Books published in Ukrainian during 1801-1922

Les Martovych (1871-1916) was a prominent Ukrainian realist writer of the revolutionary democratic movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an excellent connoisseur of the life and way of life of the Galician peasantry.
His characters are peasants from the most remote villages of Western Ukraine, but in his work the writer departed from the folk canons; he often developed the deep socio-economic roots of class inequality in the countryside. A distinctive feature of his artistic style is a combination of the tragic and the comic, humour that sometimes turns into sharp satire.
Les Martovych's best work, a satirical short story about elections, The Cunning Pan, shows that the poor could not even exercise the very limited rights proclaimed by the tsarist constitution because of the arbitrariness, fraud, and intimidation used by the gendarmes during the elections.
The satirist's skill and understanding of the psychology of the peasant can be traced in the story "Loomer". It shows a true picture of the life of western Ukrainian workers, who were deprived of their most basic rights by the Austrian authorities and subjected to countless taxes.
In a number of the short stories presented in the collection, Les Martovych exposes the hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy and the Austrian constitution, depicts the typical situation of elections in the Western Ukrainian lands, and condemns the falsity of the freedoms proclaimed by the authorities.

To view this document log in or sign up, please

View in electronic catalog