Lypa Yurii.Cossacks in Muscovy: a romance from the 17th century.Paris, 1957

“Let the Cossacks gouge out the eyes of the Muscovite snakes!”

Lypa Yuriy. Cossacks in Muscovy: a seventeenth-century novel / [edited by Dmytro Shtykalo; cover by Yakov Hnyzdovsky].

Paris: Published by Ukrayinets, 1957. — 206 pp. — (Library of Selected Works; vol. 1). — 19 × 14.5 cm. Third edition. Printed at Imprimerie de Navarre, 11, rue des Cordelières, Paris; part of the print run was printed on offset paper with numbered copies.

Original publisher’s cover by Yakov Hnyzdovsky, printed in two colors: on a cream background, woodcut figures of three clergymen; the lower half is solid cherry red with the title set in type; on the back cover, a round publisher’s mark “Ukrayinets Publishing House. Paris.” Rubbing along the edges and bumped corners of the cover; tears at the top and bottom of the spine; the text block is firm and complete. The paper shows natural yellowing, with occasional foxing on the first and last leaves. Pencil mark “100” on the back cover. Good condition.

Third edition of the novel and the first book in the series. The edition has historical and cultural value, and Yakov Hnyzdovsky’s cover is of independent artistic interest.

INFORMATION

“Cossacks in Muscovy” is the only novel by Yuriy Lypa (1900–1944), set in the mid-seventeenth century: nobleman Hryhoriy Trembetskyi and his companions set out from Danzig and reach Moscow on the eve of the Pereyaslav Uprising. The language is richly imbued with period vocabulary, so an index of archaic words for each section is included at the end of the book. The novel was first published in the 1930s (according to different sources, 1934 or 1935); its second edition was published by the Ukrainian Publishing House in Kraków in 1942; the Kraków text, as noted in the edition, served as the basis for the Parisian edition.

Yuriy Lypa was a poet, prose writer, journalist, and physician, and the son of writer and statesman Ivan Lypa; author of the collections “Svitlist” (1925), “Suvorist” (1931), “Viruyu” (1938), the three-volume “Notatnyk,” and the geopolitical trilogy beginning with “The Destiny of Ukraine.” He died in 1944 in the Lviv region. In the biographical note in this edition, his birth year is given as 1904—an error later corrected by other literature to 1900.

The cover was designed by Yakov Hnyzdovsky (1915–1985), one of the most renowned Ukrainian graphic artists of the twentieth century.