Novel
People of the Marsh
Людзі на балоце
Ivan Melezh · 1962
Synopsis
In the village of Kurani, on an island in the Polesian marshes linked to the world only by a causeway, life changes in the years after the revolution. On a June morning, the villagers set out to mow the marshy meadows. Young Vasil Dziatlik, proud and reserved, draws closer over the summer to Hanna Charnushka, the teasing daughter of Tsimokh Charnushka, whom Yaŭkhim, the son of the wealthy Khalimon Hlushak, also courts. The division of the land and the building of a dyke divide the village.
Context
The novel opens the Chronicle of Polesia, a trilogy about the Polesian village of the twenties and thirties, collectivisation and dekulakisation, continued with Podykh navalnitsy and Zaveï, sniežan. It appeared in 1961 or 1962, then in Russian as early as 1962, in Estonian in 1964, in Spanish in Moscow in 1975 and in English in 1979, under the title People of the Marsh. Viktor Turov made a film from it in 1981.
Who it is for
A long novel in Belarusian, of about four hundred and fifty pages, the first volume of a trilogy; no French translation.
Prizes and reception
Yakub Kolas Prize in 1962, then the Lenin Prize in 1972 with the following volume; regarded as a book without which one cannot understand the soul of the country.
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