Metadata: S. An-ski
Collection
- Country:
- Ukraine
- Holding institution:
- Manuscript Institute of the V. I. Vernads’kyi National Library of Ukraine
- Holding institution (official language):
- Інститут рукопису Національної бібліотеки України ім. В.І. Вернадського
- Postal address:
- Building number 2, 62 Vladimirskaya street, 3rd floor, k.307; 4th floor, k. 403, Kiev 03039, Ukraine
- Phone number:
- 380 (44) 288-1418
- Web address:
- http://www.nbuv.gov.ua/node/1
- Email:
- irnbuv@gmail.com
- Reference number:
- F. 339
- Title:
- S. An-ski
- Title (official language):
- Ан-ский С.А.
- Creator/accumulator:
- S. An-ski
- Date(s):
- 1884/1918
- Language:
- Russian
- Hebrew
- Yiddish
- Extent:
- 1,405 storage units
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Photographic images
- Graphic material
- Scope and content:
-
Included are manuscripts of works of fiction, editorials, and literary criticism articles by the collection creator: “The Shop” (1884); “A Tale” (1885); “Stories from the Life of Russian Jews in Paris” (1890s); “The People and the Book” (1902); “On the Accusation of Jewish Treason during the Imperialist War” (1915); “Polish-Jewish Relations during the Imperialist War, and Ways to Combat Polish Slander” (1915-16); “The Hymner of the Great Past” (Shimen Frug, 1916); etc.; travel notes; essays on the economic and political state of Jews in the Russian Empire; fairy tales and legends collected by S. An-ski during ethnographic expeditions in Podolia and Volhynia and adapted by him literarily in his writings; translations of Biblical texts (“From the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel”; “From the Book of the Prophet Isaiah”); programmes and notes for lectures and reports (“Legends of Old Stones”; “Sholom Aleichem, Perets, and Frug” [early 20th c.]; “Legends and Beliefs of the Jews of the Southwestern Territory” [1910]); etc.
The fond also has an epistolary section, featuring letters of S. An-ski to Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik, V. G. Gintsburg, Simon Dubnow, and others; letters to An-ski from V. G. Gintsburg, Simon Dubnow, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Peysekh Marek, Samuil Marshak, and others; official salutations from Jewish public and religious organisations, publishing houses, and editorial offices; personal correspondence of the collection creator (including with his wife E. Glezerman); and correspondence of other persons, in particular, letters of Z. I. Grzhebin to K. S. Stanislavskii.
The fonds also contains photographs, mainly of the collection creator’s friends and relatives, and a collection of portraits of prominent Jewish political figures, writers, and scholars, as well as an “Album of Jewish Artistic Antiquity, vol. 1” (1918).
- Administrative/biographical history:
-
The writer, folklorist, ethnographer, and public figure S. An-ski (Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport) (1863-1920) was born in the town of Chashinki (Lepel’ county, Vitebsk province; now a city in the Vitebsk region, Belarus). At age sixteen, motivated by populist convictions, he worked as a teacher in the countryside, at coal and salt mines of the Ekaterinoslav province. Later, on the advice of G. I. Uspenskii, he moved from southern Russia to Petersburg, where he worked at populist journals. He was forced to leave Russia in 1892, whereupon he lived in Germany and Switzerland, and from 1894, in Paris, where at first he worked at a factory and at binderies, and then as secretary to Petr Lavrov (until the latter’s death in 1900). An-ski wrote primarily in Russian until 1904, and thereafter in Yiddish, notably composing the Bund anthem Di shvue [The Oath], which became “the Marseillaise of Jewish workers.”
Returning to Russia in 1905, he joined the party of the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs). In this same period, he took an interest in Jewish folklore, and began recording and publishing legends, Hasidic stories, and fairy tales. As the head of Jewish ethnographic expeditions in 1911-14, he traversed the villages and towns of Volhynia and Podolia, assembling a voluminous collection of materials and recording Jewish folksongs, tales, and traditions, which became the basis of his famous drama The Dybbuk. During the First World War, An-ski worked in medical detachments in Galicia, and took part in establishing committees to aid Jewish refugees and in saving monuments of Jewish antiquity from destruction in the war zone. In 1917 he was elected as a Socialist Revolutionary delegate to the All-Ukrainian Constituent Assembly; in 1918 he helped reorganise the Vilno Jewish community; and having moved to Warsaw in 1919, he founded there, not long before his death, the Jewish Ethnographic Society.
S. An-ski was one of those who took the initiative in establishing the Jewish Museum in Petersburg, and had an active role in operations of the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society and the publication of the Russian-Jewish journals Evreiskii mir [Jewish World] and Evreiskaia starina [Jewish Antiquity]. The most complete edition of his works is found in the posthumous fifteen-volume collection published in Yiddish in 1920-25.
- Access points: persons/families:
- An-ski, S.
- Gintsburg, V. G.
- Glezerman, E.
- Grzhebin, G. I.
- Marek, Peysekh
- Sholem Aleichem
- Stanislavskii, K. S.
- Subject terms:
- Bible
- Correspondence
- Ethnography
- Literature
- Manuscripts
- Personal records
- Photographs
- System of arrangement:
- The fonds includes a single inventory systematised by document type, and alphabetically (by document title and addressee/correspondent name) within each section.
- Finding aids:
- An inventory is available.
- Yerusha Network member:
- Jewish Theological Seminary
