62.

63. 62. ЛВ

4. А в нас будем істи
уску кайку тмусту
Родим у своїй Мати
В сивій картацині.
В нас будем ходити
В сукни картацині”.

5. Привим дївину
З цутни лїс осика
Привим дївину
До цутої” ерекки
Вєрнисє дївино
Май без суперєрки

6. Привєди дївину
До сосни плєнита
________________
Данамили сосну
Звєрха до корінка

4. And in our place we will eat
a piece of pork neck and something
We will give birth at our Mother’s
In a gray cardigan.
In our place we will walk
In cardigan dresses”.

5. Bring the girl
Into the dense aspen forest
Bring the girl
To the “standing” church
Return, girl
Have no super skirt

6. Bring the girl
To the pine tree tight
________________
Sweep the pine
From above to the root

Series of pages torn out after this page

Core and theme of pages 63–62 (song fragment 4–6):

This is a short excerpt from a larger collection of Ukrainian folk songs (likely love, courtship, or wedding pisni). The core motif is the ritualistic “bringing” or “leading” of the girl/bride (привєди дївину / Привим дївину) into symbolic natural or domestic spaces.

  • Song 4 sets a festive, everyday domestic scene: eating fatty pork neck (уску кайку тмусту), wearing simple gray cardigan-like clothing (В сивій картацині), and walking in cardigan dresses — evoking rural humility, abundance, and shared life.
  • Songs 5–6 shift to a more poetic, almost incantatory tone: the speaker repeatedly commands or pleads to bring the girl into the forest (aspen grove) and then to a pine tree (“standing” church-like or tall and straight). The pine is treated almost reverently — sweeping it “from above to the root” — suggesting a symbolic act of preparation, purification, or claiming a space for union.

Overall theme: Courtship and marital union framed through nature imagery. Trees (aspen, pine) often symbolize femininity, endurance, or the marital home in Ukrainian folklore. The repeated “bring the girl” formula is typical of wedding songs where the groom’s party “fetches” the bride. The tone mixes playful domesticity with ritualistic seriousness — a blend of earthy village life and poetic longing.

Interpretation of the crossed-out section:

In song 6, after “До сосни плєнита” (To the tight/pine-clad pine), there is a clear horizontal line and the heavily crossed-out phrase “Данамили сосну” before continuing with “Зверха до корінка”.

This looks like a classic self-correction by the writer:

  • They probably started writing a variant or misremembered line (“Данамили сосну” appears to be a garbled or dialectal attempt at something like “Дай нам или сосну” or a phonetic slip).
  • Realizing it broke the meter, rhyme, or didn’t match the traditional wording, they struck it through and resumed with the correct continuation (“Зверха до корінка” — sweeping from top to root).
  • The long underscore line was likely added to clearly mark the deletion and separate the corrected text, a common practice in handwritten songbooks to keep the lyrics clean for later performance or copying.

Such corrections are very typical in personal notebooks of folk songs — the scribe was transcribing from memory or oral performance and fixed an error on the spot. It shows the text was living and actively edited rather than copied from a printed source.

“ЛВ” in the header “63. 62. ЛВ” are the initials of the singer/informant.

In early 20th-century Ukrainian handwritten folk-song notebooks (called pisenniki), it was standard practice for the collector/transcriber to write:

  • the song or page number first (here 63. 62.),
  • followed immediately by the initials of the person who sang or recited the songs.

“ЛВ” therefore identifies the specific performer whose repertoire is recorded on these two facing pages. This system allowed the collector to keep track of which songs came from which singer across the entire collection.

(The person who actually wrote the notebook down usually signed the individual songs at the end with the name “Неспіш” / “Hnespish” — most likely the collector himself.)

So in short: ЛВ = the singer’s personal initials (e.g. Л[юба / Лариса / Лев] В[…]), not part of the song text itself.

The pencil vs. ink distinction tells us this is a working field notebook created in two distinct stages:

  • The songs themselves were written first in ink (the main cursive text). This was the primary recording phase — the collector (Неспіш) transcribed the lyrics directly from performance, memory, or dictation during collection sessions. Ink was used because it was permanent and suitable for the core content.
  • The page numbers (e.g. “63. 62.”) and singer initials (“ЛВ”) were added later in pencil. This was a secondary organizational/cataloging pass. After filling pages with songs, the collector went back through the notebook to number them sequentially and tag each section with the performer’s initials (ЛВ = the specific singer whose repertoire appears on those pages).

What this reveals:

  • It was a living, practical ethnographic document, not a clean final copy made from a printed source.
  • The collector worked systematically: first capture the oral material (ink), then impose structure and source-tracking (pencil).
  • Pencil allowed easy changes, erasures, or renumbering if the collection grew or pages were rearranged — very common in early 20th-century Ukrainian folk-song notebooks (pisenniki).
  • The crossed-out lines we saw earlier (also in ink) further confirm the scribe was actively editing in real time while the main text was being written.

This workflow is typical of folklorists collecting large repertoires from multiple singers: record first, organize/index later.