Maria (Ukrainian novel)
book by Ulas Samchuk
Maria (Ukrainian: Марія) is a 1934 historical novel by the Ukrainian author Ulas Samchuk. The novel, dedicated "to the mothers who died of hunger in Ukraine in 1932–33", follows the life of a village woman, Maria, between the 1861 emancipation of serfs to the 1932–33 Holodomor. Maria, the first work of fiction to treat the Ukrainian famine, has been included in post-1991 Ukrainian school curricula.
The book is organised into three parts: A Book about the Birth of Maria, A Book of Maria's Days, and A Book about Bread. Orphaned at the age of six, Maria is illiterate and forced into work when young. Her first three children die of infectious disease. Her son Maksym, before his murder by his father, is a poor farmer who evicts his parents, denounces his brother, and watches his sister starve. Maksym "combines many features of the Holodomor perpetrator: a quisling, communist, profiteer, sadist and Russian-speaking". Behind Maksym, as the 'Other' bearing ultimate responsibility for the famine, lies the Soviet state centered in Moscow. "Our country has not known such a Tsar-like plundering", exclaims one tortured character.
“Maria (Ukrainian novel)” enters the record as book by Ulas Samchuk. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Maria, Ukrainian and novel can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 14, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q12121692. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1934, 1932, 1861 and 1991.
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This entry incorporates text from “Maria (Ukrainian novel)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.