At the Village

At the Village is the second volume of Polish poet and novelist Józef Lobodowski’s Ukrainian Trilogy, written between 1955 and 1960. The most lyrical and evocative installment of the cycle, it offers the fullest and most sympathetic portrait of Cossack life in all of modern Slavic literature. Lobodowski immerses the reader in the world of a fiercely independent people whose destiny has long been shaped by the competing gravitational pulls of the Russian Empire and the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The book’s protagonist, Staś, finds himself the guest of the Cossack Jakov Antonovich, a scholar as well as a military leader and an agricultural potentate. His time at Antonovich’s stanitsa provides him with an incomparable education in the history of the old Polish Commonwealth of nations, which at its height encompassed Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. It is a lesson all the more engaging to the reader in that it is presented from a perspective that is neither Polish nor Russian, but Cossack. Through Łobodowski’s interweaving of historical reflection with sumptuous descriptions of agricultural life on the well-ordered stanitsa, At the Village is sometimes compared to the Polish national epic, Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz (1834), upon which Łobodowski is said to have consciously modelled the novel.

Józef Lobodowski (1909–1988) was born into a Polish family at a time when the Polish state did not exist on the political map of Europe. Since 1795, the Third Partition of Poland, his homeland had been divided between the empires of Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Łobodowski’s life itself reflects the history of Poland in all its glory and wretchedness. The son of a colonel in the Tsarist army, he entered the world near Kaunas, in present-day Lithuania. Because of his father’s career, he and his family moved to Lublin, then to Moscow, and then to the Kuban, the setting of his most famous works in prose. Łobodowski’s life and writing embody the turbulence, resilience, and contradictions of modern Polish history.