"Three Cuckoos with a Bow" Summary

• "Three Cuckoos with a Bow" Summary

Literary Passport

• Kind of literature: epic.
• Genre: Novella.
• Theme: Complexity of human relationships, expressed through the story of unhappy love.
• Idea: Glorification of love as a high Christian value that elevates a person above everyday life and cleanses their soul.
• Characters: Narrator, his parents (Mykhailo and Sofia), Martha Yarkova, Uncle Levko the postman.
• Compositional and stylistic features: The novella has the epigraph "Dedicated to all-encompassing love," which aptly reveals the main idea. The novella deeply reflects the author's inner world and worldview.
• The work consists of three novellas and a framing story. The letter seems to shift time planes, bringing the father closer to his son; it is a message into eternity. Without the letter, the love story would be incomplete, because we learn from the letter that Martha's love overcomes distance, and her soul is next to Mykhailo.
• The son-narrator unites the three novellas into one whole.

Plot and Characters

• The plot centers around a "love triangle." Martha, married to an unloved man, loves another man, the narrator's father. Her love for Mykhailo is not treacherous or sinful. She does not aspire to someone else's happiness.
• Soon, he is sent to Siberia for hard labor, from where he never returns. Mykhailo is survived by his wife Sofia and a young son. However, the events depicted in the work seem to fade into the background. The main focus is on the feelings and suffering of the characters.
• There is no jealousy between the two women, Sofia and Martha. They are united by grief and longing. Sofia is not angry with Martha because she understands her feelings. Martha's love is pure and unpretentious, without envy towards her rival.
• From time to time, letters arrive from Mykhailo to his wife. In them, he writes that he loves her and their son. Martha senses the arrival of a letter from Mykhailo earlier than Sofia; she asks the postman to give it to her just to hold it in her hands.
• In the last letter, Mykhailo asks Sofia to send Martha "three cuckoos with a bow," because he feels that "Martha's unhappy soul is walking around here near me."