Works
Terlecki was not a professional writer. Still, his literary and journalistic productions are far from negligible. In presenting a catalogue of Ter- lecki’s writings, my purpose is to give some indication of the scope of his intellectual interests, and also to provide guidelines for future research.
Only two of Terlecki’s works were accessible to me. These are the programmatic political pamphlet in Polish, The Address of a Ruthenian (1849),35 which will be examined in detail in the next section, and his Russian-language “Reminiscences.”36 They possess considerable value from the historical and literary points of view. The Polish historian Mar- celi Handelsman stresses their reliability.37 They are written in a simple, straightforward, and yet vigorous manner, without any trace of selfadvertisement or special pleading. Their outstanding feature is, perhaps, a tone of emotional detachment. They give the impression of being the work of an old man who has retained a fresh mind and a vivid memory of past events, but who reports the story of his stormy youth and mature manhood from a great distance, as if from another shore.
During his years in Austria Terlecki published several books in Ukrainian: a translation of Thomas a Kempis’s Imitation of Christ;38 a volume of translations of the poems of Bohdan Zaleski;39 a collection of sermons;40 and a description of his Secondjourney to Palestine and the Near East.41 The last work was planned in three volumes, but only two fascicles of the first volume appeared in print. According to a cryptic note of the bibliographer, Ivan Levytsky, the publication was discontinued because “the sequel did not suit the taste of the Galician-Ruthenian public.’’42 Also the apparently non-controversial translations of the poems of Zaleski were to cause Terlecki unexpected worry. Bohdan Jozef Zaleski, a Romantic poet and leading exponent of the “Ukrainian School’’ in Polish literature, was a friend of Terlecki,s from his Paris days.
Terlecki dedicated the volume to the author “in remembrance of an unshakeable friendship.’’ But Zaleski disowned the translation.43 The reason for this rebuff, which must have been painful to Terlecki, was rather peculiar. Zaleski was angered that the book was printed in the Cyrillic script. This was a time when many Polish patriots were convinced that Ukrainian was a peasant dialect of the Polish language. Consequently, they demanded that the Latin-Polish alphabet be used in Ukrainian publications and denounced the Cyrillic alphabet as a device of tsarist Russia.During the decade from 1861 to 1872 Terlecki published about a dozen articles in the Lviv newspaper Slovo.44 Some of them were fairly long, as they ran over several issues. Judging by their titles, they dealt with religious and political topics or contained descriptions of Terlecki,s former travels.
After his move to Russia, Terlecki brought out a little book based on his observations in Transcarpathia, entitled Ugorskaia Rus’ ³ voz- rozhdenie soznaniia narodnosti mezhdu russkimi v Vengrii (Hungarian Rus’ and the Rebirth of National Consciousness among the Ruthenians in Hungary, 1874).45 To my knowledge, this was the last of Terlecki’s works to appear during his lifetime. The “Reminiscences” were published posthumously. None of Terlecki’s writings has ever been reprinted.