An introduction to an original poetic voice from eastern Ukraine with deep roots in the unique cultural landscape of post-Soviet devastation
"Everyone can find something, if they only look ...carefully," reads one of the memorable lines from this first collection of poems in English by the world†'renowned Ukrainian author Serhiy Zhadan. 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. In the tradition of Tom Waits, Charles Bukowski, and William S. Burroughs, Zhadan creates a new poetics of loss, a daily crusade of testimonial, a final witness of abandoned lives in a claustrophobic universe where "every year there's less and less air." Yet despite the grimness of these portraits, Zhadan's poems are familiar and enchanting, lit by the magic of everyday detail, leaving readers with a sense of hope, knowing that the will of a people "will never let it be / like it was before."
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.
Les Kurbas arrived in Kyiv in March of 1916. He was twenty-nine years old and he had great expectations.¹ As a resident of Western Ukraine and a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he was ...travelling into a new land; but as a Ukrainian he was stepping into the heartland – the city of Kyiv. By 1925 Kurbas would make the city his own, re-shaping the vision of Ukrainian theatre and becoming its most important figure. Here we will examine his work at theMolodyi teatr(Young Theatre) in Kyiv from 1917 to 1919, which was the first step in the process.
In the late fall of 1921 a group of actors paraded into Kyiv to the steady beat of a single drum. They had spent a year and a half in the provinces. They had survived the hunger and chaos of the ...times. Now they followed a lone figure – Les Kurbas was leading his actors back to Kyiv and into the forefront of the renaissance of Ukrainian cultural life.¹ In less than two years Kurbas would head the boldest experimental theatre. His productions would develop from mass movement set to music to explorations that peered into the inner workings of the
