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Death and the Penguin
Andrey Kurkov
Novel, 1996. Translated from Russian
Darkly comic portrait of 1990s Kyiv, with post-Soviet chaos, mafia influence and shabby flats.
Books set in Ukraine
Five books by writers from Ukraine, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with Death and the Penguin and Grey Bees.
About the literature of Ukraine
Ukraine's national poet is Taras Shevchenko, whose 1840 collection Kobzar helped make Ukrainian a language of literature. The Russian Empire banned most printing in Ukrainian in 1876, and in the 1930s Stalin's purges destroyed a generation of writers now called the Executed Renaissance. The country's literature has long been written in several languages, Ukrainian, Russian and Yiddish among them, and since 2014, and the full-scale invasion of 2022, war has become its central subject.
Start with Andrey Kurkov's Death and the Penguin, translated from Russian, in which an obituary writer and his penguin drift through the gangster Kyiv of the 1990s. Kurkov's Grey Bees follows a beekeeper from the Donbas grey zone to Crimea. Mikhail Bulgakov's The White Guard traces a Kyiv family through 1918, Oksana Zabuzhko's The Museum of Abandoned Secrets digs through three generations of Ukrainian memory, and Sholem Aleichem's Tevye stories recall Jewish life near Kyiv.
By writers from Ukraine
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Grey Bees
Andrey Kurkov
Novel, 2018. Translated from Russian
A beekeeper in the war-torn Donbas 'grey zone' travels to Crimea, showing rural life between the front lines after 2014.
The White Guard
Mikhail Bulgakov
Novel, 1925. Translated from Russian
Kyiv during the 1918 civil war and Ukrainian-Hetmanate upheaval, seen through one besieged middle-class family.
The Museum of Abandoned Secrets
Oksana Zabuzhko
Novel, 2009. Translated from Ukrainian
Epic of Ukrainian memory spanning the Second World War, the Soviet era and post-Orange Revolution Kyiv.
Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories
Sholem Aleichem
Short stories. Translated from Yiddish by Hillel Halkin
Jewish shtetl life in the Kyiv-region Pale of Settlement, written by a Ukrainian-born author in the early twentieth century.
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