Voroshilovgrad - by Serhiy Zhadan (Paperback)

About the Book

A city-dwelling executive heads home to take over his brother's gas station after his mysterious disappearance, but all he finds at home are mysteries and ghosts. The bleak industrial landscape of now-war-torn eastern Ukraine sets the stage for Voroshilovgrad, the Soviet era name of the Ukranian city of Luhansk.

Book Synopsis

"Trainspotting set against a grim post-Soviet backdrop." -- Newsweek

World Literature Today's Recommended Summer Reads 2016

A city-dwelling executive heads home to take over his brother's gas station after his mysterious disappearance, but all he finds at home are mysteries and ghosts. The bleak industrial landscape of now-war-torn eastern Ukraine sets the stage for Voroshilovgrad, the Soviet era name of the Ukranian city of Luhansk, mixing magical realism and exhilarating road novel in poetic, powerful, and expressive prose.

Serhiy Zhadan, one of the key figureheads in contemporary Ukrainian literature and the most famous poet in the country, has become the voice of Ukraine's "Euro-Maidan" movement. He lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine.

Review Quotes

"Voroshilovgrad is an unsentimental novel about human relationships in conditions of brutality in which there is not a single act of betrayal... In his prose there is no nostalgia, but there is genuine affection, rough and profound. Even in this brutish habitus, there is trust, loyalty, and love." - Marci Shore, The New Yorker

"Voroshilovgrad is more, however, than an exercise in post-Soviet social realism. There is something deeply mythological about the novel, and, like many myths, it is a story of homecoming. . . . Zhadan's language is suitably elastic, swinging from the tough, streetwise irony of a Ukrainian Irvine Welsh to flights of ebullient poetry more reminiscent of Bruno Schulz." -- Uilleam Blacker, Times Literary Supplement

"A homecoming is by turns magical and brutal in Zhadan's impressive picaresque novel. . . . For Zhadan, loyalty and fraternity are the life-giving forces in this exhausted, fertile, near-anarchic corner of the country . . . readers will be touched by his devotion to a land of haunted beauty, 'high sky, ' and 'black earth.'" -- Publishers Weekly

"With Voroshilovgrad, Zhadan has created an authentic poetics of post-Soviet rural devastation. His ragged, sympathetic characters aren't the newly rich post-Soviets of Moscow, the urban oligarchs Peter Pomerantsev has described, who "sing hymns to Russian religious conservatism -- and keep their money and families in London." They are individuals struggling to come to terms with their place in history and with the history of their place." -- Amelia Glaser, Los Angeles Review of Books

"A trippy novel of contemporary Ukraine . . . set far away from the bustle of the metropolis and the Maidan, yet no less representative of the unsettled state of a country unable to transition. A bit meandering--but generally in a good way--Voroshilovgrad is an entertaining sort-of-road-novel with quite a bit of depth to it." -- Michael Orthofer, Complete Review

"Zhadan's canvas is large and is filled with bold characters... [he] also tosses into the mix fantastic and surreal flights of prose; poetic descriptions of the still-beautiful parts of the Ukraine, with its rich, black, enduring earth." -- Willard Manus, Lively Arts

"Ukraine's best-known poet and the country's most famous counter-culture writer." -- Sally McGrane, The New Yorker

"Blurring the boundaries between time and space as well as place, Voroshilovgrad narrates the journey of Herman, an advertising executive, who returns to his remote home after years of city living to find his missing brother." -- World Literature Today's Recommended Summer Reads 2016

"Zhadan is a writer who is a rock star, like Byron in the early nineteenth century was a rock star." -- Dr. Vitaly Chernetsky, professor of Slavic Literature at the University of Kansas, The New Yorker

"Voroshilovgrad crosses, with tremendous grace, back and forth between lyrical dreaminess and brutal nightmarishness, and Zhadan works in lots of absurdity... it's absurdity of the sort that feels normal in books set in the Former Soviet Union, making everything in Voroshilovgrad feel paradoxically both real and bizarre." -- Lisa Espenschade, Lizok's Bookshelf

"A fascinating exploration into a post-soviet Ukraine. Not only does it explore the effects of communism to an industrial city, but also the power vacuum left behind when the Soviet Union collapsed." -- Michael Kitto, Knowledge Lost

"A dark but funny tale of an urbanite who returns to his ho

About the Author

Serhiy Zhadan is one of the key voices in contemporary Ukrainian literature: his poetry and novels have enjoyed popularity both at home and abroad. He has twice won BBC Ukraine's Book of the Year (2006 and 2010) and has twice been nominated as Russian GQ's 'Man of the Year', in their writers category. Writing is just one of his many interests, which also include singing in a band, translating poetry and organizing literary festivals.
Zhadan was born in Starobilsk, Luhansk Oblast. He graduated from Kharkiv University in 1996, then spent three years as a graduate student of philology. He taught Ukrainian and world literature from 2000 to 2004, and thereafter retired from teaching. Zhadan has translated poetry from German, English, Belarusian, and Russian, from such poets as Paul Celan and Charles Bukowski. His own works have been translated into German, English, Polish, Serbian, Croatian, Lithuanian, Belarusian, Russian, Hungarian, Armenian, Swedish and Czech. In 2013, he participated in Euromaidan demonstrations in Kharkiv, and in 2014, he was assaulted outside the administration building in Kharkiv, an incident discussed in The New Yorker. He lives and works in Kharkiv.

Reilly Costigan-Humes is a graduate of Haverford College, where he studied Russian literature and culture. He lives and works in Moscow, and translates literature from the Ukrainian and Russian.

Isaac Wheeler received an MA in Russian Translation from Columbia University, and is also a graduate of Haverford College, where he studied Russian Language and English Literature. Wheeler lives in Brooklyn, NY, where he is a professional business and literary translator.