Publishing centers that dreamed of Ukrainian statehood on paper

[ad_1]

In the district library of my childhood, Soviet and Russian books are being written off in full swing. I am asking the employees for permission to inspect the stacks of candidate books for waste paper. I find the Moscow edition “Pervopechatnyk Ivan Fedorov” by P. Berezov. The abstract states that Fedorov was an ardent patriot of Russia, strengthened the culture and power of the Moscow State by introducing book printing here. Next is the same record: after working in Russia, Fedorov came to Lviv to finally enlighten the unfortunate people in Ukrainian lands and show them what a printed book is.

This story is about how Russia brought light to dark Ukrainians. This story was still in our libraries. This story is another Soviet fake about the intellectual inability of Ukrainian culture.

Were Ukrainians so cut off from the world and waited almost 100 years after Gutenberg’s invention until Ivan Fedorov (or Fedorovych after all?) came to Lviv in 1572? Most of the countries of Western Europe took advantage of Gutenberg’s ingenious invention – the printing press – in the first decades. According to the research of bibliographer Ivan Ohienko, printing spread a little more slowly in the Slavic world: Czechs – 1478, Ukrainians – 1491, Poles – the end of the 15th century, Belarusians – 1517, Russians – 1564.

Russian scientists aggressively rejected the printing of books on our territory in Latin and Polish, saying, what does Ukraine have to do with it? But itinerant booksellers, such as Piotr from Lübeck or Jan Pfeffer from Krakow, who were engaged in printing in Ukraine, at the beginning of the 16th century, would definitely be offended by this. Or Schweitpolt Fiol, who printed the first Cyrillic Slavic books in Krakow back in 1491, the language of which, according to many researchers, is close to living Old Ukrainian. There is also documented information about the printing house of the Lviv Basilian Monastery of Saint Onuphrius.

And there was also a lively book trade in Lviv. For example, from the posthumous inventory of one bookstore from 1559, we learn about 3 chests of books, their estimated value and what was read then in Lviv, which is ancient literature, philosophical works of Aesop, Cicero, Erasmus of Rotterdam, textbooks on law, history, dictionaries , prayer books, books on raising children, business advisors.

So, when Ivan Fedorovych came to our region, it was easy for him to launch his startup on such a basis.

As we can see, the history of domestic book publishing also needs decolonization. We must understand that the worldview of Ukrainian readers was formed in a multi-confessional, multicultural environment, with extensive international interaction and the involvement of advanced scientific and technological achievements. The idea of ​​the history of domestic book printing should go beyond the “Cyrillic” repertoire, because there were publishing centers in Ukraine that created a wide variety of editions in different European languages, and the exchange of books and ideas with European countries took place constantly.

Printing houses that worked on Ukrainian lands were part of various state entities – the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Austrian, Russian Empires, the Royal Romania, and the USSR. Literally every story of the iconic publishing center of Ukraine is a story of struggle for the right to free press, avoidance of censorship or adaptation to new bans.

Kyiv-Pechersk paterik.

For example, the printing house of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, founded in 1616, which started the phenomenon of Ukrainian book baroque in illustration, instantly introduced all fashionable European trends, such as the publication of panegyrics or philosophical sermons, hired students of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and generally became a notable cultural institution.

In 1720, Peter I issued a decree on mandatory censorship of Kyiv and Chernihiv editions for “full compliance with the Great Russian editions” so that there was “no difference and special adverb” (of the Ukrainian language) in them. Censored books begin to appear with notes “in all respects similar to Great Russian”. This goes on until the original editions are completely washed out, and bright authors do not get a proper platform to spread their ideas.

Here, the pre-revolutionary publishing house “Vik” published fictionalized biographies of Alexander the Great and Ivan Vyhovsky. Why fictionalized? Because every more or less serious publication with a hint of scientific content ran the risk of not being censored. Therefore, popularizing authors had to mask the historical and political context with an unpretentious plot.

But already the Soviet times and the history of the children’s publishing house “Rainbow”, whose books accompanied the growing up of every Soviet child. Publishers and authors faced not only dismissal from work and expulsion from the party, but also imprisonment or exile for the slightest real or imagined deviation from the instructions. It is not surprising that next to “Toreadors from Vasyukivka” by Vsevolod Nestayk, stories about little Lenin and Karl Marx, milkmaid girls, sowing fields with corn are published here.

Covers of the 1st and 2nd volumes of the Anthology “The Age” of the publishing house of the same name.

Despite the tight framework of prohibitions and censorship, publishers manage to risk both their work and their lives, releasing masterpieces that shaped Ukrainian culture. The monks of the Lavra printing house published historical descriptions of Kyiv in elegant decoration. In the last years of the Russian Empire, the student-founders of the publishing house “Vik” carried out an audacious project – they published the eponymous poetic anthology of Ukrainian poetry “for 100 years” to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of Ivan Kotlyarevsky’s “Aeneid”. The 3 volumes of the project were a fundamental summation of all the great literature of Ukraine for all previous years. Or let’s take the cooperative publishing house of our 20s “Book Union”, which not only published novels included in the current canon, but also translated into Ukrainian the works of Sholom Aleichem, Victor Hugo, Herbert Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Yaroslav Hasek, Charles Dickens, Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy. Thanks to this, Ukrainians could get acquainted with world classics, including Russian, not through the Russian language, but through their native language. It is worth explaining that all this affected the development of the Ukrainian language and the national school of translation.

Before independence was proclaimed, the Ukrainian state was born on paper. It was the publishing centers that brought the emergence of this state closer by their activities, outlining its image, introducing the very discourse of Ukrainianness, even suggesting its emergence. That is, long before 1991, publishing centers gathered around them like-minded people who dreamed of statehood, converting their dreams and ideas into texts that received material form and distribution.

In particular, they worked closely with local elites, publishing their works and amplifying their voices. The influential Prince Vasyl-Kostyantin Ostrog turned his ancestral residence into the intellectual capital of Ukraine, and Ostrog became the center of cultural and religious resistance to Catholic and Union expansion. The role of the “Ruska besida” society was decisive for the development of the Ukrainian language and culture of Bukovyna, as well as for the formation of the national consciousness of the Ukrainian population of the region. In different years, “Ruska Besida” stood near the sources of the formation of various public organizations, such as “Mishchanska Chitalnia” (1880), “Narodnyi Dim” (1884), “Russian (later Ukrainian) School” (1887), “Bukovynsky Voyak” (1895), “Women’s Community” (1906).

Newspapers of the “Ruska besida” society.

Despite the censorship, the content of the publications already prepared the readership for awareness of common history, geography, important actors and communities. In Soviet times, masking the true content and deceiving the censorship, Ukrainian publishing houses created a common information space, continued to develop the Ukrainian language, terminology and translations from other languages, separating it from the direction of Moscow.

Therefore, upon gaining independence, Ukraine as a state inherited a remarkable intellectual background spanning several centuries.

The burning of Ukrainian books and the destruction of hundreds of libraries today is a utopian attempt by the Russian Empire to destroy evidence of its own helplessness, to mask its intellectual defeat.

***

Project “To print!” sets itself the goal of studying and popularizing significant publishing centers that worked on the territory of Ukraine from the beginning of book publishing until the era of independence or operated in the diaspora. The project is carried out by the public organization “Chitomo” with the support of the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation.

[ad_2]

Original Source Link