Exploring Ukraine through its literature: Books

Ukraine's most famous novelist dramatises the conflict raging in his country through the adventures of a mildmannered beekeeper. His simple mission on behalf of his bees leads him through some the hottest spots of the ongoing conflict, putting him in contact with combatants and civilians on both sides of the battle lines.

This is an emotional history of Ukraine with a very well researched and vivid historical background. Maria Matios is an award-winning author based in Kyiv, and in this surrealist novel she writes of the deeply rooted trauma of Ukraine and its people, through a family saga with overlapping storylines that pulls on the country’s history. During the Soviet Occupation of Ukraine, a young woman is trying to overcome everything she remembers, the guilt she carries, memories of violence and horror. Her unbearable headaches continue to strike as the story unfolds. The novel pulls on the history of Matios’s own family.

This remarkable novel by one of Ukraine’s most prolific and popular writers, Yuri Vynnychuk, takes place primarily in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. It intertwines two stories that unfold over two time periods and then converge. One takes place in independent Ukraine, from the early 1990s into the 2000s; the other goes to the time between the end of World War I and 1943. Before the two stories begin, a single page describes a key scene: four young men in a wartime bunker are about to blow themselves up, as enemy soldiers wanting to take them captive rapidly approach.

A unique work of fiction of nine interconnected stories and accompanying poems from the troubled streets of Ukraine, giving invaluable testimony to the new history unfolding in the nation's post-independence years. Zhadan employs both prose and poetry to address the disillusionment, complications, and complexities that have marked Ukrainian life in the decades following the Soviet Union's collapse.

In the 90s 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. He accompanies her on a hair-raising trip to the Carpathian mountains as well as in the madness of the "Tavern On The Moon," which served briefly as an observatory and athletic training station with commercial film production, starring strippers, bodyguards and various intellectuals. Lurkers here will come to understand that the postmodern folk novel from Ukraine they are reading is in fact about the West.

Amid the turbulence of 20th century Lviv, meet four generations of women from the same fractious family, living beneath one roof and each striving to find their way across the decades of upheaval in an ever-shifting city. More important even than these four women though is the character of the city of Lviv, a city of markets and monuments, streets and spires, where history and the present collide, civilisations clash and stories rise up on every corner.

Stanyslaviv of late XIX — early XX century. An ordinary town at Krecy of Happy Austria where people live, suffer, indivisibly fall in love, admire the science and quack performances of world renowned illusionists, entertain themselves at balls and carnivals, take walks and hide secrets in carved chests. And against the backdrop of the era, the fate of two women who are so closely intertwined, as trees. Andrukhovych's second novel, it became a bestseller in Ukraine.

As a foundational text, originally published in 1840, The Kobzar poetry has played an important role in galvanizing the Ukrainian identity and in the development of Ukraine's written language and Ukrainian literature. The first editions had been censored by the Russian czar, but the book still made an enduring impact on Ukrainian culture.

This light family comedy turns things upside down in the life of its main character Emile Polonsky, journalist by profession, happily married to Sarah. The novel presents a number of small slices of life and is filled with lively repartee. There are many comic moments, and the novel is saturated with a great amount of word play and humor. It gives the reader a good deal of insight into the everyday lives, loves and tribulations of Ukrainians living today.

This book is a strange, poetic journey through a little-known corner of Europe. This is a work of magical realism inflected with the distinct, melancholy, yet ironic poetics of Central Europe, a story that is both hyper-local and yet universally accessible, and is one of the finest works by one of Ukraine’s most enthralling writers.

Called "the most influential Ukrainian book for the 15 years of independence," Oksana Zabuzhko's Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex became an international phenomenon when it shot to number one on the Ukrainian bestseller list and remained there throughout the 1990s. The novel is narrated in first-person streams of thought by a sharp-tongued poet with an irreverently honest voice. Her exposure to American values and behaviours conspires with her yearning to break free from Ukrainian conventions, especially for women.

What was the fate of Stanislav Perfetsky; poet, provocateur, and hero of Ukrainian underground culture? Evidence points to suicide. But some whisper murder. Some suggest the grand Eastern European tradition of coerced suicide. It may even be related to the religious cult ceremony he happened upon in Munich . . . or that job as a dancer in a strip club for older women. Perverzion constructs Perfetsky's final days using a mishmash of relics, from official documents to recorded interviews to scraps of paper.

This novel, originally published in 1909, is based on the traditional Ukrainian folk song "Oi, ne khody Hrytsiu". The tragic story of a young man torn between two women and poisoned by one of them lends itself readily to literary interpretations. It is not merely a love story: it is a story of the eternal conflict between passion and reason, between personal happiness and social constraints, between freedom and its practical limitations. Kobylianska turns the love story into a feminist exploration of the psychology of two strong women.

This classic, also translated as "Tiger Trappers" or "Tiger Catchers" is an adventure novel built around two figures - Grygory and KVSM ajor Medwin. Their duel is a struggle of man with the world of darkness and hell. The author, as an eyewitness, depicts terrible pictures of abuse of people, the humiliation of their human dignity, violence, condemnation to oblivion in the hell of concentration camps.

The Forest song is a drama-fairy-tale in three acts. The play, which became a masterpiece of Ukrainian drama, was written in 1911. It was first put on stage on November 22, 1918 at the Kyiv Drama Theater. The product is one of the first prototypes of fantasy in Ukrainian literature. The original drama of the poet is published in two languages in one book - in Ukrainian and in English.

A historical romance depicting the life and system of government of the people in the Carpathian region of Ukraine during the 13th century, at the time of the Mongol invasion. Includes a brief outline of Ukrainian history.