"I must say that even in Franko's Forge, there were responsible communists who monitored everything. And Vasyl Levytskyi, who was three years ahead of me when he decided to step down from leadership, unilaterally said, ‘I trust that you will lead the studio.’ And immediately, we were summoned to the dean’s office. We grew up in an environment where [we were constantly told], ‘What are you doing? Only the party committee... the party committee determines who will lead.’ We constantly heard about students who were expelled from the university for publishing the self-published [magazine] Skrynia. We were always warned that if you do something, you will be expelled immediately. I must also say that when our child was born, we wanted to have them baptized. People told us, ‘Don’t do it, or you will be expelled from the university immediately. After you graduate, you can baptize your child. Don’t do it.’ Today, I am very grateful to those wise people who told us not to baptize the child while we were still studying."
"You see, independence began, and now I reflect on how much independence has given me. That is, how much life has given a person the opportunity to fulfill themselves in an independent country. Because when I think about how my life would have turned out if there had been no independence, I see that there would have been no prospects, because, for example, I was never able to publish a book during Soviet times. Even though I submitted manuscripts to various publishing houses, one of the reviews (there were editorial reviews back then, meaning they were closed) stated… One of the reviewers wrote that there was no depiction of Soviet reality there; the women were somehow pathological, they had some kind of pathological love or something. It’s as if it were the 19th century. I was so pleased with this assessment. In reality, as a writer, I had little chance under the Soviet system. Because you had to write in a way... back then, they even used the term “paravozyky” (little locomotives). Poets wrote poems dedicated to Lenin or the Party so that their collections would be published. The same was required of writers — to depict the bright Soviet life. But I wanted to write about that world of my childhood in which I grew up, about the people I heard, about my grandfather, about others. A world that was mystical, fairy-tale-like, yet distant from the bright Soviet reality."
"In the early 1990s, when a young Harvard doctor, Borys Hudziak — now a bishop — came to Lviv, he founded the Institute of Church History. And the living story of recording interviews with repressed priests, nuns, and their children. I mean the children of priests, their wives. I was asked, as someone from Zakarpattia, <...> to primarily record interviews with Zakarpattia priests and all that. It was an immense experience for me. I think I recorded at least a hundred. Those were times when, to reach a village, there were no cars, no buses, you walked on foot, or rode on a cart if someone gave you a lift. You waited for a priest or his wife. But it was a monumental experience of communicating with people who had gone through hell but remained so bright, so kind that it still amazes and inspires me to this day. There were occasions when priests were afraid to meet with me, and I remember in Mukachevo, I won't mention his name, I approached the priest's house five times and was told five times that the priest was not at home, gone. But he was there. Later, other priests told [him], 'Meet [him], this man has already recorded us'. There were nuns who said, 'We cannot tell you everything about how we saved ourselves. Why? Because it may come back, and we don't want our sisters to be deprived of this chance to save themselves.' That is, even when they were already living there, say, in the '95 or '96, they were still fearful that Muscovy might return. That all this could return, all the horrors could return.”
"It's almost a legend nowadays that in 2002, I decided to publish what I had been dedicating my life to for many years before, writing about the generation of the Eightiers, in one book. And I broke the mold... I didn't want it to be called an anthology. Again, this internal resistance to the standard. And I decided that it should combine works, a detailed bibliographic reference. Not only a story about the author but also where you can read what works and reviews were published and where they were published. A small bibliography of sorts. And it turned out to be something that no one had done before. <...> And I came up with a title, which had to be something very private. And my wife said, 'A collection.' Yes, something like that. It should be a private collection. And this first book, which was published under the title ‘Pryvatna koleksiia’ (‘A Private Collection’), was dedicated to the generation of the eighties. Everything about them and their works, who wrote about them, and what they wrote. At that time, the Internet was not so widely available, and it was very difficult to find biographical information. But this publication made a splash at the Publishers' Forum that we did not anticipate. It was recognized as the best book. There were lots of reviews in the press. Everyone was talking about it. And I was always asked, 'Did you buy everyone?'. But I didn't know anyone. It was something like, well <...> inebriation. But in Ukraine, media success does not mean commercial success. In fact, we invested a lot of money in this publication. <...> We did it together with Oleh Hovda. He was... His wife <...> was a private entrepreneur, and as a private entrepreneur, we published this book. We invested in it. We had to... We invested money, borrowed money, and in order to pay it back at that time, in 2002, we would have had to sell our two apartments to pay it back. I published... Well, for printing. And our wives said, 'Guys, you're crazy, we're going to end up on the street with children.' The paradox, perhaps, is that madness was that good madness that drives the world. If it didn't exist, this project wouldn't exist. It appeared, and people appeared who said, 'We need to help.' We bought it for the parliamentary library. We got rid of our debts. And my friend Oleh Govda said, 'Listen, we got rid of one meningitis, let's do some more'."
"I have already mentioned Halyna Pahutyak. I mentioned that we published a thematic ten-book series. That is, it was a project that departed from the Soviet [environment]. Previously, there had to be ten volumes, and you had to buy them all. And I don't want to <...> impose on people. People... you shouldn't impose on people. <...> Perhaps they like one thing about this writer, say, gothic prose, or travel, or philosophical, or historical [works]. And we came up with this project, <...> essentially ten giant books, which present most of Halyna Pahutyak's writings. Although not all of them."
“But when the war broke out, you suddenly realized with horror that everything you lived, loved, your emotions, your thoughts, <...> were pushed to the background, they became unimportant. Something entirely different becomes important. What becomes important is that Ukraine survives, that it endures. And in this situation, it seemed that we should only help, which is what we are doing. We are helping. We are volunteering. But my friend Ihor Byrka brings me back to reality. He asks me, 'What are you doing?' I answer, 'I'm helping.' 'No, no. What do you do with what you used to do? <...> You know, the books, do you publish them?' 'No,' I said. 'I don't publish because no one wants them.' 'You're wrong! Every person in their place must volunteer and do what they were doing, and do it even better than they were doing.' And it was Dr. Ihor Byrka who brought me back to my senses again after the war started, and we started publishing books in short runs, but we returned to the work we dedicated our lives. So that after a year of war, there would be no emptiness in that spiritual space. And at that time, we published travel essays such as The Charm of Venice and The Magic of Paris, I published the translated works of Oleh Lysheha, and we <...> finally completed the ten-book series of Halyna Pahutyak."
Vasyl Gabor is a writer, literary scholar, and the author of the publishing project Pryvatna kolektsiia (A Private Collection). He was born on December 10, 1959, in the village of Oleksandrivka, located in the Khust district of the Zakarpattia region, into the family of Vasyl and Mariya Gabor. He studied at the Khust Boarding School. In 1986, he graduated from the Journalism Department at the Ivan Franko State (now National) University of Lviv. Since 1993, he has worked as a research fellow at the Vasyl Stefanyk Lviv Scientific Library of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (now the Vasyl Stefanyk Lviv National Scientific Library of Ukraine), where he continues to work to this day. In 1997, he defended his dissertation on The Ukrainian-Language Press of Zakarpattia in the 1920s–1930s in the Context of the Region’s National Revival and earned the degree of Candidate of Philological Sciences. He is the author of prose books, occasional writings, essays, and literary studies. He is a laureate of the Kurylas Family Award for the best interview on the underground Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (1994) and the Lesya and Petro Kovalev Literary Prize (2006). Together with friends of similar views, he succeeded in restoring the literary legacy of unjustly forgotten Western Ukrainian writers such as Dariia Vikonska, Sofia Yablonska, Stepan Levynsky, and others. Over the twenty years of the Private Collection publishing project, Vasyl Gabor has published more than 225 highly regarded editions. He lives in Lviv, continuing to write and publish books.
