King Stakh's Wild Hunt - Hardcover

by Uladzimir Karatkevich (Author), Mary Mintz (Translator)

"A haunting piece of gothic intrigue, and a meditation on the destiny of a people."

Autumn 1888. Andrey Belaretsky, a young ethnographer travelling the countryside to collect folk legends, is caught by a storm and takes shelter at Marsh Firs, the seat of the fading Yanovsky family. His host is Nadzeya, eighteen years old and the last of her line.

She tells him about the curse laid on her house two centuries earlier, and about the apparitions that foretell her early death. She lives in unbroken fear. Belaretsky, a rationalist by training and temperament, begins to look into the family's history, and the deeper he goes the more the past closes around him. Then the Wild Hunt turns its attention to him: twenty silent horsemen who ride out across the marshes and kill everyone they overtake.

To free Nadzeya he has to understand what the hunt actually is, and the answer lies somewhere between an ancient European legend, two hundred years of family history, and the marshes themselves.

Uladzimir Karatkevich is credited with creating the Belarusian historical novel, and he gave his country the name it still carries in its own imagination, the land under white wings. A trained philologist and a passionate historian and archaeologist, he made the history of Belarus into fiction with a conviction few writers have matched. King Stakh's Wild Hunt is among his most celebrated works and was filmed in 1979.

It works on two levels at once. As gothic intrigue it is genuinely frightening, built on the imagery of Belarusian folk tradition and paced like the best suspense fiction. As something more, it is a meditation on what a people inherits, what it owes the dead, and how long a curse can be made to last if enough people believe in it.

Translated from the Belarusian by Mary Mintz.