At a High Cost
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One of the best historical adventure books of Ukrainian classic literature.
They just wanted to be free. But freedom is given at a high cost!
Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky’s novella “At a High Cost” (1901) is set in 1830s Ukraine which belongs to the Russian Empire where serfdom is established. The main characters are young peasants Ostap and Solomia who flee from their cruel master. Ostap is threatened with death for disobedience, and his beloved Solomia married to one of the master’s men without her consent is ready to follow her sweetheart. They decide to cross the Danube to the Turkish side, to the Ottoman Empire, where a few years ago the Danubian Sich used to stand as a center of freedom for the Ukrainian Cossacks.
But the empires tenaciously hold slaves in their claws. Forests, fields, wetlands, wide rivers, predatory animals, and predatory people who hunt for fugitives stand in the way of the lovers to freedom. Exhausted and almost alone in their pursuit of happiness, Ostap and Solomia pay a very high price so that at least one of them would break free.
This is the only book on the historical subject by the classic Ukrainian writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky. His call for the liberation of people from social, national, and spiritual oppression sounded strong and passionate and produced a great impact on readers. Alfred Jensen, a Swedish Slavonic scholar, called “At a High Cost” a pearl of Ukrainian fiction and stressed that “the story reaches the soul of the Ukrainian people and is well aware of their way of life and character.”
Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky
Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky (1864–1913) is one of the most popular Ukrainian classic writers. Being a humanist, a subtle lyricist, and an intellectual, he knew the depths of folk life and became the first Ukrainian impressionist. In the writer’s lifetime, his works were translated into German, Swedish, Polish, Czech, Romanian, and Russian. Kotsiubynsky died when he was only 48 years old, but he left several dozens of very talented stories and a few novels. The writer was born into a large family of a petty official in Vinnytsia. Earl having lost his father, Mykhailo had to give up on his dream to study at the university because he needed to make some money for his mother and sisters. Beginning with the presenting of peasant life in his early writings, Kotsiubynsky depicted the life and customs of the Crimean Tatars and Moldovans (“For the Good of All”, “In Shaitan’s Grip”, “On the Rocks”, and “For the Common Good”). These works are written in a realistic manner. Subsequently, the writer expanded the range of his artistic observations by turning to historical subjects (“At a Heavy Cost”), psychological themes (“Apple Blossoms”, “Intermezzo”), and the philosophical aspects (“From the Depths”, “The Dream”). In the short story “Apple Blossoms” Kotsiubynsky first portrayed the inner split of one person – the father’s immense grief from the loss of his small daughter and the writer’s relentless, cold memory that will save all his emotions as the stuff for creativity. The story “Intermezzo”, despite the simplicity of its plot, astonishes with the richness of impressionistic colors. Its autobiographical narrator, tired from his work, came to the village for some rest. He spends all the days in the June fields, admiring the song of the larks. “The sun is in the sky, I am in the fields,” the author writes. Nature is described through colors, smells, and sounds. It gave the narrator the new positive energy. Kotsiubynsky spent almost all his life in a quiet provincial town of Chernihiv where he worked for the zemstvo (an institution of local government). He was a happy father of four children. But suddenly he fell in love with a young secretary, Alexandra Aplaksina. This love and inner experiences were reflected on the pages of his romantic story “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors”. Its main characters, Ivan and Marichka, are called the Ukrainian Romeo and Juliet.
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At a High Cost - Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky
PROLOGUE
THIS STORY takes place in the thirties of the last century.¹ The Ukrainian peasantry, defeated in the class struggle and with the yoke of serfdom on its neck, dragged its fate with a muffled clamor. This was not an ox under the yoke, a common domestic ox, that could be made happy by fodder and reprieve: the yoke was forced on the neck of a wild aurochs², weary, exhausted, but still driven by the steppe wind. It had not lost a taste of freedom and wide spaces. Having yielded to imposed authority he plodded beneath the yoke, although at times his eyes were red with anger, and he stamped his hooves and stabbed the ground with his horns...
The free spirit of the people still smoldered in the ashes of slavery. The recent traditions of freedom, so recent that sometimes it was difficult to distinguish between today and yesterday, fueled the spark still glowing under the ashes. The older generation, witness to another life, still showed the calluses on their palms left by the saber that had been raised to defend national and human rights. The song of freedom, poetized, perhaps, in hard times, as a charming chord, echoed in the hearts of the young, called them to the places where there is no clang of chains yet, forged by and for the people. Toward the wide Bessarabian³ steppes, free from any master and corvée a hot imagination rushed, and it led on hundreds and thousands...
At least over there, across the Danube – hey, over there, across the Danube!.. The survivors of the Sich ruins – the most courageous, the most zealous – built their nest in Turkey and went from there to Ukraine. As furtive and dangerous as smuggling was their passionate appeal to the kish⁴, to the Sich brotherhood, for freedom.
Through the ravines, through the dried-up riverbeds, through the forest slums, under the cover of darkness, hiding as if from wild beasts, so fled from the master and the corvée all those that had not taken on the mold of serfdom, that had not lost a living soul. They fled to gain everything that their ancestors had unsheathed their sabers or went into battle with pikes and pitchforks for...
Meanwhile the enemy did not sleep.
Those who owned the souls – souls that had reverted to being like working cattle and were recorded in the landlord’s household equipment alongside oxen and horses – were most afraid of the restless, freedom-loving spirit of the people, for it could not be adapted to the lord’s interests and could not be reconciled that the immeasurable treasures of the Ukrainian land were cultivated by the serfs but given to the master. The age-old struggle between the two classes – the landlords and the peasants – was a constant struggle, which at times took an acute form and stormed over the unfortunate land – never ended, indeed it could not end, although the lord had won. Not long ago, the landlord bathed in his own blood at Uman⁵ and piled the haidamaka⁶ heads on stakes at Kodnya⁷. He relished the victory, vigilantly defending his rights to own live working equipment – the serf. The serf protested, the serf escaped to the free land, fleeing, as he could, from the corvée, leaving behind in the native land everything dear, everything sweet to his heart. But even there, far from his native land, his landlord’s hand caught him. On free lands raids for fugitives were organized. These were true manhunts, as though for a wolf or a bear. Throughout Bessarabia the raiding parties raced, searching everywhere: in the ditches, in the haystacks, in the reeds of swamp rivers they hunted these impoverished, tortured people. In the south of Bessarabia, from the west side of the fast river Prut, along the left bank of the Danube, and down to the sea itself, there were troops on guard. It overshadowed the freedom that was shining somewhere in a foreign land, across the wide Danube, behind the green riverside willows…
The head of any fugitive had a price. For everyone caught the riverside Cossacks⁸ received a bounty. Hundreds, thousands of the unfortunate fell into the hands of the Cossacks – and those captured had to drink the bitter cup to its dregs. A terrible fate awaited the fugitive: he was given to the Cossack recruits, exiled to Siberia, tortured with lashes, branded like cattle, or, with a half-shaved head, beaten down and whipped, he was sent back in chains to his master, once again returned to captivity, to serfdom.
But what could he expect at home from his master? Like melting ice under the warm breath of spring, the Ukrainian peasantry flowed like a river to that place where, although at a high cost, they could obtain their desired freedom, but if not – there they could lay down their lives and take eternal rest...
CHAPTER ONE
IS THAT you, Ostap?"
Yes, it’s me, Solomia...
What’s going to happen?
What’s going to happen?.. Let it all go to hell... I’ll escape ... I’ll go beyond the Danube, maybe there the people haven’t yet turned into savages... You see – I am packed... Take care, Solomia...
So you’re running… leaving me... And I will be here alone with that hateful man... No, run away, run away, Ostap... If you only knew what’s going on in the upper chambers: the landlord is running around the house like a madman. ‘Rebel,’ he screams, ‘Haidamaka! He is inciting my people!..’ He called his Captain and told him, ‘bring Ostap Mandryka to me...’
So...
‘I’ll skin him alive, I’ll gut him thoroughly... I’ll make that Haidamaka remember Kodnya...’
So...
"‘I’ll have him recruited,’⁹ he says. And his lady was pale, so pale, shivering with fright, and she wrung her hands and cried: ‘Roman, let’s flee from here, otherwise those serfs will murder us, like they did to my grandpa in Uman...’ Run, Ostap, run, sweetheart... If those monsters catch you, they’ll torture you. They won’t let you live..."
Damn him... I’m not so much afraid of that Polack as I am furious at our own people: the ox has stuck his neck in the yoke and, no matter what you do, he doesn’t care, he pulls anyway... Eh, I’ll go to where there’s freedom, where the people are different... Take care, Solomia...
Climb over here, so we can at least say goodbye.
Ostap threw his saddlebags over to where Solomia was standing and climbed the fence. Against the starlit night sky the silhouette of a well-built youth was projected for a moment and disappeared in the thick weeds on the other side of the fence.
Ouch, there’s so much nettle here, and it’s stung me all over. Where are you, Solomia? I can’t see you in the dark.
Here I am...
and in front of Ostap appeared a large dark silhouette, like that of a tall man. Let’s go to the pond and sit under the willows.
Stumbling through the high weeds, sprawling under the bushes, all tightly intertwined in this neglected section of the landlord’s grove, they finally reached the water. It was humid here. Total silence hung in the air. The thick grove had retained the warmth gathered during the day, and now the heat glowed there, as if from a stove. On the glassy surface of the pond, from whose depths