People of the Marsh

The village in this novel stands on an island, and the sea around it is mud. There are no waves, not even the ripples of a lake, washing against its shores: it is surrounded by a wilderness of slimy tussocks and the rustling of eternally sodden forests. For most of the year Kureni cannot be reached. A letter arrives in the bag of a chance traveller, because nobody would cross that bog without a pressing reason. In autumn and winter the village is sealed for months, and its people live as though on a raft that dirty weather had torn from its moorings.

Then the sun comes up, smoke rises, milk zings into buckets, and a boy walks down the empty street shouting for the cows to be sent out. The gates open and the cows come out self-important as a court procession.

Melezh finished People of the Marsh in the autumn of 1961, writing in Belarusian. It is the first novel of A Polesye Chronicle, and it is about what collectivisation looked like from inside a village that the twentieth century had barely reached.

The translation is by Natalie Ward, and it keeps the Belarusian shapes of the names that a Russian-mediated version would have smoothed away. The text is the Progress Publishers printing of 1979, in the Soviet Authors Library, reproduced complete, with a new critical introduction.