The Joy of Books

By Walter Kish

Since I moved into my new house several months ago after four years of transient existence, I have been experiencing the little joys that come from opening up boxes packed as many as four years ago, and discovering things I had forgotten I had.  None have brought me more joy than those cartons which contained some of my rather large collection of books.

You should understand that I love books and always have from an early age.  Over my five decades of existence on this earth, I have accumulated a rather large personal library numbering in the thousands of volumes.  Throughout the “ups and downs” of my life, books have been virtual friends to me.  They have conveyed to me a phenomenal amount of knowledge and facts; they have imparted to me the collected wisdom of the best that Mankind has produced; they have brought me laughter and joy as well as sadness and anger; and they have been the foundation upon which much of my life has been built.

It is therefore hardly surprising that I have seldom gotten rid or disposed of any of my books.  Four years ago, when my wife and I sold our last house and moved to Ukraine, we did make an effort to try and scale back on the amount of our accumulated belongings.  The process was easy and fairly satisfying until we came to our collection of books.  I could not bear to part with any, though after some persistent pressure from my wife, I did finally sacrifice several hundred paperbacks that fell into the category of what I deemed casual or not “serious” literature.  I have since regretted even doing that.

In any case, I more than made up for this moment of weakness by returning from Ukraine with a substantial trove of Ukrainian books that I acquired during my three years there.  While living in Ukraine, I made a special effort to improve my Ukrainian reading skills.  Initially, this was not an easy process and I would struggle many weeks with a given Ukrainian language book, making frequent use of a comprehensive Ukrainian-English dictionary at my side.   Although I never came close to attaining the reading speed that I have in English, wherein I can read a book in the course of an evening or two, I did get to the point where I could complete a standard Ukrainian language book in a week’s worth of concentrated effort.

Mostly, I read non-fiction with a focus on history, though I did eventually branch out into modern Ukrainian literature, becoming acquainted with the leading young Ukrainian writers such as Yuri Andrukhovich, Oksana Zabusko and Taras Prokhasko. 

However, my favourite author in terms of pure reading enjoyment turned out to be a living legend of twentieth century Ukrainian literature, Pavlo Zahrebelny.  Born in 1924 in Poltava Oblast, Zahrebelny became one of the most popular writers in Soviet Ukraine in the post World War II era.  He is particularly known for his historical novels.  His writing style encompasses such a rich level of detail that you can not only see the scene he is describing, but almost touch, taste, hear and smell its surroundings as well.  Because of the depth of his research, reading one of his historical novels gives you a comprehensive understanding of all aspects of life for the period he is painting with his prose.

His most well known novels of this genre are Roksolana (1980) about the abducted Ukrainian peasant girl of that name who became the wife of Suleiman the Magnificent, I Am Bohdan (1983), a two volume biographical novel on the life of Bohdan Khmelnitsky, and First Bridge (1972), a novel centred around the first bridge built across the Dnipro River in Kyiv during the Kyivan-Rus era.

I Am Bohdan (“Ya Bohdan”) in particular made a deep impression on me, although I struggled for several months before I finished reading it.  Zahrebelny’s vocabulary and knowledge of old archaic Ukrainian words and phrases would make this a challenge to even a well-educated native Ukrainian speaker; however, the effort was well worth it.  In particular, one of his favourite techniques is to put you right inside the protagonist’s head, enabling you to witness the thought processes as he experiences the major events that shaped his life.  It makes history a living and emotional experience.

In any case, I now have several cartons of books that I stocked up on while living in Ukraine waiting to be read.  The real challenge now is to find the time to read them.