Novel
Mykola Dzherya
Микола Джеря
Ivan Nechuy-Levytsky · 1878
Opening lines
Широкою долиною між двома рядками розложистих гір тихо тече по Васильківщині невеличка річка Раставиця. Серед долини зеленіють розкішні густі та високі верби: там ніби потонуло в вербах село Вербівка.
Along a wide valley between two rows of spreading hills, a small river, the Rastavytsia, flows quietly through the Vasylkiv district. In the middle of the valley lush, thick, tall willows grow green: there, as if drowned in willows, lies the village of Verbivka.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from uk.wikisource.org
Synopsis
In Verbivka, Mykola Dzherya, the son of serf peasants, marries the poor Nymydora against his mother's wishes. Working on the lands of the lord Bjozovsky, he sees the steward have flogged those who worked their own field, then strike his wife, and he sets fire to the master's haystacks. Threatened with being sent to the army, he urges the serfs to disobey and flees with a few men to a sugar refinery, leaving behind his wife and his little daughter. There begins a long wandering as a worker without papers, from factory to factory and then as far as the sea.
Context
Written in 1876, the year in which an imperial decree forbade printing in Ukrainian, the tale was sent to Lviv, to the journal Pravda, which published it in 1878; it is dedicated to the composer Mykola Lysenko. A version cut by the censors appeared in 1883 in Starytsky's almanac Rada, a first separate volume in 1892 in Lviv, and the author still had to soften his pages on the clergy for a St Petersburg edition of 1899. The full text was not restored until 1965. A film was made of it in 1926, and an English translation appeared in Kyiv in 1985.
Who it is for
A narrative of some one hundred and seventy pages in the 1926 edition, in eight chapters in the last edition revised by the author. Serfdom was not abolished until 1861.
Prizes and reception
One of the narratives that founded realism in Ukrainian prose; Ivan Franko devoted a study to it.
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