The Raven Who Speaks English

Best-selling Ukrainian novel of all time now available in English

(Kalyna Language Press) – In March 2013, Aventura eBooks, London, published a translation of Vasyl Shkliar’s best-selling Ukrainian language novel, ‘Raven’, edited and translated by Stephen Komarnyckyj and Susie Speight, from Kalyna Language Press, a translation and literary agency. This will be the first time that an ordinary non-specialist press has published a Ukrainian language novel in translation.

‘Raven’ (or Чорний Ворон, Chornyj Voron in Ukrainian) was published in 2009, and sold over 100,000 copies before several pirate versions were released. The book tells the story of how, in 1921, when Ukraine had been overwhelmed by vast numbers of communist troops after four years of war, a small army of Cossacks battled on in the forests of an area of Central Ukraine known as Kholodnyi Yar (Холодний Яр) or “Cold Ravine.” There, they built huge underground chambers which could conceal hundreds of men and horses in between their attacks on Soviet forces. They were finally suppressed in 1926.

When the award winning author Vasyl Shkliar, born in 1951 and known as the father of the Ukrainian best seller, was growing up in a village in the woods where these warriors had fought, all mention of them in public was forbidden. He only heard about them from furtively whispered tales. When the Soviet Secret Police files were eventually opened, he used the secret reports on this guerrilla activity, which he has included in the book to piece together the jigsaw of these men’s tragic lives.

In 2011, he was awarded the Shevchenko Prize, Ukraine’s highest literary honour worth $32,000 USD for the book, but refused the honour in protest of the educational policies of the Ukrainian government. The accolade which means the most to him, however, is the author whose books are most often stolen from bookshops.

The novel mixes fact with fiction, and police reports with imaginative prose, as Shkliar tells the tale of Raven and Veremii, two of the Cossack chiefs who battled on after Ukraine had fallen. When Veremii dies in battle, Communists secretly follow three Cossacks and a priest, who bury his corpse in the forest, but when they dig up the coffin later, they find a cryptic note instead of a corpse. Meanwhile, Raven thinks his life has ended when a grenade blows him off his horse. So, he is surprised to wake up in the house of Yevdosia, a witch. The book follows Veremii’s wife as she tries to find her husband, who keeps sending her enigmatic messages, and Raven, as he and his men dodge grenades and bullets while trying to free their country – Ukraine.

The book is available through the Aventura eBooks site:

http://www.aventuraebooks.com/