Volodymyr Gzhytsky – författare

A memoir in novel form, Night and Day is the third novel in a trilogy tracing the life of Mykola Stepanovych Haievsky, both a self-portrait of Gzhytsky and a depiction of a Galician intellectual of the first half of the twentieth century. The title of the first part, Into the Wide World, conveys Haievsky's decision to entrust his fate to the nascent Soviet Union, while that of the second part, Great Hopes, reaffirms (with accompanying evil omens) his faith in the future of the Soviet Union. The title of the third part, Night and Day, conveys several ideas: the disillusionment of imprisonment and exile, followed by renewed hopes (explicit in the final words); constant unremitting and repetitive sequence of night and day in the North, with overtones of Gzhytsky's love of nature; the white nights and "black days", the more general implications of the inseparability of good and evil and the great power of fate; and, though this is most certainly an exaggeration, relations between man and woman, a theme given prominence throughout the trilogy, particularly in this third part, with its setting in the Soviet prison camps.