Theatre
Stolen Happiness
Украдене щастя
Ivan Franko · 1893
Opening lines
Парубки й дівчата
Ой там за горою, та за кремінною
Не по правді жиє чоловік з жоною.
Oh, over there beyond the hill, beyond the flinty hill,
A husband does not live rightly with his wife.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from uk.wikisource.org
Synopsis
At the foot of the Carpathians, on a winter evening, the neighbours have gathered at the home of Mykola Zadorozhny, a peasant much older than his wife Anna, with whom he has lived for three years. Anna is worried: her husband has not yet come home. Then a gendarme, Mykhailo Hurman, arrives in the village, the man Anna loved before her marriage, and he begins to frequent the house. A drama unfolds between these three people in which none is entirely guilty.
Context
The subject comes from a popular song, that of the gendarme, which a friend of the author, Mykhailyna Rochkevych, had noted down in 1878 in the village of Lolyn. First titled The Gendarme, the play was written for a drama competition opened on 18 March 1891 by the Galician Diet; the jury demanded revisions and the censors had the gendarme replaced by a postman. Awarded a prize in January 1893, it was premiered in the last months of the year at the Ruska Besida theatre in Lviv, to great success; the gendarme returned to the stage only in 1907. The text appeared in 1894, and Yuliy Meitus made an opera from it, premiered in Lviv in 1960.
Who it is for
Five acts and few characters, built around three roles. One must know that a gendarme then represents the authority of the Empire in these villages.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's best play, and one of the most frequently performed on the Ukrainian stage.
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