The Nose Doesn't Fall Far from the Face

Review by Bob Blaisdell

The Witch of Konotop

By Hryhoriy Kvitka-Osnovyanenko
Translated from the Ukrainian by Michael M. Naydan and Alla Perminova
Glagoslav; 174 pp.;  $24.99

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I never thought of Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) as having a literary uncle, but I think I found him in Hryhoriy Kvitka-Osnovyanenko (1778-1843), a fellow Ukrainian who also wrote in both Ukrainian and Russian. The narrator of Kvitka-Osnovyanenko's 1836 novel, The Witch of Konotop, similar to Gogol’s confused narrator in “The Nose,” sometimes has trouble getting out of his own way or becomes testy with his imagined reader-listener:

… a new misfortune had completely twisted him up, though he himself didn’t understand the cause of his fretting. What misfortune befell him, and why did such sorrow overwhelm him? Well! Be patient, and I’ll tell you the whole story: from whence he arrived home so late, and why he had such a bad night’s sleep. Here, look, just take a little bit of the stronger snuff, and listen.

The Witch of Konotop rises above folk tale limitations with its social satire. We have stupidity in leadership today, there was stupidity then. Kvitka-Osnovyanenko mocks the witch-prosecuting numbskull Captain Zabryokha:

Although he went up to people, all of whom took off their hats in front of him and paid deference to him, he walked alone, pouting, and he looked at no one. Only he puffed out his cheeks, so that everyone knew that he was the elder leader here.

(Is it just my imagination, or does his manner resemble the current American president’s?)

The Witch of the title is Zubykha, a village woman accused, as are five other village women, of being a witch. The innocent others are drowned or nearly so, while she, Zubykha, who is actually a witch, laughingly survives.

The Captain spends the entire novel distracted and confused about following the simple directive to bring his hundred men to headquarters (one problem, besides the rumor that witches are causing the region’s drought, is that neither he nor his scribe can count). The conniving scribe Pistryak is a kind of incompetent Iago. The Captain and everyone else often can’t make out what Pistryak says, because Pistryak believes plain-speaking is unsophisticated and therefore uses archaic and elevated Church Slavonic phrasings that he himself doesn’t really understand:

“Woe is me, Pan Captain!” Pistryak said, “Having thus passed a week causing a ruckus with young maidens in the taverns of our local locality and, missing supper – I hit rock bottom, I was immobile like a clade, and mute like a fish in the sea. And all this sudden news shooketh mine inner womb, and even more so, even more so, when I read and understood the order of the gracious administration to prepare for a campaign to Chernihiv. This they write, Pan Captain, sparing our souls, but not when fear and trembling overcomes us, and we sorrowfully fall onto our bed into death; and for the sake of this, I secretly deliberate, if it will only be to Chernihiv, but who knows? Wilt we go further yet? O woe, woe is me! And I say unto thee: woe is me!”

The translator Naydan explains:

The essential hurdle for the translator consists of the novel’s complicated vocabulary and linguistic structures … How does one convey that archaic style of a bookish language that is meant only to be written and used primarily in religious services and religious contexts? We have opted for pseudo-Elizabethan English in this translation as well as some King James Biblical locutions to try to convey some of the effect of the scribe’s speech patterns in English.

The dunderheaded Captain more or less does whatever the scribe tells him to do, that is, as well as he can comprehend it.

Only in the epilogue does Kvitka-Osnovyanenko lose his comic nerve; he reverts to the conventional religious training he had as a monastical student and attempts to wash away the literary magic he has conjured up:

All these misfortunes befell them for the following reasons: On Pan Zabryokha for his reliance on the scribe. He should have acted on his own and acted justly, like a true leader. … Instead of doing what the superiors commanded, perhaps even to defend his land from the enemy, he set out to exorcise women. Presumably, drowning witches would bring rain to the land. It was as if the witches had the power to counteract the will of the heavens. Everything unfolds according to God’s will.

Perhaps it’s a tradition or psychological tendency for Orthodox writers to renounce the pleasure they have given themselves and others at the conclusion of their works? At least Kvitka-Osnovyanenko, “the father of Ukrainian prose,” didn’t try to burn his novel, as Gogol (rendered in Ukrainian as “Mykola Hohol” by Naydan) so sadly tried to do with Dead Souls.

The translators, having succeeded in bringing the good Witch of Konotop to light into English, also include Kvitka-Osnovyanenko’s loudly moral tale “Tumbleweeds,” which, for its preachiness, I cannot highly recommend even though it does, interestingly, dramatize a few moments of detective investigation that precede Crime and Punishment by about thirty years:

The investigator ordered the witnesses to testify if there were any signs of struggle. “There are none!” Denys shouted from a distance. “Why would there be? Just one stab with a knife, that’s all.” The investigator noticed this and remained silent.

Perhaps Dostoevsky’s Porfiry Petrovich had an uncle too!