The personal collection of books of the Polish intellectual, writer and philosopher Stanisław Vincenz will be available for reading in the halls of the Lviv National Scientific Library of Ukraine named after Vasyl Stefanyk. The unique collection includes about a thousand rare editions of past centuries, including the works of Dante, Homer, Shakespeare, Plato and other classics of world culture. The special value of the collection is the author’s notes and autographs of Stanisław Vincenz left on the pages of the books. By the way, January 28, 2026 marked 55 years since Stanisław Vincenz passed away.
Stanisław Vincenz is known as the author of a four-volume publication about the Hutsul region – “On the High Uplands”. The four logia became an encyclopedia of Hutsul life and popularized the Hutsul region to the world. Due to the Soviet occupation, the writer was forced to emigrate and live far from his beloved Carpathian region. Vincenz described the experience of imprisonment in the Enkavedist prison in his work “Dialogues with the Soviets”.
Therefore, his personal books are not only a library collection, but also a source of facts about the Hutsul Region researcher and his contemporaries.
The unique library of personal books of Stanisław Vincenz was found by the family of Larisa and Mykola Kniazhytskyi, who purchased the books from the descendants of Stanisław Vincenz and transferred them to Lviv libraries for temporary storage. For several years, the collection was kept in the library of the Ukrainian Catholic University and was available to students and scientists.
From 2026, the book collection will be stored in the funds of the Lviv National Scientific Library of Ukraine named after Vasyl Stefanyk. Currently, scientists are working on the collection, some of the publications will be restored and restored.
For book lovers and everyone who wants to see unique books in the library, we will soon organize a special event – an intellectual event and the opening of the “Vincenz Bookshelf”.
“Books from Stanisław Vincenz’s shelf contain many unexplored facts, intellectual connections and thoughts of the Polish writer and philosopher. It is important that this collection is part of the public cultural heritage. Such books should be stored in the scientific library. There they will be able to explore them, open new pages of the history of European humanitarian thought, after all, the hitherto unknown secrets of the history of culture. All those willing will have the opportunity to touch the history of intellectuals through books from past centuries,” says Larysa Kniazhytska, a member of the supervisory board of the All-Ukrainian Democratic Forum NGO.
About Stanisław Vincenz: Polish writer, philosopher, essayist and cultural expert was born on November 30, 1888 in the village of Sloboda-Runguska, Kolomiysky district, Ivano-Frankivsk region. Stanislav studied at gymnasiums in Kolomyia and Stryi. Subsequently, he studied law, biology, psychology, philosophy, Sanskrit at the universities of Lviv and Vienna, and knew 14 languages. Although Stanisław Vincenz spent a large part of his life in exile – in Hungary, France, Switzerland. The main work of his life is the four-volume edition about the Hutsul region “On the High Uplands”, the author began writing in 1930 and worked on it for four decades. The publication became a cultural collection that combined: songs, customs, legends, prayers, parables.
