Poetry
До сонця
Not translated into English
Petro Karmansky · 1941
Synopsis
A selection of poems written over forty years. It includes the elegies of his modernist beginnings, men weary of struggle and broken by life who sit down at the edge of graves, a lullaby from a Ukrainian mother to her child, then recent pieces, including one addressed to Tytchyna, which welcome the new power that has arrived in Galicia. The title says what the poet claimed to be seeking after years of pessimism: the sun.
Context
The collection was published in 1941 in Kyiv, by Radianskyi pysmennyk, a year after the author was admitted to the official writers' organisation; Maksym Rylsky prepared and introduced it. In it he quoted a letter from the poet, for whom his life had been that of Galicia: servitude, the search for a way out, falls, depression, pessimism, and once more the search for the sun. The same year two poems appeared, on Shevchenko and on Franko; the only later collection, in 1952, was not recognised by its readers.
Who it is for
A volume of more than one hundred and sixty pages that combines two voices: the pre-war elegy and the occasional verse of the Soviet years.
Prizes and reception
Ranked by critics among its author's books of official optimism, far from his early modernist collections.
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