About this ebook
Mykhailo, the elder, has been his father's right hand since he was seventeen — "the most honest lad in the village". Sava, the younger, is nineteen, and, his father says, "he doesn't love the land". He loves black-eyed Rakhira, the daughter of the uncle who bore false witness against his father.
Now the Emperor's army is to take Mykhailo. Ivonika means to buy him out with three hundred gulden saved "kreuzer by kreuzer"; his wife goes to a fortune-teller, whose cards promise streams of tears and the threshold of the court. The money is gone, and the man who had it with it, and Mykhailo goes straight out to get the plough ready: "The land is waiting."
One July night, under the moon, he asks Anna, the housemaid at the manor, to be his wife. She has no land and no money. "I have no field," she says. "I'm not asking about a field." He gives her a ring, and asks her to stay true to him while he is in the army. Then she points across the boggy meadow at the "neighbouring" wood and cries out that something is coming from it — "At you and at me!" He sees nothing.
The land, Ivonika knew, "was like a man, and it demanded sacrifice."
The woman who wrote it
Olha Kobylianska (1863–1942) was born at Gura Humorului, in Bukovina, and made Chernivtsi her home from 1891.
For the most part she taught herself, and she wrote first in German before she turned to writing in Ukrainian. The Land came out in 1902; its village lies in her own Bukovina, and she dedicated it to her father.
What is in this edition
· The whole novel in a new English translation from the Ukrainian
· An introduction that does not give away the ending
· 30 notes, marked in the text — no note sends you to the back of the book
· 58 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, and notes on the edition and the translation
Translated from the electronic text of the Ukrainian online library UkrLib, which a note at the front of the book describes.
Discover more
Ratings and reviews
About the author
Olha Kobylianska was born at Gura Humorului, in Bukovina, on 27 November 1863. For the most part she taught herself, and when she began to write, in 1880, she wrote in German.
Chernivtsi was her home from 1891. She was drawn into the Ukrainian women’s movement of Bukovina, and turned to writing in Ukrainian. Tsarivna (The Princess), a novel, appeared in 1895; among the novels that followed are Zemlia (The Land), the novel in this volume, in 1902, and V nediliu rano zillia kopala (On Sunday Morning She Gathered Herbs), in 1909.
She died in Chernivtsi on 21 March 1942, aged seventy-eight.
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, The Twins, The Hired Girl and Varnak and The Diary, Lesya Ukrainka’s The Forest Song and The Boyar’s Wife and In the Catacombs, Osyp Turiansky’s Beyond the Limits of Pain and The Thought of the Primeval Forest, Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s Notes of a Snub-Nosed Mephistopheles, Andrii Chaikovsky’s After His Sister, Ivan Franko’s For the Hearth, Oleksa Slisarenko’s The Black Angel, Yevhen Hrebinka’s Aleksei Chaikovsky, and Panteleimon Kulish’s The Black Council.
He translated this one because in it the land is “like a man”, and demands sacrifice of a family that earned it with its own hands.
