Friends!

 Today marks his 56th birthday Ivan Malkovich - Ukrainian poet and publisher, director of the publishing house "A-BA-BA-HA-LA-MA-HA." I'm sure each of you have heard of the books, which are published by Ivan Antonovich. At least, he gave printed whole series of books about Harry Potter in Ukrainian. At first it had a small circulation, but then books about the young wizard that audience as "accustomed" to read in Russian, began to be bought only in Ukrainian, because the translation had not only good quality - the new edition in Ukrainian could read among the first, because material was prepared quickly and responsibly.

Now the "A-BA-BA-HA-LA-MA-HA" is one of the leading Ukrainian publishers. Since it worked with Mykola Vingranovsky, Lina Kostenko, Sasha Derman, Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, Andrey Kokotyukha, Vsevolod Nestayko, Dmytro Pavlichko, Volodymyr Rutkivsky, Yuri Vynnychuk and other famous Ukrainian authors. The important role played the illustrations in books - they are very beautiful and well-remembered.

Ivan Malkovich is the man, that is causing delight. Not only due his contribution to the Ukrainian book publishing. This year he was awarded the National Taras Shevchenko Prize of Ukraine. Speech delivered by Ivan, touched everyone. If you did not read iy, I advise you to do it, because there were a lot of interesting thoughts about everything - from the Shevchenko to the importance of the Ukrainian language. Let me give you one of his quotes: "My dream is to live to the time when children in school will not be told about unlucky serf who served powerless, dumb slave of masters and the paradigm will be changed to the inspired talks about the incredible boy, who glowed with great talent, the boy, who without father and mother, without any chances of success,created himself. This glow was seen by all - and the arbitrary drunk pope, which read with Taras small harps over the dead - and even obstinate Paul Engelhardt ... "

Friends! Interestingly, Germany is conducted May the 10th the Book day. In 1933 in Berlin on the square in front of the State Opera to the sound of music by Strauss and military marches, the Nazis burned at the stake books of the internationally renowned authors. Thousands of works of world culture pearls, were burned in a huge fire in Berlin and other German cities. In memory of there is a memorial "library drowned", created by the famous Israeli sculptor Micha Ullman. On it are engraved the words of Heinrich Heine: "Where books are burned, eventually, people will be burned too.”



Several decades later in the day, when the books were mocked was born man who makes many efforts to help Ukrainian book to live, develop, know better life. For your children and grandchildren could read quality literature on their native language. I congratulate Ivan Malkovich on his birthday, I wish you long life and thank for invaluable work!