The Lost Letter

The cossack Vasyl is given a task: carry a letter from the hetman to the empress in St Petersburg. He takes his friend Andriy along. The road is long and everything is on it: a tavern, a witch, the devil, a lost letter, a card game, a palace. One night Vasyl loses the letter and has to play cards with the devil to get it back. He reaches Petersburg in the end, and what goes on at the empress's court gets mixed up with the way cossacks tell a story. Borys Ivchenko directs the Ukrainian film; seventy-nine minutes, with Ivan Mykolaichuk as Vasyl. It is adapted from the story in Gogol's Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka; the screenplay is by Ivan Drach, who added Ukrainian folk songs and cossack legends to Gogol's text. It was banned by the Soviet censors and could not be shown until the last years of the Soviet Union.