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The Noblewoman and In the Catacombs: read in Ukrainian (B2)

Lesya Ukrainka’s verse dramas The Noblewoman and In the Catacombs in Ukrainian. Level B2: a Cossack bride in Moscow and a slave in Rome, with word translation.

Бояриня. В катакомбах (Леся Українка)

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About this article

Level B2 Reading focus

What you'll learn

Dialogue in blank verse with inverted word order, sentences running across line breaks, the 1918 spelling (се and сей for це and цей, particles joined with a hyphen: та-ж, ти-б, тілько, іх), the respectful plural for parents (батько вмерли), vocabulary of a 17th-century Muscovite household (боярин, терем, рундук, челядь, джура) and of the early Church (єпіскоп, діакон, неофіт, раб), Ukrainian history of the Ruin, Lesya Ukrainka’s dramatic poems

This article contains the full text of two dramatic poems by Lesya Ukrainka as printed together in Katerynoslav in 1918: The Noblewoman (written 1910, first printed 1914), five scenes about Oksana, a Cossack officer’s daughter who marries Stepan, a Ukrainian-born boyar, and follows him into the closed world of a Moscow terem in the 1660s; and In the Catacombs (written 1905, printed 1906), where a newly baptised slave questions a bishop about freedom among the first Christians of Rome. Level B2 suits readers who can follow spoken Ukrainian in verse. You will learn the vocabulary of a 17th-century Muscovite household and of the early Church, the 1918 spelling (се, та-ж, тілько) and how blank verse turns Ukrainian word order around.

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