Poetry
Marusia
Маруся
Levko Borovykovsky · 1829
Synopsis
On New Year's Eve, the village girls consult fate: they listen beneath windows, watch for dogs, melt wax. Marusia weeps apart: for a year she has had no news of her betrothed, who went far away. She in turn pours the wax into water and reads in it a coffin, a cross, candles, a spade and two shovels. At midnight, a sleigh stops in front of the house; the fiancé enters, says that the priest is waiting for them, and carries her off across the steppe, silent and pale as clay.
Context
The model is Svetlana, which Zhukovsky had drawn from Bürger's Lenore: the text keeps its rhythm, number of stanzas and rhymes, sets the divination in a Ukrainian village, with its rites and vocabulary, and drops the moral that closed the Russian poem. Composed between 4 and 6 February 1829, it appeared in March in the Messenger of Europe, pages 117 to 127, signed with a simple cryptogram; the editors presented it as a translation and wished it the success that Hulak-Artemovsky's Tvardovsky had had in 1827. Ivan Franko devoted a study to it.
Who it is for
A ballad of a few pages, in the stanza of its Russian model. The scene takes place on the night before New Year's Day, during the winter festivities when fortunes are told.
Prizes and reception
The best-known work of its author, which made him one of the first Romantic poets of the Kharkiv school.
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