About one's own in a foreign land: the path of Fedir Odrach's fiction to the reader

Abstract

The purpose of the publication is to recreate the path of Fedir Odrach (pseudonym of Fedir (Theodor) Sholomytskyi (1912–1964)) to the reader in the diaspora. The exploration methodology is based on general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis; The cultural-historical method provides an opportunity to reproduce the peculiarities of the literary, artistic and publishing life of
the Ukrainian diaspora.

The role of Fedir Odrach's autobiography of 1950 as a source of information about the novelist's artistic heritage is noted.

The result of the research is that for the first time in Ukrainian literary criticism a collection of stories "The Red Ghost" ("In a Foreign Land", 1946) was singled out. It is noted that in the 1940s Fedir Odrach published works of art on the pages of diaspora periodicals (weekly newspaper "Pu-Gu" (Ausburg), Plast youth magazine "On the Trace" ("Na slidi") and others). The path of Fedir Odrach's prose in the 1950s is reproduced from the publications of excerpts in the diaspora magazines "Time", ("Chas"), "Issue of ODFFU" ("Visnyk ODFFU"), "Thresholds" ("Porohy"), "New Days" ("Novi Dni"), etc. to individual book publications. It is noted that most of the book editions of Fedir Odrach's works were published in the 1950s and early 1960s: "On the way" (Buenos-Aires, 1954), "Our Polissya" (Vinnipeg, 1955), "Twitter" (New-York, 1957), "Whistle stop out the village" (Buenos-Aires, 1959), "The Abandoned House" (Toronto, 1960), "On Uncertain Ground" (Toronto, 1962). The texts "The britisch lady", "One Hundred Kilometers on Foot", "Chosts dance", "Mystery of the Future" are highlighted, which were published in diaspora  agazines and were not included in individual books of Fedir Odrach's works. The stages of the path to the reader of the novel "The dawn glow" are emphasized: from the publication in 1959 of an excerpt in the journal "Issue of ODFFU" to the book edition of 1972, the publication of which became possible thanks to the work of the "Committee for the Publication of the Novel "The dawn glow" in Toronto".

The conclusions note the prospects of the research, in particular, the fate of the manuscripts of the novel "Among the Swamps" and the story "Refugees", excerpts from which were published on the pages of magazines, remains unclear. The systematized material provides an opportunity to trace the chronological sequence, and to a certain extent to reveal the secret behind the curtain of the creative laboratory of the writer Fedir Odrach.