IV. Наймичка
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Fifteen narrative poems from the 1876 Kobzar
The Servant Girl and Other Poems Наймичка та інші поеми
Taras Shevchenko, 1876
This is the complete original Ukrainian text of fifteen narrative poems by Taras Shevchenko, as printed in the Prague edition of his Kobzar in 1876, among them Наймичка (The Servant Girl), Причинна (The Bewitched Girl) and Гамалія (Hamaliia). It is for advanced learners who want Ukraine’s national poet in his own words: ballads of drowned girls and water nymphs, a Cossack sea raid, and village stories of seduced servant girls, cruel landlords and a convict’s confession. About 18,000 words of verse in 15 chapters, one poem each, from Русалка (about 220 words) to Відьма (about 2,550).
- C1
- 17 967 words
- 3-5 hours
Will this text hold?
B2
Earlier
At B2 the short lines look easy, but old spellings like ёго, в-ранці and зъїли stop you on every page; start with The Servant Girl, the A2 prose retelling of Наймичка in the catalogue, then come back to the poem in verse.
B2C1
This text
At C1 you can read it: once your eye turns ёго into його and в-ранці into вранці, what remains is the rhythm and the repetitions of folk song, which carry you through the story; words of village life such as кісники or щепи need a tap.
Check this passageC2
With room to spare
At C2 these poems read freely, and the next step is Shevchenko in an older spelling and a denser style: Kobzar (1840), Haidamaky, and The Dream, The Caucasus, The Epistle and Other Poems, all in the catalogue at C2.
Start readingBy the numbers alone this would be B2: 10 words per sentence and 6.5% of words with 9 letters or more (about one in 15), close to Lesya Ukrainka’s verse dramas Бояриня and В катакомбах (6 words, 6.3%), which are B2. In verse, sentence length says little: the dialogue scenes of Сотник average 7 words per sentence, the long narrative of Москалева криниця 16. What makes it C1 is the language of 1837-1850 in the spelling of 1876. Shevchenko writes in the forms of folk song: around 90 long adjective forms such as козацькиї, молодая, білеє, люде for люди (54 times), тілько for тільки (24). The edition writes йо as ё (137 words, ёго alone 58 times), uses ъ or ь where an apostrophe stands today (64 times: зъїли, пьяний), and joins prepositions to nouns with a hyphen (206 times: в-ранці, у-ночі, чи-мало), forms a dictionary lookup will often miss. Prayers bring in Church Slavonic (Во віки, «О здравії», псалтирь) and some characters Polish words (костёл, кгвалт). That is about 600 marked forms, one in 30 words, fewer than in the 1879 first edition of Kaidash’s Family (one in 16), which is also C1, so this is C1 and not C2. This is the catalogue’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 17 967
- words
- 10
- words in an average sentence
- 3-5
- hours of reading
- 1876
- Книгарня др. Грегра та Ф. Даттла
Книгарня др. Грегра та Ф. Даттла, 1876. Wikisource
What it is about, without the ending
The fifteen poems tell separate stories, most of them about women wronged by men and by fate. In Причинна a girl driven out of her mind by a fortune-teller’s spell wanders the bank of the Dnipro at night, waiting for a Cossack who left her a year ago. In Гамалія Cossacks held captive in a dungeon in Scutari pray for rescue while their comrades sail across the Black Sea. In Наймичка a young mother leaves her unbaptised son at the gate of a childless old couple and a year later comes to work for them as a hired servant, never telling anyone who she is. In Сотник an old Cossack captain decides to marry Nastia, the girl he raised as a daughter, just as his son comes home from school in Kyiv. Варнак is the confession of an old convict met in exile beyond the Urals, and in Відьма a woman the village calls a witch tells a Roma camp how a landlord ruined her life. What happens next in each poem is not revealed here.
Compare two places
Наймичка та інші поеми
IX. Сотник
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Choose an underlined word.
A lament in the voice of folk song
The mother speaks to the fog as to a living person: Ой, тумане, тумане is the vocative case (туман becomes тумане, туманочку, брате), the way folk laments address nature. Read слёзами as сльозами, лоня as лона, and єсть as є (there is).
Verse laid out as a play
This part of Сотник is written like a play: the speaker’s name (Сотник., Настя.) stands on its own line before each speech. Як-би ... то я б is the old spelling of якби ... то я б (if ... I would), and хиба is today’s хіба (surely not).
Chapters
Translation while you read
The book stays free on every plan. Reader, €1 a month, removes the daily limit on words and sentences.
Reader
€1 a month
Whole-sentence translation helps with folk images such as Не китайкою покрились / Козацькиї очі, “no silk cloth was laid over the Cossack’s eyes”, the red cloth that covered a fallen Cossack’s face, here missing because he died unburied in a foreign field.
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Before you read
Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
It is the original, not an adaptation: fifteen complete narrative poems by Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), written between 1837 and 1850: Причинна 1837, Черниця Марьяна and Утоплена 1841, Гамалія 1842, Наймичка 1845, Русалка and Лілея 1846, Княжна and Відьма 1847, Титарівна, Марина and Варнак 1848, Сотник 1849, Петрусь 1850, and Москалева криниця in its second version of 1857; Відьма is the version he reworked in 1858. Many could only be printed in full abroad, and the text here is the two-volume Kobzar published in Prague in 1876 by the bookshop of Dr Grégr and F. Dattel, from Wikisource. The selection is the catalogue’s own, in the order of that edition. It keeps the spelling of 1876: ё for йо (ёго, слёзи), ъ or ь where an apostrophe stands today (зъїли, пьяний), prepositions joined with a hyphen (в-ранці, у-ночі), люде and тілько. Черниця Марьяна is printed, as in the edition, as a fragment of a longer poem. Rows of dots are in the edition itself and mark lines Shevchenko left out in his manuscripts; the editor’s footnotes with variant readings are not included, and a few obvious transcription slips were corrected. Москаль here means a soldier of the Russian army, and in two places the text uses a period word for Jews that is offensive today. If the verse is too hard, the catalogue also has The Servant Girl, an A2 prose retelling of Наймичка.
Is there an audiobook?
There is no audio on MovaReader: the poems are read on screen, and a tap on a word shows its translation. You will need it for words of village life such as кісники (ribbons braided into a girl’s plait) and китайка (the red silk cloth laid over a fallen Cossack’s face). Old spellings are easier to look up once you read ёго as його and в-ранці as вранці.
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes, with the Reader plan. It helps most where a folk image carries the meaning, as when the mother in Наймичка promises her baby: Із самого неба / Долю виплачу слёзами / І пошлю до тебе (“from heaven itself I will weep out a better fate with my tears and send it to you”). Without the plan, single words are translated up to the daily limit.
How many hours does it take?
About 3-5 hours at the pace of someone reading with translation of new words, slower than a native speaker. The poems differ greatly in size: Русалка has about 220 words and Лілея about 310, while Відьма has about 2,550, Наймичка about 1,950 and Сотник about 1,900; most have 700-1,800 words, so one poem takes from ten minutes to an evening.
Where does the text get easier?
It is not even, and you can choose where to start. The short ballads Русалка, Лілея and Утоплена are the gentlest entry, though Лілея has one of the higher shares of long words (8.9%); Причинна has the highest (9.0%). Сотник and parts of Відьма are written as dialogue scenes with the speakers’ names, with short sentences (7 and 9 words on average), while Москалева криниця runs to 16 words per sentence. The 1876 spelling is the same in every poem, so it gets easier as your eye adjusts.
Will my place in the book be saved?
Yes. Once you sign in, the reader keeps your last place and the words you opened, so you can come back where you left off. Any of the fifteen poems also opens from the contents on this page, for example IV. Наймичка, which begins with a young woman on a burial mound in the morning fog.