Vasyl Stefanyk. Stone Cross

Vasyl Stefanyk

Work proposed for translation:

Stone Cross
Short stories (1899–1926)
Length: 320 pp.
Copyright: Public domain

Vasyl Stefanyk (1871–1936) is a Ukrainian writer and public and political figure, one of the most important modernist authors in Ukrainian literature. He received his education at the Faculty of Medicine of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Already the first collections of his short stories – Little Blue Book (1899), Stone Cross (1900) and The Road (1901) – attested to his high writing skills and talent. However, due to his doubts about his talent, he did not publish anything for a long time, focusing mostly on public and political activities (ambassador to the Austrian parliament), family and economic life. Experiences during the First World War brought him back to literary work, which resulted in his collection of short stories entitled Land, published in 1926.

In Ukrainian literature, Vasyl Stefanyk’s work is considered a benchmark in the short story genre. Almost every significant short story writer of future generations is compared to him. The authenticity of his language (use of the local dialect) of the characters and the author’s narration not only creates a local charm, but above all represents a way of thinking. For the most part, Stefanyk’s heroes are Pokuttia peasants, while his work is a phenomenon of how the material and social challenges and life situations of people in a particular region become existential universals and can be consonant with any other environment of human society. As Ivan Franko wrote, these are tragedies of the soul, conflicts and dramas that can be reproduced in the soul of any person. Most of the writer’s works are about the drama of life and the inevitability of death: his heroes constantly walk this line — they learn, suffer, rejoice, cry, reflect. Despite the laconicism of the expression, they are prominent and expressive, as if carved.