Warm the Children, O Sun (Women's Voices in Ukrainian Literature, Vol. V)

Women's Voices in Ukrainian Literature

The turn of a century marks a pause in time-a pause that impels us to take stock, to assess the extent and significance of social changes, and make sense of our collective and individual experience. When the end of a century coincides with the millennium, this need to engage in retrospective analyses is intensified.

The purpose of this series is to make accessible to English readers the selected works of Ukrainian women writers. The works selected range from vignettes and sketches, to novelettes and novels. Together they constitute an unsystematic but compelling social history of a period when the mortar of social mores, religious beliefs, and gender distinctions began to crumble as the political and ideological cataclysms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries wreaked havoc with time-honoured personal and societal relations. History provides us with a temporal account of the past, but it is literature that gives it a human face

Each of Volumes I to IV features the writings of two authors and comprises a broad array of subject matter This volume, drawing on the writings of six of these authors, is an anthology of stories that illuminate the lives of children and adolescents in the class society of the day, a society in which people were rigidly divided into the powerful and the oppressed, the privileged and the poor, and the educated and the ignorant. Children were born into the status of their parents, and it was this status that constrained the interplay between inherited characteristics and culture, and determined how individual lives would play themselves out. Vertical mobility was not a social value, and although issues of justice and fairness tormented the odd adolescent, maturity was expected to bring with it an unquestioning acceptance of one's fate.

While not equally talented or skilled, what the authors have in common is an appreciation of the power of literature as a vehicle of social activism, and collectively they document the debilitating social structures and mores of the separate worlds of the peasantry and the privileged, address matters of gender that cut across ethnic and social divisions, and explore the power and often devastating consequences of social conditioning Moreover, whatever the subject matter, they observe and interpret experience from a female perspective and demonstrate a keen sensitivity to both the promise and human cost of change.

Their voices are loud and strong, what they have to say is worth hearing, and their impact should not be confined to one time or place. Translating their stories into English permits their message to transcend temporal, geographical, and linguistic boundaries.

The process of translation, in and of itself a formidable undertaking, was compounded, in the case of some of the earlier works, by archaic forms of Ukrainian; late-nineteenth century stylistic conventions, paragraphing, and punctuation; texts that varied with the era in which they were published; vexing problems of transliteration; and the fact that a number of the works had never undergone a judicious editing Ultimately, it was the criterion of readability that informed the many and difficult decisions that had to be made.

A biographical sketch about each author anchors her writings in a social and historical context. No other analyses are provided; the works are allowed to speak for themselves.