Poetry
Стилет і стилос
Not translated into English
Yevhen Malanyuk · 1925
Synopsis
Poems written in 1923 and 1924 by a defeated officer. One, under an epigraph from Verhaeren, calls himself a grandson of carters and a descendant of the Cossacks of the Sich, in love with the free state; others see in the revolution the cruel footsteps of the hordes and the yellow sun of Asia, a new defeat on the Kalka. One poem reproaches Tychyna for having kept of his clarinet only a painted pipe, and the epilogue sets the attentive stylos of reason against the fiery stiletto of the heart.
Context
The poems appeared at Poděbrady in 1925, from the Kyïv publishing house, in a volume of 47 pages; it was the second collection the author had composed, but the first to be printed. They come from the Polish internment camps, where he had founded the journal Veselka with other officers. From Kyiv, Mykola Zerov hailed the same year the most gifted of the young poets of the emigration, while rejecting his ideology and his declamatory tone. The title names both the soldier's weapon and the writer's tool.
Who it is for
A short collection, oratorical in tone, in which the princes and Cossacks of history recur; the language, chosen and dry, sometimes borrows from Galicia.
Prizes and reception
The first published book by its author, received somewhere between complete rejection and enthusiasm; some of its pieces are studied in Ukrainian schools.
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