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THE ENCHANTED DESNA

THE ENCHANTED DESNA

$24.00Price

ISBN: 979-8-9890965-5-8

Pub Date: Spring 2026

Pages: 90


By Oleksandr Dovzhenko

Dzvinia Orlowsky and Ali Kinsella, translators

The Enchanted Desna, Oleksander Dovzhenko’s luminous autobiographical “film tale,” unfolds the filmmaker’s childhood along the Desna River, where memory, myth, and nature coalesce in scenes of quiet wonder. Written during years of exile and only published posthumously, it introduces us to that twilight place where opposites overlap and magic becomes possible. The silent details of childhood—the scents and rhythms—are given voice through the filmmaker’s lyrical prose. He recognizes the preordained cycle of life and death amidst nature’s beauty and bounty. In Dzvinia Orlowsky’s and Ali Kinsella’s attentive translation, Dovzhenko’s spirit returns as Ukraine’s native son, offering English readers a vital testament to memory, loss, and cultural survival.


    A story told beautifully and movingly between the paintings of Chagall and a movie by Béla Tarr, The Enchanted Desna is a rare thing: a novelization-before-the-fact of a movie made after the author’s death. The Ukrainian Oleksander Dovzhenko was perhaps the greatest of Soviet film directors, with an imagination that took in all the beauty of natural world and mankind’s toil in it. He was also the most unfairly treated director of his generation, maligned and banned by Stalin. This superb translation of his book can only arouse new interest in his masterful filmmaking, still too unknown to Anglophone audiences.

    —A. S. Hamrah, author of Algorithm of the Night and The Earth Dies Streaming


    This brilliant translation by Orlowsky and Kinsella of Dovzhenko’s masterpiece carries us into the fascinating realm of Ukrainian rural life in the early twentieth century. Keen-eyed and compassionate Sashko vividly describes tender and terrifying family members, quirky villagers, clueless clergy, and an array of charming animals, including a rascally dog named Pirate. The dark and whimsical humor, the scything swing of enchantment and disillusion, allow us to experience rich folk traditions and a poor Soviet agricultural economy endured through backbreaking labor, food, drink, love and imagination. The Enchanted Desna is a powerful testament to Ukrainian cultural identity and an important contribution to world literature.

    —Henry Hughes, author of Sergeant Dark, editor of River Stories


    Oleksander Dovzhenko’s The Enchanted Desna is not just the author’s return to the headwaters of the great and picturesque river of his childhood, on whose banks coexist the living and the dead, humans and nature, the magic of a child’s gaze and the tragic burden of history. It is a book about how the imagination, memory, and love for one’s earth form a person and give them the strength not to break even in the most trying of times and how individual recollections become the emotional landscape of a nation.

    ­—Halyna Kruk, Ukrainian poet, finalist for the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize


    Oleksandr Dovzhenko (1894–1956) was a Ukrainian filmmaker, writer, and artist, widely regarded as one of the most original voices of early Soviet cinema. Born in the Chernihiv region, he first trained as a painter and diplomat before turning to film in the 1920s. His groundbreaking silent films, including Zvenyhora (1927), Arsenal (1929), and Earth (1930), combined visual lyricism with folk imagery and political themes, earning him international acclaim. His later autobiographical work The Enchanted Desna exemplifies an innovative “film-tale” form, blending memory, myth, and personal reflection. Revered as Ukraine’s poet of cinema, Dovzhenko left a legacy that continues to influence world film and literature.



    Dzvinia Orlowsky is a Pushcart Prize poet, award-winning translator, and a founding editor of Four Way Books. She is the author of six poetry collections including Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry. She is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Grant, a Sheila Motton Book Award, and a co-recipient of a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship. Her first collection, A Handful of Bees, was reprinted as part of the Carnegie Mellon University Press Classic Contemporary Series. Her new poetry book, Those Absences Now Closest, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon in fall 2024.




    Ali Kinsella holds an MA in Slavic studies from Columbia University and has been translating from Ukrainian for twelve years. She won the 2019 Kovaliv Fund Prize for her translation of Taras Prokhasko’s novella, Anna’s Other Days, forthcoming from Harvard University Press. In 2021, she was awarded a Peterson Literary Fund grant to translate Vasyl Makhno’s Eternal Calendar. She co-edited Love in Defiance of Pain (Deep Vellum Publishing, 2022), an anthology of short fiction to support Ukrainians during the war. Her other published translations include pieces by Stanislav Aseyev, Lyubko Deresh, Kateryna Kalytko, Myroslav Laiuk, Bohdana Matiiash, Olena Stiazhkina, and others.

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