Results by title

At the Village is the second volume of Polish poet and novelist Józef Lobodowski’s Ukrainian Trilogy, written between 1955 and 1960. The most lyrical and evocative installment of the cycle, it offers the fullest and most sympathetic portrait of Cossack life in all of modern Slavic literature. Lobodowski immerses the reader in the world of a fiercely independent people whose destiny has long been shaped by the competing gravitational pulls of the Russian Empire and the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
The book’s protagonist, Stas, finds himself the guest of the Cossack Jakov Antonovich, a scholar as well as a military leader and an agricultural potentate. His time at Antonovich’s stanitsa provides him with an incomparable education in the history of the old Polish Commonwealth of nations, which at its height encompassed Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. It is a lesson all the more engaging to the reader in that it is presented from a perspective that is neither Polish nor Russian, but Cossack. Through Lobodowski’s interweaving of historical reflection with sumptuous descriptions of agricultural life on the well-ordered stanitsa, At the Village is sometimes compared to the Polish national epic, Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz (1834), upon which Lobodowski is said to have consciously modelled the novel.

The Road Home is the third volume of Polish poet and novelist Józef Lobodowski’s Ukrainian Trilogy, written between 1955 and 1960. Stas Majewski, the teenage hero of the Ukrainian Trilogy, returns to his family home after the turbulent events of the earlier volumes, only to encounter a world transformed by war, revolution, and displacement. Separated from his family and forced into a harsh struggle for survival, he begins a difficult journey across the borderlands of the former empire toward the newly reborn Poland.
Set amid the violence and social disintegration of the revolutionary period, there is no hatred in Lobodowski's work. Instead, it offers a vivid and nuanced portrayal of the Kuban, a multinational area in the northwestern Caucasus near the Sea of Azov, as a landscape where brutality and compassion coexist. Within spaces marked by deprivation and upheaval, bonds of loyalty, honor, and care emerge in unexpected ways, and strangers become protectors and guides.This volume presents a powerful meditation on endurance, identity, and the persistence of humanity in an age of collapse.

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.