Novel
Marusia Churai
Маруся Чурай
Lina Kostenko · 1979
Synopsis
The registers of the Poltava court burned with the city in 1658, and the poem imagines that one of them survived. In it, Marusia Churai, whose songs are known throughout the country, is on trial, accused of having poisoned out of jealousy the Cossack Hryts Bobrenko, who had left her for Halia, the daughter of a wealthy notable. Colonel Martyn Pushkar and the young Ivan Iskra take up her defence, and the accused, in her cell, relives her childhood and her love.
Context
The book was written during the years when its author was no longer being published, and the manuscript waited six years: the censors reproached it for a bourgeois and objectivist approach to history, pseudo-historical conceptions and even artistic weakness. A special decision of the presidium of the Writers' Union, in 1979, allowed it to be published in Kyiv. Nine chapters of unequal length combine the love story and the war of the time, with Khmelnytsky, Ostrianytsia and Vyshnevetsky as background figures.
Who it is for
A long narrative in verse, which can be read in one sitting; the legend of the singer, and the song attributed to her about Hryts, are known to everyone in Ukraine.
Prizes and reception
Crowned with the Shevchenko Prize in 1987, it is regarded as its author's major work and studied in Ukrainian schools.
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