COURAGE

savienojot kolekcijas

The Zagreb Gymnasium private collection consists of memorabilia from the 1985-89 period. The school was then named as the Educational Centre for Languages, and two of its classes, which retained the classical curriculum, were considered a peculiarity. It was highly exceptional at the time, because in the framework of the secondary school reform implemented by Stipe Šuvar in 1975-76, which promoted so-called “directed education,” all gymnasia in Croatia were transformed into some manner of vocational schools with the aim of preparing the students for the labour market. From the communist perspective, the classical education was deemed unnecessary petty bourgeois elitism, which prepared select students for the university and enhanced class inequality.

The Zina Genyk-Berezovska Collection at the T.H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature in Kyiv is crucial for understanding the transnational networks underpinning cultural opposition in Ukraine and the Ukrainian diaspora community in Prague. The latter was largely composed of anti-Bolshevik émigrés that had fled to Czechoslovakia in the 1920s, after their failed attempt to establish the Ukrainian National Republic amid the chaos of the First World War. Genyk-Berezovska was born and raised in this community, studied Slavic languages and literatures at Charles University in Prague, later teaching and translating Ukrainian literature into Czech. Through personal connections, Genyk-Berezovska was also deeply involved in the cultural renaissance in Soviet Ukraine known as the sixtiers movement. 

In addition to the more than 800 letters Genyk-Berezovska received from her many correspondents in Ukraine, her archive contains her own works as a scholar of Ukrainian and Czech literature, translator, and prominent community figure, as well as those of her husband Kost’ Genyk-Berezovsky, a philologist who taught Ukrainian at Charles University in Prague. Their family archive served as a repository for materials about prominent members of the Ukrainian émigré community in Czechoslovakia, including the Ukrainian sculptor Mykhailo Brynsky, the Czech writer František Hlaváček, the Ukrainian chemist and statesman Ivan Horbachevskyi, and Petro Krytskyi, a former colonel in the Ukrainian National Republican army, among others. This unique collection highlights both the transnational and the intergenerational dimensions of Ukrainian cultural opposition to communism.

The collection illustrates Zvonimir Kulundžić's intellectual work as a journalist, historian and literary critic who chose to pursue his activity independently outside of the institutions controlled by the socialist government. The Collection includes books, original manuscripts, the author's published articles, his correspondence and polemics, which reflect a critical standpoint toward Croatia’s institutional historiography and literature in the period from the 1950s to the late 1980s.