COURAGE

Свързване на колекции

After the death of the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka in 1977, his students were afraid that his manuscripts would be confiscated by the state police. The fact that Jan Patočka had died at Strahov Hospital was hidden from the public. Ivan Chvatík learned of it from a broadcast by Radio Free Europe. He decided to immediately save Patočkaʼs documents. Ivan Chvatík met Miroslav Petříček on the way to Patočkaʼs house and together they called Jiří Michálek, who owned a car. It turned out that Michálek and Jiří Polívka had had the same idea. They travelled together to Patočkaʼs flat. After initially hesitating, Jan Sokol, the son-in-law of Jan Patočka, finally agreed to give Patočkaʼs writings to Chvatík and his colleagues. Then, Patočkaʼs materials were loaded into the car. The situation seemed dramatic, as an unknown car with men sitting inside was waiting in front of the house, and Chvatík and his collaborators were afraid they were being watched. Nevertheless, nothing unexpected happened and Jiří Polívka were able to safely hide the documents in a secret location.

Thanks to the fact that Patočkaʼs students Chvatík, Polívka, Petříček, and Michálek ran the risk of being uncovered and saved Patočkaʼs manuscripts, almost all of Patočkaʼs work and his personal notes were preserved and could be later published.

In 1977, during her visit to Brno in Czechoslovakia, an English nurse Frances Meacham randomly heard about Czech poet Ivan Blatný, who, at that time, was living in a psychiatric clinic in Ipswich, England. She met Blatný’s cousin Jan Šmarda and after her return to England, Meacham started regularly visiting Blatný and collecting his manuscripts. Thus, Meacham’s visit to Czechoslovakia in 1977 was crucial to the preservation of Ivan Blatný’s manuscripts written in exile.

The purchase of the Plast House in Tremont in 1977 was an important event in the history of the Ukrainian Museum-Archives. The scouting organization moved to a new location in Parma (its holdings transferred in 1983), which allowed the building to be used exclusively for storing, organizing and displaying its archival collection. Though the museum was founded in 1952 by Leonid Bachynsky, its materials were first held in a defunct coal bin at the St. Volodymyr Orthodox Church in Parma. Then because of Bachynsky’s ties to Plast, the archives were transferred slowly to the attic and basement of the building in Tremont. In 1959, the UMA in Cleveland was officially registered by the state of Ohio as the “Ukrainian Museum-Archives” and in 1966 was granted tax-exempt status. That same year the UMA inaugurated membership dues, which provide a steady flow of income.

The year 1977 was a time of transition for the museum. Bachynsky resigned as director at the age of 81, moving to Denver, Colorado, and the UMA became the formal owner of the property on Kenilworth Avenue. That year, the UMA also launched a fund-raising campaign to help support maintenance and repairs. The new director Oleksander Fedynsky was another passionate collector of Ukrainian books and other printed material and kept the UMA focused on preserving the treasures of the past, so that someday the institution could share with an independent Ukraine this rich collection compiled by émigrés.