Buy Book "City." in Ukrainian

In its simplest reading, Valerian Pidmohylny’s novel The City is the story of an ambitious young man who moves from the countryside to Kyiv and builds a new life there. He is often compared to the hero of Maupassant’s Any Friend and the self-confident and unscrupulous conquerors of social heights from Balzac’s stories. For Pidmohylnyi, however, this is not just a career story. He places the life of Stepan Radchenko in the historical and cultural context of Ukraine at the time. The marginalized and outsider Radchenko purposefully reinvents himself throughout the novel, gets an education, and joins the intellectual and creative elite. The world around him seems increasingly complicated. Among other things, the novel The City, written in 1927, testified to an incredibly important achievement of the national revolution: the return of urban space to Ukrainian cultural jurisdiction. The era of humiliating self-restraint within the framework of household rusticity was over, and Kyiv was once again becoming the center of a powerful artistic renaissance.