Shevchenko Taras.Kobzar: selection for children.Lviv, 1921

“Read them carefully, dear children, Shevchenko’s little songs, those beautiful fragrant roses-flowers…”

Taras Shevchenko. Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar: a selection for children. Third edition; on the 60th anniversary of the Poet’s death.

Lviv: published by the Ukrainian Pedagogical Society, 1921. — 63 p.: portrait. — Printed at the Shevchenko Scientific Society Press.

Later half-leather binding: spine and corners in blue leather, covers bound in marbled paper in blue, yellow, and brown tones; on the spine, the title is stamped in red, the author’s name in silver, and floral rosettes in green. Endpapers of light blue marbled paper. The original publisher’s cover with a portrait vignette and title, and the back cover, are preserved in the binding. The paper is yellowed, with occasional foxing and brown spots on the edges, and tears along the fold of the title page. On the title page, the price “30 sot.” is written in ink, along with two owners’ signatures; on the title page, the first page of text, and at the end of the text block, there are purple oval library stamps with Polish text, some partially obscured; on the publisher’s cover and blank pages, there are pencil signatures and inscriptions. The binding is modern; the text block and publisher’s cover are authentic. Condition: restored.

The book has historical and cultural value and is of collector’s interest; the binding is of independent artistic interest.

INFORMATION

The book is designed as a child’s first encounter with Shevchenko: it opens with a biography of the poet, written simply and without pathos—about his stepmother, orphanhood, and school in the village of Dyako—and ends with a direct appeal to the young reader to learn Shevchenko’s songs by heart. This is followed by a selection from Kobzar: “Zaspiw,” “My thirteenth has passed,” “Ivan Pidkova,” “Hamalia,” “The Plague,” “The Death of the Ostap,” “Orphan’s Easter,” “The Bequest”—a total of over forty texts. Difficult and archaic words are explained in footnotes, and short notes on Skutar, the Bosphorus, and Khortytsia have also been added to “Hamalia.”

Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861) was a poet and painter, born into serfdom and manumitted in 1838; Kobzar, first published in 1840, became the book around which Ukrainian national consciousness revolved on both sides of the Austro-Russian border.

The edition was dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the poet’s death and was published by the Ukrainian Pedagogical Society—an institution that had maintained a private Ukrainian school in Galicia at its own expense since 1881 and received the name “Ridna Shkola” in 1926. Printed at the Shevchenko Scientific Society Press. The year of publication coincides with the first months of Polish rule over Galicia, when Ukrainian schooling was losing state support—and it was in a school book collection that this copy ended up: the Polish-language library stamps on it bear witness to its further journey.