Intermezzo

A short story regarded as the summit of Ukrainian impressionism in prose. The narrator, exhausted by human grief and by his own inability to respond to it, flees the city for the countryside to be alone with the field, the sun and the silence. Kotsiubynskyi casts not people but states and phenomena as the dramatis personae: Weariness, The Fields in June, The Sun, Three White Sheepdogs, The Cuckoo, The Larks. The gradual return of the capacity to feel is broken by an encounter with a peasant whose account of destitution returns the narrator to responsibility. The text is built on rhythm and repetition, almost without plot, and for that reason remains among the most studied works in Ukrainian literature. The story is customarily set beside the finest examples of European impressionist prose of the early century. The story has been translated into many languages and consistently represents early twentieth-century Ukrainian prose in anthologies.