The City

 

The City / Valerian Pidmohylnyi
trans. from the Ukrainian by Maxim Tarnawsky 
Cambridge, MA: HURI, 2025, c1927.
504 p.

I read this recently, as it's a Ukrainian classic now available in English. It was written in 1927 and is considered one of the first urban novels (as per the title). 

The cover is evocative, as the story is about Stepan Radchenko, who comes to Kyiv from his village, to study and help build up socialism. He is ambitious, driven, sensitive to what others think of him, works hard and takes whatever advantage he can. He intends to climb the social/artistic ladder as high as he can. He doesn't have much emotional intelligence, but he knows how to play the game and advance himself wherever possible. I thought the story was quick moving, psychologically interesting, and definitely a great picture of 1920s Kyiv when Ukrainization was going strong -- before Stalin reintroduced russification and the generation of writers including Pidmohylnyi were killed -- the Executed Renaissance. 

However. I did not love this book. Stepan is a bit of a self-centred asshole so I had a hard time finding sympathy for him. He has three relationships with women once he arrives in Kyiv, all focused on his own needs and desires, not theirs. He forces himself on a girl from the village who had been stepping out with him, then drops her. He starts a physical relationship with his married landlady. And then he has a long-standing relationship with another young woman who he leads on to the point of proposing, only to then change his mind and drop her too. These women were only useful to him insofar as they helped him advance in some way. 

So Stepan's great ideal of socialism and equality only extends to men like him. The book thus made me feel conflicted; while I admired the writing style and some of the psychological insight into Stepan and his fellow writers and students, and the depiction of the arts scene in Kyiv, I was dismayed by the depiction of women's status and experience as being secondary and only important in relation to the men in the book.  Their rights of artistic growth and autonomy are not considered. At the same time, the writing itself is good, with quotable moments of insight and the evocation of an era. So this is a mid book for me -- the good is counterbalanced by the bad so it comes out just middling for me as a reader.