I. Дія перша
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A Galician village, a husband and a gendarme
Stolen Happiness Украдене щастя
Ivan Franko, 1960
Ivan Franko’s complete play in Ukrainian, a “drama of village life in five acts” first published in 1894, not an adaptation. It is for B2 learners who want a tight, fast stage text about a love triangle in a Galician village of the 1870s, built on a folk ballad about a gendarme and full of the speech of the Carpathian foothills. About 16,400 words in five acts, 5 words per sentence on average.
- B2
- 16 426 words
- 3-5 hours
Will this text hold?
B1
Earlier
At B1 the short spoken lines carry you a long way, but the Galician words (шандар, пощо, відки) and the stage directions that run straight into the speech will slow you down. Read one act at a time and tap freely.
B1B2
This text
At B2 you can read it: the lines are short, and the same village words come back again and again, so after the first act шандар, кумо and аджеж no longer stop you.
Check this passageC1
With room to spare
At C1 the play reads quickly; only the German loans of Austrian officialdom and a few dialect verbs make you pause.
Start readingThe average sentence has 5 words, one of the shortest of any complete original in the catalogue, because the play is almost all talk: nearly 800 of its 971 paragraphs open with a speaker’s name. Only 5.3% of words have 9 letters or more, one of the lowest shares among the originals, below Natalka Poltavka (7.4%), the other village play at B2, and far below Stepan Vasylchenko’s Karmeliuk (9.2%). What keeps it at B2 is the Galician village speech of the 1870s, printed as Franko wrote it. The gendarme is шандар 25 times; відтак (“then”) and відки (“from where”) come 10 times each, пощо (“what for”) and лиш (“only”) 8 times each; the short forms of бути cling to other words (повинні-сте “you ought to”, певне-сте “you must have”); and Austrian officialdom brings German loans such as постенфірер (the head of the gendarme post) and форшпан (the duty to provide carts). Stage directions are not set off by brackets: they follow the speaker’s name and run straight into the speech. Hence B2. This is the catalogue’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 16 426
- words
- 5
- words in an average sentence
- 3-5
- hours of reading
- 1960
- Книгоспілка
Книгоспілка, 1960. Wikisource
What it is about, without the ending
Nezvanychi, a village in the Carpathian foothills of Austrian Galicia, around 1870. Anna’s brothers married her off to Mykola Zadorozhnyi, a poor carter twenty years older than her, so that they would not have to share their father’s land with her. On a snowy winter night, after the village girls and lads have left a spinning party in her house, her neighbour Nastia tells her a secret: Mykhailo Hurman, the young man Anna loved and swore to marry, did not die in Bosnia as her brothers claimed. He is alive, he serves in the gendarmerie and has just been posted to their district. Late that night Mykola comes home from hauling firewood with his face scratched and bloodied, and soon a man half frozen in the blizzard knocks at the door asking for shelter: a gendarme, Mykhailo himself. The next day he returns with the village head. The innkeepers of the tavern on the Kupinnia road have been murdered in the night, and there is blood on Mykola’s boots and axe. What happens next is not revealed here.
Compare two places
Украдене щастя
II. Дія друга
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Choose an underlined word.
How the women talk
Nastia and Anna call each other кумо, the vocative of кума (a godparent of one’s child, and so a close woman friend); голубонько (“my dove”) and небого (“my dear”, literally “poor girl”) are terms of affection. The Galician forms are easy once you know them: аджеж is адже ж (“but surely”), зо мною is зі мною (“with me”), ув іншій стороні is в іншій стороні (“in another part of the country”). Він по мою душу прийшов means “he has come for my soul”, as a ghost would.
Stolen, broken, paired off
Anna answers with impersonal forms in -но that say what was done to her without naming who did it: моє вкрадено (“mine was stolen”), серце розбито (“my heart was broken”), мене спаровано (“I was paired off”). Mykhailo replies with the imperative for “let us”: відокрадімо (“let us steal it back”); the same ending comes a moment later in поживімо and покуштуймо (“let us live, let us taste”). The play’s title, украдене щастя, is the participle of the same verb.
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
When Anna learns how her brothers lied to her, whole-sentence translation keeps the folk idiom in one piece: Невже й тут мене одурили, ошукали, мов кота в мішку продали? (“Did they fool me and cheat me here too, selling me like a cat in a sack?”)
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Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
It is the original, not an adaptation: Ivan Franko’s complete “drama of village life in five acts” (драма з сільського життя в 5 діях). Franko wrote it in 1891 for a playwriting competition, building it on a Galician folk ballad about a gendarme. It was first staged by the Ruska Besida theatre in Lviv on 16 November 1893 and first printed in the magazine Зоря in 1894, the same year as a separate edition in Lviv. The text comes from Wikisource, which reproduces volume XVII of Franko’s Works in 20 volumes (New York, Knyhospilka, 1960). That edition prints the play in modern spelling but keeps Franko’s Galician village speech (шандар, пощо, відки, сьогодня, в цілім селі), and its stage directions follow the speaker’s name without brackets. The edition’s short footnote glossary is not included: tap a word instead. The villagers speak of Jews with a word of the period that is offensive today, and a lad repeats a crude saying about beating wives.
Is there an audiobook?
Stolen Happiness has no audiobook on MovaReader: the play is read on screen, and a tap on a word shows its translation. You will need it for the village and Austrian words: латри (“stacks of firewood”, a measure of cut logs), жупа (“the salt works”, where Mykola hauls the wood), форшпан (“the duty to provide horses and carts”) and постенфірер (“the head of the gendarme post”).
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes, with the Reader plan. It helps most where Galician forms and strong feeling meet, as in Mykhailo’s vow: Раз мені щастя всміхнулося по тільких роках, то вже я тепер не випущу його! (“Now that happiness has smiled on me after so many years, I will not let it go!”). 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 first act is the longest, about 5,300 words; the second has about 2,700, the third about 3,000, the fourth about 2,300 and the fifth about 3,100, so one act makes an evening.
Where does the text get easier?
The difficulty is even. The first act runs to 5.7 words per sentence, with Nastia’s long stories; the other four stay between 4.7 and 4.9. Long words are between 4.2% and 5.3% in four acts; the third act, the Sunday dance in front of the tavern, where the innkeeper waves his imperial licence at the village head, rises to 7.1%. Once the first act has taught you шандар, кумо and відки, the rest reads faster.
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. Each of the five acts also opens from the contents on this page, for example III. Дія третя, the Sunday dance in front of the village tavern.