"Ukraine In Postcards"

"Cartophilia Ukrainiana...........Ukraine's bewitching beauty, the life of her people, her national folklore and the work of her artists attracted the attention of publishers and collectors and encouraged them to print postcards which they would later disseminate. 

This momentous step on the part of the artists and publishers stirred a great love for art in the hearts of the people.

Each postcard was cherished by patrons of Ukrainian art.  In order to gladden the heart of a distant friend who lived in a foreign land or one's relative, or anybody for that matter, one would send that person a postcard bearing the image of either a Ukrainian thatched-roof house or views of Kyiv, Lviv, Poltava, the Dnipro, Halych or other corners of Ukraine.

The demand for postcards grew while publishers, in their turn, continued to seek out appropriate themes.  The most popular postcards were those depicting a girl wearing the national costume or, if a portrait was depicted, giants of the Ukrainian spirit.

Those people who found themselves in foreign countries were often consumed with nostalgia for their native land.  They sought some sort of contact with that which was close and dear to them.  They needed something which could cheer them up,  extinguish their grief and warm their broken hearts, remind them of the dear, the close things that were always on their minds, the things that were now very far away, across the vast oceans and beyond the high mountains.

And this tiny message which arrived from the native land------this postcard-----was showered with kisses and drenched with tears and cherished as a priceless momento for many years.

My task was to prepare for publication an album of collected postcards which would express all the facets of Ukrainian life as it actually was.  Ivan Buhayevych of Kyiv, a collector of postcards, put great effort into the preparation of the book, "Ukrainian Postcards and Cartophilia" published by "Mystetstvo" in Kyiv in 1970.  This collection consists of 106 black and white postcards.

This first modest book provides a wealth of reference material for future generations even though only one third of it is dedicated to Ukraine while the rest is, as they say, propaganda." 

Ukraine In Postcards
Konstantyn Szonk-Rusych
Stetch & Stetch Studios, Inc.
New York, New York, USA, 1981
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 81-90039