S’vit, magazine

S’vit, magazine (World). A literary and scholarly semimonthly magazine published in Lviv in 1906 (20 issues) and 1907 (17 issues; the last issue for 1907 appeared in 1908). Until October 1906 it was the organ of the Galician modernist group Moloda Muza. In 1907 it was subtitled ‘An Illustrated Periodical for Ruthenian Families’ and had ties with moderate circles in the Ukrainian Radical party. S’vit was initially published and edited by Volodymyr Birchak with the aid of Petro Karmansky, Ostap Lutsky, and Mykhailo Yatskiv. Bohdan Lepky, Vasyl Shchurat, and Vasyl Pachovsky were artistic advisers. Later Viacheslav Budzynovsky (nos 14–20) and M. Yatskiv (in 1907) were the editors and publishers. All of the aforementioned contributed prose, poetry, articles on literature and art, and/or reviews. Besides translations from European and American authors (eg, Maurice Maeterlinck, Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Nietzsche), S’vit was the first to publish Olha Kobylianska's novel Nioba, Ivan Karpenko-Kary's drama Sava Chalyi, and Mykhailo Starytsky and Liudmyla Starytska-Cherniakhivska's novel Pered bureiu (Before the Storm). Its ‘art for art's sake’ orientation was criticized by Ivan Franko. Like its antecedent Ruska khata, it folded because of a lack of subscribers.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]