The Thickets is the first volume of Polish poet and novelist Józef Lobodowski’s Ukrainian Trilogy, written between 1955 and 1960. Set primarily in Russia’s Kuban region, the novel unfolds against a rich backdrop where Ukrainians, Russians, and Cossacks live alongside Tatars, Circassians, and waves of other peoples under Tsarist rule—among them Armenians and Poles. From this world emerges Stas (Stanislaw), a young Pole and the central figure of the trilogy.

In The Thickets, Lobodowski paints a stark, unforgettable portrait of the turmoil that engulfed the former Russian Empire after the fall of the Tsar and Kerensky’s government. For Stas, once a student at a classical gymnasium, survival now means peddling contraband on the black market. Through his eyes, the reader is plunged into the chaos of war, revolution, and occupation—rendered with visceral power and human urgency.

Józef Lobodowski (1909–1988) was born into a Polish family at a time when the Polish state did not exist on the political map of Europe. Since 1795, the Third Partition of Poland, his homeland had been divided between the empires of Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Lobodowski’s life itself reflects the history of Poland in all its glory and wretchedness. The son of a colonel in the Tsarist army, he entered the world near Kaunas, in present-day Lithuania. Because of his father’s career, he and his family moved to Lublin, then to Moscow, and then to the Kuban, the setting of his most famous works in prose. Lobodowski’s life and writing embody the turbulence, resilience, and contradictions of modern Polish history.