Research Report No. 62
Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press
Edmonton & Toronto
1999(html & text)
Note! Some files are large. Please be
patient.
CONTENTS
This bibliography is made available to users on the Internet for their own, private, non-commercial use. Any other use requires the permission of the author and copyright holders.
The General Plan:
Ukrainian Literature in English, 1980-1989 is the third published book in a major continuing bibliographical project that attempts, for the first time, a comprehensive coverage of translations from and materials about Ukrainian literature published in English from the earliest known publications to the present. The project is planned to include:
The general plan is as follows:
Scope, limitations, form, structure:
The present report covers all four categories of materials, i.e. separately published books and pamphlets, as well as articles, translations and book reviews published in journals and collections during the 1980's. Titles are arranged by main entry in a numbered alphabetical sequence. There is one general (name and subject) index which serves as a retrieval key to all the materials included.
The focus of Ukrainian Literature in English is on modern Ukrainian literature, i.e. literature written originally in the Ukrainian language and published since 1798. Entries from early periods of Ukrainian literature (i.e. Slovo o polku Ihorevim) and from folklore are included selectively. Works by and about Ukrainian authors whose primary literary output is in a language other than Ukrainian (e.g. Nikolai Gogol) are outside the scope of this bibliography. Memoirs and biographies are covered only, if they are by or about prominent writers and/or deal with literature. Non-literary works of Ukrainian writers are not covered. The scope is limited to materials published in books, pamphlets, monthly or quarterly journals, yearbooks, encyclopedias, anthologies and other collections. Unpublished dissertations are not covered, but published abstracts of these dissertations are included. No attempt has been made to cover materials published in the daily press, in weekly or semi-monthly periodicals.
No title is included in Ukrainian Literature in English unless it was examined personally and unless the bibliographical information was verified de visu. This is an important limitation. Some materials for which limited bibliographical data is available, are difficult or impossible to obtain and so the information cannot be verified. Not even a comprehensive bibliography can ever be complete: an estimated 80-90% coverage, I would hope, should be considered enough for a first publication. Future supplements (which would include materials newly discovered and/or personally verified) would eventually bring the coverage closer to 95%-98%; it would probably be unrealistic to ever expect a 100% coverage.
Main entries in the bibliography appear, as a rule, in standardized transliterated form: variant forms of names as used in the sources themselves, if different, are retained in the body of the bibliographical entry. Names of Ukrainian writers and Ukrainian titles of their works are transliterated according to the Library of Congress system, with the omission of diacritical marks. For other authors who consistently use a different form of name for their publications in English, that preferred form has been retained. For books whose year of publication is not given on the title page, the year of copyright is indicated in brackets, e.g. [c 1987]. The index provides access to the bibliography by means of personal names of authors, co-authors, translators, compilers, editors, illustrators, or by means of specific subjects. Subject headings conform to the standards set by the Library of Congress Subject Headings (8th ed., 1975). A list of subject headings used in this bibliography is appended. Cross references are provided in the index from forms of names or subject headings not adopted. A list of journals and collections indexed is included to facilitate an overview of sources.
All entries for books, articles and translations are annotated. Annotations attempt to provide a factual non-biased comment, with an occasional critical note, whenever the factual content of the material is found to be misleading or incorrect. Quotations from the sources themselves used in annotations are meant to give the reader both the substance and the stylistic flavor of the original. Occasionally, a reference to another article in this bibliography is inserted to alert the reader to interrelated materials.
The attempt to provide original Ukrainian titles for translated works of poetry, prose and drama presents a number of difficulties. Except for those rare publications where parallel texts are printed side by side, identification of original titles is seldom supplied by the translators themselves. This requires additional research. The absence of extensive Ukrainian poetry and short story collections in American libraries makes such research difficult. Textual comparisons are seldom possible. The use of secondary sources can be risky. The authors themselves are not always the most reliable sources, either. Moreover, the titles of literary works sometimes change, and a single title may have more than one variant.
The decade of the 1980's witnessed a dramatic increase both in the quantity and quality of English language materials on Ukrainian literature. This was due in large measure to five factors: 1/ renewed activities of some publishers (especially Dnipro in Soviet Ukraine, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and Bayda Books in the West); 2/ the publication in Toronto of the first two volumes of the Encyclopedia of Ukraine; 3/ the creative efforts of a younger, Western-educated generation of Ukrainian literary scholars; 4/ systematic translations of Ukrainian prose and poetry by the journals Ukraine (Kyiv) and Ukrainian Canadian (Toronto); and 5/ persecution of Ukrainian writers in the USSR and the resulting publicity in Western media. High level literary scholarship is still not too abundant, and a serious English language journal devoted exlusively to Ukrainian literature is still conspicuous by its absence. In comparison to earlier periods, however, the improvement is rather remarkable, and the present bibliography bears witness to this welcome development.
Acknowledgments
The work on this segment of Ukrainian Literature in English has been supported partially by a grant from the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta. That assistance and encouragement is acknowledged with gratitude. I would also like to express my appreciation to the following libraries, whose collections made this work possible: the Van Pelt Library of the University of Pennsylvania, the Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto, the St. Vladimir Institute Library in Toronto and the Ukrainian Library at the Ukrainian Educational and Cultural Center in Philadelphia. Rostyslav Dotsenko of Kyiv and Myroslava Antonovych of Ivano-Frankivsk deserve my thanks for their help in identifying some of the English translations of Ukrainian poetry and prose.
Philadelphia, September 1996 Copyright by Marta Tarnawsky