Pyriatyn, on the river Udai, in the days of the Hetmanate. The old archpriest of the castle church is dead, and the town begs the colonel of Lubny to make his son priest in his place.
The colonel is Ivan-tradition, the narrator tells us, does not give his surname-a stubborn old soldier who treated his late wife like a despot and says that a woman is trash. He has a young daughter, Marina. The archpriest's son, Aleksei, a handsome youth of about twenty, is fetched home from his studies in Kyiv.
He never takes holy orders. He and Marina fall in love and meet in secret on an island in the Udai, until the colonel's face looks at them out of the willow branches, and Aleksei throws himself into a boat and rows away.
At a camp of young men gathering to raid across the Dnipro he meets a kharakternyk of the Zaporozhian Sich, who offers to take him there. "Call me, brother, simply Nikita Prikhvosten," he says. The Otaman of the Sich, Zborovsky, turns out to be the Gritsko Strizhka that Aleksei went carousing with at the Kyiv bursa. The priest's son is sent to the Popovich kuren, and the Cossacks elect him clerk of the Host.
A love story and a Cossack story, and how a priest's son came by his name.
The man who wrote it
Yevhen Hrebinka (1812-1848) was born on his father's farm near Pyriatyn, the town where this novel begins. He settled in St Petersburg in 1834, took part in buying Taras Shevchenko out of serfdom in 1838, and helped to publish Shevchenko's Kobzar in 1840. He wrote this novel in Russian, and it came out in 1843. Its narrator argues with his reader from the first chapter, stops the story for the tales of an old melon-keeper he listened to as a boy, and fills the book with songs.
What is in this edition
• The whole novel, unabridged, in a new English translation from the Russian
• An introduction that does not give away the ending
• 80 notes at the foot of the page, the author's own three among them-no note sends you to the back of the book
• 29 essays at the back, following the story chapter by chapter, for after you have finished
• A list of the people of the book, a note on pronunciation, notes on the edition and the translation, and a chronology of Hrebinka's life
Translated from the Russian text printed in Kyiv in 1988, which a note at the front of the book describes.
