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Ferenc Sebő (b. 1947) is a Hungarian folk musician, singer, songwriter, folk music researcher and architect. He graduated from the Architectural Faculty of the Budapest Technical University in 1970. Sebő studied music beginning in his childhood and composed and played music in addition to his architectural works. With his classmate, Béla Halmos, he founded the Sebő Ensemble, which became famous as a result of its new adaptation of folk music. Under the influence of György Martin, he joined the collectors of folk music as well. They played collected folk songs and music with their own band, thus becoming the initiators of the folk music movement. At the invitation of Sándor Tímár, he became the musical director of the Bartók Dancing Group, which gradually launched the dance house-movement for young people. Initially, the closed R Club formed for the Sebő Ensemble at the Budapest Technical University, later the Kassák Club in the Zugló district of Budapest was also established. Sebő worked at this club from 1973 to 1981. In 1984, he began his studies at the Musicological Department (founded by Zoltán Kodály) of the Academy of Music. In 1989, Sebő graduated with a degree in music-history education and later in music scholarship. He taught at the Bartók Béla Vocational School of Music, then at the Musicological Department of the Academy of Music. Moreover, he worked at the Musicological Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. From 1991 to 2006, Sebő held a job at Hungarian Television, where he organized folk-music programs, folk dance and performances of old music. In December 1996, he was asked to lead the Hungarian National Folk Group. Since 2002, Sebő has been the professional director of the House of Traditions.

Vasyl Sedliar was a Ukrainian painter and graphic artist, executed during the Stalinist purges in 1937 along with his mentor Mykola Boichuk and fellow artist Ivan Padalka. Sedliar studied at the Kyiv Art School and then under Boichuk at the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts, focusing on large-scale murals, book illustrations, packaging design and ceramics. Together with Oksana Pavlenko and others, Sedliar created murals at the Kyiv Institute of Plastic Arts in 1924, which were destroyed in 1934 after the institution was dissolved. Frescoes produced with Boichuk and Padalka at the Kharkiv Chervnonozavodskyi Ukrainian Drama theatre were also destroyed.

Sedliar’s works were often executed in the embattled Boichukist style, borrowing directly from Byzantine religious imagery—both icons and, most particularly, mural painting—and also incorporating contemporary secular subject matter. His illustrations in a 1931 edition of Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar, which is a featured item of the Ukrainian Museum-Archive’s collection, were created in this vein. Sedliar, like many artists of that time, fell under increasing pressure to employ elements of socialist realism in his creative works, though his use of those motifs did not prevent him from persecution during the Stalinist terror.  He was arrested in November 1936 and charged with terrorist activity. He would be executed on the same day as his mentor Boichuk and his friend Padalka, after which the majority of his works were destroyed. The 1931 and 1933 editions of the Kobzar were also banned, existing copies confiscated and destroyed. There were 5,000 published in the first edition and 10,000 in the second, with only a few restricted copies surviving along with a few in private collections, which makes the fact this volume surfaced in Cleveland, OH all the more remarkable.

Rostyslav Semkiv is a Ukrainian writer, literary critic, translator and publisher. He has obtained his PhD in philology from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Kyiv. From 2003 to date, he is director of the Smoloskyp publishing house in Kyiv. He directs the digitization projects of the Smoloskyp collection, and organizes national exhibitions, promoting the collection to university students, secondary school students and the general public.