Yuri Andrukhovych is one of Ukraine’s preeminent authors and cultural commentators. In recognition of his literary writings and his role as a public intellectual he has received numerous awards including the Herder Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Goethe Medal. My Final Territory is a collection of Andrukhovych’s philosophical, autobiographical, political, and literary essays, demonstrating his enormous talent as an essayist to the English-speaking world. This volume broadens Andrukhovych’s international audience and will create a dialogue with anglophone readers throughout the world in a number of fields including philosophy, history, journalism, political science, sociology, and anthropology. In their introduction, Mark Andryczyk and Michael M. Naydan reveal a somewhat lesser-known side of Andrukhovych’s writings that places him alongside such writers as recent Belarusian Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich. Eleven of the fourteen essays in this volume, including his seminal work "Central-Eastern Revision" and a brand-new essay on the Russo-Ukrainian War, appear here for the first time in English. My Final Territory showcases Yuri Andrukhovych’s unique voice and provides insight into the Ukrainian experience of nationality and identity.

Fiction. Eastern European Studies. Translated from the Ukrainian by Vitaly Chernetsky. "The literary dormitory at Moscow University becomes a kind of Russian Grand Hotel, serving the last supper of empire to a host of writers gathered from every corner of the continent, and beyond. Young poets from Vietnam, Mongolia, Yakutia, Uzbekistan, Russia, and Ukraine assemble to study, drink, frolic, and explore each other and the decaying city around them. When the supper turns into a bacchanal, who's surprised? 'The empire betrayed its drunks. And thus doomed itself to disintegration.' Part howl, part literary slapstick, part joyful dirge, charged with the brashness of youth, betraying the vision of the permanent outsider, Andrukhovych's novel suggests that literature really is news that stays news. Funny, buoyant, flamboyant, ground-breaking, and as revelatory today as when it was first published in Ukrainian, THE MOSCOVIAD remains a literary milestone. In spirit and intellectual brio Andrukhovych, whose irreverence makes Borat seem pious, is kin to the great Halldor Laxness and the venerable David Foster Wallace"--Askold Melnyczuk.

Yuri Andrukhovych emerged as a prominent voice in Ukrainian literature with the publication of his first book of poems in 1985. The same year, together with Oleksandr Irvanets and Viktor Neborak, he formed the poetic group Bu-ba-bu, which became a leading force in Ukrainian poetic innovation for nearly a decade. After publishing only prose for a number of years, Andrukhovych returned to poetry in great form but with a much-changed poetics in 2004, with the publication of another collection. A comprehensive selection of his poetry from the 1980s-1990s, titled Lysty v Ukrainu (Letters to Ukraine), came out in 2013; in it, Andrukhovych revisited and revised several of those texts. This book traces the evolution of his poetics from the 1980s onward.

Yuri Andrukhovych is one of Ukraine's preeminent authors and cultural commentators. In recognition of his literary writings and his role as public intellectual he has received numerous awards including the Herder Prize, Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Goethe Medal. My Final Territory is a collection of Andrukhovych's philosophical, autobiographical, political, and literary essays, which demonstrate his enormous talent as an essayist to the English-speaking world. This volume broadens Andrukhovych's international audience and will create a dialogue with Anglophone readers throughout the world in a number of fields including philosophy, history, journalism, political science, sociology, and anthropology. In their introduction Michael Naydan and Mark Andryczyk reveal a somewhat lesser-known side of Andrukhovych's writings that place him alongside such writers as recent Belarusian Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich. Ten of the twelve essays in this volume, including his seminal work "Central-Eastern Revision," are appearing for the first time in English. My Final Territory showcases Yuri Andrukhovych's unique voice and provides insight into Ukrainian experience of nationality and identity.

The tale of a poet's tragicomic last days in Venice

What was the fate of Stanislav Perfetsky -- poet, provocateur, and hero of Ukrainian underground culture? Certain evidence points to suicide. But some whisper murder. Some suggest the grand Eastern European tradition of coerced suicide. It may be related to the religious cult ceremony he unluckily happened upon in Munich. . . or that job as a dancer in a strip club for older women.

Or, then again, it may not.

Perverzion reconstructs Perfetsky's final days using a mishmash of relics, from official documents to recorded interviews to scraps of paper. Perfetsky, the personification of the Ukrainian artistic superman (for example, he plays countless musical instruments so well he collaborated with Elton John during the star's secret sojourn in Ukraine), is bound for Venice to participate in a seminar to save the world from its absurdity. On the way he becomes a Ukrainian Orpheus, descending into the sophisticated decadence of the West, navigating through surrealistic adventures and no less surrealistic seminar topics as he charges head up (and pants down) toward his fate.

A work of sly, subversive humor and fantastic wordplay, Perverzion is a look into the new Ukraine's post-Soviet literary culture by one of the country's foremost contemporary writers.