How to Arrange 14,000 Proverbs: The Collections of Nomys and Franko

“Still water breaks the dam.” “A gift for a gift, a word for a word.” Some Ukrainian proverbs like these were compiled and numbered into books in the 19th century. The best known are Ukrainian Proverbs, Sayings and the Like, edited by Matvii Nomys and published in St. Petersburg in 1864, and Galician-Rus’ Folk Proverbs, edited by Ivan Franko and published in Lviv in 1901–10.

The entry “Proverbs” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, CIUS, at the University of Alberta; hereafter IEU) calls Nomys’s book the finest collection of the 19th century, and Franko’s book one that remains unsurpassed to this day. The two books arranged tens of thousands of proverbs in entirely different ways.

Nomys Was a Pen Name

Nomys (Номис) was a pen name; his real name was Matvii Terentiiovych Symonov (Симонов). According to IEU and the Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine, compiled by the Institute of History of Ukraine at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, he was born on 17 November 1823 in a village in Lubny County, Poltava Governorate, and died on 26 December 1900. He graduated from a university in Kyiv in 1848 and became a teacher, and according to IEU served as headmaster of the Lubny gymnasium from 1873. Late in life he sold his land and donated the proceeds to organisations including the Shevchenko Scientific Society.

The title page reads, “Collected by O. V. Markovych and others. Edited by M. Nomys.” The foundation was the collection of proverbs made by the folklorist Opanas Markovych, which, according to Nomys’s preface, numbered more than 50,000 including variants. To this Nomys added collections sent to him by others. The preface records each contribution individually — for example, that Mykola Bilozerskyi sent 2,011 proverbs and 345 riddles, and that the poet Stepan Rudanskyi sent 298 proverbs he had recorded in villages of Podillia in the 1850s.

According to IEU, the book included 14,339 proverbs, excluding variants, and 505 riddles (the Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine gives “approximately 15,000 records”). IEU judges it, despite cuts made by the censor, to have been the finest achievement in Slavic proverb studies of its time. The censored passages were later published in 1909 by the literary scholar Mykhailo Vozniak (Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine). The verso of the title page carries the print line “Censor’s approval: 13 July 1864, St. Petersburg.” The year before, in 1863, the Russian Empire had issued a directive banning the publication of Ukrainian-language works other than literary ones (see the article on how, the year after Ukrainian-language publishing was banned in the Russian Empire, the University of Tokyo was founded in Japan).

Nomys’s Arrangement: By Theme

In his preface, Nomys explains his thinking on arrangement. Rather than basing it on some psychological theory, he arranged the proverbs “by subject,” so that they would be easy to find, read and remember. The body of the book begins with the sections “Faith,” “God,” “Sin,” “Fasting,” “Prayer” and “Church,” in that order, and the beginning of each section indicates the range of numbers it covers.

According to the preface, Nomys included everything in the collections, including riddles and incantations. He left the local forms of speech as recorded, without correcting them, and after each proverb gave an abbreviation for the region where it was recorded and the person who collected it. Proverbs that arrived after the numbering was finished were gathered at the end of the book as a “supplement.”

Reading by Original Text and Number

Nomys’s book is usually cited by its running numbers. Franko’s collection also cites Nomys’s numbers in its notes, for example as “Nomys 6066–6068.” Below are six proverbs from Nomys’s book and one from Franko’s book, given exactly as spelled in the originals (the abbreviation in parentheses is the place of recording written after each proverb).

Immediately before no. 12870 in Nomys’s book comes another proverb: “Slovo ne horobets, nazad ne vernetsia” (“A word is not a sparrow; once it flies out, it does not come back”). Franko adds to the “Az, buky, vide” proverb the explanation that it “expresses the idea that learning leads a person to a higher station.”

The meanings and uses of these proverbs belong to the time and place where they were recorded. This article does not address how much any of them is used in Ukraine today, since no survey data on this could be found.

Franko’s Arrangement: Alphabetical by Keyword

Franko’s Galician-Rus’ Folk Proverbs was published between 1901 and 1910 as volumes 10, 16, 23, 24, 27 and 28 of Etnohrafichnyi zbirnyk (Ethnographic Collection), a series published by the Shevchenko Scientific Society. It comprises three volumes, each split into two parts, for six books in all. IEU puts the number of proverbs included at more than 30,000.

Unlike Nomys, Franko arranged the proverbs alphabetically by a keyword within each proverb. Volume 1, part 1 covers “A–Vidaty”; the final part runs through “Rabunok–Yachmin.” Each proverb is given with the place where it was recorded, and many carry an explanation of the situations in which it is used or the story it arose from, together with comparisons to proverbs in other languages.

IEU’s “Proverbs” entry notes that Soviet-era proverb collections included a large section of “Soviet proverbs” about the Party, the Soviet system and “enemies of the people,” many of which were artificial creations made on Party instruction and had nothing to do with the folk. The fact that the two 19th-century collections recorded the place and person for each proverb individually also serves as a clue for verifying which proverbs were genuinely recorded from the mouths of the people.