Kobets Oleksa.Memoirs of a Prisoner.Munich, 1959 — with a Dedication

Oleksa Kobets. Notes of a Prisoner (Adventures and Impressions of a Participant in the First World War) / cover by Myron Levytskyi; foreword by Dr. Mykhailo Loza.

Munich: Dniprovska Khvylia Publishing House, 1959. — Fourth edition. — 414 pp.: portrait. — 20 × 14 × 2.5 cm. — Printed by BIBLOS G. m. b. H., Munich, Heß-Straße 50. Print run not stated.

In the original publisher's binding. Minor wear to the cover. Age-toned paper, intact block. Condition: good.

Lifetime edition. The book has historical and memoir value and is an interesting example of Ukrainian émigré literature. Bibliographic rarity.

INFORMATION

The author recounts his own front-line experience during the First World War: captivity, wandering through camps, the lives of Ukrainian prisoners of war in captivity, and their awakening of national consciousness while imprisoned. The text combines personal testimony with ethnographic observations of the daily life and attitudes of prisoners of various nationalities.

Oleksa Kobets is the pseudonym of the writer Oleksa Varava (1882–1967), a journalist, translator, and prose writer, participant in the First World War, and full cavalier of St. George. Co-founder of the newspaper Kanivska Nedilia (1913), he debuted with the collection Ryast. After the Second World War, he was held in displaced persons camps in Germany, and in 1950 emigrated to the United States.

Notes of a Prisoner was first published in 1931 in Kharkiv–Kyiv. The 1959 Munich reissue was already the fourth, published in exile with a foreword by Dr. Mykhailo Loza; the book contains a 1917 photograph of the author, and the cover was designed by the painter and graphic artist Myron Levytskyi (1913–1993). The donor inscription on this copy indicates its personal history within the reading community of the diaspora.