Pădureanca
Ioan Slavici
Pădureanca
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Busuioc, the richest farmer in Curtici, defies a cholera ban to bring the poor folk of the hills down to reap his wheat. Among them is Simina, an orphan girl from the forest villages, and Busuioc's only son Iorgovan, schooled in Arad and meant for a good match, cannot get her out of his head. Unable to have her and unable to give her up, he drifts into drink, debts and lies, while his father's farmhand Șofron courts the girl in earnest.
About the book
Pădureanca (The Girl from the Forest) is one of Ioan Slavici's best-known novellas, serialised in the Transylvanian newspaper Tribuna in the summer of 1884. It is set on the plain between the Mureș and the Criș rivers, where every harvest the people of the wooded hills come down to work the lowland farmers' fields. As in Moara cu noroc, Slavici follows a passion that a man cannot master, step by step and without sermon: the gap between rich and poor, the pride of a father, and a son's slow unravelling. It ends in tragedy, and it remains a classic of Romanian village prose. This edition is the original Romanian text.
About the author
Ioan Slavici (1848–1925) was a Romanian writer, journalist and teacher, born in Transylvania when it was still under Austro-Hungarian rule. He is one of the founders of Romanian realist prose: his village stories are about what money does to people who have never had any, told without sentiment about peasant life and without excusing anybody. He was imprisoned more than once for his journalism, in Hungary before the First World War and in Romania after it. His best-known works are the novella Moara cu noroc and the novel Mara.