Ukrainian Literature in Five Books
and let's add five more to the list
Five Books is a website with ten million readers per year. It publishes interviews with experts who get a chance to recommend five books in their field to a global audience. And let’s be honest, a rare member of the global audience doesn’t like a good list. It is a privilege and a great responsibility to have been invited to provide my top five in Ukrainian literature.
The brick wall one hits once the initial excitement subsides is the lack of translations. An interest in Ukraine has surely been spurred by the Ukrainians’ unanticipated resistance to Russia’s war of annihilation. However, the underresourced area of literary translation from Ukrainian, which has been overshadowed by the copious from looting imperialist neighbour, is unsurprisingly not up for the challenge of filling all the gaps in knowledge, accumulated through decades of neglect. There have been heroic efforts by Ukrainians abroad to translate and promote Ukrainian literature (see, for example, the Canadian Language Lanterns series). Thanks to them, Slavic Studies departments worldwide have a volume or two in their libraries with a selection of teachable materials. These publications are not, however, what one picks in a Foyles bookshop or a local library.
Taking these limitations into account, I am beyond grateful to the translators and publishers who have ventured into the underexplored territory of Ukrainian literature and amplified Ukrainian voices globally — and to those Ukrainians who write in English while exploring Ukrainian contexts. Read more about my top five books here.
Below are five more books which didn’t make the selection either because they are forthcoming (but available for pre-order) or represent a genre already on my list (or because I hate the foreword, fairy emoji).
Maik Yohansen, Dr. Leonardo’s Journey to Sloboda Switzerland with His Future Lover, the Beautiful Alcesta, trans. by Uilleam Blacker (HURI, 2024)
There is no other book I have been waiting for quite as much as Yohansen’s playful modernist landscape novel, translated by Uilleam Blacker. Yohansen’s description of the steppe shook my world to the core and influenced some of my life choices.
Olena Stiazhkina is one of my favourite Ukrainian writers and one of the wisest people I’m fortunate to know. Cecil the Lion is a novel about the war, about eastern Ukraine, and about history. It is written in the Ukrainian and Russian languages where the transition between the two is tied to the characters’ changing political choices and identities. You can watch excerpts from our ‘fighting talk’ about language (May 2023, UCL SSEES, organised by the Ukrainian Institute London) here. Also, consider becoming a paid subscriber to receive my dispatch on Stiazhkina’s war prose in a couple of weeks.
Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, ed. by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky (ASP, 2017)
This poignant collection with some of the most important poems of the past decade has the advantage of being available online for free. Zhadan, Kalytko, Lutsyshyna, Izdryk: read them. Here’s the beginning of Halyna Kruk’s poem, for instance:
like a bullet, the Lord saves those who save themselves,
like the bullet that the man in a trench
saves for his own temple
The White Chalk of Days: The Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology, compiled and edited by Mark Andryczyk (ASP, 2017).
Another fantastic anthology of Ukrainian poetry and short prose, much of which is available online. Mostly our great men of today and yesterday, but also Marjana Savka, Sophia Andrukhovych, and Luba Yakimchuk.
A subversive feminist Ukrainian retelling of the myth of Orpheus, anyone? Forthcoming from HURI. We badly need fresh translations of all the dramas by Lesia Ukrainka to rethink feminism, imperialism, Europe, and existential problems troubling humankind since the times of Homer. You can read an excerpt from her Forest Song, translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps, in the London Ukrainian Review; and another excerpt from the same play, translated by Eriel Vitiaz.
Hi Sasha, I'm the translator of Cecil the Lion -- it's great to see it on your list! Please let me know if you'd like me to send you the translation of a particular excerpt for your post on Stiazhkina.