We were grateful to partner with Razom for Ukraine to feature readings from the books Mondegreen: Songs About Love and Death by Volodymyr Rafeyenko, The Orphanage by Serhiy Zhadan, Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets, and Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov. These masterful novelists paint four searing, illuminating portraits of conflict in Ukraine and the people caught within it.
Featured Books
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Mondegreen: Songs About Death and Love
By Volodymyr Rafeyenko
Published by Harvard University Press
Translated by Mark Andryczyk
Mondegreen tells the story of a refugee from Ukraine’s Donbas region who has escaped to Kyiv at the onset of the Ukrainian-Russian war. Written in beautiful, experimental style, the novel shows how people—and cities—are capable of radical transformation and how this, in turn, affects their interpersonal relations and cultural identification.
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The Orphanage
By Serhiy Zhadan
Published by Yale University Press
Translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes & Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler
If every war needs its master chronicler, Ukraine has Serhiy Zhadan, one of Europe’s most promising novelists. Recalling the brutal landscape of The Road and the wartime storytelling of A Farewell to Arms, The Orphanage is a searing novel that excavates the human collateral damage wrought by the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine. When hostile soldiers invade a neighboring city, Pasha, a thirty-five-year-old Ukrainian language teacher, sets out for the orphanage where his nephew Sasha lives, now in occupied territory. Venturing into combat zones, traversing shifting borders, and forging uneasy alliances along the way, Pasha realizes where his true loyalties lie in an increasingly desperate fight to rescue Sasha and bring him home.
Written with a raw intensity, this is a deeply personal account of violence that will be remembered as the definitive novel of the war in Ukraine.
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Lucky Breaks
By Yevgenia Belorusets
Published by New Directions
Translated by Eugene Ostashevsky
Out of the impoverished coal regions of Ukraine known as the Donbass, where Russian secret military intervention coexists with banditry and insurgency, the women of Yevgenia Belorusets’s captivating collection of stories emerge from the ruins of a war, still being waged on and off, ever since the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. Through a series of unexpected encounters, we are pulled into the ordinary lives of these anonymous women: a florist, a cosmetologist, card players, readers of horoscopes, the unemployed, and a witch who catches newborns with a mitt. One refugee tries unsuccessfully to leave her broken umbrella behind as if it were a sick relative; a private caregiver in a disputed zone saves her elderly charge from the angel of death; a woman sits down on International Women’s Day and can no longer stand up; a soldier decides to marry war. Belorusets threads these tales of ebullient survival with a mix of humor, verisimilitude, the undramatic, and a profound Gogolian irony. She also weaves in twenty-three photographs that, in lyrical and historical counterpoint, form their own remarkable visual narrative.
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Grey Bees
By Andrey Kurkov
Published by Deep Vellum
Translated by Boris Dralyuk
Little Starhorodivka, a village of three streets, lies in Ukraine’s Grey Zone, the no-man’s-land between loyalist and separatist forces. Thanks to the lukewarm war of sporadic violence and constant propaganda that has been dragging on for years, only two residents remain: retired safety inspector turned beekeeper Sergey Sergeyich and Pashka, a rival from his schooldays. With little food and no electricity, under constant threat of bombardment, Sergeyich’s one remaining pleasure is his bees. As spring approaches, he knows he must take them far from the Grey Zone so they can collect their pollen in peace. This simple mission on their behalf introduces him to combatants and civilians on both sides of the battle lines: loyalists, separatists, Russian occupiers and Crimean Tatars. Wherever he goes, Sergeyich’s childlike simplicity and strong moral compass disarm everyone he meets. But could these qualities be manipulated to serve an unworthy cause, spelling disaster for him, his bees and his country?
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Featuring
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Volodymyr Rafeyenko
Volodymyr Rafeyenko
Volodymyr Rafeyenko is an award-winning Ukrainian writer, poet, translator, literary and film critic. Having graduated from Donetsk University with a degree in Russian philology and culture studies, he wrote and published entirely in Russian. Following the outbreak of the Russian aggression in Ukraine’s east, Rafeyenko left Donetsk and moved to a town near Kyiv where he wrote Mondegreen: Songs About Death and Love, his first novel in the Ukrainian language, which was shortlisted for the Taras Shevchenko National Prize, Ukraine’s highest award in arts and culture. Among other recognitions, he is the winner of the Volodymyr Korolenko Prize for the novel Brief Farewell Book (1999) and the Visegrad Eastern Partnership Literary Award for the novel The Length of Days (2017).
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Mark Andryczyk
Mark Andryczyk
Mark Andryczyk teaches Ukrainian literature at Columbia University and administers the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute. He has a Ph.D. in Ukrainian Literature from the University of Toronto (2005). He is the author of The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction (University of Toronto Press) and the editor and compiler of The White Chalk of Days, the Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology (Academic Studies Press, 2017). He has translated many contemporary Ukrainian writers. Andryczyk is also a musician, recording and performing under the name Yeezhak.
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Serhiy Zhadan
Serhiy Zhadan
Serhiy Zhadan is often regarded as a living classic and the voice of contemporary Ukraine. His novels have received multiple international and domestic book prizes including the 2018 Leipzig Book Fair Prize and the 2015 Central European Angelus Prize. His poetry collection has been twice shortlisted for PEN America Poetry in Translation Award. He is also a recipient of the 2021 Dereck Walcott Prize for Poetry. He also sings in a band, collaborates with a number of musicians, translates poetry from several European languages, hosts a popular weekly radio show, and regularly travels to the war zone with humanitarian missions.
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Reilly Costigan-Humes & Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler
Reilly Costigan-Humes & Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler
Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler are a team of literary translators who work with Russian and Ukrainian, known for their renderings of novels by contemporary authors including Serhiy Zhadan, Dmitry Lipskerov, and Andriy Lyubka. Their translations have appeared in numerous journals, including Little Star, Trafika Europe, and the Tupelo Quarterly. Wheeler is also a published poet. His first poetry collection, The Eleusinian Mysteries, is available from Aubade Publishing.
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Yevgenia Belorusets
Yevgenia Belorusets
Yevgenia Belorusets is a Ukrainian writer, journalist, artist, and photographer who lives between Kyiv and Berlin. Her photographic work calls attention to the more vulnerable sections of Ukrainian society—queer families, out-of-work coal miners, the Roma, people living in the war zone in the East—and was shown in the Ukrainian pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. Lucky Breaks, her first work of fiction, was given a 2020 HKW International Literature Award in Germany.
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Eugene Ostashevsky
Eugene Ostashevsky
Eugene Ostashevsky is a poet, translator, and scholar. He is the author of The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi and The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza. He teaches in the Liberal Studies program at NYU.
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Andrey Kurkov
Andrey Kurkov
Born near Leningrad in 1961, Andrey Kurkov was a journalist, prison warder, cameraman and screenplay-writer before he became well known as a novelist. He received “hundreds of rejections” and was a pioneer of self-publishing, selling more than 75,000 copies of his books in a single year. His novel Death and the Penguin, his first in English translation, became an international bestseller, translated into more than thirty languages. As well as writing fiction for adults and children, he has become known as a commentator and journalist on Ukraine for the international media. His work of reportage, Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kyiv, was published in 2014, followed by the novel The Bickford Fuse (MacLehose Press, 2016). He lives in Kyiv with his British wife and their three children.
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Boris Dralyuk
Boris Dralyuk
Boris Dralyuk is an award-winning translator and the Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He taught Russian literature for a number of years at UCLA and at the University of St Andrews. He is a co-editor (with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski) of the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, and has translated Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories, as well as Kurkov’s The Bickford Fuse. In 2020 he received the inaugural Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing from the Washington Monthly.
