The Hunters and the Hunted

254 Pages·1957·4.555 MB·English

by  Ivan Bahrianyi, George S.N. Luckyj

THE HUNTERS AND THE HUNTED

THE HUNTERS
AND THE HUNTED
BY
IVAN BAHRIANY
ST MARTIN’S PRESS
NEW YORK
1957
ST MARTIN 'S PRESS INC
Ntw York
Affiliated publishers:
MACMILLAN AND COMPANY LIMITED
Loudon Bombay Calcutta Madras Melbourne
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OP CANADA LIMITED
Toronto
i» U.S.A, by
NOBLE OFFSET PRINTERS, Inc.
400 Lafayette Street
New York 3, N. Y.
Introduction
The author of this novel, Ivan Bahriany, was bom in 1907
in the province of Poltava. His father was a bricklayer; his
mother came of peasant stock. After attending a grammar
school and graduating from an industrial trade school,
Bahriany entered the Institute of Fine Arts in Kiev. He com­
pleted his course of study, but failed to gain a diploma be­
cause he was suspected of ‘political unreliability’. His first
poems and short stories began appearing in Soviet Ukrainian
periodicals in 1925. He was a member of the literary group
MARS (The Workshop of the Revolutionary Word) which
stood aloof from the official literary currents sponsored by
the Party. All members of MARS became victims of the
purge of Ukrainian literature in the early 1930’s.
Several of Bahriany’s collections of short stories, his long
poem Ave Maria, and the historical novel The Little Cliff were
published between 1926-32. His novel was severely attacked
by the Communist critics and condemned as nationalist and
counter-revolutionary. In 1932 Bahriany was arrested. After
spending eleven months in an isolation cell in prison, he was
sentenced to five years’ penal servitude. He served his sen­
tence in a Bamlag (a concentration camp on the Baikal-
Amur Main Line). In 1936, fearing that his sentence might,
as frequently happened, be renewed, he escaped. For two
years he was a free man, though pursued by the NKVD,
which seized him in 1938, while he was on a visit to his
mother in the Ukraine. He was rearrested and spent two
years and four months in a prison in Kharkiv, awaiting trial.
Finally, because of ill-health he was released, but compelled
to live in his home town under the surveillance of the local
police.
v
Introduction
During the Second World War Bahriany made his way to
the West Since 1945 he has lived in Germany, unable to
emigrate to the United States or Canada because he is suffer­
ing from tuberculosis. He continued writing after the war.
In 1945 he wrote a short pamphlet Why I Don't Want To Go
Home which was translated into several languages. Among
his other works are the novels The Orchard of Gethsemane
(1950) and The Ring of Fire (1953), a collection of poems,
The Golden Boomerang (1946), and a play, The General,
In 1943 Bahriany took part in the Ukrainian resistance
movement, and today he is the leader of the Ukrainian
Revolutionary Democratic Party, largely consisting of
Soviet Ukrainian refugees, dedicated to the idea of an inde­
pendent and democratic Ukraine.
University of Toronto George S. N. Luckyj
Contents
Pogt
INTRODUCTION V
I THE DRAGON I
2 THE WORLD ON WHEELS II
3 THE DUEL WITH DEATH 33
4 THE FAMILY OF TIGER-HUNTERS 50
5 TARGET PRACTICE 8l
6 A MEETING WITH THE MOROZ FAMILY 100
7 MEMENTO MORI 134
8 AUTUMN AND WINTER IN THE TAIGA I5I
9 KHABAROVSK RAIDED 169
10 AFTER ‘CATS’ 203
II NOTHING VENTURE, NOTHING WIN 228
VÜ

The dragon with wide-open fiery eyes, breathing sparks and
smoke, flew through the endless night, shaking the wilderness
with its mighty roar.
Not out of Chinese fairy tales nor from the pagodas of
Tibet but from somewhere in the centre of ‘The Land of the
Men-hunters’ it rushed over vast distances, across the endless
Urals, over the impassable steppes of Siberia, through the
grim Baikal and the wild watershed of Trans-Baikaha. It
wound itself around the peaks and rocks, sowing sparks and
stench into the sky. It burst like a flame above crevasses,
curled up and around steep precipices, flew like a whistling
spiral into the wild high lands, and disappeared suddenly
into the bowels of the earth. Far, far away it flew out of the
ground, shaking the night with its infernal laughter, like a
creature out of Hell.
This was not the legendary dragon of the Dalai Lama. It
was a real dragon, the biggest, the most fearful of all dragons;
neither Kozhumiak1 nor St. George could have dealt with it.
Sixty sections to this dragon. At the front there was a
fiery-eyed head — a huge two-eyed Cyclops, a super-loco-
motive J.S. (Joseph Stalin) ; at the rear, a super-locomotive
F.D. (Felix Dzerzhinsky). Sixty sections to this dragon,
each bristling with bayonets like a porcupine; sixty enormous
brown coffins each filled with helpless victims, each full of
living dead. Flickering eyes peered through the iron gratings,
1 Kozhumiak, a legendary Ukrainian hero, a dragon-slayer, renowned for
his physical strength.
I
The Hunters and the Hunted
through the darkness into a lost world, looking back to­
wards their motherland, bathed in sunlight, filled with the
laughter of children, of wives and families left behind. The
belly of the dragon was full of these eyes, the eyes of those
condemned by the GPU, the NKVD.
And there was no legendary Kozhumiak to save them.
No one to hear their cries as they were borne into the fright­
ful unknown, across thirty lands to the edge of the world.
Occasionally a guard, imagining some plot to escape, lost
his nerve and fired a shot blindly into the treacherous night.
And although no one could jump off and live at this speed,
and although no one so well guarded and sealed could
escape, still — the guard must be careful and ‘observant’,
for he had been assigned a task of ‘honour and glory and
heroism’. But perhaps he too was frightened, perhaps his
head was spinning, riding on the tail of this diabolical comet.
Scores, hundreds, thousands of kilometres slipped by as
the dragon crossed the meridian and described a gigantic
parabola somewhere near the forty-ninth parallel. No
ordinary express moved like this, only these fantastic trains
of death. The ‘specials’ of the GPU and NKVD drove at
this mad pace, for they were all bound for a secret destin­
ation festooned with bayonets and searchlights. These were
the fantastic yet real accessories of a legend; a secret legend
about the disappearance of souls.
At various places the express stopped only for a brief
moment and guards ran along the roofs, jumping from car
to car, poking sticks into the iron gratings to see whether a
break had been effected anywhere or whether there were any
attempts to escape. Another group of guards ran along the
sides of the express knocking on the cars — perhaps a bolt
had been loosened, perhaps from within one of these cars an
enemy had plotted against the State, against law and order.
After all, it was their task of ‘glory and honour’ to see that
these prisoners reached their destination.
The Commandant of the express ran along, starting from
the engine, and, with his head high, cast a worried look
2