Pysanka Painting of Podillia in Handwritten Heritage of 1920s

Abstract

The goal of the paper is to disclose complete archival documents, including correspondence of Hnat Tantsiura on collecting information about pysankas and pysanka painting (Pysankarstvo) in Podillia. Main objective is to analyze the activities of Hnat Trokhymovych Tantsiura, Ukrainian folklorist, ethnographer, and educator, who was one of the prominent collectors of oral folk art, in the matter of recording and collecting materials on creating Easter eggs called pysankas. The other objectives are to introduce the found materials into scientific circulation by publishing some documents, unknown to the general public and previously unpublished, and to enlarge the source and historiographical base.

Author focuses on the materials of the archive of Danylo Shcherbakivskyi, which are stored in the Scientific Archive of the Institute of Archeology and the fund Ethnographic Commission of Rylskyi Institute of Art Studies, Folklore and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. In particular, attention is paid to the correspondence of Hnat Tantsiura with Nataliia Kotsiubynska, an employee of the Cabinet of Ukrainian Art History of All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, on the studied issue, and the respondents from villages and towns of Podillia who sent their materials to the Ethnographic Commission.

Thus, in the letters and other materials of Hnat Tantsiura we can find information about pysankas, embroidery, ornaments, collecting samples of products, etc. In addition, there is information about the particular type of folk art, existed in the region, and the ritual and customary culture of the local population associated with pysankas. This in turn helped Nataliia Kotsiubynska to work on the creation of a map ‘Artistic Crafts of Ukraine.’ At the same time, the epistolary heritage itself is an interesting and little-studied historiographical source.