Olha Kobylianska. Under The Bare Sky

Olha Kobylianska

Work proposed for translation: 

Under The Bare Sky
Short stories (1887–1928)
Length: 320 pp.
Copyright: Public domain

Olha Kobylianska (1863–1942) was a well-known Ukrainian writer and social activist. She was born in Bukovina into the family of an Austro-Hungarian civil servant. As a result, the writer felt at ease in a multicultural environment, communicating in Ukrainian, German and Polish. Her first works were written in German. She made her debut in Ukrainian literature in 1894 with the short story The Person, which was published in the Lviv magazine Zoria. Collaborating with German and Austrian periodicals, Kobylianska expanded the capabilities of national literature, in which she established herself as an exponent of modernist aesthetics. Kobylianska’s oeuvre includes one novel and eighty short prose works (novellas, short stories, prose poems). The writer’s life was marked by many tragic events and social catastrophes, which are reflected in various ways in her works.

In Olha Kobylianska’s work, an important place is given to people and their inner worlds. This is the main axis around which situations and conflicts are built, related to people’s search for their own identity and place in society, gaining experience and overcoming stereotypes. The characters in the collection of short stories Under the Bare Sky are faced with a choice or deprived of it (Nature, Uncultured, Boundary, A Letter from a Soldier Sentenced to Death to His Wife, The Moon, Niobe). In The Battle, the author goes beyond the usual conflict — the main character is the Carpathian primeval forest. It is doomed to fall at the hands of hired workers, who represent a strange, brutal force capable of destroying the established natural order in the world of local residents. The storm, the felling of the forest, the movement of the train, and the traditional dance are different ontological dimensions of the boundaries within which humans exist. Another theme explored by the author is death, which arises as a result of the situation in which people find themselves during wartime. A father, having pointed out the direction of an Austrian patrol to the Russians, causes the death of his only son (Judas), and a peasant, having hidden Russian weapons after the war, accidentally kills his son-in-law (The Moscow Rifle).