Novel
Do Oxen Low When Mangers Are Full?
Хіба ревуть воли, як ясла повні?
Panas Myrny and Ivan Bilyk · 1880
Opening lines
На дворі весна вповні. Куди не гльань — скрізь розвернулосьа, роспустилосьа, зацвіло пишним цвітом.
Outside it is full spring. Wherever you look, everything has unfolded, opened out, burst into splendid bloom.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from uk.wikisource.org
Synopsis
In Pisky, near Myrhorod, Chipka grows up without a father, in poverty, mocked by the other children. A herdsman in the service of a serf, he sees his family breathe more easily when a plot of land falls to them by inheritance, and he falls in love with Halia while guarding his rye. But a judgment gives his land to someone else, a clerk demands a bribe, and Chipka takes to drink with bad company. In counterpoint, the book traces the past of the village, from a family of Zaporozhian Cossacks to that of the lords of the place.
Context
The younger brother had heard, in a stagecoach between Poltava and Hadiach, a coachman pity a local brigand sentenced to hard labour; he drew from it a story, Chipka, which the elder brother criticised and which the two brothers reworked together, extending the action over nearly a century. Completed in the autumn of 1875 and cut by the Kiev censors, the novel was to be printed in Petersburg in 1876 when the Ems Ukaz banned Ukrainian printed matter. It appeared in Geneva in 1880, through the efforts of Mykhailo Drahomanov; a censored version, under the title La Force perdue, was authorised in 1903, and the complete text waited until 1925.
Who it is for
A big novel in four parts, which weaves together three family lines over nearly a hundred years. It is worth knowing that land is the only possession in it, and that losing it amounts to disappearing.
Prizes and reception
The first of the great peasant novels of Ukrainian literature, selected by Ukrainian PEN among the hundred major books of the language.
Sources for this page 5
The pages consulted to check this page.