Recommendations from the Kyiv Independent: The Hunters and the Hunted (Patreon)

Welcome to a new edition of Team Recommendations. I'm Yuliia Beba, Membership Retention Manager at the Kyiv Independent, and today I want to recommend a novel that has deeply moved me at different moments in my life, filled me with hope, and reminded me of the simple joy of getting lost in a great story.

It's The Hunters and the Hunted (Tyhrolovy in Ukrainian) by Ivan Bahriany. For decades, it was banned in the Soviet Union, while its author, Ivan Bahriany, was persecuted and forbidden from publication. Today, the novel is considered a classic of Ukrainian literature.

Partly inspired by Ivan Bahriany's own experience of Soviet imprisonment, the novel follows Hryhorii Mnohohrishnyi, a young Ukrainian engineer sentenced to 25 years in the Gulag. On his way to Siberia, he makes a daring escape from a prison train into the vast taiga. Exhausted and close to death, he is rescued by the Sirko family — Ukrainian settlers who have preserved their traditions, language, and love of freedom while building a life in the wilderness hunting tigers.

As Hryhorii learns their way of life and finds love and hope again, an NKVD officer relentlessly pursues him, determined to return him to the Gulag.

The book first came into my hands when I was sixteen. Like many high school students in the early 2010s, I wasn't expecting much from the Ukrainian literature curriculum. I imagined another tragic story about suffering and oppression. The Hunters and the Hunted is indeed about struggle, but it is unlike anything else I have read.

It is an unforgettable adventure story about survival, love, courage, and refusing to surrender your freedom. Despite its subject, this is not a heavy book to get through. It's dynamic, suspenseful, full of compelling characters, and surprisingly life-affirming. It was also the first book that made me genuinely want to explore Ukrainian literature beyond what we read at school. It opened the door to so many other incredible Ukrainian authors.

I returned to this novel after Russia's full-scale invasion. In those first months, I couldn't read anything except the news. When I finally returned to books, The Hunters and the Hunted was one of the first I picked up. Somehow, Hryhorii's courage felt strikingly familiar. His determination to remain free, even when everything was against him, reminded me of what I was seeing every day in Ukraine.

Perhaps that's why one line from the novel has become so well known:

"The brave always have happiness."

Maybe it isn't always true. But believing in it is what keeps us going.

If you decide to read The Hunters and the Hunted, I'd love to hear what you think. You can email me at y.beba@kyivindependent.com and share your impressions after reading. I'd be happy to continue the conversation.

Best,

Yuliia