Oksana Ivancenko.Forest Tales.Kraków, 1942

“But those are not flower petals—those are wings.”

O. Ivanenko. Forest Tales / [cover and illustrations by Myron Levytsky].

[Kraków: Ukrainian Publishing House, 1942]. — 48 p.: ill. — ([My Little Book]; [No. 32]).

Publisher’s binding: cardboard covered with an illustrated cover, spine in gray cloth. Front cover features a woodcut-style drawing by Myron Levytsky, printed in black and green inks: an old tree with a human face and a squirrel on a branch; artist’s signature “Lev.” and publisher’s monogram “UV” at the bottom. Endpapers with continuous green print on pale green paper—children, a goat, a fox, a squirrel, sunflowers, and trees. Each page of text is framed, with headpieces and tailpieces featuring forest animals; full-page illustrations in the same style appear within the text. Front cover has small stains and scuffs, with paper loss along the top outer edge; back cover is heavily soiled, with fingerprints, a small hole near the top, and tears and paper loss along the edges; corners bumped. Spine cloth intact. Paper evenly yellowed. Thin pencil lines appear on the full-page illustration after p. 18. The price “950.0” is written in pencil on the back endpaper. Text begins on p. 1 immediately after the endpaper; there is no separate title page in this copy. Text block tight. Condition: good.

Lifetime edition. The book has historical and cultural value, and Myron Levytsky’s illustrations are of independent artistic interest.

INFORMATION

This book by a Soviet writer was published in 1942 by the Ukrainian Publishing House in Kraków—the only legal Ukrainian publisher in the General Government—in the children’s series “My Little Book.” The author’s first name is abbreviated on the cover, and Kraków critics apparently did not know who it belonged to: a review of 1942 children’s new releases in Krakówskie Wiadomości (April 1943) dismissed the surname as masculine—“O. Ivanenko,” praised the tales as a bridge between the world of fantasy and the living natural world, and recommended them for the first two grades of the People’s School, while also demanding that “Sovietisms” such as “morning exercises” and “hello” be removed from the text.

The collection contains tales from the cycle that made Oksana Ivanenko (1906–1997) famous: about a traveling squirrel who gets lost in the forest, a young sour cherry tree that protects its first blossom, and the sister birds Tsvi and Rin, whose arrival brings spring. Born in Poltava and a graduate of the Kharkiv Institute of Foreign Languages, she worked at Anton Makarenko’s colony in 1924–1925 and became the inspiration for Oksana Varska in The Pedagogical Poem. Forest Tales was first published in Kharkiv in the mid-1930s, establishing her as a classic of Ukrainian nature-themed children’s literature.

The book was designed by Myron Levytsky (1913–1993), an art editor at the Ukrainian Publishing House in 1942–1944; he signed the cover with his artistic pseudonym “Lev.” The cover, endpapers, headpieces, and illustrations are executed in a stylized woodcut style characteristic of his graphic work. After the war, Levytsky worked in Innsbruck and Winnipeg, and from 1954 in Toronto, where he designed more than 300 books. Wartime children’s books were printed on cheap paper and have mostly survived heavily read.