LYKHO Z ROZUMU (“THE CHORNOVIL PAPERS”)

 294515.11.2006

“LYKHO Z ROZUMU (Portraits of twenty „criminals)”  (literately, “Woe from wit (Portraits of twenty “criminals”], but published in the West as “The Chornovil Papers”] was the first Ukrainian collection of documentary evidence put together in 1967 by Viacheslav CHORNOVIL in Lviv. The work contains material about the first wave of arrests among members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia from 1965-66, biographical details about the twenty political prisoners of the “selection”, their letters and appeals, as well as their literary and creative works.

In addition, CHORNOVIL provides a list at the end of the book of the prisoners of Dubravlag (the political labour camps of Mordovia) – those who took part in the struggle for Ukrainian independence from 1942-1954, as well as those convicted for their religious beliefs

The book first came out in Ukrainian in 1967 and gained international popularity (it was published in English in 1968 and in French in 1974) and made many Ukrainian dissidents well-known. For this book V. CHORNOVIL, imprisoned on 3 August 1967, was awarded an international journalism prize (in the United Kingdom). In 1996, for this and other works previously labelled “anti-Soviet”, he received the Taras Shevchenko State Prize for publicist writing. In 1991 the collection was reprinted in Lviv. It has also been published in the author’s 10-volume collected works (V. 2, 2003)