Embroidered Kobzar, a unique book

The National University of the Ostroh Academy hosted presentation of this valuable publication. Two craftswomen from Rivne, Olena Medvedieva and Anna Tymoshok, managed to recreate the first edition of Taras Shevchenko’s immortal book. They developed the schemes and went on to embroider onto fabric all the works that were included in Kobzar’s 1840 version. The pair kept all author’s punctuation intact and supplemented the handmade book with six paintings by Shevchenko. They confess that this latter task was the hardest one, since translating paintings into embroidery schemes and picking the right colors to reflect Shevchenko’s full palette was not that simple.

Craftswomen chose the poet’s early paintings for the book, the most interesting and, at the same time, the most difficult of them being these three: a self-portrait of young Shevchenko, the famous Catherine and a little-known work The Liberation of the Apostle Peter from Prison, which symbolizes Shevchenko’s liberation from serfdom.

The book is embroidered onto what is popularly called “toadflax cloth.” Medvedieva and Tymoshok used the feather stitching technique, managing to make the handmade Kobzar to look almost exactly like its old printed book model.

“We tried to make a creative book for a long time, starting with embroidering illustrations for Ukrainian fairy tales and producing amber books. We had these and other works displayed at the Book Museum in Ostroh. Subsequently it occurred to us that some grander project was in order,” Medvedieva told us. “The embroidered Kobzar took a year for us to finish.”

The unique embroidered book will soon come to the Museum of Books and Book Printing in Kyiv, the Taras Shevchenko Museum, and exhibition halls of the Rivne Regional Museum.