About this ebook
Yakim Girlo, a rich old Cossack, and his wife Marta keep the boy and call him Marko. A month later the young woman walks into their house and asks whether they will be needing a hired girl. She is a soldier's wife, she says, and luckless: she had a child too, but God took it. Her name is Lukiya, and the baby in the cradle is her own.
They take her on, and before long the whole house is in her hands. Alone, she settles it with herself: "No, I won't tell, I'll never tell." The Hired Girl follows Marko from the cradle to manhood, and his mother is there all the way, as the servant in his house.
Varnak opens far from Ukraine, at a small fort built on a block of salt in the Orenburg steppe. In church the narrator notices a tall grey old man trimming the candles. "That, sir, is a one-time varnak," a lame old soldier tells him, "and now a settler here. A man with the kindest soul." A varnak is a branded convict. In the old man's cottage a set of fetters hangs on a nail. "A heavy trophy!" he says. "I won it by long years of crime and carried it here on my own legs from Zhytomyr itself."
He loves the Italian poets and can recite The Divine Comedy by heart, and in the end he tells his countryman his life: an orphan boy from a Volhynian village, taken into a countess's house as her son's companion, taught French, Italian and the pianoforte, and then set to work in the estate office, where he hears for the first time the word serf.
Two lives lived in other people's houses. Each novella is about what that costs.
The man who wrote them
Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861), the poet of Kobzar, was born a serf and bought out of serfdom at twenty-four, with the money raised by a lottery for a portrait painted by Karl Bryullov. In 1847 he was arrested and sent to the Orenburg Corps as a private soldier, under an order that he was not to write and not to draw. He wrote these two novellas in Russian at the Novopetrovsk fort on the Caspian, about 1852–1853, and dated them years earlier, before his arrest. Neither was printed until 1886, twenty-five years after his death.
What is in this edition
• Both novellas, unabridged, in a new English translation, made from the 2003 scholarly text
• An introduction to the two, the men who tell them and where they were written
• 181 notes on a word, a name, a song or a place — no note sends you to the back of the book
• 28 essays at the back, following both stories in order, 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 Shevchenko's life
Translated from the Russian texts established for the 2003 Kyiv edition of Shevchenko's collected works, which a note at the front of the book describes in full.
Discover more
Ratings and reviews
About the author
Taras Shevchenko was born a serf in 1814 and was twenty-four before he was a free man. His freedom was bought in 1838 with the money raised by a lottery for a portrait painted by Karl Bryullov, and he went into the Academy of Arts in Petersburg as a student of painting. Two years after he was freed he published Kobzar, his first book of poems.
In 1845 he was back in Ukraine, travelling for the Archaeographic Commission and describing the old monuments of the Poltava country, and that November, at Pereiaslav, he wrote a poem called The Hired Girl. In the autumn of 1846 the Commission’s work took him through Volhynia and Podolia. On 5 April 1847 he was arrested at the Dnipro crossing by Kyiv as a member of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood, and was sent to the Separate Orenburg Corps as a private soldier, under an order that he was not to write and not to draw. In 1848, in exile, he wrote another poem, Varnak.
He served at the Orsk fortress, crossed the steppe with the Aral survey expedition, and from October 1850 was held at the Novopetrovsk fort on the Caspian, where he remained nearly seven years. He wrote nine novellas in Russian in the years of his exile, and the 2003 editors of his collected works count these two as the first of them. They place The Hired Girl, approximately, in 1852–1853 and Varnak in 1853, and think it most likely that he began the Russian novellas after he came back from the Karatau expedition of 1851.
Under each novella he wrote a date from before his arrest: 1844 and Pereiaslav, 1845 and Kyiv. The editors hold both dates fictive, set down so that a manuscript found on him would not seem to break the ban on his writing. One scholar argued, in 1958, that the dates were genuine; most have not followed him.
Each novella takes up a poem of his own. The Hired Girl uses the plot of the poem of 1845, and the editors see in it one of his central subjects, the village girl seduced by a man above her, turned a new way: a mother who must hide that she is a mother, for her child’s sake. The plot of Varnak is close to the poem of 1848, and its action is set in the Orenburg country and in Volhynia.
In 1856 he sent a copy of Varnak to a friend to be passed on to Petersburg for printing, but it was not printed, and neither novella appeared in his lifetime. He was released in 1857 and died at Petersburg in 1861, aged forty-seven. He was buried, as he had asked, on a hill near Kaniv, and both novellas first appeared in print twenty-five years later.
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 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 these two because they carry this series further into Shevchenko’s prose, and because stories written under an order forbidding their author to write deserve to be read in more languages than one.
