Ukrainians to see “Dnieper Rapids” again

The Academician Dmytro Yavornytsky House-cum-Museum in Dnipropetrovsk has opened an exhibit, “Dnieper Rapids,” devoted to a unique natural and historical phenomenon, a Ukrainian symbol destroyed during Soviet industrialization.

Today, Dnipropetrovsk’s museum repositories keep one of Ukraine’s largest collections of antiquities, which thoroughly covers this topic. It is Dmytro Yavornytsky, an outstanding historian, archeologist, and researcher of the Dnieper rapids, who laid the groundwork for this collection – he once published a large generously illustrated historical and geographical essay, Dnieper Rapids.

The exhibit displays rare 19th-early-20th-century pictures and maps, documents, exclusive publications, and unique archeological finds from the collections of O. Pol, D. Yavornytsky, and Y. Novytsky, ancient work implements, fragments of weapons and crockery found in the places of rapids. A separate installation shows the work and everyday life of Dnieper pilots.

On the day the exhibit was opening, Dnipropetrovsk residents could see a reprinted edition of Yavornytsky’s book Dnieper Rapids. According to Nadia Kapustina, Honored Personality of Culture, director of the Dnipropetrovsk National Historical Museum, the book’s publication is a major cultural event. “I am highly pleased to speak about the work of Mr. Oleksandr Savchuk on whose initiative the book was republished. It is very close to the 1928 original which our museum keeps.”

The Kharkiv-based publisher Savchuk says that the new book is not just a reprint. It has a modern-day preface, a text with numbered pages, and Yavornytsky’s illustrations. He thanked academics, the staff of the Yavornytsky House-cum-Museum, the National Preserve of Khortytsia, and the Institute of Archeology, for help. “Thanks to Ms. Kapustina, we found a lot of original illustrations which Yavornytsky himself had included into his edition. There is also a supplement of illustrations, some of which being published for the first time. I mean photographs of the area between Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhia, photos of the Dnieper rapids proper, about which the historian writes,” Savchuk says.

The book is very easy to read, and you can see that the author, Academician Yavornytsky, was also a talented writer. Yet it is sad even now to read the book, for it is in fact a publication from the “Ukraine that we have lost” series. In the opinion of Oleh Vlasov, a researcher at the National Preserve of Khortytsia, present-day Ukrainians tend to view Yavornytsky’s book as sort of an encyclopedia of the Dnieper rapids. The book is supposed to acquaint the public with such a unique thing as the Dnieper rapids before they were flooded over. “Our goal now is to continue working in this direction,” the historian pointed out.