“For All Good, Contrary to All Evil...”

It is in headlined words that the great Ukrainian poetess Lina Kostenko signed her own historical novel Berestechko donated to the Chornukhy Library. Ms. Kostenko graced — a bit suddenly but still expectedly — The Day’s office with her presence in order to personally hand over her carefully selected books. There were lots of them: three volumes of Shevchenko, two volumes of Lesia Ukrayinka, four volumes of Chekhov, Serhiy Paradzhanov, Hermann Hesse, and textbooks. Among these stand out: a striking opus Ukrainian Folk Tales (Brama, 1998) — it is for illustrating this book that artist M. Storozhenko was awarded a Shevchenko Prize; Under a Wormwood Star, a well-illustrated photo story on the history and culture of Chornobyl Polissia (Sieda-Stil, 1996), with Ms. Kostenko’s dedication calling on all to remember that Chornobyl is not only the Dead Zone but also part of the Fatherland; Mykhailo Zahreba’s photo book We Let Chornobyl into Our Hearts (Spalakh, 2002). And what I think is the most valuable acquisition — not only the decoration but also the pride — of the Hryhory Skovoroda library is Lina Kostenko herself. Her works range from Marusia Churai (1979), Inimitability and A Garden of Non-Meltable Sculptures to Selected and Berestechko recently published after years of painstaking work. Last year saw the birth of an extremely fine book, The Nightingale Caught Cold (Makhaon-Ukraine), and the author wholeheartedly wished this book would find its way to Chornukhy children... Ms. Kostenko signed all the books she had written. She told us that “one must run away from the swamp into an extreme situation” and that if people responded to this kind of initiative, this means we do have this kind of society. She said she was our newspaper subscriber and wanted, particularly, to single out Klara Gudzyk, and many other things off the record. It was so hard to part.

Here we put a period or, to be more exact, a semicolon. Last Friday most of the books gathered at The Day’s editorial office for the future library were loaded onto a huge old MAZ truck. There will be another load soon. We extend our special thanks to the people who handled several tons of books. They reached Chornukhy on the same day. As organizers of this action, we also visited the place and are going to give a full account of the results. Read about this in The Day’s next issues.