Ukrainian-Ruthenian Publishing Company

Ukrainian-Ruthenian Publishing Company (Українсько-руська видавнича спілка; Ukrainsko-ruska vydavnycha spilka). A publishing venture established as a joint-stock company in 1899 in Lviv. Initiated by Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who also served as the first director, it published literary and scholarly works and literature in translation. The chief editors were Ivan Franko and Volodymyr Hnatiuk. In 1905 the company assumed responsibility for the publication of Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk from the Shevchenko Scientific Society. From 1907 to 1918 the company was based in Kyiv. Renewed in 1922 in Lviv as the Ukrainian Publishing Company, it continued to function until 1932, but its output was minimal and of relatively little importance.

By 1917 the company had issued over 300 books in two major series. Its belletristic series included original and reprinted works by Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Olha Kobylianska, Les Martovych, Vasyl Stefanyk, Marko Cheremshyna, Ivan Franko, Ivan Nechui-Levytsky, Marko Vovchok, and Bohdan Lepky, and translations of William Shakespeare, G. Byron, H. Heine, K. Hamsun, G. Hauptmann, E. Zola, G. de Maupassant, H. Pontoppidan, K. Gutzkow, Leo Tolstoy, F. Dostoevsky, Władysław Orkan, Vladimir Korolenko, and others. Its popular-scholarly series included primarily translations of historical, sociological, and philosophical works by authors such as J. Ingram, H. Taine, N. Kareev, A. Smith, F. Engels, and K. Kautsky.

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