Marko Cheremshyna. Scores

Marko Cheremshyna

Work proposed for translation:

Scores 
Short stories (1896–1925)
Length: 160 pp.
Copyright: Public domain

Marko Cheremshyna (real name Ivan Semaniuk, 1874–1927) is a Ukrainian writer, translator and public figure. He received his law degree from the University of Vienna. Marko Cheremshyna’s professional career is connected with legal activities. He established himself in literature as a master of short prose. During his lifetime, two collections of short stories were published: Scores (1901) and The Village is Dying. Stories from Hutsul Life (1925). In his works, Marko Cheremshyna actively uses dialect words, not only in dialogues or character lines, but also in the author’s narration. There is an important aspect in the writer’s creative biography — there is a significant break between his first and second books: having debuted with the book Scores, he stopped writing, and his talent was revealed in a new way after the First World War, having received a paradoxical inspiration for creativity under the influence of traumatic war experience.

In his short stories, Marko Cheremshyna works with the opposites of man and wild nature, life and death, eroticism and the horrors of the dark side of human existence. His early texts focus on religious themes as well as on natural forces. Here we are dealing with spiritual traditions in their life cycle, collisions of interpersonal relationships of mountain dwellers, everyday difficulties, which sometimes become a real challenge for his characters. But the sharpness of border contrasts becomes most clearly felt in his later works, where love of life and a permanent desire to “live wildly” are intertwined with the deadly realities of the war coming to the territory, which has long been accustomed to such a dramatic way of existence. It is the war experiences that make Cheremshyna the master of the word that we know him as. He unerringly hits the very core of dramatic human existence, when destructive circumstances provoke the characters to understand and appreciate life more deeply.