Zakhar Berkut

A historical novella by Ivan Franko about the Carpathian village of Tukhlia at the time of the Mongol invasion of 1241. The community, led by the elder Zakhar Berkut, resists not only the external assault but also the boyar Tuhar Vovk, who seeks to destroy its ancient order of self-government. Franko deliberately builds the work around the idea of the community as a form of organisation able to hold where an individual force is helpless. Historical material is combined with an adventure plot and the love story of Maksym and Myroslava, which made the novella one of the most widely read books of the Ukrainian classics and part of the school curriculum for many decades. The novella has been filmed several times, and its story is firmly fixed in popular cultural memory. The novella appears in Ukrainian classics series and remains one of the most popular books for adolescent reading.