Narrative
Вертеп
Not translated into English
Arkadiy Lyubchenko · 1927
Opening lines
Шалено-швидко пролітають наші дні, мчать життям, як розлогими степами, наші буйногриві місяці, пропливають, як гордовито задумані кораблі, наші роки... Все це, як знаєте, дуже непомітно й дуже просто.
Our days fly by madly fast, our thick-maned months race through life as through wide steppes, our years sail past like proudly pensive ships... All this, as you know, happens very imperceptibly and very simply.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from ukrlib.com.ua
Synopsis
The book presents itself as a nativity-play show of a new kind: a word before the curtain warns that one will see neither the death of Herod nor the farce of the rich man, and that the roles will be played by feelings, thoughts and images. Then life and death, youth, strength, the city and the steppe, the past and the future file past, but also scenes of everyday life, gravediggers, a bourgeois drawing room, an argument on leaving a lecture, around a heroine named the Woman.
Context
The book appeared in 1927. Its author said he had written it in an Aesopian language, and he later had to criticise himself publicly for it, as for other texts of the Vaplite period. Critics see in it an attempt at a philosophical synthesis of the ideas of the cultural renaissance of the twenties and link it to the vitalism preached by Khvylovy; it breaks with continuous plot and brings music, painting and theatre into play. It was reissued in Kraków in 1943, then in Kharkiv in 2005 with the author's diary.
Who it is for
A short book, in tableaux with no continuous plot, which reads as a series of scenes and monologues; the vertep is the puppet theatre that was taken from village to village at Christmas.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's major book and as one of the most characteristic works of Ukrainian modernism of the twenties.
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