VII. New-Canadian Letters

LETTERS IN CANADA: 1950 423 du cinquantieme anniversaire de la Caisse populaire de Levis (Levis, Edns Le Quotidien; Federation des Caisses popuiaires, 59, avenue Begin, 233 pp., $1.75) . V EKEMAN ( VICTOR ), Creur brisc: melodrame en trois actes (48 pp., 7Sc.); Dne fille un peu bebete: une piece en un acte ( 16 pp.); La folie de Maurice: comedie en un acte (24 PP'J 3Se.); Heure de folie: melodrame en un acte (16 pp., 3Se.); Mariage d'argent au mariage d'amour: drame d'amour en trois actes (61 pp.• 7Sc. ) ; Le sourd volontaire : unc piece en un acte ( 16 pp.J 35e.) (Montreal, Edns du Levrier) . PIECE PRESENTEE: DELISLE (GEORGES). La melodic inachevee (Quebec, les Comedicns de Chez-Nous) . VII. NEW-CANADIAN LETTERS WATSON KiRKCONNELL Of the thirty-four titles surveyed in this category for 1950, twenty are by Ukrainian-Canadians, eight by Icelandic-Canadians, two by a German-Canadian, three by Jewish-Canadians, and one, in English, by a Byelorussian. Once more the Ukrainian community, not least by its sheer bulk, dominates the record. Within that community, moreover, a scholarly new-comer, the Metropolitan lIarion (Professor Ivan Ohienko), heads all the rest with six books and a pamphlet. The Metropolitan is a man of unusual versatility. He leads off with a five-act mystery play in rhymed quatrains, entitled The Birth of a People. This poetic drama is announced, moreover, as only the first part of a "philosophical tetralogy" entitled The Sea of Life. It opens with a "prologue in heaven" where the angel-choirs hymn the omnipotent Deity, and the Devil and the Lord engage in a verbal fencing-match. Thereafter it shifts more and more into dialogue by the pe.rnonified abstractions of a morality play: Health, Love, Hope, Knowledge, Evil, Sickness, Misfortune, War, Despair, Old Age, and Death, not to mention Earth, Sun, Moon and Stars. The forces of evil and good strive for possession of the Soul, and the Soul finally rests in the affirmation: "But I live towards God!" The play ends symbolically with a mother singing a lullaby over the cradle of her baby son, as the spiritual hope of life goes on. Also in quatrains but more ambitious in form is his Prometheus: Twilight of the Greek Gods, where his obvious model is Aeschylus. His treatment, however, is deliberately non-dramatic and his exposition is set forth in twelve lengthy strophes, from "The first peoples dwelt in darkness," to "And they nailed him to the crag." While the theme is ancient, the poem is full of modem overtones. Still another volume of poetry by the same author is Evening Sacrifice : Jesus and Barabbas, which is now in its third edition. It is essentially a sequence of devotional poems dealing with the events of UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, vol. XX, no. 4, July, 1951 424 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY Passion Week and ending with the triumphant hymn: "The crucified Jesus is risen I"~ The Metropolitan Ilarion is also a scholar. He has published in Winnipeg a 2DD-page critical edition of the Narrative of the Raid of Ihor, a tweUth-century dwarf epic that is the chief literary monument of early Slavic literature. For this he supplies the textus reeeptus, a literal prose version, an extended verse translation, a lengthy introduction , critical apparatus, a glossary, and notes. Side by side with this should be placed his hulky History of the Ukrainian Literary Language, in which he traces the literary speech of his nation from a past more venerable than that of Muscovy and in many respects independent of it. His brief pamphlet, Ukrainian Literary Language in the USSR, shows how the Bolsheviks, like the Tsars before them, have sought by violence and guile to assimilate forty million enslaved Ukrainians by warping their language closer and closer to Russian. The seventh volume of Metropolitan Ilarion is in the field of church history and deals with the unscrupulous assimilation of the Ukrainian church to that of Moscow in the later eighteenth century. Related at one point to the work of the Metropolitan is a monograph by Vasyl Chaplenko on The Language of the "Narrative of the Raid of Ihor," stressing its Kievan (i...