This collection of Ukrainian folk songs was presented to Vitaly Zakrutkin by his friend, the Ukrainian writer Oles Honchar. The collection is titled “Strings of the Heart”. For Vitaly Zakrutkin, it was not only a unique but also a useful gift. The Zakrutkins knew many Ukrainian songs and sincerely loved them. These songs were part of the writer’s and his family’s life. The songs helped them cope with the difficulties after the Russian Civil War, working in the fields, hunger, cold, and the hardships of moving from one place to another. And even in the Russian Far East, where the Zakrutkins happened to reside for some time, they sang Ukrainian songs in the evenings — the songs that were close to their heart and soul.

Vitaly Aleksandrovich often recalled that during moments of rest at war, he and his comrades sang not only Don Cossack and Russian folk songs, but also Ukrainian songs — marches, lyrical songs, and sometimes cheerful tunes, to boost their morale. The writer remembered the words of his maternal grandfather, who was a musician. He said that songs heal the soul and sometimes even help to cope with illnesses.

The Zakrutkins were a musical family. The writer’s grandfather Nikolay Konstantinovich taught music and singing at the teachers’ institute in Feodosia. The writer’s mother Mariya Nikolayevna played the piano beautifully and passed on her piano skills and love of music to all four of her children. The writer’s father Aleksander Mikhailovich had a powerful and well-trained baritone voice. In his youth, he sang in professional choirs and performed solos.

When Vitaly Zakrutkin was already living in Kochetovskaya, he would organize musical nights for relatives, friends, and neighbors in his living room. His mother (or sometimes Zakrutkin himself) would sit down at the piano and fill the room with the sounds of romances, Russian, Don Cossack, and Ukrainian songs. Among the Ukrainian songs frequently performed in the Zakrutkins’ house were the following: “A Moonlit Night”, “Black Eyebrows, Brown Eyes”, “The Cossack Rode beyond the Danube”, “There, on the Mountain…”, and “Spring’s Song”. The Zakrutkins found the lyrics to many of these tunes in the collection “Strings of the Heart”.