Horlis-Horskyi Yurii.Kholodnyi Yar: in Two Parts.London, 1967

“Kholodnyi Yar is one of the most vivid pages of the liberation struggle in Ukraine.”

Yurii Horlis-Horskyi. Kholodnyi Yar (in two parts, with a map). Fourth edition.

London: published by M. Myronenko, 1967. — 437 pp.: map. — 21.5 × 14.5 × 2.5 cm.

Publisher’s dust jacket in light blue paper: the front has a black stencil—the author’s name and title; the back is plain. Slight rubbing and minor soiling along the edges, a creased upper corner on the back with some loss of paper, and occasional foxing. The paper is cream and clean, the binding is firm, and there is no loss of text. The title page bears an owner’s stamp in the form of an unfurled ribbon: “Petro Lysyi’s Book.” Condition: very good.

The book is of historical and cultural value and is of collector’s interest.

INFORMATION

“Kholodnyi Yar” is the memoirs of a lieutenant of the 1st Regiment of the Kholodnyi Yar Regiment on the insurgent struggle in the Chyhyryn region in 1919–1922. The narrative is told from within the events: a stay at the Motronyn Monastery, where Ataman Chornota reads “Critique of Pure Reason” in a cell, with nearby volumes exchanged for Bolshevik propaganda trains in the villages; riding in threes to the Kreseltsi forest with the Chuchupak brothers; the reorganization of the Kholodnyi Yar Regiment into a brigade of three regiments in the summer of 1920; the destruction of a Chekist “shock group” that had camped in a dugout in the Kholodnyi Yar forest. It was from this book that the image of the Kholodnyi Yar Republic, which fought under the national flag until 1922, entered the Ukrainian memory.

Yurii Horlis-Horskyi (1898–1946), born Yurii Horodianyn-Lisovskyi, was a senior officer in the Army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, a scout, and a writer. A participant in the Kholodnyi Yar insurgent movement, he later became a prisoner in Bolshevik jails, escaped from a psychiatric hospital, and reached Poland. In the 1930s, he lived in Galicia, where the first editions of “Kholodnyi Yar” were published (Lviv, 1934–1935). During World War II, he ended up in the West; he died in Germany in 1946.

The title page of this edition marks it as the fourth. It was published in London by M. Myronenko, who added his own historical and political essay-afterword (pp. 419–434), signed in January 1967, — a polemical review of events from the Central Rada and the Hetmanate to the Directorate. Ukrainian London editions of the 1960s were published in small print runs and circulated within the diaspora community, so copies are rare.