Poetry
Русалка Дністровая
Not translated into English
Markiyan Shashkevych · 1837
Synopsis
Folk songs collected in the villages of Galicia, others taken from the collections of Maksymovych and Sreznevsky, the poems and a little prose by the three compilers, a few verses by two friendly poets, translations of Serbian songs and of extracts from an old Czech manuscript, all in the language that the peasants of the region spoke, under a title that makes the Dniester a nymph of the Slavic world.
Context
Two collections from the same circle, Syn Rusi in 1833 and Zoria in 1834, had failed before the censors, and their material passed into this one. It was printed at Buda, at the presses of the University of Pest, where the censorship was more lenient, in civil type and in a phonetic spelling that set a trend; the print run, completed in December 1836, bears 1837. Banned in Lviv and then in Vienna until 1848, it was seized in nearly eight hundred copies out of a thousand, and the Greek Catholic hierarchy showed itself hostile to its authors. Its motto, borrowed from the Slovak Kollár, expresses the idea of Slavic solidarity that drove it.
Who it is for
A small almanac in which folk songs and texts by named authors are mixed, in a spelling that was new at the time.
Prizes and reception
The first book printed in the spoken language in Austrian Galicia, and the act with which the literature of western Ukraine begins.
Sources for this page 8
The pages consulted to check this page.