Character guide

Unknown

major

Also known as me, thee, mine, myself

This speaker is less a person than a pressure gauge for Ukraine's grief, slipping into the masks of a girl waiting for a drowned lover, a nun cursing her stolen youth, and a prophet tearing icons from church walls. The recurring ache is abandonment—by a lover, by God, by history—and the recurring answer is defiant tenderness, as when she vows to bloom as a red viburnum over a grave so strangers cannot trample it. These voices set the book's emotional register: intimate loss scaled up into national lament.

The Servant

supporting

Also known as the servant, herself, Servant Anne

Anna moves through the farm as its invisible hinge—bathing the child Mark, sewing, singing, weeping alone at night while the family sleeps. Everyone treats her as a servant, yet her care for Mark exceeds duty, and when his wedding approaches she flees to Kiev on pilgrimage rather than sit in the mother's chair. Her buried claim on him turns every small kindness into quiet agony, and the household's cheerful arrangements press steadily toward the moment her silence can no longer hold.

Mark

supporting

Also known as VIII Now Mark

Mark is the household's hope: he hauls ox-teams to Crimea for salt and cloth, brings Katherine rich fabric and Anna a lace-trimmed bonnet, and sings on the road home while sorrow gathers ahead of him. His goodness is uncomplicated, which is exactly what makes him vulnerable—he loves the servant Anna as a second mother without knowing why she weeps. His homecoming collides with her deathbed confession, and the poem turns on whether a son can absorb a truth that arrives only as she stops breathing.

Katherine

major

Also known as Kate, gentle Katherine, Daughter Katherine

Katherine is the household's steady warmth—nursing the sick woman through nights without sleep, running to meet Mark's oxen, praying as if in a dream when he finally appears. She loves generously and is loved in return, but the dying servant asks her to leave before the confession, placing her outside a secret that concerns her marriage. Her grace under that exclusion, and her role as the bridge between Mark and the home he returns to, make her the quiet moral center of the poem's middle movement.

The Cossack

major

Also known as Cossack

He sits above Traktemir watching the sun set over a Ukraine he can no longer recognize, remembering when Cossack churches waited for warriors from the Delta and the Zaporogues held the steppe. His grief curdles into bitter speech—against the Poles, the squabbling officers, even against Christ for changing a people God made—yet he pulls back from cursing the sacred hills themselves. He is the book's memory made flesh, a man whose love for the land is so total he'd risk his soul for it, and whose lament frames the loss the other poems circle.

Trophimus

supporting

Also known as Old Trophimus, old Trophim

Trophimus is the household's surviving patriarch—grieving 'Stasia, then throwing himself into wedding preparations with kegs of home-brew and a joy that nearly outruns his old legs. He clings to the servant Anna as a substitute mother for Mark, pleading with her to stay, and reads her refusal as a slight he cannot parse. His blundering cheer against her hidden sorrow gives the poem its cruelest irony: a father celebrating a marriage while the woman who raised his son quietly leaves to die.

Anna

supporting

Anna lies anointed and failing while Katherine keeps vigil and old Trophim paces the yard like a stricken thing. She waits for Mark's caravan not for gifts but for the words she has hoarded a lifetime, asking forgiveness before she can name herself. Her revelation reorders the household's grief, turning a homecoming into a reckoning with blood, service, and the debts of the past.

The Tchumak

supporting

Also known as Tchumak

The Tchumak returns from beyond Lyman with another's possessions and no luck of his own, his wagon heavy with gifts for a family bracing for sorrow. He measures himself against luckier men, wondering why his strength and knowledge of the roads yield so little. His arrival stitches distance to homecoming, making every gift he carries a small argument against the fate he keeps singing about.

The Servant Who Cares Not for Wage

minor

A distinct servant figure who serves without expectation of payment.

The Cossacks

supporting

Also known as Cossacks

The Cossacks linger in the poem as memory and grievance: leaning crosses, the Dnieper singing below, Traktemir scattering its houses like a drunkard's bags. An old man on the hillside curses not the holy hills but the generals and Poles who let the Hetman's land be stripped. Their lost glory presses on the present, asking whether anything sacred can be rebuilt from quarreling and forgetting.

The Kobzar

supporting

The Kobzar moves through these poems as the keeper of memory, the voice that recites what the powerful would rather forget. He is the poet's kin and conscience, a figure whose blindness sharpens rather than dims what he sees of Ukraine's suffering. Without him the people's wounds would go unnamed; with him, every dirge becomes a quiet act of resistance.

Shevchenko

major

Also known as Taras Shevchenko

Shevchenko writes from disciplinary brigades and Siberian exile, an old man in his own poems gazing at hills he may never see again. He loves Ukraine so fiercely he fears blasphemy, and he aims his bitterest lines at educated Ukrainians who serve foreign oppressors for gain. His longing and his anger give the collection its spine, binding folk memory, prophecy, and protest into a single voice.

Hamaleia

supporting

Also known as Brave Hamaleia

Hamaleia dances through flames in glee, breaking fetters and loosing gray falcons who have forgotten the sound of a Christian word. He fights not for gold alone but against the shame of Cossack hands in chains, and his raid sets Byzantium roaring from its sleep. His ferocity gives the collection its heroic register, a reminder of what Cossack freedom once looked like when it struck back.

The German

minor

Also known as the mighty German

A foreign antagonist or figure of oppression in the poems.

Holy Barbara

minor

Also known as Barbara

A saintly female figure, possibly invoked in prayer poems.

The Dnieper

minor

Also known as Dnieper

The personified Dnieper River, a recurring symbolic presence.

Taras

supporting

Also known as Taras Traselo

Taras Traselo belongs to the old Cossack order the poem mourns — the world of Naleweiko and Paulioha, of hetmans and banners now lost to flame and flood. When his comrades ask what to do while their enemies feast, he answers with patience sharpened into strategy: let them feast, for night lends counsel. He leads the strike at the Alta, and the poem's grief and glory both pass through him — a man who taught the Poles a lesson and left a burial mound behind.

Stasia

minor

A minor female character, possibly a servant or village woman.

Mongols

minor

Historical invaders mentioned in narrative poems.

Kalina

minor

Also known as Kalina The Cranberry

A personified or symbolic figure, possibly representing the cranberry or a woman.

Tchabàn

minor

A shepherd character appearing in pastoral or exile poems.

The Poles

minor

Also known as the inhuman Poles

Polish oppressors or antagonists in historical poems.

Tchornobriva

minor

A female character, possibly a lover or mourner, with dark brows.

Bosphorus

minor

Also known as great Bosphorus

The personified Bosphorus strait, appearing in exile poems.

Topolia

minor

A named female character or personification, possibly a poplar tree.