About this ebook
The colonel is Ivan — tradition, the narrator tells us, does not give his surname — a stubborn old soldier who treated his late wife like a despot and says that a woman is trash. He has a young daughter, Marina. The archpriest's son, Aleksei, a handsome youth of about twenty, is fetched home from his studies in Kyiv.
He never takes holy orders. He and Marina fall in love and meet in secret on an island in the Udai, until the colonel's face looks at them out of the willow branches, and Aleksei throws himself into a boat and rows away.
At a camp of young men gathering to raid across the Dnipro he meets a kharakternyk of the Zaporozhian Sich, who offers to take him there. "Call me, brother, simply Nikita Prikhvosten," he says. The Otaman of the Sich, Zborovsky, turns out to be the Gritsko Strizhka that Aleksei went carousing with at the Kyiv bursa. The priest's son is sent to the Popovich kuren, and the Cossacks elect him clerk of the Host.
A love story and a Cossack story, and how a priest's son came by his name.
The man who wrote it
Yevhen Hrebinka (1812–1848) was born on his father's farm near Pyriatyn, the town where this novel begins. He settled in St Petersburg in 1834, took part in buying Taras Shevchenko out of serfdom in 1838, and helped to publish Shevchenko's Kobzar in 1840. He wrote this novel in Russian, and it came out in 1843. Its narrator argues with his reader from the first chapter, stops the story for the tales of an old melon-keeper he listened to as a boy, and fills the book with songs.
What is in this edition
• The whole novel, unabridged, in a new English translation from the Russian
• An introduction that does not give away the ending
• 80 notes at the foot of the page, the author's own three among them — no note sends you to the back of the book
• 29 essays at the back, following the story chapter by chapter, for after you have finished
• A list of the people of the book, a note on pronunciation, notes on the edition and the translation, and a chronology of Hrebinka's life
Translated from the Russian text printed in Kyiv in 1988, which a note at the front of the book describes.
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About the author
Yevhen Hrebinka was born in 1812 on his father’s farm outside Pyriatyn, the town where this novel begins, and went to school at Nizhyn, where he was already writing verse and fables in Ukrainian and in Russian. In 1834 he moved to St Petersburg, and there he stayed. His Little Russian Fables came out the same year, and they are the Ukrainian work he is best remembered for.
In the capital he wrote more and more in Russian, and more and more in prose. S. D. Zubkov’s preface to the 1988 edition counts more than forty tales, novels, stories and sketches in fifteen years, printed in nearly every journal of the day, and the subjects run from the Ukrainian past to the government clerk and the serf. He did not forget where he came from. He took part in buying Taras Shevchenko out of serfdom in 1838, helped to publish Shevchenko’s first book of poems, Kobzar, in 1840, and in 1841 brought out The Swallow, an almanac of Ukrainian writing.
Chaikovsky came out in 1843. The critic Vissarion Belinsky, as the preface records, counted it among the best original tales of that year, praised its colonel and “many features of the historical life of Little Russia” for their poetic truth, and called Marina the book’s heroine. By the account of Hrebinka’s contemporaries the novel was built from his own family’s stories — his mother came of a family of Chaikovskys — and from episodes of the folk duma of Aleksei Popovich.
He died at St Petersburg on 15 December 1848, aged thirty-six.
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 and The Twins, 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, Andrii Chaikovsky’s After His Sister, and Ivan Franko’s For the Hearth.
He translated this one because its author was one of the men who worked to buy Taras Shevchenko out of serfdom, and because Hrebinka opens it in the town he was born beside.
