Oleksandr Irvanets
Charków 1938
“Kharkiv 1938” by Oleksandr Irvanets (LEE project)
Participants: Oleksandr Irvanets – author, Andrij Saweneć – translator, moderator: Switłana Ołeszko | Warsztaty Kultury in Lublin, ul. Grodzka 7 – patio
Imagine that after winning the war with Bolshevik Russia in 1920, Ukraine defeated all external and internal enemies, growing into a world power. Every year, the capital of the Ukrainian Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic, a country building national communism, hosts the Proletarian Carnival. Politicians, writers, artists, spies, and assassins come to the city. Among the carnival guests are Leni Riefenstahl and Nobel laureate Olha Kobylanska, Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller… Meanwhile, one of the guests, someone invisible, powerful and dangerous, becomes the target of the search for SBU colonel Yuriy Kotsiuba. In the novel “Kharkiv 1938” Oleksandr Irvanets , in a mocking and iconoclastic tone, plays with the conventions of alternative history, dystopia and spy thriller. Letting his imagination run wild, he delves into the deep recesses of Ukrainian national traumas and complexes.