THE GENOCIDE IN UKRAINE: MARIA (1934) AND ULAS SAMCHUK

Ulas Samchuk is considered to be one of the most important Ukrainian writers of the 20th century. A gripping story about a village woman’s loves, losses, and daily toil, from the emancipation of serfs in 1861 to one of the most tragic periods in human history– the 1932-33 Holodomor, or Famine-Genocide. In 1932, in Prague, U. Samchuk first heard about the artificial famine unleashed by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin upon the Ukrainian people, which some sources say eventually claimed as many as ten million lives. Overwhelmed by the horror, he wrote the novel Maria (1934) –– the first literary work about the famine, and a powerful characterization of village life at the time. That same year the first volume of the trilogy Volyn–Where the River Flows was published. The young author was not only honoured for the work with a literary prize, but was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature…

Source: 1st page of book