Василь Барка. Спокутник і ключі землі

Василь Барка

Work proposed for translation:

Спокутник і ключі землі
A parable novel (1992)
Length: 420 pp.
Copyright: Orphan work

Vasyl Barka (real name Vasyl Ocheret, 1908–2003) was a Ukrainian writer and poet. He studied at the Faculty of Philology of the Krasnodar Pedagogical Institute and completed his postgraduate studies at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute. He then taught the history of Western European literature at the Faculty of Philology of the University of Rostov. Under the Soviet regime, he wrote mostly in secret, choosing “voluntary poetic silence.” In 1941, he was mobilised to the front, where he was seriously wounded. After the war, he found himself in a camp for displaced persons in Germany. In 1947, he moved to France, and in 1950, he settled in the United States, where he continued his literary activities. His preserved literary legacy includes more than 20 books of poetry, novels, short stories, essays, translations, and literary criticism. His most famous work is the novel The Yellow Prince, which bears witness to the horrors experienced by Ukrainians during the famine of 1932–1933 organised by the totalitarian regime, and which has been translated into many languages.

Vasyl Barka’s The Penitent and the Keys of the Earth is the story of the post-war generation of Ukrainian intellectuals who settled in New York after World War II. The bishop of the Ukrainian church confides a secret to the emigrant Oleh Paladiuk: during a heart attack, he accidentally dropped a chalice with consecrated communion wine. Anything that the wine (the blood of Christ) has touched must be destroyed. The bishop asks Paladyuk to do this secretly, because the church community is on the verge of schism. In the end, he is accused of murder, because witnesses to the burning saw red, blood-like stains on these things. The main character in the novel is a man who finds himself in an extreme situation, quickly coming to terms with the inevitability of his own death. The novel’s structure is built as a kind of imitatio Christi. At the same time, a discursive feature of the work is the conversations and reflections on music, literature, architecture, painting, etc. The religious attitude of Vasyl Barka’s characters leads to an optimistic and at the same time tragic denouement: the return to life from the electric chair of the main character, who does not break his oath even under the direct threat of death.