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kabulka's review
adventurous
emotional
funny
informative
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.5
naverhtrad's review
4.0
Full review can be read here: https://heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2019/10/vazovs-under-yoke.html
Under the Yoke was actually published in Britain before it reached native audiences in Bulgaria, and it had an undeniable impact. The sympathy and the pity that was roused in Morris’s noble breast for the Bulgarians can be felt in Ivan Vazov’s prose in every page, nearly every sentence. In terms of its sheer literary quality, it’s masterful, and suffers only from a few traces of turgidity. It deftly combines elements of satirical comedy with its overall tragœdian outlook. It explores the natures of heroism and cowardice – both moral and physical. It draws somewhat caricatured, yet vivid and poignant, images of the political trends in Vazov’s Bulgaria, in ways that remind one strongly of the writing of Nikolai Gogol – Taras Bulba in particular. It spends time to portray the inward lives and commitments of its protagonists – particularly Boicho Ognyanov and Doctor Sokolov, the two primary revolutionaries – in ways that show Vazov to have been a pupil also of Dostoevsky.
Yes – Vazov was incontrovertibly a literary Russophile. He himself is not coy about showing it, with Dostoevsky’s name being mentioned at several places in the text. But his work is quite original in that it explores the peculiarities of the Bulgarian situation in lights that can be unflattering. He muses deeply on what might have caused the rebellion to succeed or fail, what caused one village to take up arms against the Turks and another to surrender. He depicts the soaring hopes of the Bulgarian revolutionaries and the ordinary people that followed them. He also does not shy away from the grisly realities of defeat, meaning not only genocide and (not uncommonly) rape as weapons of war, but also the more pathetic realities of informing, favour-currying and backstabbing that were the means of self-preservation among a populace that had much to fear from Turkish repression.
But what struck me the most strongly about the text was Vazov’s tacit understanding of the folk-poetics of the desperate. Here he does not come off as necessarily a literary Russophile, but he does observe the folk tradition with the appreciative eye of one of his British near-contemporaries like GK Chesterton or JRR Tolkien...
I still feel as though I have not done a very great service to Under the Yoke. I have dwelt here mainly on the conscious similarities Vazov’s writing has to a most un-revolutionary author in another country. And yet it is a martial epic tragœdy – a revolutionary epic tragœdy. It dwells profoundly on the paired themes of revenge and forgiveness, honour and degradation, in such a way that even someone who is not particularly inclined to nationalism must be stirred, if he has a heart at all.
Under the Yoke was actually published in Britain before it reached native audiences in Bulgaria, and it had an undeniable impact. The sympathy and the pity that was roused in Morris’s noble breast for the Bulgarians can be felt in Ivan Vazov’s prose in every page, nearly every sentence. In terms of its sheer literary quality, it’s masterful, and suffers only from a few traces of turgidity. It deftly combines elements of satirical comedy with its overall tragœdian outlook. It explores the natures of heroism and cowardice – both moral and physical. It draws somewhat caricatured, yet vivid and poignant, images of the political trends in Vazov’s Bulgaria, in ways that remind one strongly of the writing of Nikolai Gogol – Taras Bulba in particular. It spends time to portray the inward lives and commitments of its protagonists – particularly Boicho Ognyanov and Doctor Sokolov, the two primary revolutionaries – in ways that show Vazov to have been a pupil also of Dostoevsky.
Yes – Vazov was incontrovertibly a literary Russophile. He himself is not coy about showing it, with Dostoevsky’s name being mentioned at several places in the text. But his work is quite original in that it explores the peculiarities of the Bulgarian situation in lights that can be unflattering. He muses deeply on what might have caused the rebellion to succeed or fail, what caused one village to take up arms against the Turks and another to surrender. He depicts the soaring hopes of the Bulgarian revolutionaries and the ordinary people that followed them. He also does not shy away from the grisly realities of defeat, meaning not only genocide and (not uncommonly) rape as weapons of war, but also the more pathetic realities of informing, favour-currying and backstabbing that were the means of self-preservation among a populace that had much to fear from Turkish repression.
But what struck me the most strongly about the text was Vazov’s tacit understanding of the folk-poetics of the desperate. Here he does not come off as necessarily a literary Russophile, but he does observe the folk tradition with the appreciative eye of one of his British near-contemporaries like GK Chesterton or JRR Tolkien...
I still feel as though I have not done a very great service to Under the Yoke. I have dwelt here mainly on the conscious similarities Vazov’s writing has to a most un-revolutionary author in another country. And yet it is a martial epic tragœdy – a revolutionary epic tragœdy. It dwells profoundly on the paired themes of revenge and forgiveness, honour and degradation, in such a way that even someone who is not particularly inclined to nationalism must be stirred, if he has a heart at all.
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