Vasyl Barka.Lirnyk: Selected Poems.New York, 1968

Vasyl Barka. Lirnyk: selected poetry = Wasyl Barka. Lirnyk: selected poetry.

New York: New York Group Publishing House, 1968. Printed by: «Logos» GmbH, München.

Illustrated dust jacket: on a blue background, an orange line drawing — rays around an eye with two palms in a circle; the author's surname and title — in orange letters along the contour of the eye. The dust jacket is worn and soiled; the spine and upper left edge of the front cover are covered with yellowed traces of a library sticker and tape, the upper right corner is torn, the lower corners are worn down to the white paper, there is a small dent near the bottom edge. The back cover is yellowed, with stains and tape residue at the top near the spine; at the top, there is a handwritten inscription "2500 грн". The block paper has natural yellowing, with occasional foxing on the edges of the sheets. On the title page, there is a blue stamp "St. Andrews Ukrainian Church, P. O. Box 7136, North Port, Florida 33596". Condition: good.

Lifetime and first edition of the collection. The book has historical and literary value as a publication of the New York Group, which was printed in Munich.

INFORMATION

"Lirnyk" is a collection of selected poems by Vasyl Barka, one of the most famous poets of the Ukrainian emigration, published by the New York Group in 1968. The book includes "Father and Son", "Apostles", "Poem of the Blooming Wheat", "Tsareborets" (fragments), "The Bread-Making Poem", "Poem of Farewell", and other poems and cycles, dated, among others, 1938, 1945, and 1964–1965. Yuriy Sherekh dedicated his study "The Poetry of a Cherry-Blossom Evening" to the poem "Father and Son", which opens the collection.

Vasyl Barka (real surname Ocheret; 1908–2003) was born in the village of Solonitsi in Poltava Oblast, studied and taught in Krasnodar; in 1943, the Germans deported him to Berlin. After the war, he lived in displaced persons camps in Augsburg, and at the turn of the 1940s–1950s, settled in the USA. Author of the poetry books "Apostles" (1946), "White World" (1947), "Ocean", and the novel "The Yellow Prince" about the 1932–1933 Holodomor, based on which Oles Yanchuk filmed the movie "Holodomor-33" in 1991.

The New York Group is an association of emigrant poets that published the yearbook "New Poetry" (1959–1971) and also published poets of the older generation, among them Barka. "Lirnyk" has a bilingual title — Ukrainian and English. An expanded edition of the collection was published in Kyiv in the early 1990s.