Konotop, some time in the eighteenth century. Captain Mykyta Ulasovych Zabryokha commands a hundred Kozaks and cannot count past thirty. His scribe, Prokip Ryhorovych Pistryak, answers every question in a fog of archaic church language that his captain does not understand and is too proud to admit he does not understand. Between them they decide that the drought punishing the town must be the work of witches, and that the sensible course is to round up the local women and throw them in the pond.

What follows is one of the funniest books in Ukrainian literature, and one of the cruellest. The witch Yavdokha Zubykha floats when she should sink, mocks her judges from the water, and then takes her revenge the slow way, through a love charm that ruins every person who asked her for help. Nobody in this story gets what they wanted. Everybody gets what they deserved.

Hryhoriy Kvitka-Osnovyanenko (1778 to 1843) is widely called the father of Ukrainian prose. He wrote The Witch of Konotop in 1833 and published it in 1836, and it has been part of the Ukrainian canon almost ever since. It has never before appeared in English. The obstacle was always the language: the book runs from Old Church Slavonicisms in the scribe's mouth to broad village speech in the captain's, and the comedy lives in the gap between them. Michael M. Naydan and Alla Perminova solve it with a pseudo Elizabethan English and King James cadences for the scribe, set against the plain warm voice of the narrator. The volume also carries Tumbleweed, a very different piece of work.

A poor man is murdered on the road for the money sewn into his footwraps, and the crime is uncovered by a tumbleweed rolling across a field as though pushed by the hand of God. Where The Witch of Konotop is farce with a knife in it, Tumbleweed is a quiet story about poverty, conscience and the limits of getting away with something. Readers who know Mykola Hohol will recognise the ancestry at once: the rambling folksy narrator, the absurd officials, the demons and witches drawn straight from village belief.

Kvitka-Osnovyanenko got there first. Folklorist Natalie Kononenko contributes a guest essay on what Ukrainian tradition actually held about witches, born and learned, and on how far Kvitka-Osnovyanenko departed from it. Michael M. Naydan adds a biographical note and an account of the translation. Published with the support of the Translate Ukraine Translation Program. Translated from the Ukrainian by Michael M. Naydan and Alla Perminova. Edited by Ludmilla A. Trigos.