Electronic Library of Ukrainian Literature: Small number of publications in English; many resources in Ukrainian, including works of Taras Shevchenko, Ol’ha Kobylianska, Hryhoriy Skovoroda, and others.
Ukrainian Literature: A Journal in Translation (Shevchenko Scientific Society of Canada): Downloadable English translations of classic and contemporary Ukrainian literature. Volume 5 includes several stories from HURI’s language instructor, Volodymyr Dibrova.
Library of Ukrainian poetry: This is a very comprehensive website devoted to Ukrainian poetry. On this site one can find Ukrainian poetry from the 17th-19th centuries, poetry of the 20th century, and works by contemporary poets. The website is up-to-date and easy to search. Search by author and by period (description by University of Toronto).
Mary Fisher-Slyzh library: The Electronic Ukrainian Library named after Mary Fisher-Slyzh is a rich resource of Ukrainian literature. This library is located on the website "Ukrainians in Sevastopol’”. The site provides access to a wide range of Ukrainian books in many areas, namely literature, drama, poetry, language, and history (description by University of Toronto).
Contemporary Fiction in Translation
Oksana Zabuzhko
Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (1996; trans. Halyna Hryn, 2011). From the author: “When you turn 30, you inevitably start reconsidering what you have been taught in your formative years—that is, if you really seek for your own voice as a writer. In my case, my personal identity crisis had coincided with the one experienced by my country after the advent of independence. The result turned explosive: Field Work in Ukrainian Sex.”
Museum of Abandoned Secrets (2009; trans. Nina Shevchuk-Murray, 2012). From Amazon: “Spanning sixty tumultuous years of Ukrainian history, this multigenerational saga weaves a dramatic and intricate web of love, sex, friendship, and death. At its center: three women linked by the abandoned secrets of the past—secrets that refuse to remain hidden.”
Your Ad Could Go Here: Stories (2020, trans. Nina Murray, Halyna Hryn, Askold Melnyczuk, Marco Carynnyk, Marta Horban). From Amazon: “Oksana Zabuzhko, Ukraine’s leading public intellectual, is called upon to make sense of the unthinkable reality of our times. In this breathtaking short story collection, she turns the concept of truth over in her hands like a beautifully crafted pair of gloves. At once intimate and worldly, these stories resonate with Zabuzhko’s irreverent and prescient voice, echoing long after reading.”
Serhii Zhadan
Depeche Mode (2004; trans. Myroslav Shkandrij, 2013). From Amazon: “Serhiy Zhadan’s first novel Depeche Mode depicts Ukrainian youth during the turbulent 1990s. Described by the author as “a book about real male comradeship,” the novel follows the unemployed narrator and his friends, Jewish anti-Semite Dogg Pavlov and Vasia the Communist, on their adventures around Kharkiv and beyond.”
Voroshilovgrad (2010; trans. Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Wheeler, 2016) From Amazon: “A city-dwelling executive heads home to take over his brother's gas station after his mysterious disappearance, but all he finds at home are mysteries and ghosts. The bleak industrial landscape of now-war-torn eastern Ukraine sets the stage for Voroshilovgrad, the Soviet era name of the Ukranian city of Luhansk, mixing magical realism and exhilarating road novel in poetic, powerful, and expressive prose.”
Mesopotamia (2014; trans. Reilly Costigan-Humes, Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler, Virlana Tkacz, Wanda Phipps, 2018). From Yale University Press: “A unique work of fiction from the troubled streets of Ukraine, giving invaluable testimony to the new history unfolding in the nation’s post-independence years. This captivating book is Serhiy Zhadan’s ode to Kharkiv, the traditionally Russian-speaking city in Eastern Ukraine where he makes his home.”
What We Live For, What We Die For (2019; trans. Virlana Tkacz & Wanda Phipps) From Yale University Press: “These robust and accessible narrative poems feature gutsy portraits of life on wartorn and poverty-ravaged streets, where children tally the number of local deaths, where mothers live with low expectations, and where romance lives like a remote memory.”
Related HURI Content: Live stream of Serhii Zhadan's poetry reading at Harvard (via Facebook)
Yuri Andrukhovych
Recreations (1992, trans. Marko Pavlyshyn) From CIUS Press: Recreations is a novel of carnivalesque vitality and acute social criticism. It celebrates newly found freedom and reflects upon the contradictions of post-Soviet society. Recreations established Andrukhovych as a sophisticated but seductively readable comic writer with penetrating insights into his volatile times.
Perverzion (trans. Michael M. Naydan, 2005) From Northwestern University Press: “Perverzion constructs Perfetsky's final days using a mishmash of relics, from official documents to recorded interviews to scraps of paper. Perfetsky, the personification of the Ukrainian artistic superman--he used his masterful musicianship in a collaboration with Elton John during the pop star's secret sojourn in Ukraine--is bound for Venice to participate in a seminar to save the world from absurdity. On the way he becomes a Ukrainian Orpheus descending into the decadence of the West, navigating through surrealistic adventures and no less surrealistic seminar topics as he charges head up (and pants down) toward his fate.”
The Moscoviad (1993, trans. Vitaly Chernetsky, 2008) From Spuyten Duyvil Press: “The literary dormitory at Moscow University becomes a kind of Russian Grand Hotel, serving the last supper of empire to a host of writers gathered from every corner of the continent, and beyond. Young poets from Vietnam, Mongolia, Yakutia, Uzbekistan, Russia, and Ukraine assemble to study, drink, frolic, and explore each other and the decaying city around them. When the supper turns into a bacchanal, who’s surprised?”
Twelve Circles (trans. Vitaly Chernetsky, 2015) From Spuyten Duyvil Press: “In the 1990s, Karl-Joseph Zumbrunnen, an Austrian photographer with Galician roots, travels repeatedly through Ukraine. The chaos of the transitional post-Soviet era seems infinitely more appealing than the boring life of the West—especially since falling in love with his interpreter Roma Voronych. Andrukhovych relates all this madness absorbingly, with much wit and ironic joust. Lurkers here will come to understand that the postmodern folk novel from Ukraine they are reading is in fact about the West.”
Related HURI content: Poetry and Prose with Yuri Andrukhovych, a write-up of a literary reading at Harvard
Andrey Kurkov
Kurkov is one of the most widely translated Ukrainian authors (his works are first published in Russian). Here are just two recommendations, but many more books are available through the press or online booksellers.
Death and the Penguin (2002) From Penguin Books: Viktor is an aspiring writer with only Misha, his pet penguin, for company. Although he would prefer to write short stories, he earns a living composing obituaries for a newspaper. He longs to see his work published, yet the subjects of his obituaries continue to cling to life. But when he opens the newspaper to see his work in print for the first time, his pride swiftly turns to terror. He and Misha have been drawn into a trap from which there appears to be no escape.
Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev (2014, trans. Sam Taylor): From Penguin Books: “Ukraine Diaries is acclaimed writer Andrey Kurkov’s first-hand account of the ongoing crisis in his country. From his flat in Kiev, just five hundred yards from Independence Square, Kurkov can smell the burning barricades and hear the sounds of grenades and gunshot. Kurkov’s diaries begin on the first day of the pro-European protests in November, and describe the violent clashes in the Maidan, the impeachment of Yanukovcyh, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the separatist uprisings in the east of Ukraine. Going beyond the headlines, they give vivid insight into what it’s like to live through – and try to make sense of – times of intense political unrest.”
Taras Prokhasko
UnSimple (2007): Unsimple tells a story of strange people living through wars - but "story" is hardly a proper word for this text. It is closer to a meditation, or a prayer. It should be read silently, and slowly. A biologist by education, Prokhasko writes his texts as if they were penetrating into the very mysteries of life. He sits comfortably in the tradition of Western mystical writers like Meister Eckhart, and among European fin-de-siècle poets like Hofmannsthal, and in the French nouveau roman tradition with its non-linear structures and broken narration.
ANTHOLOGIES AND COLLECTIONS (IN TRANSLATION)
New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City (2019; edited by Ostap Kin): New York Elegies attempts to demonstrate how descriptions and evocations of New York City are connected to various stylistic modes and topical questions urgent to Ukrainian poetry throughout its development. The collection thus gives readers the opportunity to view New York through various poetic and stylistic lenses. Ukrainian poets connected themselves to a powerful myth of New York, the myth of urban modernity and problematic vitality. The city of exiles and outsiders sees itself reflected in the mirror that newcomers and exiles created. By adding new voices and layers to this amalgam, it is possible to observe the expanded picture of this worldly poetic city.
The White Chalk of Days: The Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology (2017; ed. Mark Andryczyk): The publication of The White Chalk of Days: The Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology commemorates the tenth year of the Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series. Co-sponsored by the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University and the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Series has recurrently organized readings in the US for Ukraine’s leading writers since 2008. The anthology presents translations of literary works by Series guests that imaginatively engage pivotal issues in today’s Ukraine and express its tribulations and jubilations. Featuring poetry, fiction, and essays by fifteen Ukrainian writers, the anthology offers English-language readers a wide array of the most beguiling literature written in Ukraine in the past fifty years.
Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine (2017: ed. Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky): The armed conflict in the east of Ukraine brought about an emergence of a distinctive trend in contemporary Ukrainian poetry: the poetry of war. Directly and indirectly, the poems collected in this volume engage with the events and experiences of war, reflecting on the themes of alienation, loss, dislocation, and disability; as well as justice, heroism, courage, resilience, generosity, and forgiveness. In addressing these themes, the poems also raise questions about art, politics, citizenship, and moral responsibility. The anthology brings together some of the most compelling poetic voices from different regions of Ukraine. Young and old, female and male, somber and ironic, tragic and playful, filled with extraordinary terror and ordinary human delights, the voices recreate the human sounds of war in its tragic complexity.