Ihor Kachurovsky.House on the Slope.Munich, 1966

“Never in my life—neither before nor after—have I been so deeply respected as in the spring and summer of 1942.”

Ihor Kachurovsky. House on the Hill (Sequel to “The Way of the Unknown”) / cover by Valeriia Hutyk.

Munich: Dniprova Khvylya Publishing House, 1966. — 266 pp. — Printed by Biblos G.m.b.H., Munich.

In a softcover edition: blue illustrated cover with a nighttime landscape—a dark tree on a hill and a house with a lit window; white spine with blue lettering and the Dniprova Khvylya publisher’s mark. Front cover with light wear along the edges and a crease mark along the spine; water stains at the top of the spine; back cover with water stains, dirt, and foxing, most pronounced along the left edge and at the bottom. Paper naturally yellowed, with darkened edges on the text block and small spots on the edges of the first few leaves. The text block is tight, and the text is clean. Condition: good.

First edition, published during the author’s lifetime. The book has historical and cultural value and is of collector’s interest.

INFORMATION

The hero of this novel is a deserter who does not want to fight for the Soviet regime that destroyed his family, nor does he seek to curry favor with the Germans. “House on the Hill” is the second and final book in the diptych opened by “The Way of the Unknown” (1956; in English, “Because Deserters Are Immortal,” 1979). It is also composed of twelve novellas—from “My Name” to “The Last Day.” The action takes place in occupied Ukraine in 1942, particularly in a village on the Desna River: the hero tries to unite his fellow villagers, but hears only “We are a people wronged”; alongside this are the fates of women, love, and loss.

Ihor Kachurovsky (1918–2013) was a neoclassical poet, prose writer, translator, and literary scholar, and a laureate of the Shevchenko Award. Born in Nizhyn, he spent his childhood in Kruty; he returned to Ukraine in 1942 and left for the West the following year. He taught in Argentina and lived in Munich from 1969, where in the 1970s and 1980s he worked as a literary reviewer for Radio Free Europe. The novel was published ten years after “The Way of the Unknown.”

The book was published by the Munich-based Dniprova Khvylya Publishing House, founded in 1953 by the historian Oleksiy Vintonyak; the cover was designed by Valeriia Hutyk and printed at the Munich-based Biblos printing house. The cover motif—a house on a hill—returns in the novel’s final paragraph: in the rays of the evening sun on a distant hill, a house on the hill shines white.