Buryakivets Yuriy.The Heart of Drunken Warmth: Poems.New York, 1967 — author's autograph

Yurii Buryakivets. The Heart’s Drunken Warmth: Poems / [Cover by R. Pachovsky].

New York: Published by Vasyl Pustovyi, 1967. — 128 pp.: portrait. — 20 × 14 cm. Printed by Nasha Batkivshchina Press, New York.

Hardcover in light blue cloth, with the front board blank. The illustrated cover by R. Pachovsky (silhouettes of a woman with a flag and a rider on a rearing horse in a light green circle against a black background) is pasted into the binding. On the front endpaper is a portrait of the author, with his signature “Yurii Buryakivets” in blue ink below it. The cloth of the front board shows mottled dark stains and small dark spots; the top and bottom of the spine show slight wear to the cloth. There is a dark stain on the upper right of the pasted cover. The text block is firm, and the paper is clean and bright. Condition: good.

Lifetime edition with the author’s autograph. The book has historical and cultural value as a keepsake of Ukrainian diaspora poetry in the United States, and the graphic cover is of independent collecting interest.

INFORMATION

The autograph of the poet, who survived occupied Kyiv, forced labor in Germany, and post-war emigration, appears beneath his own portrait on the front endpaper of this 1967 New York collection. The Heart’s Drunken Warmth is Yurii Buryakivets’s fifth book of poetry and his first since Vinogradnyk, published in Buenos Aires in 1956. The collection opens with a cycle dated 1941–1944—war-time poems written between Kyiv and Germany.

Yurii Buryakivets (1922–1996) was born in Chernihiv and lived in Kyiv from childhood, where he graduated from school in 1941. That same year, he joined the OUN, took part in the resistance movement against the German occupiers, and was deported to Germany for forced labor. He graduated from the Ukrainian Free University in Munich (1949); from 1947, he was a member of the Union of Ukrainian Writers and Journalists in Augsburg, where his first collections, Slovo pro Ukrainu, Do verchyn dukha, and Zirnytsi, were published. In the United States, he studied at the University of Pennsylvania, earned a master’s degree (1960), and taught German and Spanish. He later published the collections Perelohy, Polumian Vles, and Ridnoho kraiu haluzka, and the novels Pasport na Ukrainu and Pravo na velyku drohu in New York. His work is distinguished by its philosophical reflection on the fate of the Ukrainian people, mythological and historical themes, and depictions of his native Polissia.

The book was published by Vasyl Pustovyi, who also funded other New York editions by the poet, and printed at the Nasha Batkivshchina Press on East 4th Street in New York. The cover was designed by the artist R. Pachovsky: two dynamic silhouetted figures set within a light circle echo the emotional, “drunken” tone of the title.