Halyna Pahutiak. Bitter Lands

Halyna Pahutiak

Work proposed for translation:

Bitter Lands
Short stories (2016)
Length: 224 pp.
Copyright: Author: antrum1@gmail.com

Halyna Pahutiak (born 1958) is a famous Ukrainian writer. She received her education at the Faculty of Ukrainian Philology of the Taras Shevchenko State University of Kyiv. She worked at a school, the Drohobych Museum of Local Lore, the Lviv Art Gallery, and the legal and consulting centre for refugees “Human Rights Know No Borders.” The author’s debut book (1982) included the stories Children, The Tale of Mary and Magdalene, Dolly and Matsko, and the novel The Philosopher’s Stone. The writer’s prose has been translated into English, German, Slovak and Croatian. For her novel The Servant from Dobromyl she received the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine (2010). She is the Winner of the Ukrainian-Australian Aistra Award for her novel Sunset in Urozh (2008) and the Valeryi Shevchuk Literary Prize for her novel Magnate (2014). The writer gravitates towards such genre varieties as historical-mythological, philosophical-fantasy and Gothic novels as well as pure fantasy.

The collection of short prose Bitter Lands includes the mystery of the same name and five stories united by the motifs of degradation and crisis. In the mystery, a young migrant worker, Lilia, who was forced to go to Italy to work as an eighteen-year-old girl to provide for her family, experiences destructive conflicts with her family due to the alienation caused by her long stay away from home. She moves away from her parents and brother, losing the desire to be a daughter and sister. She is overwhelmed by suicidal thoughts, resistance to her surroundings, fear, resentment, rage, and despair. Her personal crisis is exacerbated by the destructive chaos of the city of Boryslav, which is unable to perform the therapeutic functions of her native space. Lilia herself transforms into a “foreign body” for her fellow countrymen. The transformation of “ours” into “alien” and vice versa leads to chaos and becomes the cause of the main character’s tragedy. Other short stories included in the collection Bitter Lands touch on the theme of the Russian-Ukrainian war as well as the rapid process of losing cultural heritage.