Emilian Perkhun. An Unhappy Parting (a tale from folk life in the time of the World War of 1914-1918); S. M. Kalynets. The Blessed Stone. Lviv: published by the M. Kachkovsky Society, 1936. – 32 pp. – (People's Library. Series of tales; part 1 (540), January 1936). – Printing house of the Stauropegion Institute in Lviv, leased by Z. Medytsky. Editor responsible: Yaroslav Iv. Verbytsky. The book has historical and cultural value and is of collector's interest. Information With this booklet the publishers opened the year 1936 and a new project: printing tales by "our peasants, those self-taught talents", as the preface "From the Publishers" puts it. "An Unhappy Parting" is the story of Petro and Orysia from a Galician village, whose love is cut short by the First World War. According to the publishers, the action unfolds against the background of the Talerhof persecutions: in 1914 the Austrian authorities carried out mass arrests of Galician peasants and priests suspected of pro-Russian sympathies and deported them to the Talerhof camp near Graz. The chapters open with verse epigraphs, including some by M. Mokrytska. The second tale, "The Blessed Stone", is a legend retold by an old grandfather about a rock beside which monks lived in a cave for nine years before the Maniava Skete arose. The preface presents both authors as self-taught peasants: Emilian Perkhun is "a peasant from Repniv, Kamianka district", who "writes verse quite successfully", and Sylvester Mykhailovych Kalynets is "a second poet and writer". The Mykhailo Kachkovsky Society was founded in 1874 in Kolomyia on the initiative of Fr Ivan Naumovych and soon moved to Lviv; it was the main educational society of the Galician Russophiles, which for decades issued cheap monthly booklets for the countryside – the running number 540 on the title page is the count of this series. The language of the edition is typical of the Russophile press: the Galician vernacular with Church Slavonic and Russian forms ("издательство", "русский народ"), and in the list on the back cover Ukrainian titles appear alongside Russian ones. The Society was dissolved in 1939. Intended for rural readers, the booklets were printed on cheap paper and have survived poorly.