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Sweet Darusya: A Tale of Two Villages by Maria Matios: book review

 



Sweet Darusya: A Tale of Two Villages (2003) is set in the villages of Bukovyna, Ukraine, from the 1930s. 

 

In the villages in Ukraine, close to the magical, mysterious Carpathian Mountains, the history of the isolated, rural region and its families begins in the 1960s, before taking readers to the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Sweet Darusya was in love with Ivan Tsvychok. Before then, Darusya’s parents were in love.

 

Sweet Darusya is eccentric, almost the village fool, or touched by God, depending on the villagers’ perspective – the perspective of the local indigenous people, the Hutsuls, who ‘live hard, work hard, play hard, and love hard.’ But people among them have a dark side – lying, drinking, cheating, stealing, and having secret dalliances. 

 

Sweet Darusya loves to dance in a circular motion, she braids and unbraids her hair, and plucks meadow flowers for her neighbours: ‘Darusya hears and knows everything, she just doesn’t speak to anyone.’ In her earlier years in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the untidy, unsuccessful newcomer Ivan Tsvychok was a ‘strange and foolish man’ thought the villagers. Perfect for sweet Darusya. He wants to show her the world, but Darusya had never walked further than the mill.

 

Darusya’s parents, Mykhailo and Matronka Ilashchuk, lived through the hardest, most tyrannical times – told from the 1930s and 1940s. Darusya regularly visits the cemetery. 

 

From the traumas of the micro-cosmic village society to the macro-view of the Ukranian nation, Maria Matios conveys the story of the Carpathian Mountains in a time of occupying forces – Polish, Romanian, and Soviet Russian forces, long before Ukrainian independence in 1991.

 

The people seem simple and isolated from troubles, but theirs is a disquietening, complicated world. The touching, powerful, and mesmerising historical background gives rise to vivid, memorable characters and a novel of passion and intensity. 


 




Doll by Ukrainian artist Nataliya Dolgannikova 




 

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MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS  is an international aid and development consultant, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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