I found this novel compelling, a page turner. A detective/ghost story. Without spoilers this text in Goodreads about the english translation gives a good synopsis:
King Stakh's Wild Hunt tells the tale of Andrey Belaretsky, a young folklorist who finds himself stranded by a storm in the castle of Marsh Firs, the seat of the fading aristocratic Yanovsky family. Offered refuge by Nadzeya, the last in the Yanovskys’ line, he learns of the family curse and terrible apparitions that portend her early death and trap her in permanent, maddening fear.
As Belaretsky begins to unravel the secrets of the Yanovskys, he himself becomes quarry of the Wild Hunt, silent phantoms who stalk the marshes on horseback and deliver death to all who cross their path. He must uncover the truth behind the ghostly hunt to release Nadzeya from her fate and undo the curse that hangs over the marshes.
A jewel of Belarusian classic literature, King Stakh's Wild Hunt is one of Karatkevich's most critically acclaimed works that also inspired a 1979 film adaptation. Based on an ancient European legend, this suspense masterpiece taps into the imagery of the country’s rich cultural heritage to offer both a haunting piece of gothic intrigue as well as a profound meditation on the destiny of the Belarusian people.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/161 ... Lqn&rank=2
Language-wise this novel was hard, a tough nut to crack. Many unknown words, and besides that, many words which I couldn't find even in my biggest paper monolingual russian dictionary (the 2000 Kuznetsov Dictionary with 130,000 words) . This was driving me nuts. I was dumbfounded. Never had I encountered such a difficult translated text. Then I did three things: got the original Belarusian text, shelfed my paper dictonaries and began to use a russian monolingual multidictionary online search (23 dictionaries simultaneously): slovari.ru . Using these tools I managed to unravel the linguistic mystery of the russian version's difficulty. I found out that many belarusian words were translated by means of mysterious russian cognates. And these mysterious russian cognates were giving me trouble because all of them were and are dialectal words in Russian!
For instance, the belarusian verb "хаваць/схаваць" (to hide) was translated sometimes not as the standard russian verbs meaning "to hide" ("прятать/спрятать" or "скрывать/скрыть"), but as an obscure dialectal russian cognate "ховать/сховать".
After discovering this I feel vindicated and could resume the reading using slovari.ru as my weapon of choice, although I must confess that I stumbled upon a word that even this site couldn't give me a clue of (the verb "шкодовать", whose existence in Russian, even as a dialectal word, is doubtful (see this discussion: https://russian.stackexchange.com/quest ... in-russian)
Books read: 18.
Pages read: 4,997.