Ulas Samchuk (1905–1987) is a Ukrainian writer, journalist, publicist, whose legacy is large and diverse. He wrote not only about his native Volhynia, Transcarpathia, but also about Great Ukraine, Ukrainian emigration, he is considered "a chronicler of the Ukrainian space." Samchuk was deliberately silenced in Soviet times. Only in the independent Ukrainian state did the writer's works begin to be published in his homeland. In the novel "Maria" (1934), the author was the first to tell the world the truth about the Holodomor of 1933, its causes and consequences. Through events from the life of Maria, her relatives, countrymen for several decades - from the pre-revolutionary period to the Bolshevik reforms of the 1930s and the genocide of the Ukrainian peasantry - the author artistically interprets the tragedy of one family within the tragedy of the entire Ukrainian nation and elevates the image of the peasant Maria to a symbol of the whole of Ukraine .