Narrative
In the Grainfields
В житах
Hryhoriy Kosynka · 1926
Opening lines
Це все було просто до дрібниць: і я, і заспаний ранок, і сивий степ.
It was all simple down to the smallest detail: me, the sleepy morning, and the grey steppe.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from uk.wikisource.org
Synopsis
Korniy Dizyk, a deserter from a band of insurgents, hides in the rye near his native village, which he cannot enter without risking a bullet. He spends a summer day there, speaks to the sun, the bees and the wind, and the humming that seems to repeat his nickname reminds him of what he is. The memory of a man he helped to shoot weighs on his heart. Then Uliana, whom he loved and who married another, passes through the rye on her way to her mother's, and finds him.
Context
Written in 1925, the story gave its title to its author's second collection, published in Kyiv in 1926. Its manner, which stops on a single day and renders it through impressions, has been compared to Kotsiubynsky's Intermezzo and to Stefanyk's short story. Party criticism accused these stories of spreading kulak ideology and banditry; they reappeared only after their author's rehabilitation, in New York in 1955 and in Kyiv in 1962. In English, the story appears in the anthology Modern Ukrainian Short Stories.
Who it is for
A brief first-person narrative set within a single summer day and conveyed through the narrator's sensations. Armed bands were then roaming the Ukrainian countryside.
Prizes and reception
Regarded, with Фавст, as one of the best-known stories of its author, it is studied in Ukrainian schools.
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