Ivan Nechuy-Levytsky was born on 25 November 1838 to a family of a peasant priest in Stebliv (Cherkasy region of central Ukraine). In 1847 entered the Boguslav religious school. Upon graduating from the Kiev Theological Academy (1865) he taught Russian language, history, and geography in the Poltava Theological Seminary (1865鈥�1866) and, later, in the different gymnasiums in Kalisz (Congress Poland), Siedlce (Congress Poland, 1867鈥�1872), and Kishinev (Bessarabia, 1873鈥�1874). He started writing in 1865, but due to Russian imperial censorship his works appeared only in Galician periodicals, such as the journal Pravda, Dilo, and Zoria (Lviv).
This is a Ukrainian classic novel from the last quarter of the 19th century, the English title can be translated as "The Kaydash Family". This novel has been part of the school program I guess since the 1920s until today, because the story works under any authority, for it is an example of a realistic social story. It was written by one of the most famous Ukrainian writers of the 19th century - Ivan Semenovych Nechuy-Levytsky, and first published in 1879 in Lviv (then the Austria-Hungary, because in the russian empire, publishing of Ukrainian texts was banned).
As I wrote elsewhere, I now try to (re-)read Ukrainian classics, so I took (Ukr) and decided to go through the list as it is composed, i.e. chronologically. This novel, despite it being the most widely known isn鈥檛 on the list, however, two others are there 鈥� and , reviewed by me here and here. it isn鈥檛 in the top-100 novels, but it is present in the list of best literary works compiled by the same group.
The story starts with the beautiful rural sights but soon moves to the village of Semyhory, where the main characters live: 鈥� Omelko Kaydash, the head of the family, both trying to follow formal religious norms (like feasting on Fridays) and failing by ending his days drinking in a local pub. 鈥� his wife Marusia, who worked for local clergy and landowners as a cook and because of regularly working with wealthy and literate, she assumes herself a head and shoulders above 鈥榦rdinary peasants鈥� 鈥� their sons Karp and Lavrin, who are of marriable age and are seeking for brides.
Karp, the older, marries first on the daughter of a wealthy peasant Motria Dovbysh. The rest of the story is a queue of both tragic and comic scenes of conflict of young and old (especially Marusia and her first and later second daughter-in-law, where she initially assumes that the young daughter-in-law are more servants than members of the family.
The re-read (I first read it in a school program like 35 years ago) showed me that this is really a great text!
For me, this is as far as Ukrainian classic literature gets; I may discover better works, but in the one small chest of Ukrainian books I have read this is the diamond. People talk like real village folk, they act like those, and the descriptions of nature do not make me snore, but do really recall images of rural Ukraine I used to see rarely and long ago. Essentially, the book is about a family feud in a village some time after serfdom abolishment (or something like that), when people became lords of the land. Repetitive bitter and violent fights between family members make the bulk of this work, filling your head with beautiful folk curses as obscene as a classic work of literature can hold. It spans a period of some 10-15 years during which nothing substantial happens apart from the marriage of two brothers in the beginning, a short trip of one of the wives to Kiev, and steady growing apart of the family, which is punctuated by different stages of physical division. The narrative skips from one fight to another, usually resolved by a walk to the village elders or a priest, who provide the spiteful family with a temporary solution. There is no real resolution but an unsteady truce on the background of emotional and physical damage. One should probably look for a symbol in the unreconcilable brothers and their wives sitting on two sides of a withered tree, but who would do that of his own accord? The author has some problems with women (the book is clearly misogynous and Nechuj-Levyckij never married - is there a connection and a symbol?) and with Jews (who get an expressive chunk of the story to themselves, cunning and greedy as they appear in the author's eye). Well, says I, whatever. Give me some nice linguistic gravy and I'll swallow it with some salt and some water.