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Maria Matios “Beech Land”

There is little written about Bukovyna in school textbooks. It’s good if there is a paragraph or two on the topic. It sometimes seems to me to be a white spot in Ukraine.

The book impressed me. It resonated with orphans in my body, heavy heartbeats, and soul pain.

Maria Matios is a master of words. Each of her books is poetry in prose. Her comparisons, metaphors, and epithets are so rich and vivid that everything described is experienced as if it were happening to you right now. The fact that the book is filled with dialects and a certain surzhyk makes it even more realistic and lively.

It is such a depth and simplicity that fascinates you and does not let go of you for a moment.

I read it for a long time. No, not because it’s boring or uninteresting, but because nowadays I have a catastrophic lack of time for paper books. Those 20-30 pages every night only piqued my curiosity and kept me dreaming all night. I finished the last 300 pages the day before yesterday and yesterday. I could no longer live in such a chaos of unread thoughts and stories. Now I’m sad that Beechland is over. I don’t know how much longer I will carry its depth and greatness in me. A long time. I hope a very long time.

You know, this is the first time when there is no confusion about the characters. Sometimes I’ve had the experience of “losing” someone in 500-700 pages of text and then being surprised to realize, reading other people’s reviews and feedback, that there was also this character, and I don’t even remember him. And here everyone is so bright and special. Just the Vasylkos alone are worth it! And the Wagners? The Berehivchuks. The sheep farmers. The Shelhorns. And even Piddubnyi and Drozdov.

And Fedora. It seemed to me that the author cherished her the most. Her image is simply perfect. It is revealed by every thought, action, dream, deed, desire. Every word of Fedora’s is balanced and precise. She is someone you seem to have known all your life. For me, Fedora became the center of the book. She personified Bukovyna at different stages of its historical development.

Speaking of The Beechland, I would like to mention the incredible descriptions of nature. It’s like watching a cool movie. Those mountains, beeches, spruces, meadows with stitches, the land-everything is described with a vivid word, full of love, wonder, and admiration.

What is the book about? About everything, but above all about love for the native land. About humanity and faith. About care and concern. About invaders and enemies. About struggle and death. About wounds and pain, about sadness and joy.

And about Bukovyna. The historical background that formed the basis of the book is very powerful and true. It does not allow us to forget for a moment who is a friend and who is an enemy.

Tell me, people, how can pro-Russian forces be brought to power with Matios, Zabuzhko, and Shklyar? How can you miss the Soviet Union, even if you have a distant relative in your history, repressed, shot, taken to Siberia or camps? How? Have you forgotten how to read? Or have you lost your memory?

A huge tome that impresses not only with its volume but also with its large-scale content. Maria Matios has described the history of one of the parts of our long-suffering country with all the skill that is unique to her.

Bukovyna was inhabited not only by Ukrainians, but also by representatives of other nationalities who spoke different languages and had different origins, but they were always patriots of their land, where they lived, grew up, died, and defended it from all kinds of invaders and wanderers. Maria Matios was quite scrupulous in her research of historical and folklore material, so the story turned out to be so realistic and interesting that it allows you to study the history of Ukraine not only by reading dry material from historical scholarly works, but also by reading her book. The reader can draw from it a wealth of factual material and learn many interesting facts that are not taught in school.

The author tried to convey the spirit of the era, to show how ordinary people lived, what they dreamed of, what they hoped for, what they aspired to, how they treated the authorities, etc.

Great book. Haven’t finished it yet… The author Maria Matios is an outstanding philologist and writer. Ukrainian language inspires admiration. The story of the land, the people, the generations makes you think both about the meaning of life and established principles, and in many ways agree with what people think about, what they dream about, what they believe in… THEOLOGICAL reflections from page 1 to page 35 read several times, trying to understand the unusual monologues and dialogues of God and Angels – White and Black. The author’s reflections on behalf of God are an attempt by anyone to understand the essence of God. These reflections are interesting and profound. However, the dialogues between the White Angel and the Black Angel and the extended dialogue involving God raise some doubts, in terms of their correctness according to a spiritual education… I believe that this part of the book needs a review by the holy fathers, as it is very important for the novel as a whole. Unfortunately, no one who has written a review is paying attention to this initial part of the novel. And yet the author put THEOLOGY as the title part, as a guide for people’s lives. After all, according to THIS GUIDE the entire history of life of the region is built. That is, I would like readers to pay attention to the title chapter of the novel, as the author, it seems to me, considers this chapter as the MAIN RULE OF LIFE ON EARTH and according to this RULE OF GOD and develop further events …, then harmonizing with God’s ORDER, then breaking it, causing complex perepetias of human life and the Beech Land and the whole civilization …

I read the book with great pleasure … I read slowly and thoughtfully. To the author THANK YOU!

Maria Matios’s novel is so majestic, large-scale, and detailed that at the beginning you have to go back a few pages to make sure you remember the names of the characters and their genealogy correctly. And in the middle of the novel, you become so immersed in the world of Bukovyna that it seems as if your house is lost somewhere between the mountains, and at night the Ounists may come and ask for food, and danger from the Soviets lurks every moment and someone invisible is watching your every move.

I have to admit that this part of Ukrainian history was not entirely clear and familiar to me, and somehow it happened that little attention was paid to the OUN members and their struggle against the system in history classes. Maybe because I am from the right-bank Ukraine, and we did not have such fighters. While reading the novel, I was imbued with the spirit of these brave guys and wanted to learn more. That’s why Maria Matios inspired me, and I’m sure others, to look into history with her novel. How great was my surprise when all the characters in the novel came to life! Even the messenger Motrya is a very real woman. I’m proud to be involved in the history of the country where such heroes lived and writers who make the lives of these heroes eternal live on.

It is definitely the best book of the last 5 years, and maybe even more. Despite the volume, it is easy and fast to read. I felt as if I had lived through the life of each of the characters, and this is the most important task of a work of fiction – to give us a spiritual experience.

I have already read “Sweet Daria” and am ordering other books by Matios. The author writes very meaningfully, beautifully, and with value.

I closed the last page of the book and felt as if I had lived another life. This book is truly an event in contemporary Ukrainian literature. Very high-quality prose, the spirit of the epochs is conveyed in great detail and volume – you seem to see and feel everything visually. You can feel the work with the archives – a whole layer of the region’s history has been studied, rethought and presented as accessible as possible. I found the book both difficult and easy to read at the same time. From the very beginning-the dialog between the two angels-I couldn’t concentrate. I generally do not like such “divine” philosophical digressions, because I never understand what the author wants to say with this and I find it ridiculous and sometimes pathetic that people want to put their thoughts into the heads of angels, Satan, or God… I mean, it is clear that all these deep thoughts are actually people’s thoughts, and in the context of what I want to get from reading a book, they are not interesting to me. So, after trying in vain to concentrate for several pages and failing to catch the essence of the angelic dialog, I just decided not to waste my precious time and skipped the introduction with the angels. The first half of the book was a bit difficult to read – it was no longer a fiction novel, but a documentary in a fictional setting. However, it is quite important for understanding historical processes and events. Therefore, I perceived it more as a study of the history of Bukovyna than as fiction. But starting in the twentieth century, with the story of Fedirka and Petro Siruk, it was already quite difficult to tear myself away from the novel, and I simply devoured the book, trying to return to reading every free minute. I can’t help but notice that you don’t read the book, but physically taste it – the text is so skillfully and talentedly written, the language is so colorful, the author has such a sense of the need for a moment, a word, a phrase, a description If you compare books to food, where there is haute cuisine and fast food – in the first case you slowly savor it, tasting every bite, enjoying every moment, and in the second you just eat quickly because you are hungry and the result seems to be the same – to be satiated, but in fact the sensations are different, and in literature there is haute cuisine and literary fast food. So this book is not only haute cuisine, it is the highest cuisine:-) You savor every word, sentence, phrase, image – it is a real physical pleasure to read. The plot is the history of the region, the history of Bukovyna over the past 300 years. And Bukovyna here is a separate character, a separate living being, and human destinies only complement and shade its life through the ages. The lives and fates of people here serve as scenery, and it’s a little uncomfortable when you think that your life is a shade or a scenery of some historical process. The only drawback of the book, in my opinion, is its volume. It is so large and heavy that it is impossible to carry it around, and since I personally can only read in the subway or in lines somewhere, it took me much longer to read it than I would have liked, because I had no way to carry it around. I think it would be more appropriate to split the book into 2 volumes or publish it in two books 🙂