House on the Bluff

Igor Kaczurowskyj

House on the Bluff is the second novel by Igor Kaczurowskyj (1918–2013), an outstanding Ukrainian poet of the neoclassical school and translator of world poetry, prose writer and memoirist, universal literary scholar and legendary journalist for Radio Liberty. First published in Munich in 1966, it is the final part of a duology that begins with the novel Because Deserters Are Immortal (1956) and also consists of twelve novellettes. In these stories, the reader learns about the further fate of the protagonist, a young Ukrainian intellectual from a family repressed by the Soviet regime, who, during World War II, deserted the Red Army, but did not seek to curry favour with the Germans. Having risked his life to reach his native village in Chernihiv region, which is under German occupation, he witnesses the horrors of war thereas well, again facing mortal danger. Which enemy is more cruel — the Germans, the Hungarians or the Soviet partisans? But even amid the bloody bacchanalia of violence, a pure flower of true love can bloom.