On the Occasion of the 125th Anniversary of the Ethnographic Collection: From the History of Its Concept and the Publication’s Inception

Author

Hlushko Mykhaylo

a Doctor of History, a professor at the Ivan Franko Lviv National University Ethnology Department

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3520-8891

On the Occasion of the 125th Anniversary of the Ethnographic Collection: From the History of Its Concept and the Publication’s Inception

Abstract

The Ethnographic Collection was an organ of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lviv, which was first published 125 years ago (1895). Having used reliable archival and published sources, we consider the history of its concept, ups and downs of selection and publication of field materials in the earliest volumes of the new serial edition, as well as the motivation for changing the editor-in-chief, etc.

The idea of publishing the Ethnographic Collection belonged to Mykhaylo Hrushevskyi. The first two volumes of the Society’s organ were also edited by him. However, the historian was only nominally the editor of this publication, since the main editorial work was honestly performed by Ivan Franko, a mature ethnographer and folklorist at that time.

M. Hrushevskyi raised an issue of printing ethnographic sources before the leaders of the Society on September 30 (October12), 1894, or shortly after that date. On January 11 (23), 1895, the Presidium of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lviv came to a decision on a new periodical. A week later (January 19 (31)), this was discussed at a meeting of the Philological Section.

Initially, the Ethnographic Collection was planned for publishing a collection of recruit’s and soldier’s songs, collected by Osyp Makovey. But since the writer failed to properly process and arrange the works of folk poetry, at a suggestion of Ivan Franko, the collection was based on fairy tales recorded by Osyp Rozdolskyi. The content of the new edition’s first volume was supplemented by the folk calendar of Kuban Ukrainians compiled by Mytrofan Dykarev and Ukrainian folk anecdotes from Poltavshchyna, collected by Opanas Shymchenko.

At an initiative of M. Hrushevskyi, the first volume of the Ethnographic Collection presented an ethnographic programme, jointly prepared by four experts – personally M. Hrushevskyi, lawyer Kost Levytskyi, and philologists Ivan Kopach and Vasyl Shchurat. The main part of the methodical document (ethnographic information) was composed by literary critics I. Kopach and V. Shchurat, and that negatively affected its structure and the quality of issues proposed for field research. Therefore, this part of the programme was sharply criticized by Fedir Vovk.

While conceiving the Ethnographic Collection, M. Hrushevskyi planned to publish, on its pages, primarily ethnographic sources on the traditional culture of Ukrainians. However, with the initiation of another serial edition – Materials for the Ukrainian-Ruthenian Ethnology (1899) – the Lviv Shevchenko Scientific Society’s organ under study has become a typical folkloristic periodical.

Keywords

Ethnographical Collection, Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lviv, history of the concept and its practical implementation, Mykhaylo Hrushevskyi, Ivan Franko, Fedir Vovk.

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