A raid comes over the village in the night. The boy wakes in the yard to find his mother dead and his sister gone.
Pavlus is fifteen. He has been taught to ride, to shoot and to throw a lasso, because that is what a boy on this frontier is taught. The cottages and the church burn, the men who stood in front of them are cut down or roped, and the people who can be sold are driven south. His sister Hanna is among them.
He flees into the steppe on a Tatar horse, and a Cossack company takes him in. When the company has fought and Hanna is not among the people won back, his father and brother tell him it is over.
He goes after her on his own.
What follows is the thing the steppe does to a boy riding alone. He is caught. His arms and his legs are felt and his teeth are looked at, the way traders handle cattle at a market, and he is sold to a Tatar caravan. It carries him across Perekop into the Crimea, to a rich merchant's stockaded homestead, where nothing he can do by force will get him one step nearer to Hanna.
So he uses his head instead. He invents, he bargains, and he holds a fact back until it is worth something to the man who wants it.
He came for his sister. What he is finally offered is not what he set out for.
The man who wrote it
Andrii Chaikovsky (1857-1935) was a lawyer in the Galician country towns and one of the builders of Ukrainian civic life there - reading rooms, the Prosvita and Sich societies, the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen. He wrote for decades, and the historical novels he wrote for the young are what he is remembered for. За сестрою appeared in 1907, for an audience that was being taught in school that it had no history, and Ukrainian children have been reading it ever since.
What is in this edition
- The complete novel, all nine chapters, in a new English translation
- An introduction to Chaikovsky, and to the frontier the book is set on
- 37 short footnotes at the foot of the page - nothing to look up, nothing in the way
- 19 essays at the back, one for each stretch of the story, for afterwards
- A cast list, a chronology, a note on how the names are said, and a note on the words the translation keeps in the original and why
It was written for young readers and it still reads that way. Short sentences, plain narration, and dialogue carrying the scenes - with the slave trade at the middle of it, told straight.
Translated from the modernised Ukrainian electronic text of the novel, which a note at the front of the book describes in full.
