Vasyl Pachovskyi.Ukrainians as a People.New York, 1917

“And amid the diverse patience, the indomitable Ukrainian Enceladus digs under the base of the terrible wheel…”

Ukrainians as a People / written by Vasyl Pachovsky. — An answer to a questionnaire on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Hadiach postulates of Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky.

New York: [publisher unknown], 1917. — 16 p. — 20 × 14 cm. On the cover, the city is given as “New York,” on the title page — “New York.”

Publisher’s cover of grayish-blue paper: the title, author’s name, and subtitle are printed in black; at the bottom — a small typographic ornament in the Secessionist style; the back cover is blank. Above the first section — a Secessionist headpiece with floral ornament. The text block is fastened with two wire staples; the staples are rusted, with brown rust stains around the holes showing through the inner edge of the cover and inside the text block, particularly on the spreads of pp. [2]–3, 4–5, and p. 16. The cover has even darkening along the edges, with small tears in the paper near the staples on the back cover. The paper of the text block is evenly yellowed, with occasional spots; there is no loss, and the text is fully legible. On the front cover in the lower right corner, “25” is written in pencil. Condition: good.

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

INFORMATION

The first section of the pamphlet has a title that sounds like a manifesto: “Ukrainians — the First Modern People.” Pachovsky answers a questionnaire on the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Hadiach Treaty of 1658 and argues that individualism, hostility to capitalism and militarism, and a longing for justice are traits of the modern person that the Ukrainian people sang about in their songs long before Europe, and that Vyhovsky was the first to put forward the postulate of a national state. The second section, “Ukrainians — as Individuals,” is a sharp self-criticism: the people possess a high sense of individualism, but lack a sense of national unity. The epigraph consists of stanzas from “Poesie religiose” by the Italian poet Mario Rapisardi, in which the “Ruthenian Enceladus” undermines the base of the bloody wheel; in the author’s note, the Ruthenian Enceladus became Ukrainian.

Vasyl Pachovsky (1878–1942) was a poet, playwright, and historian, and one of the founders of “Moloda Muza.” Already in the first paragraph of the pamphlet, he refers to his own drama “The Dream of a Ukrainian Night,” where the same idea of reviving Cossack glory “took hold with a flame.” Later, the historiographical theme became his leading one — all the way to “The World Mission of Ukraine” (1933).

The essay was first published in 1907 in Galicia; the 1917 New York edition was the second. The publisher is not indicated. The Galician text on the state-building tradition was reprinted across the ocean the very same year that the question of Ukrainian statehood shifted from the theoretical to the practical.