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Vacation time is coming and you are certainly getting set to go on various outings and maybe you will go on a longer vacation somewhere. I do not know what kind of 'sport' the children are up to now: whether they go fishing or gather berries, but for a change it might be interesting for them to take up 'ethnography'; that is, to jot down how people interpret dreams for themselves and what they think about them in those places where they find themselves. Certainly they must have already heard much about these kinds of interpretations and it would not be hard to do so ... At the same time they would be doing me a great favor and ... one for scholarship too! To encourage you I would add that many people here are already enthusiastically gathering information about dreams and in a while we think to have a nice collection of materials on the basis of which to construct a larger work about the kind of role the interpretation of dreams has on the conceptions and poetical creations of our people. Just as Mykhailo Hrushevsky conscripted his wife and daughter into the scholarly world, so too, it seems, did Kateryna try to do the same with a wider circle of relatives. During the 1927-28 academic year, Kateryna undertook a research trip to western Europe. She made a special point of visiting Paris where she established contact with a number of eminent social scientists and scholars engaged in Slavic studies. At the French Ethnographic Society and the French Society of Slavists, she lectured on the traditional epic songs (dumas) sung by the Ukrainian folk minstrels called kobzars. (These songs had been handed down from as far back as Cossack times). She argued that the Ukrainians folk dumas found in western Ukraine (Galicia, Podolia, and Volhynia) were essentially part of the same complex as those found in central and eastern Ukraine. The implications of this position, of course, were that while Ukrainian ethnographic territory was then divided on a political level, it was still united on the level of popular culture. As it turned out, Kateryna's work on the Ukrainian folk dumas was to be her most important achievement of the 1920s. Since their days in Vienna at the Ukrainian Sociological Institute, she and her father had dreamed of compiling an authoritative edition of these historical songs. The previous collection of V.B. Antonovych and M. Drahomanov was badly outdated and needed considerable supplementation and revision. Accordingly, after her arrival in Kyiv, Kateryna devoted most of her energies to the compilation of a new and more authoritative edition. This Corpus of Folk Dumas (Korpus narodnykh dum) finally began to appear in 1927. A total of six volumes was planned. The first two volumes contained the texts of the dumas with all their variants; the third was to contain musical annotations; the fourth was to contain traditional parodies and humorous songs dealing with the dumas; the fifth and sixth were to discuss literary parallels and related poetic works. The publication of volume one was a truly significant cultural event. It contained an authoritative introduction by Kateryna and thirteen texts in 117 variants. These texts were divided into three parts: Dumas about the slave in Turkish captivity (Dumy nevilnytski), Dumas about the Cossack expeditions at sea, and Dumas about the steppes. The book was positively reviewed in Ukraine, Russia, and various western countries. In recognition of her achievements, Kateryna was elected a full member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lviv. She was the youngest person of her time to win such recognition and was also the only woman to do so. In fact, she had reached the pinnacle of her professional career as an anthropologist. It was not to last. By 1928, Joseph Stalin had consolidated his control in Moscow and he turned decisively against Ukrainians and other non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union. Most copies of the second volume of the Corpus of Folk Dumas which appeared in 1931 (and contained nineteen texts in 156 variants) were confiscated by the authorities before they could be distributed. No further volumes were ever published. The Ukrainian Academy of Sciences was thoroughly purged and thousands of scholars were denounced for "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism" and either exiled to the Gulag or executed. For Ukrainians, at least, the time of "the Great Terror" had begun. In 1931, amidst constant denunciations in the Communist press, Mykhailo Hrushevsky was forced to leave Kyiv and live in Moscow where he resided with his wife and daughter in a small flat owned by the Ukrainian Academy. He was interrogated and had to report regularly to the Soviet political police. Friends and colleagues were afraid to visit him. Nevertheless, with Kateryna's help, he managed to continue to do research and to publish. Kateryna gathered materials for him in the libraries and the archives and when his sight began to fail, read to him and copied out notes for him. In addition to this, she managed to spare a little time to devote to her own work. During this very difficult period, she retained enough peace of mind to 12 ’’НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ВЕРЕСЕНЬ 1998 Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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