At its core, the novel is a philosophical search for harmony in a world where our intellectual side expects rational order, whereas the instinctive natural world follows its own principles. The resulting alienation and disorientation reflect the basic principles of existential philosophy, in which Pidmohylnyi is close to his European counterparts of the day.
Valerian Pidmohylnyi was one of the most prominent Ukrainian modernist writers, translators, and literary scholars of the early 20th century. Born into a peasant family, he studied law and math, and made a living working as a teacher, translator, editor, and bibliographer. In 1921, he moved to Kyiv where he stayed, with some interruptions, until moving to Kharkiv in 1932, in the midst of Stalin’s manmade Holodomor famine in Ukraine. He was arrested by the Soviet authorities in 1934 and executed in 1937 among over 1000 other Ukrainian intellectuals.
