Imagine that after winning the war with Bolshevik Russia in 1920, Ukraine defeated all external and internal enemies, growing into a world power. Every year, the capital of the Ukrainian Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic, a country building national communism, hosts the Proletarian Carnival. Politicians, writers, artists, spies, and assassins come to the city. Among the carnival guests are Leni Riefenstahl and Nobel laureate Olha Kobylanska, Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller… Meanwhile, one of the guests, someone invisible, powerful and dangerous, becomes the target of the search for SBU colonel Yuriy Kotsiuba. In the novel “Kharkiv 1938” Oleksandr Irvanets , in a mocking and iconoclastic tone, plays with the conventions of alternative history, dystopia and spy thriller. Letting his imagination run wild, he delves into the deep recesses of Ukrainian national traumas and complexes.

Participants: Oleksandr Irvanets – author, Andrij Saweneć – translator, moderator: Switłana Ołeszko

Ołeksandr Irvanets (born 1961 in Lviv) is a poet, prose writer, playwright, and translator. He grew up in Rivne, Volyn, and from 1990 to 2022 lived in Irpin near Kyiv. Graduate of the Maxim Gorky Institute of Literature in Moscow (1989). Together with Yuriy Andruhovych and Viktor Neborak, he co-founded the legendary literary group Bu-Ba-Bu. In Polish translations, a selection of his dramas “Recording” and other works (2001), novels “Rivne/Rowno” (2008) and “Lovecraft’s Disease” (2013), and poems “Vanya from Ryazan” (2022) were published. Translator from Belarusian, Czech, French, Russian and Polish (works of Janusz Korczak and Janusz Głowacki). Winner of the Helen Szczerban-Lipka Prize (USA), scholarship holder of the Fulbright Foundation (USA), Schloss Solitude Academy (Germany), Kultur-Kontakt Foundation (Austria) and the Gaude Polonia programme of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland. Finalist of the Angelus Central European Literary Award (2014).