Forgottenness

October 16, 2023
Maljartschuk’s resonant English-language debut takes the form of a contemporary Ukrainian writer’s biographical sketch of a 20th-century Ukrainian nationalist. The unnamed narrator, beset by panic attacks and preoccupied with her mortality (“It always seems as though I’ve lived interminably long and that the end should be arriving at any moment”) takes solace in reading old newspapers, where the “fragility of human life” is preserved. One day, she stumbles across a 1931 headline announcing the death of Viacheslav Lypynskyi. Born in Poland, Lypynskyi was a historian and politician who tirelessly advocated for Ukrainian independence. Though little else links them besides sharing a birthday 100 years apart, the narrator compulsively attempts to braid their stories together: “Our lives were too disparate to comfortably fit into a shared narrative, if not for my irrational stubbornness.” The dual portrait shines when the narrator focuses on Lypynskyi’s intellectual and political journey, as well as his health woes (“Tuberculosis was the favorite illness of the Ukrainian intelligentsia”). She also offers an engrossing summary of an early 20th-century “stateless Ukrainian society,” which was divided between the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. Throughout, Maljartschuk fruitfully explores themes of erasure and remembrance to meditate on what survives the onslaught of time. Fans of postmodern European literature ought to check this out.

January 1, 2024
This literary novel jumbles two lives "too disparate to comfortably fit into a shared narrative," the narrator admits, except for her "irrational stubbornness." The contemporary narrator contextualizes her life with that of Viacheslav Lypynskyi, who was born on the same day as the narrator 100 years earlier. A Polish aristocrat obsessed with Ukrainian independence, he spent his short, tubercular life as an ideologue for the formation of a Ukrainian monarchist state. Interspersed are the narrator's series of romantic relationships with "golden-haired" men, complicated by existential angst and the subsummation of a promising intellect beneath a search for novelty, burgeoning mental illness, and reflections on remembrance. From 1907 to the 1930s, the complicated and volatile politics of what would become Ukraine are explored through Lypynskyi's life as he witnesses it "flail between socialist and nationalist ideologies like between the banks of a swift mountain river onto which few manage to clamber alive." Originally published in 2016 in Ukrainian, this translation, in light of current events in the country, offers a wider international audience access to Ukrainian voices.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.