⚡ Pace: moderate · 🎭 Emotions: ironic, tense · 🚪 Entry threshold: medium · ⭐ Why read: ideological debates, spirit of the era
There are mystery books in literature that hold cultural codes no matter what genre they belong to, from the Sumerian epic to limericks or space operas. These are codes of eternal love and endless wars, codes of humanity, nations, special worldviews, faith, and the future – the list can be continued by anyone who has already read The Woodcocks by Mykola Khvylovyi.
For those who haven’t read it, the novel The Woodcocks is known only for its first part – one of those mysterious books. The very first mystery lies in the title, which doesn’t explain the idea, but rather hides it even from a perceptive reader. What relationship does hunting or hedonism have to the old, unequal relationship between Ukrainians and their eternal mental enemy? Why does the Ukrainian hero feel like a victim of a Muscovite mistress? Because he was a Chekist and mowed down his fellow tribesmen in favor of the enemy's ideology, that is, in particular, the seductress from the enemy's state?
And if a reader takes into account that the novel takes place in the atmosphere of the hot Ukrainian south after the lost war, as if outpacing a similar bestseller of an American classic with its Spanish and also romantic Fiesta, then Khvylovyi created ideal conditions for reading such secret codes. Also, he used the classic genre of suspense – anxious uncertainty, intense anticipation, a premonition of the inevitable tragic events, and terror before the unknown, which reawakened in the sleeping enemy. History proved that the author’s intention was not to scare his readers. He was preparing the hero to lose to his Muscovite temptress.
It is the summary of the first part of the novel. The second part was destroyed both by the author and Stalin's national policy. The edition of the literary magazine where the continuation (ending) of the novel The Woodcocks was published was requisitioned and destroyed by the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU). Unfortunately, it is impossible to find out how The Woodcocks appeared and its tragic fate, which also creates a flair of great mystery for the Ukrainian Executed Renaissance. The novel The Woodcocks is one of the most mysterious works of art of its era and the entire period of Ukraine’s existence.
In the second part, Mykola Khvylovyi, probably, tried to answer the question of worldview and historical sadomasochistic (which is how his seductress opponent would first of all like to present this conflict) relations between Ukrainians and "Great Russians."
The first, well-known, part of the novel encodes the struggle of Ukrainians against the "older enemy-brother" for all previous centuries. The second was destroyed and lost and could encode the future. Reading The Woodcocks from such an angle is both scary and extremely compelling, especially since Ukrainians still have hope of finding the surviving text of the second part.
We are sure that a romantic story in the noir style will also attract the reader.
📚 Did you know 📖
Khvylovy was a leading figure of Ukraine’s literary renaissance of the 1920s.
His short stories were marked by expressionism and a “nervous” intensity.
The authorities viewed his work as overly “nationalistic.”
In 1933, Khvylovy took his own life in protest against repression.
Fun fact: his contemporaries often called him “the Ukrainian Mayakovsky.”