Novel
Fata Morgana
Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky · 1904
Opening lines
Коли Андрій Волик проходив повз головний будинок погорілої сахарні, з стін руїни з галасом знялось вороння, а в середину з лускотом посипались тинк і цегла.
When Andriy Volyk passed the main building of the burnt-out sugar mill, crows rose noisily from the walls of the ruin, and plaster and bricks crashed down inside.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from uk.wikisource.org
Synopsis
In a village where the sugar mill has burned down, Andrii Volyk, an old landless worker, waits for it to be rebuilt and no longer wants to work in the fields. His wife Malanka, who spent all her youth in service to the masters, dreams only of a plot of land and plans to marry their daughter Hafiika to the son of a well-off peasant. But Hafiika secretly reads the books of Marko Hushcha, a worker brought back from Odessa under escort for stirring up his factory, and to whom the village youth listen.
Context
The first part, written in 1903, appeared in 1904 in the journal Kievskaya starina as a complete story; its author extended it, without revising it, with a second part, which carries the peasant unrest of the 1905 revolution and appeared in the April 1910 issue of the Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk. The planned third part was never written. The title, the Latin name for the mirage, expresses the vanity of hopes for land. The story appeared in French in 1978 and in English in Kyiv, from Dnipro.
Who it is for
About a hundred pages in two parts, the narrative having been left unfinished. The author's subtitle promises the moods of the village rather than a plot.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's best-known work and his greatest narrative, it counts among the peaks of Ukrainian prose of the beginning of the century.
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