Baley Petro.Pan: Novellas and Short Stories.Jersey City; New York, 1984

“When I was very little, He came to me in my sleep.”

Petro Baley. Pan: Novellas and Short Stories.

Jersey City; New York: Svoboda Publishing House, 1984 (second edition, expanded). — 279, [1] pp.

In a softcover edition: orange background, the author’s calligraphic signature in black, a blue oval emblem with the title “Pan” in white on blue, and a stylized flower below. The cover is bright, with slight wear in the upper left corner. The paper has a natural tone, which is more pronounced on the last blank leaf. The binding is firm, the text is clear, and the printing is even. Condition: very good.

Lifetime edition.

INFORMATION

The second, expanded edition of Petro Baley’s prose collection opens with the eponymous short story “Pan,” about a mysterious figure who visits a boy in his dreams, accompanying him through his childhood fears and his first awareness of his parents’ mortality. This is followed by “From My Mother’s Notebooks,” dedicated to the author’s mother; the satirical letter series “From the Letters of a Strong Man” about a rogue who “turned an idea into a commodity”; the legend “The Fourth Kingdom”; the miniature “The Siege”; and texts on the Bolshevik coup and the insurgent struggle, including “Don’t Hang Me!” and the excerpt “The Last Days” from the novella “The Criminals”—fourteen novellas and short stories in total. Compared with the first edition, published in 1948 in the DP camp in Regensburg under the title “Pan: A Collection,” this book has been significantly expanded.

Petro Baley (1912–2003) was a Ukrainian writer, publicist, and public figure, and a full member of the OUN. He graduated from the Sokyly Gymnasium (1932) and the Faculty of Law and Economics at the University of Lublin (1939). During World War II, he was a prisoner in Auschwitz—an experience he recounted in the book of caricatures and tragic drawings “The Political Prisoner’s Album,” published under the pseudonym Osinka (Munich, 1946). After the war, he settled in the United States, where, in addition to fiction, he wrote a number of non-fiction works on the Soviet era; in 2001, he was named an honorary doctor of the National University “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.” He was the father of conductor and composer Virko Baley.

The Svoboda Publishing House operated in conjunction with the oldest Ukrainian newspaper in the diaspora (published since 1893) of the same name and had its own printing house in Jersey City. In that same year, 1984, the book was provided with a parallel English-language title page, “Peter Baley. Pan. Short Stories”—a characteristic gesture of diaspora publishing toward cataloging in libraries outside the Ukrainian-speaking environment.