Осип Турянський. Поза межами болю

Осип Турянський

Work proposed for translation:

Поза межами болю 
A novel (1921)
Length: 120 pp.
Copyright: Public domain

Osyp Turianskyi (1880–1933) is a Ukrainian writer, literary critic, and teacher. He received his education at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Vienna, which he graduated from in 1907. He also defended his doctoral dissertation there. In Vienna, he joined the activities of the Sich student society, in whose almanac he began to publish his first works. In 1910, he moved to Przemyśl, where he worked as a teacher at a gymnasium. In 1914 he was mobilized into the Austrian army, and in 1915 he was taken prisoner by the Serbs, being one of the few who managed to survive there. Until the end of the war he was in an internment camp on the island of Elba. There he created his best-known work — the novel Beyond the Boundaries of Pain, which was published in German in Vienna in 1921, making the author famous. In 1923 Osyp Turianskyi returned to Galicia, where he worked as a school principal, taught, and became more actively involved in literature. For historical and political reasons, the figure and work of Turianskyi, although initially welcomed by critics, were for a long time ignored by publishers and literary scholars.

Osyp Turianskyi’s novel Beyond the Boundaries of Pain is a testimony and reproduction of his experience of being a Serbian prisoner during the First World War. This is a story about the possibility of choice in dramatic circumstances, about the strength of the human spirit and love for life even when it seems that it is no longer possible. Retreating in the winter of 1915, the Serbs took 60 thousand prisoners of war with them on the “road of death” through the Albanian mountains. The author of the story was among them. According to the plot, seven soldiers, representatives of the peoples of the Austrian Empire, flee from their escorts and captivity, hoping to escape. However, in conditions of wild nature, cold and hunger, the men are on the verge of survival. Will they remain true to the human inside in the face of death? Thus, the seven fugitives truly open up to each other. This is a novel about the height of the spiritual essence and dignity of man and at the same time about the helplessness of the human body in conditions of war and the devaluation of human life.