Fata Morgana

A novella about the Ukrainian village at a moment of social rupture, which Kotsiubynskyi wrote in instalments over several years. The title — a mirage — sets the governing motif: the peasants live in expectation of land and justice that recede the moment one draws near. At the centre are the couple Andrii and Malanka Volyk and their daughter Hafiika, each with a different notion of where deliverance will come from: the factory, the landlord's fields, or revolt. Kotsiubynskyi avoids simple judgements and shows how a shared hope disintegrates into conflicting private interests, and how the awaited liberation turns into violence. The work is regarded as one of the strongest Ukrainian novellas about village life at the start of the twentieth century. The novella remains one of the key reference points in any discussion of Ukrainian prose of the modernist period. The novella appears in the academic collected works, which present the different redactions of the text and the history of its composition.