Perverzion (Writings From An Unbound Europe)

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.Or, then again, it may not.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.

Literature & Fiction

Andrukhovych, Yuri

Contemporary

Northwestern University Press

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. Or, then again, it may not. 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.

Literary

Yuri Andrukhovych emerged as a prominent voice in Ukrainian literature with the publication of his first book of poems in 1985. The same year, together with Oleksandr Irvanets and Viktor Neborak, he formed the poetic group Bu-ba-bu, which became a leading force in Ukrainian poetic innovation for nearly a decade. After publishing only prose for a number of years, Andrukhovych returned to poetry in great form but with a much-changed poetics in 2004, with the publication of another collection. A comprehensive selection of his poetry from the 1980s-1990s, titled Lysty v Ukrainu (Letters to Ukraine), came out in 2013; in it, Andrukhovych revisited and revised several of those texts. This book traces the evolution of his poetics from the 1980s onward.

Songs for a Dead Rooster

History & Criticism

Lost Horse Press

My Final Territory: Selected Essays

Yuri Andrukhovych is one of Ukraine’s preeminent authors and cultural commentators. In recognition of his literary writings and his role as public intellectual he has received numerous awards including the Herder Prize, Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Goethe Medal.
My Final Territory is a collection of Andrukhovych’s philosophical, autobiographical, political, and literary essays, which demonstrate his enormous talent as an essayist to the English-speaking world. This volume broadens Andrukhovych’s international audience and will create a dialogue with Anglophone readers throughout the world in a number of fields including philosophy, history, journalism, political science, sociology, and anthropology. In their introduction Michael Naydan and Mark Andryczyk reveal a somewhat lesser-known side of Andrukhovych’s writings that place him alongside such writers as recent Belarusian Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich. Ten of the twelve essays in this volume, including his seminal work “Central-Eastern Revision,” are appearing for the first time in English. My Final Territory showcases Yuri Andrukhovych’s unique voice and provides insight into Ukrainian experience of nationality and identity.

University of Toronto Press

The first comprehensive English-language collection of one of the most important voices in contemporary Ukrainian literature, a collection of poems about the region's history of violence as seen through geography, myth, and city life. Yuri Andrukhovych, one of the most significant voices in contemporary Ukrainian literature, began his career as a poet, producing three collections and two separately published poem cycles in the 1980s and '90s, the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period, a time of great political change and artistic revolution. Set Change: Selected Poems presents for the first time in English comprehensive selections from all three collections and both cycles. In modern Ukrainian letters, Andrukhovych occupies a position similar to the literary giant Nikolai Gogol. While his influence is broad and significant, he is constantly reinventing himself as a writer: His work represents everything playful, free-spirited, and new, and epitomizes all the most original aspects of Ukrainian literature. The poems collected here showcase the poet's prolonged quest for a representation of--and response to--the region's history of violence. In this quest Andrukhovych explores various settings and themes of geography, investigates the shifting borders of eastern Europe, and invokes a gamut of myths and fantastical elements set in the territory of present-day Ukraine. The cornerstone of his poems is a deep fascination with the idea of the city. Andrukhovych's vivid descriptions lend themselves to his investigations of the carnivalesque and the grotesque, two of the city's most significant aspects. His deep interest in the baroque, his obsession with verbal play and irony, the elegiac mode, the many hidden as well as overt allusions to other literary works and writers, and his need for textual experimentation are the elements that make his poems arresting, timely, and perpetually fascinating. The poems in Set Change are translated by the award-winning duo of Ostap Kin and John Hennessy, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Set Change

Genre Fiction

NYRB Poets

Originally published in Ukrainian in 1992, 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. Four poets and an entourage of secondary characters converge on the fictional Chortopil for the Festival of the Resurrecting Spirit, an orgy of popular culture, civic dysfunction, national pride, and sex. Recreations established Andrukhovych as a sophisticated but seductively readable comic writer with penetrating insights into his volatile times. The novel delights the reader with its extravagant and eccentric variety. For all its artful devices, it aims to be lucid, not dark, and readable, not forbidding. Yuri Andrukhovych's works have been translated and published in Poland, Germany, Hungary, Austria, Russia, Finland, Italy, Canada and the United States.

Recreations

Humor & Satire

Canadian Inst of Ukranian Study Pr

Originally published in Ukrainian in 1992, 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. Four poets and an entourage of secondary characters converge on the fictional Chortopil for the Festival of the Resurrecting Spirit, an orgy of popular culture, civic dysfunction, national pride, and sex. Recreations established Andrukhovych as a sophisticated but seductively readable comic writer with penetrating insights into his volatile times. The novel delights the reader with its extravagant and eccentric variety. For all its artful devices, it aims to be lucid, not dark, and readable, not forbidding. Yuri Andrukhovych's works have been translated and published in Poland, Germany, Hungary, Austria, Russia, Finland, Italy, Canada and the United States.

Pavlyshyn, Marko

University of Alberta 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? "The empire betrayed its drunks. And thus doomed itself to disintegration." Part howl, part literary slapstick, part joyful dirge, charged with the brashness of youth, betraying the vision of the permanent outsider, Andrukhovych's novel suggests that literature really is news that stays news. Funny, buoyant, flamboyant, ground-breaking, and as revelatory today as when it was first published in Ukrainian, The Moscoviad remains a literary milestone. In spirit and intellectual brio Andrukhovych, whose irreverence makes Borat seem pious, is kin to the great Halldor Laxness and the venerable David Foster Wallace. --Askold Melnyczuk

The Moscoviad

Reference

Spuyten Duyvil

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. He accompanies her on a hair-raising trip to the Carpathian mountains where we hear of happenings in the solitude of the mountains, as well as in the “Tavern On The Moon,” which served briefly as an observatory and subsequent athletic training station where, in between commercial film productions starring strippers and bodyguards and various intellectuals, Bohdan-Ihor Antonych, the outlaw modernist Ukrainian poet of the 1930’s is to be found in person. 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. 
 Yuri Andrukhovych's nuanced Ukrainian prose requires an exceptionally talented translator in order to be appreciated in English. Happily, Andrukhovych has found just such a wordsmith in Vitaly Chernetsky, who has managed to accomplish the well-nigh impossible: staying true to the original text while producing powerful and persuasive English-language prose. Read this novel, both to experience one of the most important recent Ukrainian literary texts and to bear witness to Chernetsky's emergence as a great translator. Kudos to both! Alexander Motyl 
 Twelve Circles is a flamboyant meditation on the history of everything. Don’t expect the trains to run on time but (in their own time) they arrive and depart and in due time the story of Karl-Joseph Zumbrunnen unfolds before our eyes. Andrukhovych is the ultimate omniscient narrator and his mile-long sentences chart their own unbroken course, fearlessly, with no end in sight. It’s all in the details, the unspoken truths, the sidelong glances, and the marvelous translation by Vitaly Chernetsky brings it to life on the wide screen. Lewis Warsh

Twelve Circles

Spuyten Duyvil Publishing

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Books by Andrukhovych, Yuri

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Andrukhovych, Yuri. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Perverzion (Writings From An Unbound Europe)

Perverzion (Writings From An Unbound Europe)

Songs for a Dead Rooster

My Final Territory: Selected Essays

My Final Territory: Selected Essays

Set Change

Recreations

Recreations

The Moscoviad

Twelve Circles