THE 70th ANNIVERSARY OF THE FAMINE-GENOCIDE IN UKRAINE

BOOK NOTES

A collection of short stories related to the Famine-Genocide

"A Hunger Most Cruel," Sonia Morris, editor. Winnipeg Language Lanterns Publications 2002. 284 pp.

"A Hunger Most Cruel" is a collection of fictional short stories relating to the Great Famine in the winter of 1932-1933, an artifical famine orchestrated by Stalin's government in which millions of Ukrainians starved to death.

The book was edited by Sonia Morris, and the stories were translated from Ukrainian into English by Roma Franko. "A Hunger Most Cruel" contains the English translations of the work of three Ukrainian authors: Anatoliy Dimarov, Yevhen Hutsalo and Olena Zvychayna.

Anatoliy Dimarov's story "The Thirties (A Parable about Bread)," which is contained in the book, first appeared in 1966 and was published in the literary journal Suchasnist in 1989. During the time of the Great Famine, Mr. Dimarov had to flee his village with his stepmother because his father had been labelled a "kulak" - a wealthy farmer seen by the Soviets as a threat to collectivism. Dimarov's writing focuses on turning points in the lives of ordinary people and the emotional effects of these events.

"A Hunger Most Cruel" also includes Yevhen Hutsalo's "Holodomor: Murder by Starvation." Hutsalo was a member of the group of poets and writers known as the "Shestydesiatnyky," writers of the 1960s. He has published more than 30 collections of novellas and short stories, as well as a trilogy of novels. His work tends to focus on the psychological aspect of tragedy, with additional focus on nature and language.

"A Hunger Most Cruel" also includes four stories by Olena Zvychayna: "The Market at Myrhorod," "Socialist Potatoes," "Lucky Hanna" and "Without Doctors and Priests, Without Graves and Crosses." Ms. Zvychayna moved to the United States in the 1940s after having been held prisoner at a Nazi labor camp. Only after her arrival in the United States did she begin to publish her work, since she had refused to publish while under Soviet censorship. Her work focuses on the oppression endured by Ukrainians at the hands of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, November 30, 2003, No. 48, Vol. LXXI

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