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Моя жизнь
432 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2012
8 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 29, 2016
Історія родини письменниці та її життя до революції. Дуже забавно як енциклопедія тогочасного побуту (вартість різних харчів, одяг, студентські звичаї, репутації різних часописів і т.д.), тільки шкода, що вона ані словом не прохопилася про те, як дійшла до життя, власне, української письменниці.
June 2, 2024
Unfinished memoirs of one of the most prominent Ukrainian writers of historical fiction. I have just read her “Людолови” and was quite impressed both by the language of the book and a lot of powerful Ukrainian-centric messages about our history (despite being written and published under the Soviets).
These memoirs are very unusual, and I had serious doubts about reading them. First of all, they are unfinished. Зінаїда Тулуб died in the middle of writing them, and the book ends in 1917 — yeah, “at the most interesting place.” In 1917, she was 27 years old, still a very young person living with her parents and totally Russian. Yes, although Зінаїда Тулуб was born in Kyiv, and her ancestors from the side of her father were Ukrainians/Cosacks/Crimean Tatars (including Олександр Данилович Тулуб, one of the members of Кирило-Мефодіївське товариство), her immediate family lived in Russia a lot and was overall completely Russified, especially from the side of her mother. Her father worked in the judicial system of the Russian Empire, so you can understand that the whole family and all their circle of friends and acquaintances did not know anything except for Russian politics, Russian culture, Russian way of life. As a result, Зінаїда Тулуб considered herself a Russian during the most formative years of her life, and these memoirs reflect this perfectly. This is why they were written in Russian and have never been translated into Ukrainian. And, unfortunately, we would never learn from them how and why Зінаїда Тулуб changed her identity, started writing in the perfect Ukrainian language, and became very interested in Ukrainian culture and history overall.
Moreover, at the very beginning, I was totally flabbergasted by Зінаїда Тулуб’s introduction and, especially, her interpretation of those events with Олександр Данилович Тулуб and Кирило-Мефодіївське товариство. You can see clearly how wretched her mind was by the Soviet propaganda, and her statements here sometimes look like the worst propagandist materials from the Great Terror epoch of the 1930s.
Also, it should be said that the memoirs were published in an awful state, as they were in the draft before her death, i.e., totally unedited, with whole sentences unfinished and absolutely uncorrected grammar. I do not understand the purpose of publishing such raw material (they could at least add some punctuation, really…) but the publishers explain it like this:
“Повний текст машинопису спогадів Зінаїди Тулуб «Моя жизнь» зберігається у відділі рукописів і текстології Інституту літератури ім. Т.Г.Шевченка НАНУ, фонд № 155.88а (м. Київ, вул. Кутузова, 8).
Цей машинопис є четвертим відбитком оригіналу (перші три втрачено), який містить численні авторські правки (скорочення та доповнення), що суттєво ускладнювало його електронну обробку. Не менш важким завданням була гармонізація стилістики початку XX століття, яку використовувала З.П.Тулуб при написанні спогадів, із сьогоднішніми стилістичними вимогами. Зокрема, складно було відновити хід авторської думки при узгодженні усіх зроблених в одному реченні, здебільшого нерозбірливих, правок. Дуже дошкуляли численні пунктуаційні, орфографічні помилки, пов’язані, з одного боку, недостатньою професійністю друкарки, а з другого – з прогресуючою сліпотою, яка не дозволяла Зінаїді Павлівні ретельно вичитувати машинопис. Оскільки ж це видання не є науково-академічним, нам довелося відмовитися від коментарів і приміток, здійснюючи правки найбільш кричущих помилок, здебільшого друкарських.
Головна мета видавництва – зробити не тільки майже точну авторську копію тексту машинопису спогадів, надавши, таким чином, можливість дослідникам творчості слідкувати за ходом думок автора, а й донести до українського читача унікальність авторського погляду на родовід Тулубів і епоху, з якими він був пов’язаний. Сподіваємося, що нам вдалося максимально зберегти автентичність авторського тексту.”
Oh yeah, it’s pretty “authentic” if you mean all the trivial errors that a half-blind person can make in a haphazardly written text in the last days of her life…
Despite all these very serious problems, I, unexpectedly, enjoyed the memoirs a lot and learned many very interesting things from them. Зінаїда Тулуб is a very thorough and attentive memoirist, and she provides a fascinating story of life — not only about herself personally, but about her family in general, and, through it, about the lifestyle of many similar families at the time, a whole society of middle-class, intelligent, decent people. The “Soviet/Russian propaganda” aspects that scared me at the beginning of the memoirs are actually not very pronounced in the further text, and you can spot and “filter them out” easily. Otherwise, this is a quite solid and worthy memoir, rich in details and overall very illuminating about the “everyday history.” For example, Зінаїда Тулуб likes to list all the things they were eating at different periods of their lives, and this is an absolutely absorbing reading )). She also tries to indicate the costs of everything (from food to living accommodations), and you can learn a very important “price scale” for the time. From the more serious aspects, I was very interested in her representation of higher education for women (“Высшие женские курсы”) and was actually amazed by its academic level. Another great example: near the end of the book, Зінаїда Тулуб describes the famous “Процесс Бейлиса” which she and her family followed very closely at the time — and this is also a fascinating reading; I have never seen before such an informative and understandable explanation of all the details about this important trial case, and I am now very inclined to read more about it specifically.
I hope that these memoirs will be properly edited and republished with all the necessary commentaries and corrections.
These memoirs are very unusual, and I had serious doubts about reading them. First of all, they are unfinished. Зінаїда Тулуб died in the middle of writing them, and the book ends in 1917 — yeah, “at the most interesting place.” In 1917, she was 27 years old, still a very young person living with her parents and totally Russian. Yes, although Зінаїда Тулуб was born in Kyiv, and her ancestors from the side of her father were Ukrainians/Cosacks/Crimean Tatars (including Олександр Данилович Тулуб, one of the members of Кирило-Мефодіївське товариство), her immediate family lived in Russia a lot and was overall completely Russified, especially from the side of her mother. Her father worked in the judicial system of the Russian Empire, so you can understand that the whole family and all their circle of friends and acquaintances did not know anything except for Russian politics, Russian culture, Russian way of life. As a result, Зінаїда Тулуб considered herself a Russian during the most formative years of her life, and these memoirs reflect this perfectly. This is why they were written in Russian and have never been translated into Ukrainian. And, unfortunately, we would never learn from them how and why Зінаїда Тулуб changed her identity, started writing in the perfect Ukrainian language, and became very interested in Ukrainian culture and history overall.
Moreover, at the very beginning, I was totally flabbergasted by Зінаїда Тулуб’s introduction and, especially, her interpretation of those events with Олександр Данилович Тулуб and Кирило-Мефодіївське товариство. You can see clearly how wretched her mind was by the Soviet propaganda, and her statements here sometimes look like the worst propagandist materials from the Great Terror epoch of the 1930s.
Also, it should be said that the memoirs were published in an awful state, as they were in the draft before her death, i.e., totally unedited, with whole sentences unfinished and absolutely uncorrected grammar. I do not understand the purpose of publishing such raw material (they could at least add some punctuation, really…) but the publishers explain it like this:
“Повний текст машинопису спогадів Зінаїди Тулуб «Моя жизнь» зберігається у відділі рукописів і текстології Інституту літератури ім. Т.Г.Шевченка НАНУ, фонд № 155.88а (м. Київ, вул. Кутузова, 8).
Цей машинопис є четвертим відбитком оригіналу (перші три втрачено), який містить численні авторські правки (скорочення та доповнення), що суттєво ускладнювало його електронну обробку. Не менш важким завданням була гармонізація стилістики початку XX століття, яку використовувала З.П.Тулуб при написанні спогадів, із сьогоднішніми стилістичними вимогами. Зокрема, складно було відновити хід авторської думки при узгодженні усіх зроблених в одному реченні, здебільшого нерозбірливих, правок. Дуже дошкуляли численні пунктуаційні, орфографічні помилки, пов’язані, з одного боку, недостатньою професійністю друкарки, а з другого – з прогресуючою сліпотою, яка не дозволяла Зінаїді Павлівні ретельно вичитувати машинопис. Оскільки ж це видання не є науково-академічним, нам довелося відмовитися від коментарів і приміток, здійснюючи правки найбільш кричущих помилок, здебільшого друкарських.
Головна мета видавництва – зробити не тільки майже точну авторську копію тексту машинопису спогадів, надавши, таким чином, можливість дослідникам творчості слідкувати за ходом думок автора, а й донести до українського читача унікальність авторського погляду на родовід Тулубів і епоху, з якими він був пов’язаний. Сподіваємося, що нам вдалося максимально зберегти автентичність авторського тексту.”
Oh yeah, it’s pretty “authentic” if you mean all the trivial errors that a half-blind person can make in a haphazardly written text in the last days of her life…
Despite all these very serious problems, I, unexpectedly, enjoyed the memoirs a lot and learned many very interesting things from them. Зінаїда Тулуб is a very thorough and attentive memoirist, and she provides a fascinating story of life — not only about herself personally, but about her family in general, and, through it, about the lifestyle of many similar families at the time, a whole society of middle-class, intelligent, decent people. The “Soviet/Russian propaganda” aspects that scared me at the beginning of the memoirs are actually not very pronounced in the further text, and you can spot and “filter them out” easily. Otherwise, this is a quite solid and worthy memoir, rich in details and overall very illuminating about the “everyday history.” For example, Зінаїда Тулуб likes to list all the things they were eating at different periods of their lives, and this is an absolutely absorbing reading )). She also tries to indicate the costs of everything (from food to living accommodations), and you can learn a very important “price scale” for the time. From the more serious aspects, I was very interested in her representation of higher education for women (“Высшие женские курсы”) and was actually amazed by its academic level. Another great example: near the end of the book, Зінаїда Тулуб describes the famous “Процесс Бейлиса” which she and her family followed very closely at the time — and this is also a fascinating reading; I have never seen before such an informative and understandable explanation of all the details about this important trial case, and I am now very inclined to read more about it specifically.
I hope that these memoirs will be properly edited and republished with all the necessary commentaries and corrections.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews