Voroshilovgrad

In expressive prose, Zhadan delivers a road novel from the edge of Europe that dares to dream the dream of freedom in a completely new way: as the search for home in a world without boundaries.

The success of his Democratic Youth Anthem cemented poet-performer Serhiy Zhadan’s reputation as one of the most important young Ukrainian authors, alongside Yuri Andrukhovych. His latest novel is entitled Voroshilovgrad, a reference to the eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk, which in the Soviet period was renamed in honour of military commander and politician Kliment Voroshilov. The industrial landscape of eastern Ukraine provides the real and imaginary setting for this Ukrainian »Easy Rider«. The novel centres on Herman, a young advertising executive who is rattled by an unexpected phone call: his brother, who runs a remote petrol station, has disappeared. In order to find his brother he must undertake an incredible journey, drifting off the beaten track like a nomad across the steppe.

»Trainspotting set against a grim post-Soviet backdrop.« Newsweek

»Voroshilovgrad is an unsentimental novel about human relationships in conditions of brutality in which there is not a single act of betrayal … In his prose there is no nostalgia, but there is genuine affection, rough and profound. Even in this brutish habitus, there is trust, loyalty, and love.« Marci Shore, The New Yorker

»Voroshilovgrad is more, however, than an exercise in post-Soviet social realism. There is something deeply mythological about the novel, and, like many myths, it is a story of homecoming. … Zhadan’s language is suitably elastic, swinging from the tough, streetwise irony of a Ukrainian Irvine Welsh to flights of ebullient poetry more reminiscent of Bruno Schulz.« Uilleam Blacker, Times Literary Supplement

»A homecoming is by turns magical and brutal in Zhadan's impressive picaresque novel. … For Zhadan, loyalty and fraternity are the life-giving forces in this exhausted, fertile, near-anarchic corner of the country … readers will be touched by his devotion to a land of haunted beauty, ›high sky,‹ and ›black earth.‹« Publishers Weekly

»With Voroshilovgrad, Zhadan has created an authentic poetics of post–Soviet rural devastation. His ragged, sympathetic characters aren’t the newly rich post–Soviets of Moscow, the urban oligarchs Peter Pomerantsev has described, who ›sing hymns to Russian religious conservatism – and keep their money and families in London.‹ They are individuals struggling to come to terms with their place in history and with the history of their place.« Amelia Glaser, Los Angeles Review of Books

»A trippy novel of contemporary Ukraine … set far away from the bustle of the metropolis and the Maidan, yet no less representative of the unsettled state of a country unable to transition. A bit meandering – but generally in a good way – Voroshilovgrad is an entertaining sort-of-road-novel with quite a bit of depth to it.« Michael Orthofer, Complete Review

»Zhadan’s canvas is large and is filled with bold characters ... [he] also tosses into the mix fantastic and surreal flights of prose; poetic descriptions of the still-beautiful parts of the Ukraine, with its rich, black, enduring earth.« Willard Manus, Lively Arts

»Ukraine’s best-known poet and the country’s most famous counter-culture writer.« Sally McGrane, The New Yorker

»An entertaining tale … Trouble keeps finding Herman, and it’s hard not to root for him.« Roman Augustovitz, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

»Blurring the boundaries between time and space as well as place, Voroshilovgrad narrates the journey of Herman, an advertising executive, who returns to his remote home after years of city living to find his missing brother.« World Literature Today

»Zhadan is a writer who is a rock star, like Byron in the early nineteenth century was a rock star.« Dr. Vitaly Chernetsky, professor of Slavic Literature at the University of Kansas, The New Yorker

»Voroshilovgrad crosses, with tremendous grace, back and forth between lyrical dreaminess and brutal nightmarishness, and Zhadan works in lots of absurdity … paradoxically both real and bizarre.« Lisa Espenschade, Lizok’s Bookshelf

»A fascinating exploration into a post-soviet Ukraine. Not only does it explore the effects of communism to an industrial city, but also the power vacuum left behind when the Soviet Union collapsed.« Michael Kitto, Knowledge Lost

»A dark but funny tale of an urbanite who returns to his hometown to run his brother’s gas station. It’s a road novel with splashes of magical realism and an embrace of fraternal loyalty. In hindsight, the bleak, disheartening environs and attitudes make it hard not to notice parallels to Trumpian middle America.« Jay Trachtenberg, The Austin Chronicle

»Voroshilovgrad is a road novel that escapes itself ... [it] evokes the notion that the things we may consider nearest and dearest (romantic love, ›brotherhood‹ and even more cynical values like materialism) are, rather than the be-all and end-all, just the tip of the iceberg emerging from the more alien depths of human motivation.« Elisabeth Cook, Lit All Over

»The book veers from poetic lyricism to brutal realism. And sometimes we get both at the same time, a feat I would have thought impossible, but Zhadan pulls it off.« Zoe Brooks, Magic Realism

»A strange mixture of magical realism, road novel, and spiritual journey … By turns jaunty, hilarious, poignant, and depressing, Voroshilovgrad tells an important story about the people left in the wake of Communism’s collapse, and the ways in which they try to build a future.« Rachel Cordasco, Bookishly Witty

»Zhadan’s language is wild and powerful. The rhythm structuring his endless sentences demonstrates his beginnings as a poet.« Jutta Lindekugel, World Literature Today

»A generation’s manifesto.« Liza Novikova, Izvestiya (Russia)

»There is no summarizing the spicy, hot, sweet, vicious improvisations of Serhiy Zhadan – this is verbal jazz.« Kirill Ankudinov, Vzglyad.ru (Russia)

»Zhadan’s prose is so poetic, his free verse so prosaic. It is difficult to assign a genre to his work: memoir, travelogue, timely or untimely meditation – or a mixture of all these, centered on the themes ›my generation‹ and ›our epoch‹.« The New Literary Review (Russia)

»Here lies the power source of Zhadan’s writing – in its passion for language« Die Zeit

»Despite all turbulences, many floating, elegiac moments can be found in this book, sentences that show that Zhadan started out as a poet. […] the magic of the novel originates in the mixture of metaphorical indulgence, grotesque humour and tough criminological realism.« Der Spiegel

»In this novel, the absurd is paired with the romantic while the humouristic meets dramatic elements in the most wonderful way, and the dialogues are of captivatingly trenchant nonchalance. All of this together creates a exceptionally original rural slacker-novel with phantasmagoric elements.« taz. die tageszeitung

»Zhadan is an exceptionally talented connoisseur of language.« Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»[Zhadan] is a master of authentic conversations, in the tradition of Ernest Hemingway.« Anna Prizkau, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung