Metadata: Manuscript and Museum Departments of the Taras Shevchenko Institute
Collection
- Country:
- Ukraine
- Holding institution:
- Division of Holdings of the National Taras Shevchenko Museum
- Holding institution (official language):
- Відділ фондів Національного музею Тараса Шевченка
- Postal address:
- 12 Blvd. T. Shevchenko, Kiev, Ukraine
- Phone number:
- 380 (44) 234-25-23
- Web address:
- http://museumshevchenko.org.ua/page.php?id=30
- Email:
- Shevchenko-museum@ukr.net
- Title:
- Manuscript and Museum Departments of the Taras Shevchenko Institute
- Title (official language):
- Рукописный и музейный отделы Института Тараса Шевченко
- Creator/accumulator:
- Manuscript and Museum Departments of the Taras Shevchenko Institute
- Date(s):
- 1928/1933
- Language:
- Ukrainian
- Extent:
- 6 storage units
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Photographic images
- Scope and content:
-
The fonds (a conventionally-allocated set of materials) contains surviving accounting and holdings records of the Taras Shevchenko Institute’s manuscript department (now the Manuscript and Textology Department of the Shevchenko Institute of Literature) and museum department (now the Taras Shevchenko National Museum). These include documents on the Institute’s receipt and storage of materials of Jewish writers, scholars, and cultural institutions, including literary manuscripts by the poets David Hofshtein and Leyb Kvitko (1933); photographs of the writer Itsik Kipnis and the literary scholar Nokhem Oyslender (1932); letters of Sholom Aleichem (1933); and documents from the archive of the Ukrainian SSR Jewish Children’s Theater (1933).
The inventory of materials received from the archive of the All-Ukrainian Union of Proletarian Writers (VUSPP; 1927-32) has a note to the effect that these included documents of the union’s Jewish section, and contains a listing of personnel files on Jewish writers of Ukraine who were members (indicating their places of residence and work, and dates of their joining the union; 1932). The inventory of literary manuscripts received from the archive of the State Publishing House of Ukraine (Khar’kov, 1922-30) includes listings of manuscripts by Jewish writers and commentators (in particular, Leyb Kvitko’s “In the Port,” 1931). All of these materials were subsequently lost.
- Administrative/biographical history:
-
The Taras Shevchenko Institute was a research institution in operation from 1926-33 in Khar’kov (with branches in Kiev and Odessa), and was part of the Ukrainian SSR People’s Commissariat of Education system. (It is now the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences’ Taras Shevchenko Literature Institute.) It was modeled on Leningrad’s Pushkin House, and its mission was to research Taras Shevchenko’s biography and work, the history of modern and recent Ukrainian literature, and literary theory; and to publish works by classic Ukrainian writers, and specialist literature (including the annual Shevchenko and the literary-historical journal Literaturnyi arkhiv).
Structural subdivisions of the Institute included its manuscript and museum departments (in the early 1930s, the latter was reorganised as the Literature Museum, which included a department devoted to national minority literature); these collected and preserved materials from the manuscript and literary legacy of Taras Shevchenko as well as documents and museum exhibits on the history of Ukrainian literature. When the Taras Shevchenko Institute was reorganised as the Taras Shevchenko Ukrainian Literature Institute and transferred under the jurisdiction of the Ukrainian SSR Academy of Sciences, the Literature Museum’s fonds were transferred to the Taras Shevchenko Art Gallery in Khar’kov, since then succeeded by the National Taras Shevchenko Museum. A significant portion of the manuscript and museum departments’ materials, however, were lost in the latter years of the 1930s and in the 1940s.
- Access points: persons/families:
- Hofshtein, David
- Kipnis, I. N.
- Kvitko, L. M.
- Oyslender, Nokhem
- Sholem Aleichem
- System of arrangement:
- Documents are assembled in six receipt logs for the periods 1) 1928 through 1930; 2) July 1930 through January 1931; 3) January through November 1931; 4) January through November 1932; 5) December 1932 through May 1933; 6) August through October 1933. (There is no reliable data on the size of the museum’s inventory and holdings; although these logs may conventionally be categorised as relevant documentation, they are nevertheless of a different nature, since they are in essence part of another institution’s accounting records.)
- Yerusha Network member:
- Jewish Theological Seminary
