About this ebook
He is Shram, a priest's son and a priest himself, who left his parish for the Cossack risings, laid down his colonelcy after Khmelnytsky's war and took holy orders again — until the council of Pavoloch made him its colonel a second time. Now he has given out that he is ill, and slipped away with his son, Petro.
Across the Dnipro the Cossacks cannot agree on a hetman. Somko was chosen at Kozelets unanimously, but old Vasiuta of Nizhyn wants the mace for himself, and the Zaporozhians call their own man hetman: Ivanets Briukhovetsky, once Khmelnytsky's squire, whom Somko called an old dog before the Cossack officers in council. Shram is riding to Somko, to bring all Ukraine back under one mace.
On the way he stops at Khmaryshche, the farmstead of his old friend Cherevan, a merry man of enormous wealth who hardly stirs out of his apiary, and over a silver jug asks for Cherevan's daughter Lesia for his son. The two fathers shake on it. But Lesia's mother puts the match off, and on the road she tells Petro of a dream she had before Lesia was born, and of a young hetman who has since told her he will not marry till the girl grows up.
In Kyiv a crowd of townsmen at a christening feast turn on Shram and on all the Cossacks. "We'll hold a 'Black Council' for you," one of them shouts, and a Zaporozhian sits by the house, saying nothing. On the forest road up to Pechersk two Zaporozhians ride circles round the women's coach, and one of them, Kyrylo Tur, swears that the girl will be his.
A love story, and a chronicle of the year 1663.
The man who wrote it
Panteleimon Kulish (1819–1897) was born at Voronizh, in the Chernihiv province, to a poor family of Cossack gentry. Teaching in Kyiv in the 1840s, he came to know Taras Shevchenko, and in 1847 he was arrested for belonging to the secret Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius. He wrote this novel in Ukrainian, and it came out in full in 1857. The foreword to the 1943 edition this translation follows calls it "the first thoroughly successful attempt at a Ukrainian historical novel".
What is in this edition
· The whole novel, unabridged, in a new English translation from the Ukrainian
· An introduction that does not give away the ending
· 96 notes at the foot of the page, one of them Kulish's own — no note sends you to the back of the book
· 31 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 Kulish's life
Translated from the Ukrainian text printed at Kraków and Lviv in 1943, which a note at the front of the book describes.
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About the author
Panteleimon Kulish was born in 1819 at Voronizh, in the Chernihiv province, to a poor family of Cossack gentry. He entered Kyiv University in 1837 and had to leave it without finishing. Mykhailo Maksymovych took up his early writing and printed some of his first stories.
In 1843 came two firsts: a historical tale in Russian, Mykhailo Charnyshenko, and a long poem in Ukrainian, Ukraine. Teaching in Kyiv from 1843 to 1845, he worked at Ukrainian history and folk life, and came to know Taras Shevchenko, Mykola Kostomarov and Vasyl Bilozersky — the friends round whom the secret Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius took shape. In 1847, the year he married, he was arrested as one of its members; prison was followed by some years of exile.
The Black Council came out in full in 1857. He published Notes on Southern Rus, a collection of Ukrainian folklore, in which he brought in a new spelling for Ukrainian, the kulishivka, and he worked on the Ukrainian journal Osnova. From 1864 to 1867 he held a Russian official post in Poland. In later years he came to judge the Cossacks far more harshly than he had when young.
He translated Shakespeare into Ukrainian and, with Ivan Puliui and Ivan Nechui-Levytsky, the Bible, which appeared only after his death. He spent his last years on his farmstead, Motronivka, in the Chernihiv province, and died there on 14 February 1897, aged seventy-seven.
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 and The Hired Girl and Varnak, Lesya Ukrainka’s The Forest Song and The Boyar’s Wife and In the Catacombs, Osyp Turiansky’s Beyond the Limits of Pain, 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, and Yevhen Hrebinka’s Aleksei Chaikovsky.
He translated this one because the foreword to the 1943 edition it follows calls it “the first thoroughly successful attempt at a Ukrainian historical novel”.
