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 fictional Chortopil for the Festival of the Resurrecting Spirit, an orgy of popular culture, civic dysfunction, national pride, and sex. Recreations, first published in Ukrainian in 1992, established Andrukhovych as a sophisticated, yet seductively readable comic writer with penetrating insights into his volatile times. The novel delights with its extravagant and eccentric variety. For all of its artful devices it aims to be lucid, not dark, and readable, not forbidding.
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About the Translator
Marko Pavlyshyn is Mykola Zerov Senior Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of Canon and Iconostasis (Kyiv, 1997) and many articles on contemporary Ukrainian literature.
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