About this ebook
Before he walks through the door, the reader has already heard his wife and her old school friend, Yulia, talking in the drawing room — about a business they have nearly wound up, papers lodged in an archive, a man called Shternberh who has left Constantinople in a hurry, and a telegram in German.
The captain has not heard a word of it. He finds a gold watch he has never seen, a flat on the first floor instead of the third, and a bedroom where nothing but the beds is left from before. His wife has the answer before he asks: her rich grandfather in Kraków, who opposed the marriage, has relented. And she puts five years of accounts, receipts and letters in his hands and makes him promise to go through every one.
Then she wants him to leave the army and buy a little farm in the mountains — with his promotion to major due in May.
At the officers' casino his comrades shy away from him as from a leper and tell him that an ugly shadow has fallen on him. Only one friend will tell him what it is: Redlikh. Before the night is out the captain has thrown his glove in Redlikh's face.
He has lived by a code of honour. The novel is about what that code tells him to do with what he finds out.
The man who wrote it
Ivan Franko (1856–1916) is one of the central figures of Ukrainian literature — poet, novelist, scholar, translator and political activist, arrested three times and kept from teaching at Lviv University. He wrote this novel in Vienna at the end of 1892, first in Polish, and began to make it over into Ukrainian the following year; the Ukrainian book came out in Lviv in 1897. A friend who was with him in Vienna remembered that he wrote it on the basis of a trial then causing a stir in Lviv.
What is in this edition
• The complete novel, all twelve chapters, in a new English translation
• An introduction, and a short section on the Lviv trial of 1892 that lies behind the novel
• 40 notes at the foot of the page, most of them translating the German, French, Latin, Polish and Serbo-Croat in the text — no note sends you to the back of the book
• A commentary of five entries and 33 essays at the back, following the story in order, for after you have finished
• A list of characters, a note on how the names are said, notes on the edition and the translation, and a chronology of Franko's life
Translated from a modern Ukrainian electronic text of the novel; a note at the front of the book says what was corrected in it.
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About the author
Ivan Franko was born in a village near Drohobych, in the Austrian crownland of Galicia, and spent most of his working life in Lviv, its capital. He wrote poetry, novels, stories, plays, scholarship and journalism, translated widely, and was active in politics for most of his adult life; he was arrested three times between 1877 and 1889.
He earned much of his living as a journalist, and he wrote for Polish and German papers as well as Ukrainian ones. That is part of the background of this novel. He wrote it first in Polish, in Vienna, at the end of 1892, hoping to publish it in Warsaw. It was not printed there. He began to make it over into Ukrainian the following year, and the Ukrainian book came out in Lviv in 1897.
He took his doctorate in Vienna in 1893. In 1895 he gave his qualifying lecture at Lviv University, but the governor blocked his appointment. He went on writing for the rest of his life, and died in Lviv in 1916.
Serhii Sakal was born in Ukraine in 1987 and lives in the United States. He read the Ukrainian classics at school, as everyone there does, and came back to them as an adult in a country where they had not been read. His previous translations are Taras Shevchenko’s The Artist, Lesya Ukrainka’s The Forest Song and The Boyar’s Wife, Osyp Turiansky’s Beyond the Limits of Pain, Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s Notes of a Snub-Nosed Mephistopheles, and Andrii Chaikovsky’s After His Sister.
He translated this one because it is Franko at his most modern: a novel about a respectable household, and about what it costs to keep it looking respectable.
