Lina Kostenko’s Berestechko at the Literature Museum

The Lybid Publishers’ launch of the book Berestechko, which they published for Lina Kostenko’s jubilee, took place last weekend at the National Museum of Literature. The presentations of both books, actually, Berestechko and Hiacinth Sun, held in the Ukrainian Home, gathered full houses. They were followed by readers’ conferences in Donetsk and Sevastopol. The public’s interest is quite understandable, as Kostenko’s words literally fill people’s spiritual-intellectual space. “Lina Kostenko belongs to people who are distinguished by their dramatic feeling of the world. The essence of her talent is sensitivity to drama and turns of history,” literary critic Volodymyr Panchenko noted, “So it is no surprise that planning to write a cycle of works in which Ukrainian history is reflected upon over broad swathes of time, the writer could not omit the year 1651, the Berestechko Battle, and the shock experienced by Bohdan Khmelnytsky when he lost it. The novel is written as the Hetman’s inner monologue. Clearly, this monologue cannot but revolve around the following questions of utmost importance, ‘Why did we lose?’ and ‘What to do after the defeat?’ So, Khmelnytsky gets married after that. Kostenko contemplates the phenomenon of Ukrainian defeats and our ability to overcome them. Commenting on the novel’s release, she said that the work is about victory over a defeat.”