Oksana Zabuzhko/facebook
Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko published her own selection of the best Ukrainian novels of the 19th and 20th centuries. So choose for yourself what to read these summer evenings.
Summing up the results of the Kyiv “Book Arsenal”, Ukrainian writer and publicist Oksana Zabuzhko published on Facebook a list of the ten best, in her opinion, Ukrainian novels written for the past two centuries.
Zabuzhko emphasized that this selection is subjective, because she, unlike Vira Ageyeva and Rostyslav Semkiv, who compiled such a list according to the criteria of the literary canon according to Harold Bloom, chose texts “without any Bloom, according to the logic of the fictional “ideal world”, in which all Ukrainians are educated, all texts are accessible, and everyone tacitly agrees on what literature should be “according to the Hamburg account”.
If my list makes someone go to the library or to discover a new classic for oneself, means it was still worth publishing it!, Zabuzhko concluded.
The writer added that it was these texts of her time that influenced her, she loves them and rereads them.
I, for example, understand that such a list must include the “first novel of national literature”, cultured peoples even sometimes mark this as a separate date – but I never finished reading “Black Council” in my time, because *whispers * I was bored (!!!), but I insist that “The Old Nest and the Young Birds” by Vasyl Mova (reworked for the stage by Hnat Hotkevich and printed in the Literary-Scientific Herald as a drama) is a “novel in dialogues “, and here he is one hundred percent on my list of “tops”, and Vasyl Mova, in my opinion, is our greatest “lost genius” of the 19th century, – emphasized Zabuzhko.
Full list of Ukrainian novels:
- Vasyl Mova (Lymanskyi) “Old nest and young birds”
- Panas Mirnyi “Whore”
- Ivan Franko “Cross paths”
- Valeryan Podmohylyny “City”
- Mike Johansen “Journey of the scientist Dr. Leonardo and his future lover the beautiful Alceste to Slobozhansk Switzerland”
- Yuriy Yanovsky “Master of the ship”
- Zinaida Tulub “Lyudolovi”
- Victor Domontovych “Without Soil”
- Iryna Wilde “Richinsky Sisters”
- Emma Andievska “A Novel About a Good Person”
Oksana Zabuzhko is a Ukrainian poet, writer, essayist. The winner of many awards, including the Taras Shevchenko National Award of Ukraine (2019), the Central and Eastern European Literary Award “Angelus” (2013), “BBC Books of the Year” (2020). Her books and articles have been translated into more than 20 languages.