The Kaidash Family

The novella “The Kaidash Family” by Ivan Nechuy-Levytsky constructs a myth of Ukrainian society at the end of the 19th century. In this expanded and revised edition, editor Mykhailo Nazarenko helped reconstruct the full version of the text. In this form it is published for the first time.

The uncensored version begins not with the familiar school description of the village of Semygory, but with a sense of doom: the author calls the entire Dnipro region a cemetery “where Ukrainian freedom lies buried beneath countless graves.” The conflicts within the Kaidash family reveal the tragedy of a village where parents, traumatized by serfdom, raise children who are likewise unable to break the cycle of violence. Collages by Lera Sxemka offer a new way of interpreting the novella and bring a contemporary dimension to this classic work of Ukrainian literature.