The Road Home

The Road Home is the third volume of Polish poet and novelist Józef Lobodowski’s Ukrainian Trilogy, written between 1955 and 1960. Stas Majewski, the teenage hero of the Ukrainian Trilogy, returns to his family home after the turbulent events of the earlier volumes, only to encounter a world transformed by war, revolution, and displacement. Separated from his family and forced into a harsh struggle for survival, he begins a difficult journey across the borderlands of the former empire toward the newly reborn Poland. Set amid the violence and social disintegration of the revolutionary period, there is no hatred in Lobodowski's work. Instead, it offers a vivid and nuanced portrayal of the Kuban, a multinational area in the northwestern Caucasus near the Sea of Azov, as a landscape where brutality and compassion coexist. Within spaces marked by deprivation and upheaval, bonds of loyalty, honor, and care emerge in unexpected ways, and strangers become protectors and guides.This volume presents a powerful meditation on endurance, identity, and the persistence of humanity in an age of collapse.