French Balzac and German Boll

However, this money was soon devaluated by inflation, the work was suspended, and the compilers' enthusiasm faded. Only philologist Anatoly Podolynny, who was responsible for the literary encyclopedia, did not give up. Alone, he pestered sponsors and worked over the piles of material. And it turned out that his dogged labors did not go in vain but gave birth to a book, From Over the River of God: A Literary Dictionary of the Vinnytsia Region. It is a real literature encyclopedia of Vinnytsia oblast, containing 651 entries giving the biographies of that same number of writers, in this way or another associated with Podillia. (Podolynny wrote 405 entries himself.) The names of Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad, who spent his childhood in Pohrebyshche district, German prose writer Heinrich BЪll, who was in Vinnytsia with occupation army, Danish folklorist Thor Lange, who died in his own estate near Lypovets, France's Honore De Balzac, who spent his honeymoon in Nemyriv, Russian classical poet Nikolai Nekrasov, who had been born in Nemyriv, along with a whole kaleidoscope of Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish writers.

Actually, enumeration is a thankless task. Even someone well versed in literary local studies will find it hard to tear himself away from a book so full of unexpected windfalls. Unfortunately, the joy of such discovery the new will not be available to many due to its paltry print run of 1000.

Meanwhile, Anatoly Podolynny has already planned out his next work: the encyclopedia's volume on folklore and ethnography. As for the other volumes, work remains at a standstill.