The Ukrainian Section (U)
The Ukrainian section contains a number of rare printed books from the 16th–18th centuries. It also comprises the first editions of Ukrainian authors from the second third of the 19th century, e.g. Amvrosii Metlynsʼkyi, Levko Borovykovskyi or Panteleimon Kulish. Valuable items are literary almanacs, including Iuzhnyi russkii sbornik of Amvrosii Metlynsʼkii (1848, Appendage 1; Appendage 2; Appendage 3), Malorusskii literaturenyi sbornik by Danyl Mordovtsev (1859) and Kulish’s Khata (1860). These are followed by textbooks of the Ukrainian language, including the first Ukrainian grammar Grammatika malorossiiskago narechiia by Oleksii Pavlovskii from 1818, anthologies of Ukrainian folklore, and historical, geographical and historical-economic monographs.
The most developed scientific branches comprised Ukrainian ethnography, which is connected with other scientific disciplines, mainly history, philology and literary history. Likewise in this respect, the Ukrainian collection is particularly rich, including Ukrainian folk songs. It contains multiple sources on Ukrainian history, mainly works by Aleksander I. Rigeľman, Dmitrii N. Bantysh-Kamenskii, Nikolai I. Kostomarov, Denis Zubritskii, Mykhailo Drahomanov, Mykhailo Hrushevskii etc.
A literary historian can find here plenty of editions from the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century (mostly by Ivan Franko), a rich collection of books by Taras H. Shevchenko (for instance, the library owns the first uncensored edition of Shevchenko’s Kobzar published in Prague in 1876 – Kobzar: z dodatkom spomynok pro Shevchenka Kostomarova i Mykeshyna; Kobzar: z dodatkom Spomynok pro Shevchenka pysateliv Turgeneva i Polonskoho), almost complete sets of literary and popular-science magazines, Ukrainian magazines and anthologies from the interwar period. The section contains most scientific editions published by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and other institutions during the Soviet era.
There are rich collections of Ukrainian émigrés, represented by scientific, journalistic as well as literary works, not only in editions from the interwar period but also after 1945.
Newspaper collections are large. From the period before the First World War, there are mostly press organs published in centres of Ukrainian life (Kiev, Lviv, Kharkiv), the press of the fractions of the Russian State Duma in Saint Petersburg and press organs from the USA, Canada and South America. The items from the First World War include newspapers from Vienna, the USA and Canada; from the period of Ukrainian statehood (1917–1920), the library has more than a hundred titles of newspapers both from the area of Ukraine and from abroad, mainly from America. The newspaper collections of the 1920s and 1930s are also numerous, comprising i.a. printed books from Soviet Ukraine, press organs of the Ukrainian lands outside the Soviet Union (Galicia, Bukovina and Subcarpathian Rus’) and printed books of Ukrainian émigrés in Austria, Germany, France, Czechoslovakia, China, Canada, the USA, Brazil and Argentina. The collection of the magazines of Ukrainian émigrés is rich; it includes especially literary-journalistic, humorous and satirical, school and student magazines; a remarkable set comprises magazines issued by Ukrainian soldiers in POW and internment camps during the First World War and after its end.
