BOOK REVIEW: Czech ethnographer's photos illustrate book on 19th century Ukraine (09/01/96)

BOOK REVIEW

Czech ethnographer's photos illustrate book on 19th century Ukraine

The Land They Left Behind: Canada's Ukrainians in the Homeland. Stella Hryniuk and Jeff Picknicki. Introduction by Nadia Valaskova. Photography by Frantisek Rehor. Winnipeg: Watson & Dwyer, 1995. 107 pp. illus. ISBN 0-920486-13-4 $24.95 (Distributed by General Publishing: 1-800-389-0172 in western Canada, 1-800-387-0141 in eastern Canada.

by Orysia Paszczak Tracz

"Photography by Frantisek Rehor." It is the last note on the title page, and yet without it, this book would not exist. Rehor (pronounced Rzhegorzh), the Czech ethnographer and folklorist (1857-1899), fell in love with things Ukrainian. In the introduction, Nadia Valaskova writes: "By birth he was a Czech but he lived for much of his life in Ukrainian Galicia, a region whose unique ethnic coloring and rich culture so fascinated the young Rehor that he dedicated the whole of his creative life and work to its study and documentation."

That documentation included a 2,000-item collection of Ukrainian folk art and craft, 300 articles on Ukrainian themes, and a photograph collection of 350 glass plates, 9x12 cm in size, of life in Halychyna, or Galicia, the term used by the authors of the book.

Many fortunate events came together to create this treasure of a book. Ms. Valaskova discovered the photo collection in the course of her ethnographic work in the National Museum of Ethnography in Prague. For some reason, whether financial or otherwise, other Canadian scholars were not interested in acquiring the rights to these photographs.

Dr. Stella Hryniuk of the University of Manitoba doggedly pursued this project, trying to find a sponsor. This was accomplished with the generosity of the Canadian Province of the Sister Servants of Mary Immaculate, who were looking for a fitting way to celebrate their centennial: Their founding a century ago was in the general region depicted on the photographs. Jeff Picknicki, an accomplished Winnipeg researcher and writer, wrote chapters 2-11 of the book, describing so ably the life and rituals the photographs depict. To do this better, he even learned Czech, adding to his growing linguistic arsenal. As Mr. Picknicki writes, his work "was truly a labor of love."

In contrast to other books that may include photographs of village and town life in Ukraine from the end of the last century, these photographs are either not posed at all, or are moments caught in time. The impression is that the photographer just called to the people to look his way, and they did. The other photographs are of people, places and events without anyone paying attention to the camera at all.

The front and back cover photos are sepia (rather than black or grey) on white, giving the reader the feeling that he/she is entering the past. The photos in the book are black and white. The glass negatives are reproduced on the pages in an unusual way, giving the reader a sense of antiquity, or at least of stepping back in time. The edges of the photos are not sharp, but fade, just the way the negatives were developed. This adds a dreamy, almost other-worldly quality to the scenes.

And yet these scenes are so fascinating, and so down-to-earth. Before seeing these photographs, the only images I had of Ukrainian village life of the last century were from artwork - the mostly pretty and idealized paintings by Shevchenko, Vasylkivsky, and so many other fine artists. The few photographs I was familiar with before this book were posed portraits of couples and families, sitting and standing stiffly for the camera in all their finery (in the chapter "Some of the People," there are a few posed family portraits, but outdoors, as the photographer caught them). My other images are from literature, which described village life, but each reader's imagination conjures up different images of what this life was.

In "The Land They Left Behind," we see actual people, seliany [villagers] and mishchany [townspeople] living their life. The camera captured them as they were, not always attractive, and sometimes downright grubby. But then, how else is a maziar [greaseman] at work supposed to look? I imagined women washing laundry at the pond or lake or river, and here I see them, not exactly the way they appeared in my mind.

The 11 chapters of the book clearly define the photographs. Dr. Hryniuk, in Chapter 1, discusses "The Land of the Photographs," the Halychyna in which these people lived, and from which they emigrated to North America. Even though the book is all about Ukraine and Ukrainians, her wonderful title "The Land They Left Behind" connects that land and its people to Canada as the subtitle explains, "Canada's Ukrainians in the Homeland."

Dr. Hryniuk emphasizes (as she did in one of her latest books, "Peasants with Promise: Ukrainians in Southeastern Galicia 1880-1900"), that at the turn of the century, Ukrainian peasants in this region were not the downtrodden illiterate poor we have been lead to believe. They were becoming more prosperous, more educated, more active politically and socially. "As the villagers' feelings of dignity and self-worth increased, so did their expectations of a better life, for themselves, and especially for the next generation. For some of them this would lead to emigration to another country," she writes.

Chapters 2-11, written by Mr. Picknicki, are the meat of the book. Without his extremely detailed, well-researched text, the photos would have remained interesting pictures, but without meaning. The chapter titles say it all, and we learn all about each of the subjects: "House and Home" (house construction, the farm yard, manor house, wells, fences), "Working the Land" (in the fields, haying, bringing in the crops, the potato harvest), "Supplementary Occupations" (blacksmithing, tanning, cultivation of special crops, beekeeping, basketweaving and plaitwork, the greaseman, from peat to palyvo, burning limestone), "A Woman's Work" (managing the household, wash day), "To Market To Market" (Zhydachiv, Bolekhiv, Kosiv), "Some of the People" (villagers, townsfolk, the Hutsuls, Jews, beggars), "The Built Landscape" (schools, churches, roadside crosses and chapels, road building), "Special Days" (1848 remembered, Corpus Christi, Obzhynky) "Easter" (the Great Day, hayivky, Easter games, Drenched Monday, a time to remember), "To the Other World" (funerals, cemeteries).

Completing the book are a bibliography, a glossary of Ukrainian words, index, and toponymy of settlements where photographs were taken as of 1900 [this is given in the transliterated Ukrainian and in Polish, both village, town, and county].

Mr. Picknicki may be familiar to The Ukrainian Weekly readers from his "Baba Chronicles," about his grandmother. He is also the author of "Generations: a Family History" (Winnipeg: Sanford Evans, 1990).

Who would have thought that a photograph of a blacksmith would be interesting? But not only do we see a horse being shod, we see that it is a Hutsul pony, and we see that his owner came to Kosiv to the market dressed in his kyptar, with a tobivka, and wearing postoly and kapchuri. Most of the other photos also show us the folk costume of the areas in all their detail, for example, women wearing embroidered shirts and some kind of beads even for everyday work, the hairstyles, and the ornament on the back of a svyta [coat] of a man going to market in Zhydachiv.

The details in the photos are fascinating: the wattled fence (plit), the patterns in the thatched roofs, the finely plaited baskets, the musicians accompanying people headed to work the harvest, girls collecting poppy seeds (the lovely cover photo), and we see an actual "perelaz" in the fence. The details in the text also add to the richness of information. Mr. Picknicki not only describes the rituals depicted, but he explains the reasons for them. For example, in the chapter "To the Other World" (from the Ukrainian "na toi svit"), we learn why the deceased was carried out of the house feet first, and why still-hot freshly baked bread was carried to the cemeteries for the memorial service.

In her essay on Rehor, Ms. Valaskova explains why not all events of village life were photographed:

"... Not all of these groups [of photographs] however, are equal in size and some, such as christenings, weddings, and other family celebrations are completely absent from the collection, even though Rehor himself participated in these events and described them in his articles. The reason, of course, was his lack of a camera of his own [the one he used was borrowed] and the inability to photograph the interiors of houses or buildings because of technical considerations...

"Territorially, the collection includes, first of all, Zhydachiv and its environs, and also several villages in the former counties of Stryi, Dolyna, Kalush, Tovmach, and Kosiv in the Hutsul region, and Horodenka and Ternopil in Podillia...

"The photographic collection, it cannot be overstated, exists within the legacy of Rehor's life and work truly as an anomaly. Taken with a borrowed camera and at a time when photography as a part of ethnographic fieldwork was seldom used, the photographs reconstruct in considerable detail the social and cultural ambience of the era as it was seen by someone who lived through it..."

Even though this is such a special and valuable book, some improvements could be made for the next edition. One gets the impression the publisher was in too big a hurry to get this book out because, very obviously, basic proofreading was not done. For example, on the map, "countries" instead of "counties," and Slovakia labeled as "Slovenia," and in the text, "weeding" songs instead of wedding songs. The type of the text could have been a bit larger, because it is hard to read; even the page numbers are hard to find. The captions for the photos are placed on the edges of the photos themselves, and often are also difficult to see.

The term for "skasuvannia pan'shchyny" is translated as "abolition of compulsory labor." To this reviewer, "abolition of serfdom" would be a much clearer, definite translation. Serfdom and compulsory labor, while similar, convey different meanings. The Glossary of Ukrainian Words is much too short, considering the terminology in the text.

This is a special book, one-of-a-kind. This reviewer hopes that a revised edition appears, and receives mainstream attention. This material leaves you wondering what all those other Frantisek Rehor photographs show, and what he wrote about in his many articles.