Oles Honchar (I) — The Shore of Love
Oles Honchar (1918 –1995) was a Ukrainian writer and public figure, born in the village of Lomivka, which was incorporated into the Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk shortly prior to the second world war In 1938, Honchar enrolled into the Department of Philology of Kharkiv University, however, his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. In June 1941 he joined the army as part of a student battalion. After the war, he resumed his studies, and began to write. An early novel was noticed by Yurii Yanokovskyi (another author featured in this collection), who helped to facilitate its publication. He wrote widely about conflict and war, but also about ideas of a peaceful life and moral aspects of human relationships.
Excerpt:
Somewhere epidemics were rampaging, storms were out to sunder ships, while there, on the rampart, silence, light, and blessed peace reigned. From time to time a Meteor hydrofoil of the coastal water-bus service would tear by or else a ship would appear over the horizon and grow larger and larger as it approached from the distance. A familiar barge tirelessly and imperturbably floated at a respectable distance from the shore - it was sucking black sand from the bottom of the sea for the new buildings being erected. Nearby, divers had been working for many days now trying to raise from the deep a merchantman which had been bombed and sunk in these waters in 1941. She was carrying grain that summer and her holds were brimful with wheat. They said that it had kept underwater but that it had gone black. While looking for the ship, the divers accidentally came across the remains of an ancient city which in its time also sank beneath the waves. Those dry old sticks the archeologists were now interested in that, too.
All this was so usual, so natural to the little nurses that it bored them stiff. Only on rare occasions - in spring or in late summer - would the Orion, the sailing ship on which young sailors trained, appear. She would either be returning from or setting off on some voyage and would sail proudly and inaccessibly past these shores, floating in a state of complete weightlessness, looking totally unreal, something out of a fairy tale or rather, with her great sails outspread, like an apparition in sweet girlish dreams. She would pass by, sail off into the distant haze and suddenly be gone.
And it would be everyday life again. That mirage, the Orion, would be replaced by the familiar old barge with its black sand.
Explanation:Ukrainian author Oles Honchar’s Shore of Love (1976) articulates the littoral space as a site of magic, and connection in both realms of human relationships and long-lost past. This excerpt explores coastal space as one where ancient, historic ruins are surfaced – “a merchantman which had been bombed and sunk in these waters in 1941”, revealed by a team of divers and archaeologists.
Citation: Honchar, Oles. The Shore of Love. Trans. David Sinclair-Loutit, Progress Publishers, 1980, pp. 17.
