Twelve Circles

by Yuri Andrukhovych

Overview

In the 1990s, Karl-Joseph Zumbrunnen, an Austrian photographer with Galician roots, travels repeatedly through Ukraine. The chaos of the transitional post-Soviet era seems infinitely more appealing than the boring life of the West-especially since falling in love with his interpreter Roma Voronych. He accompanies her on a hair-raising trip to the Carpathian mountains where we hear of happenings in the solitude of the mountains, as well as in the "Tavern On The Moon," which served briefly as an observatory and subsequent athletic training station where, in between commercial film production, starring strippers and bodyguards and various intellectuals, Bohdan-Ihor Antonych, the outlaw modernist Ukrainian poet of the 1930's is to be found in person. Andrukhovych relates all this madness absorbingly, with much wit and ironic joust. Lurkers here will come to understand that the postmodern folk novel from Ukraine they are reading is in fact about the West.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781941550441
Publisher:	Spuyten Duyvil
Publication date:	10/15/2015
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.81(d)

About the Author

Yuri Andrukhovych was born March 13, 1960 in Ivano- Frankivsk, Ukraine. In 1985 he co-founded the Bu-Ba-Bu group, which stands for бурлеск, балаган, буфонаД а—'burlesque, side-show, buffoonery' together with Oleksandr Irvanets and Viktor Neborak. Andrukhovych writes in Ukrainian and is known for his pro-Ukrainian and pro-European views, however he is rarely considered a Ukrainian nationalist, a charge he fiercely denies himself. In his interviews, he said he respected both the Ukrainian and Russian languages and claims his opponents do not understand that the very survival of the Ukrainian language is threatened. During the 2004 presidential elections in Ukraine he signed, together with eleven other writers, an open letter in which he called Sovietic Russian culture: "language of pop music and criminal slang". Andrukhovych has published five novels, four poetry collections, a cycle of short stories, and two volumes of essays, as well as literary translations from English, German, Polish, and Russian. His essays regularly appear in Zerkalo nedeli (Mirror Weekly), an influential trilingual newspaper published in Russian and Ukrainian with excerpts published in an online English edition.