In the Cossack village of Konotop, the rains have failed, the harvest is in danger, and the local officials reach the obvious conclusion: there must be a witch to blame. What follows is a farce of superstition and misrule. A lovesick, blundering centurion, his scheming clerk, and a whole village throw suspected women into the pond to see which of them floats, while the one genuine witch, Yavdokha Zubikha, watches it all with amusement.
Written in 1833, The Witch of Konotop is a beloved comic classic of Ukrainian literature, and a close cousin to the folk-horror tales of Mykola Hohol, better known in English as Nikolai Gogol, in his Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka. It has the same delight in a rambling, unreliable narrator, the same mischief, and the same deep roots in Ukrainian belief in witches and demons, all sharpened by a satirist’s eye for the vanity and folly of those in charge.
The novella has been little known beyond Ukraine, in part because its language, shifting between archaic Old Church Slavonic and vivid, colloquial Ukrainian, has long defied translation. This edition by Michael M. Naydan and Alla Perminova brings it into English at last. Hryhoriy Kvitka-Osnovyanenko (1778–1843), born to a prominent family near Kharkiv, is regarded by many as the father of Ukrainian prose.
This book has been published with the support of the Translate Ukraine Translation Program.
Translators
Michael Naydan is Woskob Family Professor of Ukrainian Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. He has published over 50 articles on literary topics and more than 80 translations in journals and anthologies. He has translated, co-translated, or edited more than 40 books of translations, including Mark Andryczyk’s Ukraine 22: Ukrainian Writers Respond to War (Penguin Books, 2023), Zelensky: A Biography (Polity Press, 2023), Yuri Vynnychuk’s The Night Reporter: A 1938 Lviv Murder Mystery (Glagoslav Publications, 2021), Selected Poetry of Bohdan Rubchak: Songs of Love, Songs of Death, Songs of the Moon (Glagoslav Publications, 2020); Maria Matios’s novel Sweet Darusya: A Tale of Two Villages and Yuri Vynnychuk’s novel of the Shoah Tango of Death (both with Spuyten Duyvil Publishers, 2019). His own novel about the city of Lviv Seven Signs of the Lion appeared with Glagoslav Publications in 2016. He has co-translated several of these and other volumes with Alla Perminova. He has received numerous prizes for his translations including the George S.N. Luckyj Award in Ukrainian Literature Translation from the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies in 2013.
Alla Perminova is a professor of English at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a practicing literary translator from and into Ukrainian, English, and Spanish. She received her doctoral and postdoctoral degrees in translation studies from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv where she worked as a full professor for fifteen years. She is Oleh Olzhych National Literary Contest first prize winner (1997), Fulbright senior scholar (The Pennsylvania State University, 2012–2013), the author of 70 scholarly articles, translator and/or editor of 20 books, presenter of over 30 talks at international conferences. Her personal philosophy as a translator and a researcher is discussed in her book A Translator’s Reception of Contemporary American Poetry (in Ukrainian, 2015), in which she promotes the reception model of literary translation.
Endorsements and Review Quotes
“The brilliant Konotopska vidma, a work to be ranked among the best in all of nineteenth-century Ukrainian prose.”
– George G. Grabowicz, Harvard Ukrainian Studies
“Perhaps the best work of Ukrainian prose of the early 19th century.”
– Hryhoriy Hrabovych / George G. Grabowicz
“Kvitka-Osnovianenko was the first major figure in modern Ukrainian prose.”
– Encyclopedia of Ukraine
“His major contribution was to extend the use of the Ukrainian language to ‘serious’ prose.”
– Encyclopedia of Ukraine
“The Witch of Konotop reveals the internal reasons for the decline of Ukrainian Cossacks’ State.”
– Olexy Honchar, Slovo i Chas
“A complex, multi-vector, multi-problem, multi-layered work.”
– Olexy Honchar, Slovo i Chas
