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The Yellow Prince by Vasyl Barka (1908-2003)1 A Novel about the Great Famine in Ukraine A Synopsis by Helene N. Turkewicz-Sanko, Ph.D. Introduction The Great Famine, a tragic period of Ukrainian history ignored by some and denied by others, has been documented by over one hundred works by academic researchers and writers of fic tion.2 Some of the titles are more familiar than oth ers; a few examples of the nonfiction works include Execution by Hunger, Genocide by Hunger, Agony o f a Nation, The Stalin Famine, Harvest of Sorrow, L ’Histoire de la Soah en question/History of the Shoah in question, Black Deeds o f the Kremlin. Most allude to "hunger" or "Stalin" or "genocide" and approach the subject as the tragedy of a nation, citing repressive political aims and shocking statis tics. Among the fictional works on the famine is Zhovtyj Kniaz or The Yellow Prince by Vasyl Barka, who describes the events as they were or chestrated on a human level, engulfing men, women, and children. Barka wrote his novel be tween 1958 and 1961 and published it for the first time in Ukrainian in 1962 in Munich and New York.3 It remains one of the most significant de tailed accounts of the slow death of a nation by man-made starvation. Written in prose, which often borders on poetry, Barka's work offers beautiful im ages drawn from nature and the life of ordinary peo ple faced with extraordinary events. The book's twenty-eight chapters can be di vided into four episodic sections; every seven chap ters shows death taking a greater and greater toll. It opens with the agony of a single family, then a vil lage, then an entire province, and finally an entire nation. Although the family and village and prov ince have names, they are an allegorical representa tion of any given family and village and province in Ukraine in the 1930s. At harvest time, the wheat fields are covered with corpses; the dead are un ceremoniously thrown into a mass grave. When Vasyl Barka died on April 11, 2003, European world literature lost one of the twentieth century’s leading voices about the man-made fam ine in Ukraine in 1932-1933. His legacy, however, remains as tangible evidence of the importance of his literary endeavors. In 1981, the Editions Galli- mard, one of the most prestigious French publishing houses, sponsored a French translation of the novel by Olga Jaworskyi. Titled Le Prince Jaune, the translation included a powerful preface on the historical background of Ukraine by Piotr Rawicz. A film based on The Yellow Prince (directed by Oles Yanchuk from a screenplay written by Ser- hij Diachenko and Les Taniuk) was released on De cember 15, 1993 in New York City. The subject matter is so grim that it is only fitting that the movie was filmed in "black-and-white with occasional misty pastel colored scenes in which characters hal lucinate."4 The movie ends with an image that devi ates slightly from Barka's text. In the book, one of the main characters, a mother, clutches her child's notebook; in the film, she holds a loaf of bread, put ting emphasis on bread as Ukraine's staff of life. In 2003, an exhibit commemorating the Great Famine opened at the United Nations. In cluded in the exhibit was a paraphrased excerpt from Vasyl Barka’s novel in which the word "Holo- domor" was used. Since that time the word “Holo- domor” has become part of the language of the United Nations and refers exclusively to the 1932- 1933 Famine in Ukraine. 14 “НАШ Е Ж ИТТЯ”, ЛИСТОПАД 2005 Vasyl Barka Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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