Novel
Чорний Ангел
Not translated into English
Oleksa Slisarenko · 1929
Opening lines
Року тисяча дев’ятсот двадцять першого, вночі під шосте жовтня селяни Липового, Тартаків і Вересок з жахом побачили, як над Липівською комуною, в лісі, спалахнуло велике полум’я.
In the year nineteen hundred and twenty-one, on the night before the sixth of October, the peasants of Lypove, Tartaky and Veresky saw with horror a great flame flare up over the Lypove commune, in the forest.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from uk.wikisource.org
Synopsis
In a remote village of Polesia, in 1921, the agricultural commune Chervona Syla is destroyed one night by explosions; the peasants see in it a punishment from heaven, the authorities the attack of a gang. The novel goes back to the arrival of Artem Haidouchenko, an agronomist from Volhynia and former artillery officer, who founds the commune and pursues there an invention meant to lighten men's labour. Around him gravitate his brother Petro, the solitary philosopher Karlioha and the enigmatic Marta.
Context
The novel appeared in Kharkiv in 1929 from Knyhospilka, the house whose editorial direction its author had just left in order to live by his pen. It opens with a communiqué dated 8 October 1921, which blames the disaster on a Petliurist band, and then combines detective plot, psychological study and utopia. Reissued in Kyiv in 1965 and 1990, after the author's rehabilitation, it reappeared in 2020 in the Nekanonitchny kanon series.
Who it is for
A novel of intrigue, built like an investigation into a catastrophe whose outcome the reader learns first before tracing back its causes.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the first crime and adventure novels in Ukrainian literature, and reissued several times since the rehabilitation of its author.
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