The Way Things Were

 

The Way Things Were / Marko Vovchok
trans. from the Ukrainian by Maria K
TSK Group, 2018.
read by Susan Greenaway

When I saw this audiobook of Marko Vovchok's stories, I wanted to listen -- Vovchok (Maria Alexandrona Vilinskaya-Markevich) wrote many ethnographic stories starting in the 1850s, continuing for many years to write and then to translate a variety of languages into Ukrainian and Russian. Her short stories shared here show the lives of serfs, particularly those of women. They reveal the terrible structure of serfdom; people belonged to an estate, essentially, and had no freedom of movement, autonomy or rights. In one story, a girl is married to another serf by the owner's whim; in another, a young woman is given as a present to a visiting relative, and is taken away from her family without any say in it. These do reveal the day to day, of hard work, and the quality of life for these serfs fully dependent on the character of the land owner -- many of them spiteful and cruel. 

I found some of these stories very good, realistic and full of daily detail along with the emotional reactions of the characters. This servitude was a heavy burden to bear. A few of them were a bit too melodramatic for me, however, particularly "Nine Brothers & their sister Galya"; it was so ridiculous. 

But there were some important themes, and a couple of the stories really stood out to me with their strong characters and social commentary. So I'm glad I encountered them. 

However. I had difficulty finishing this collection, and that was entirely due to the odd choices in the translation, and the reader. Both felt amateur, almost at a Librivox level.  The translation uses modern phrasing and terms, maybe to bring the stories to a more relatable level, but it was a bit jarring that she always uses "kids" instead of "children", and "my dear" as a translation of any honorary address or diminuitive. It wasn't terrible, but it also wasn't really good. 

The reader was the biggest stumbling block for me. She has a British accent that was distracting, and her reading was stilted. There were pauses where it was clear a page was being turned in the middle of a sentence, or maybe she had lost her place for a second. The way the dialogue was presented was often wooden, and many, many words were mispronounced -- it took me quite a while to realize that when she was saying "Napier" she meant "Dnieper", for example. I was highly motivated to listen to these stories, so I persevered. But I can't really recommend this particular edition of Vovchok, because of the clunky translation and narration.   


If you're interested in checking out some stories by Marko Vovchok for yourself, you can find a collection of her folk tales online here from a 1983 translation made in Western Canada by N. Pedan-Popil. That's what I am going to read next!