Na vysoké Polonině - Nová doba: Svár – Vincenz Stanislaw (2025)

This novel is part of the four-volume saga set in Hutsul land, a Carpathian region known as Verchovyna. The work combines stories of real and legendary figures with ethnographic descriptions of customs, festivals and events, portrayals of the landscape and everyday life, tales, legends and folk songs. Although the Hutsuls stand at its centre, the book also gives considerable space to the Armenian, Vlach and especially Jewish cultures settled in the region; the cave above the Cheremosh River is said to have been home to Ba'al Šem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. Its varied cultural layers are reflected in its form, which moves between fiction, reportage, essays, epic, folk storytelling and symposium. Stanislaw Vincenz calls Hutsul land a “Slavic Atlantis” and sees it as a source of human values from which contemporary European culture could draw. The most novelistic volume of the saga, it describes mountain people deciding to clear a large section of virgin forest and sell the timber in order to survive a year of famine. Conflict arises between traditional thinking and economic necessity, among lumberjacks from different villages, between tradition and modernity, and finally between people and a landscape unwilling to tolerate such a major intrusion. Completed in 1949, this ethnographic and philosophical novel has an exceptionally topical ecological resonance.