessible for the wider public was the main goal of the publishing activities of various Ukrainian cultural organizations, such as societies for literacy in Kyiv and Kharkiv and the St Petersburg-based ‘Charity for publishing useful and cheap books’ (1898-1917). The overall number of Ukrainian books published between 1798 and 1916 is about 2,800 titles. During the First World War production figures fell dramatically, but the printing industry revived in the independent Ukraine between 1917 and 1921.
In the 1920s the communist regime started the policy of "Ukrainisation" in Soviet Ukraine which was a part of the all-Union program of "korenization", or indigenization, and many talented writers emerged, including the short-story writer and critic Mykola Khvylovy, who at first extolled the revolution but became increasingly critical of Soviet policies before his death. In 1932, at the time of the Holodomor or Great Famine, in which more than 4,000,000 Ukrainians died, Stalin began enforcing socialist realism as the required literary style. This was the period of the mass repressions against the Ukrainian intelligentsia - writers, scientists, philosophers, clerics, as well as political leaders who were members of the Communist Party of Ukraine, which marked the end of "Ukrainisation". Most of them were deported to concentration camps and executed in 1937-1938; others fled into exile. The post-Stalinist period saw the emergence of a new generation that rejected Socialist Realism, but repressive measures taken in the 1970s silenced many of these authors or else turned them back to socialist realism.
So, the people of Ukraine have little to thank Russia for in the 20th century, nor indeed since the 18th century. We can only express our solidarity with the ordinary people of the Ukraine who have become extraordinary in their resolve to resist the undeclared holy war of liberation Putin is conducting with the support of Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Another library that is no more, the remarkable collection that was once at Portledge in Alwington near Bideford is undergoing a continuing bibliographical excavation. Now that the transcription of the book references in the manuscript letterbook of Richard Lapthorne's correspondence during the 1690s (DRO 2610M/F/2) has been completed, work is in progress identifying the books mentioned and this has been extended to other works in the library by starting to transcribe a manuscript catalogue compiled by Richard Coffin around 1684 and attempting to match the contents with the printed sale catalogue of 1801 which lists some 5,000 items. The first section to be examined covers the works the Coffin family acquired from overseas, which includes a good sprinkle of books from leading humanist publishers such as Plantin, the Estiennes and the Elzeviers. It is fascinating to see the way the main currents of European intellectual life flowed into the backwaters of a remote estate in north Devon and it is good to note that the tradition of book collecting did not die in the Coffin family in 1699. The 1801 catalogue records many 18th century titles.
Tailpiece
So, not really enough to fill a whole issue of the newsletter, but I felt impelled to respond to the present horrific situation in Ukraine. I will work on updating the Devon bibliography over the coming weeks - and would be delighted to learn that I am now wasting my time, as there is a library somewhere in Devon that is finally picking up the torch that was unfortunately dropped so clumsily a decade ago.
