The Forest Song

A drama-extravaganza by Lesia Ukrainka, written in 1911 in a few weeks and based on the Volhynian beliefs among which the author spent her childhood. Mavka, a forest being, falls in love with the village boy Lukash and for his sake accepts a human fate — with its labour, domesticity and betrayal. The conflict is not between good and evil but between the capacity to hear beauty and the inability to hold on to it: Lukash loses not Mavka but himself. Lesia Ukrainka fuses mythological material with psychological drama of the European kind, and the language of the play remains one of the highest achievements of Ukrainian poetic drama. The work is permanently present in the theatrical repertoire. The play has never left the Ukrainian stage and has numerous musical and ballet realisations. Modern editions of the play carry notes on the Volhynian beliefs on which the author drew.