Twelve Circles
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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.
Yuri Andrukhovych
Yuri Andrukhovych is a Ukrainian poet, prose writer, essayist, and translator. His book-length works translated into English include the novels Recreations, The Moscoviad, Perverzion, and Twelve Rings, as well as a collection of essays My Final Territory. He lives in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. Vitaly Chernetsky is associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures and director of the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization and coeditor of Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry. Ostap Kin is the editor of New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poetry on the City. Kin lives in Brooklyn, New York.
More by Yuri Andrukhovych
Vitaly Chernetsky
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Vitaly Chernetsky is a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas. A native of Odesa, Ukraine, his translations into English include Yuri Andrukhovych's novels The Moscoviad and Twelve Circles, a volume of Andrukhovych's selected poems, Songs for a Dead Rooster, Zhdanovka by Ukrainian artist Alevtina Kakhidze, and two children's books by Romana Romanyshyn and Andriy Lesiv, Sound and Sight.
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