Ukraine swelled in the Western consciousness in February of 2022, when Russia launched the full-scale invasion that continues to this day. To some Westerners, Ukraine has never existed independently of the neighbor that seeks its destruction. To some Westerners, Ukraine is the ruins of Ukraine. With that in mind, I confess that any attempt to convey a single, unifying Ukrainian narrative is an exercise in futility. It’s no more realistic than proposing a single story that might encompass all that the United States is, was, and will be. Additionally, many of the books that first come to mind when I think of Ukrainian literature remain untranslated.
Here’s the truth: Ukraine is the largest country entirely within Europe. Ukraine is a sundrunk beach campsite in Crimea. Ukraine is a university in Kyiv, a café on an ancient cobblestone street in Lviv, a derelict cathedral. Ukraine is a factory whose smokestacks belch unknown vapors into the sky. Ukraine is a stork’s nest perched precariously atop a telephone pole. Ukraine is a contradiction.
My debut novel, The Sunflower Boys, is my own small contribution to this vast and wonderful contradiction. The first half of the book follows twelve year-old Artem from Chernihiv as he tries to reconcile societal expectations of masculinity with his nascent feelings for his best friend, Viktor. Russia’s full scale invasion interrupts Artem’s coming of age; suddenly, he and his little brother, Yuri, must traverse war-torn Ukraine in search of safety. I wrote The Sunflower Boys in the hope of adding my own voice to the literary chorus bearing witness to Ukraine and its endurance.
For years now—since long before 2022—Ukraine’s people and culture have been under siege. Reading its literature is more crucial than ever. Every book is an outstretched hand, an invitation to share in someone else’s version of the human experience. Literature is inherently antithetical to violence. To read Ukraine is to push back against the forces trying to destroy it.
In these ten books, Ukraine is feminist, magical realist, realist, and postmodernist. To Artem Chapeye, Ukraine is an empty bus station in Cherkasy. To Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Ukraine is the wail of alpine horns reverberating through the mountains. To Vsevolod Nestayko, Ukraine is a pair of village children stranded in a cornfield and laughing. Oksana Zabuzkho struggles to reconcile her love for her homeland with its patriarchal nature. Serhiy Zhadan says that he loves Ukraine even without cocaine—a sentiment that, conveniently, rhymes in Ukrainian and English.
There is only one trait that unifies Ukraine to all of its writers: Ukraine is home.
Dom’s Dream Kingdom by Victoria Amelina, translated by William Collins
An inept hunting dog named Dominic narrates this multigenerational epic about his human family. Though Dominic would prefer to tell his family’s story in smells, he translates it into words for the benefit of his human readers. His human readers benefit indeed; through Dominic, Victoria Amelina’s lyrical voice conjures the whimsical haze of a folktale. Yet, buried in this whimsy, Dom’s Dream Kingdom carries the burden of twentieth-century Ukrainian history—thenarrative winds through the Holodomor (Stalin’s genocide of the Ukrainian people), the Second World War, decades of Soviet occupation, and Ukrainian independence.
Dom’s Dream Kingdom was Amelina’s final novel published during her lifetime; on June 27, 2023, she was sitting in a pizzeria when a Russian missile struck, wounding sixty one people and killing thirteen, including her.
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, translated by Marco Carynnyk
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is the tragic romance of Ivan and Marichka—a Slavic, magical-realist Romeo and Juliet. Ivan Paliychuk is a shepherd boy from a village along the Cheremosh River in the Carpathian Mountains. His fascination with evil spirits makes his mother believe he is a changeling. While tending his family’s sheep, Ivan falls in love with Marichka, a girl from a rival family—the Gutenyuks—and the daughter of the man who killed his father. Their love, marred by superstition and blood feuds, blurs the line between the human world and the realm of spirits. The narrative is populated with figures from pagan Ukrainian folklore, including the sylvan temptress Mavka and the forest deity Chugaister, a nocturnal giant who drives away malevolent forces with his dancing. Kotsiubynsky’s prose is lush, otherworldly, and at times nearly psychedelic.
The Orphanage by Serhiy Zhadan, translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler
Set during the first years of the war in Donbas, The Orphanage follows Pasha, a Ukrainian-language teacher who must traverse the frontlines to rescue his thirteen year-old nephew. His nephew is stranded in occupied territory in an internat, an untranslatable Soviet institution halfway between an orphanage and a boarding school. With echoes of Dante’s Inferno, Zhadan documents Pasha’s journey across the war-torn landscape with startling clarity.
Serhiy Zhadan is an unstoppable cultural force—a rock star, a poet, an activist, and one of Ukraine’s foremost novelists. Through The Orphanage, he reminds readers that the war in Ukraine did not emerge ex nihilo; Russia has occupied and tormented southern and eastern Ukraine since 2014.
Do Oxen Low When Mangers Are Full? by Panas Myrny, translated by Oles Kovalenko
This 1875 novel, long considered one of the greatest works of Ukrainian literature, poses its central question in its title: Would the oppressed still cry out if their basic needs were met? Would people still become criminals?
Do Oxen Low When Mangers Are Full? is a monumental peasant epic that chronicles, á la One Hundred Years of Solitude, a century of life in a single village in rural Ukraine. The novel follows Chipka, a bastard child who grows into a thief with a fierce sense of justice.
As the Russian Empire crushes the Ukrainian system of governance, and Chipka and his village suffer under the Tsar’s thumb, this novel traces the ripple effects of injustice in search of the boundary between individual will and social determinism.
Love Life by Oksana Lutsyshyna, translated by Nina Murray
In Love Life, love itself is a higher power that is inextricable from pain. Yora, a Ukrainian immigrant, lives on an unnamed American peninsula identical to Florida. Disoriented, vulnerable, and highly empathetic, she falls in love with Sebastian, an actor who leads her on until revealing that she is only one of his many lovers.Yora’s life disintegrates when her relationship with Sebastian ends. She contracts a mysterious illness, and her grief reveals itself through a series of bizarre dreams. Through Yora’s descent, Lutsyshyna examines the experience of being a Ukrainian woman abroad and the existential suffering inherent to post-Soviet womanhood.
The City by Valerian Pidmohylny, translated by Maxim Tarnawsky
Pidmohylny explores interwar Ukrainian identity through Stepan Radchenko—a young, enthusiastic peasant who moves from his village to Kyiv to attend university. At first, Radchenko is set in his rural ways, settling on the outskirts of the city, boarding cattle. Gradually, Kyiv entices him. He moves toward the city center and adopts the lifestyle and dress of an urbanite. Yet, as Radchenko assimilates into Kyiv, Kyiv begins to erode his sense of identity—he develops literary ambitions and pursues sexual encounters with numerous women, losing his village self in the process.
Published in 1928, The City is widely regarded as Ukraine’s first “urban novel.” It captures the tension between rural Ukraine and urban Ukraine, and, by proxy, the tension between the intellectual and the instinctive.
The Ukraine by Artem Chapeye, translated by Zenia Tompkins
The Ukraine is a mélange of short fiction and creative nonfiction, although it’s intentionally unclear which pieces are which. The title piece is a paean to Ukraine at its most stereotypical—hence Chapeye’s deliberately incorrect use of the article ‘the.’ Each piece in The Ukraine offers a vignette of Ukrainian life, documenting every angle of the country—rural and urban, beautiful and hideous, simple and complex. Chapeye’s honesty is striking as he portrays a real, naked version of Ukraine instead of a shiny, aspirational one. The original version of The Ukraine is written in Ukrainian, Russian and surzhyk—a stigmatized Ukrainian-Russian pidgin that many writers would be reluctant to use.
Chapeye is loving in his descriptions of the unpolished corners of his homeland—the smokestacks and bus stations and derelict cathedrals. His patriotism permeates every detail—Chapeye is now a soldier in the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
Fieldwork In Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko, translated by Halyna Hryn
Oksana, a quick-witted poet and a fictionalized version of Oksana Zabuzhko, writes from the rubble of her relationship with an abusive sculptor. Fieldwork is the post-mortem of their affair, mapped onto Ukrainian history; the abuse Oksana endured grows into allegory for the abuse that her homeland endures. Zabuzhko juxtaposes the identity of a woman with the identity of a nation. Fieldwork is also about the necessity of language in the face of oppression, about her contradictory love for her patriarchal homeland, and—yes—about sex. Written in a stream of consciousness, Fieldwork vacillates between poetry and prose; Zabuzhko digresses, takes detours, and nests sentences within sentences.
Twelve Circles by Yuri Andrukhovych, translated by Vitaly Chernetsky
Set in the 1990s immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, Twelve Circles is a hectic postmodernist novel, loosely focused on Austrian photographer Karl-Joseph Zumbrunnen. Zumbrunnen wanders about Ukraine, enamored with the chaotic atmosphere of the fledgling nation—and with his interpreter, Roma. Zumbrunnen and Roma take a fateful trip to the Carpathians, staying with six others in an inn where reality warps and gives way to the absurd.
Andrukhovych’s sentences, like Carpathian roads, take hairpin turns and run for miles over treacherous terrain and through wildernesses. An undead version of real-world poet Bohdan-Ihor Antonych presides over the narrative with Andrukhovych integrating the towering twentieth century poet’s words into his own prose. This further elevates (and complicates) the book’s exploration of sex, society, and madness in a newly independent Ukraine, until the novel itself becomes a hallucination, jointly authored by the living and the dead.
The Toreadors from Vasyukivka by Vsevolod Nestayko
Many of the novels on this list deal with heavy themes: war, oppression, grief. The Toreadors from Vasyukivka bursts with Ukrainian joy. Toreadors follows two boys, the rambunctious Yava and his studious best friend Pavlik—Ukraine’s Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer—in their increasingly outlandish attempts to become famous. They dig a subway beneath their village of Vasyukivka, stage a bullfight with a docile cow, and steal a camera to photograph ghosts. Later on, they stow away on a truck bound for Kyiv and find themselves at the center of a mystery.
Vsevolod Nestayko was the father of Ukrainian children’s literature. His work is characterized by a humanistic ethos and playful dialogue, typically rendered in dialect.
The Toreadors from Vasyukivka is also a novel in urgent need of a fresh translation. It was last translated in 1983 by Raduga Publishers, a Soviet publishing house based in Moscow. At the time, the Ukrainian language was heavily suppressed, and in the process of translating The Toreadors from Vasyukivka into English, Raduga heavily russified Nestayko’s language. Even the name of the novel’s titular village, Vasyukivka, was changed to its Russian equivalent, “Vasukovka.”
The Toreadors of Vasyukivka deserves an English translation that honors and reflects the original novel. Through Yava and Pavlyk’s exploits in the village of Vasyukivka, Nestayko created a vivid, atmospheric image of Ukrainian life. He portrays Ukraine as it was, and as it will be again someday: a nation where children can roam in search of adventure each day and come home safely each night.