Marko Vovchok

Collection

Holding institution:: Manuscript and Textology Department of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences’ Shevchenko Institute of Literature

Holding institution (official language):: Відділ рукописних фондів та текстології Інституту літератури ім. Т.Г. Шевченка НАН України

Postal address:: Room 109, 4 Mikhail Hrushevsky Street, Kyiv-1, 01001, Ukraine

Web address:: http://www.ilnan.gov.ua/index.php/en/pro-instytut/pidrozdily-instytutu/viddil-rukopysnykh-fondiv-i-tekstolohii

Scope and content:: The fonds’ correspondence section includes letters (1896-1904) addressed to Marko Vovchok and M. D. Lobach-Zhuchenko from Khaim Abramovich Gurtovoi (Samara) dealing among other things with the rights of Jewish soldiers (“Nicholas’s soldiers”) and ordeals experienced by the author connected with living conditions in the Pale of Settlement.

Administrative/biographical history:: The Ukrainian and Russian writer and translator Marko Vovchok (a pseudonym; actual full name: Mariia Aleksandrovna Vilinskaia; first husband’s surname: Markovich; second: Lobach-Zhuchenko) was born in the Orlov province. In the 1850s, she and her husband, the Ukrainian folklorist and ethnographer A. V. Markovich, collected works of folk art and studied everyday peasant life in Ukraine. Her Narodni opovidannia Marka Vovchka (Marko Vovchok’s Folktales) was published in St. Petersburg in 1857; and came out in Russian translation (as Ukrainskie narodnye rasskazy [Ukrainian Folktales]) with a foreword by Ivan Turgenev in 1859. This work and her Stories from Russian Folk Life, which came out at the same time, were received with great enthusiasm by readers.

Aside from the numerous works she went on to write in Russian and Ukrainian (the novellas The Female College Student, 1860; Diary of a Deacon, 1869-70; Marusia, 1871; the satirical collection Fairy Tale and Reality, 1874; the stories “The Petty Thief,” 1900; “Crafty Khaimka,” 1902; etc.), she was also well known for her translations from German, English, Polish, and French (including fifteen novels of Jules Verne). She died in the village of Aleksandrovka (now in the Stavropol’ territory).

Access points: persons/families:: Gurtovoi, Khaim Abramovich; Lobach-Zhuchenko, M. D.; Vilinskaia, Mariia Aleksandrovna; Vovchok, Marko

System of arrangement:: The fonds’ inventory and card file are structured by document type, and within sections, arranged mainly chronologically (with correspondence alphabetised by addressee/correspondent name).