Senior boyar. Plan to the courtyard

Todos Osmachka is a poet and writer, a contemporary of Bahryany, Zerov, Pidmogylny, another “enemy of the people,” who, due to oppression by the Soviet authorities, was forced to first feign madness and then emigrate.

Osmachka’s key work is “The Senior Boyar,” in which the love story of seminarian Gordiy Lundyk for Varka, who has agreed to marry another, is depicted against the backdrop of idyllic rural Ukraine, which is slowly being destroyed by “landlordism with a Moscow orientation.”

The autobiographical story “Plan to the Courtyard” tells of the arbitrariness that the Soviet authorities inflicted on wealthy peasants: the owner and his family were expelled from their homes, and their property was appropriated. The impunity, cruelty, and omnipotence of the Bolsheviks make the text resemble a scary fairy tale.