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Ukraine in Foreign Comments and Descriptions

by
Volodymyr Sichynsky

The Book and the Author

The book was first published in Lviv in 1938 under the title Чужинці про Україну (Foreigners on Ukraine), and underwent several augmented editions in Ukrainian (Prague 1942, Augsburg 1946 are the two most recent that I know of, with reprints into our own century) before being translated into English (New York, 1953) as the work transcribed on this site.

A good biographical capsule of the author is provided at the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine.

For technical details on how this site is laid out, see below, following the Table of Contents.

 (p5)  Table of Contents

 p223  Table of Illustrations

Technical Details

Edition Used and Copyright

The text I transcribed is that of the first and maybe only edition,

The copyright on the underlying original Ukrainian-language text, published in 1938, was governed by the law of the Soviet Union as revised in 1928, in which the term was fixed at 15 years after the death of the author. Prof. Sichynsky died in 1962: the original text therefore may have risen into the public domain on January 1, 1978. Alternatively, in view of various retroactive extensions of Soviet and Ukrainian law, since the work was published in the Soviet Union in 1938 and was thus in the public domain in 1995, and its author had died before that year, the original text rose into the public domain on January 1, 1989.

The English translation was published in the United States in 1953, and its copyright is therefore subject to American law, which at the time specifically required a copyright notice in the form of "Copyright ––––––––– 1953" in order to be valid. The printed book does not include such a notice, contenting itself merely with "All rights reserved", and the English translation can be considered to have been in the public domain from the very moment of its first publication. The question is moot, however, since any copyright that there might have been was not renewed in 1980/81 as then required by the same American law to maintain it, and the translation has definitely been in the public domain since January 1, 1982: details here on the copyright law involved.

Illustrations

Of the book's 30 black-and‑white illustrations, 29 are old engravings and the like, long in the public domain. They were manifestly taken from secondary sources — i.e., from previous books rather than from the original prints — and are thus often blurry and improperly or not at all rescreened: to the point that some captions and most map indications are unreadable even when magnified. I've therefore substituted a better version of the same identical illustration, sometimes in its original colors, wherever necessary and possible. For a good example of illustrations printed in the book and my substitutions, see the title page and map on p119.

While some of the illustrations accompany the text at more or less suitable places in the printed book, others are somewhat haphazardly scattered, and at least one illustration (#10) has no direct connection with the text at all. I've felt no compunction in moving them to places I felt were more appropriate.

Illustration 30, a map, was specially drawn for the book by the author. I've colorized it for readability.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line); p57  these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)

My transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree; a red background would mean that the page had not been proofread. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The printed book was fairly well proofread (bearing in mind that I'm not an expert in Slavic geographical or personal names), except for the bibliography, which was a disaster. A few errors were significant, and are marked with a bullet like this,º but most of the errors were trivial, and I marked them with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the underscored words to read what was actually printed. Similarly, glide your cursor over bullets before measurements: they provide conversions to metric, e.g., •10 miles.

Some odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic  in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked. They are also few.

Any over­looked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have a copy of the printed book in front of you, or the pdf copy of it at Diasporiana.

The icon I use to indicate this subsite is taken from the first illustration in the book, which is also the oldest image reproduced in it, the 11c map on p31. The detail shown in my icon is the area corresponding to what is now Right-Bank Ukraine, which is labelled "hic capud Europae": "Here is the beginning of Europe."

Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
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A page or image on this site is in the public domain ONLY if its URL has a total of one *asterisk. If the URL has two *asterisks, the item is copyright someone else, and used by permission or fair use. If the URL has none the item is © Bill Thayer. See my copyright page for details and contact information.

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