Rare books by Lesia Ukrainka donated to Volyn museums

Almost simultaneously, new valuable books appeared in collections of Volyn Regional Museum and Kolodiazhne Lesia Ukrainka Memorial Museum. The latter museum received 22 books from Bohdan Pevny’s family, living in the US. Pevny, born in Lutsk in 1931, was a painter, art critic, writer, and co-editor of the Suchasnist journal. His widow donated books by Lesia Ukrainka published in the diaspora centers, particularly in the US and Canada.

For its part, Volyn Regional Museum received true rarities from Oleksii Zlatohorsky, director of Volyn Antiquities state enterprise. He started his career at the museum and has never ceased to consider himself a museum worker at heart. Knowing about financial hardship affecting museums today, he did not ask for any compensation for giving books from the personal library. His collection is really rich, including as much as 20,000 books! Zlatohorsky has been a book collector from childhood, and has been interested in Lesia Ukrainka and Josef Kraszewski for almost as long. He says he knows second-hand book sellers who, given his tastes, often offer really unique items to him...

His latest donations included following books: Lesia Ukrainka’s The Babylonian Captivity. Upon the Ruins (Kyiv-Berlin: Ukrainska Nakladnia Publishers, sine anno) and Unpublished Works, prepared for publication from manuscripts by Maria Derkach (Lviv: Vilna Ukraina Publishers, 1947), and Vasyl Simovych’s Correspondence of Lesia Ukrainka and Osyp Makovei, with Olena Pchilka’s Letters and My Own Memories of Lesia Ukrainka’s Stay in Chernivtsi Appended (Lviv: Khortytsia Publishers, 1938).

“Lesia Ukrainka did not publish a lot in her lifetime, so some books on the list’ copies are in single figures now,” Zlatohorsky says. “I have decided that they do much more good in the museum than in my home. My own library is so large, among other things, because I have acquired private collections of two prominent archaeologists. I think many of these books will find their way to the museum, too, with books and their former owners alike coming as a revelation for the public, since books are a formative factor in personal development.”