Passion's Bitter Cup (Ukrainian Male Authors, 1880-1920)

The theme of Passion's Bitter Cup is the cost of living and loving passionately, be it a matter of temperament or philosophical conviction. Some of the stories are sentimental and romantic. Others are hard-hitting depictions of rape, abortion, suicide, crimes of passion, prostitution, the plight of fallen women, and the licentiousness of the upper classes. Several describe women's initial forays into the workplace and their sexual exploitation by privileged males. Some of the short fiction in this anthology and its companion volume, Riddles of the Heart, were deemed immoral or amoral, and its authors were censured by their more conservative peers. The works considered a threat to the social order were banned and, like similar groundbreaking literature in Western Europe, did not become generally available to Ukrainian readers until several decades later. The social issues addressed in the book are disturbing, and the philosophical positions espoused by some of the protagonists may still elicit strong emotional reactions, but the content that scandalized the reader of the day has long since lost its shock value.Today's readers are more likely to commend the authors for their candid exploration of issues of morality and equity in male-female relationships. Several stories reflect a disintegrating social order, moral confusion, and a consuming search for mmeaning in a time of tumultous social change, a time when young members of the emancipated intelligentsia were caught in a maelstrom of anticlericalis, feminism, and a fanatical intolerance of dogmatism, moral rigidity, and hypocrisy. Present-day readers should not find it difficult to relate to the short fistion in this book.