Recreations

Originally published in Ukrainian in 1992, Recreations is a novel of carnivalesque vitality and acute social criticism. It celebrates newly found freedom and reflects upon the contradictions of post-Soviet society. Four poets and an entourage of secondary characters converge on the fictional Chortopil for the Festival of the Resurrecting Spirit, an orgy of popular culture, civic dysfunction, national pride, and sex. Recreations established Andrukhovych as a sophisticated but seductively readable comic writer with penetrating insights into his volatile times. The novel delights the reader with its extravagant and eccentric variety. For all its artful devices, it aims to be lucid, not dark, and readable, not forbidding. Yuri Andrukhovych's works have been translated and published in Poland, Germany, Hungary, Austria, Russia, Finland, Italy, Canada and the United States.