In a previous post, I pointed readers to specific titles on the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine’s digital platform.  Today, I wanted to give a summary of its current holdings,  to help promote what is a fantastic resource for our readers.

The front page of the VNLU digital library gives the reader the chance to select their language in the top right-hand corner.  The library is divided into the following categories, with the numbers of entries showing at the time of writing this post.

• 2000 books from the end of the 18th century into the mid-20th century
• 192 rare books
• 46 journals
• 127 manuscripts
• 59 maps
• 28 volumes of music scores
• 58 pictorial works
• 8 photo albums

Along the left-hand side are links including one by which you can find material under thematic collections and one for new additions.  Looking at entries in the latter today, I noticed a lot of books by Pavlo Khutorsʹkyĭ, a name new to me and also not to be found in the Cambridge library catalogue.  Khutorsʹkyĭ (1896-1966) was a writer from the Poltava Region.  His works (including children’s stories) about rural life and collectivisation are largely forgotten now, but the additions to the VNLU digital library suggest a fair amount of fame in his lifetime; looking at the 8 entries for his works among the 20 latest additions to the library, one of them is actually a translation from Ukrainian for a Moldovan audience and two of them (one and two) are translations into Bulgarian.

The National Library celebrated its centenary in 2018, and the British Library’s Ukrainian curator at the time wrote a lovely blog post about the library’s history to mark this milestone.  The VNLU digital library is a significant part of the library’s work, and it is incredible (and vital) that the digitisation work continues during the Russian war against Ukraine.

The images near the top of this post are: the cover of Dosvitni ohni (1908), an internal page of a 19th-century pinkas ledger from the Jewish Talmud-Torah religious school in Western Ukraine, the cover of Komuna : deklamator (1925)

Mel Bach