This book examines the early poetry (1956–1971) of the Ukrainian/American writer Yuriy Tarnawsky, one of the founders of the New York Group of Ukrainian poets and a unique figure among Ukrainian writers with regard to his experiments with forms. Demonstrating the radical changes that occurred in his poetic style between the 1950s and 1970s, Maria Grazia Bartolini analyzes the relationship between these innovations and the similar shifts taking place in Western poetry and culture during the 1950s and 1960s, when new forms of expression and a new consciousness developed in the interstices between modernism and nascent postmodernism.

The book provides the reader with a selection of unpublished materials from the Yuriy Tarnawsky Papers at the Bakhmeteff Archive of Columbia University.

Inspired by Virgil’s exquisitely ambivalent phrase “sunt lacrimae rerum” (there are tears of/for/in things), Andriy Sodomora, the Ukrainian “voice” of classical antiquity, has produced a series of original vignettes and essays about things: the big things in our lives (like happiness, loneliness, and aging); the small things we do or see daily, rarely paying attention to them (like a tree’s shadow or the kernels on an ear of corn); and the things (i.e., objects) to which we form connections.

The selected stories presented here are the first English translations of Sodomora’s profoundly intellectual and intertextual prose. Through his nostalgic memories and recollections, Sodomora takes readers on a journey through western Ukraine, as well as through world literature, from ancient Greece and Rome to the poetry of Paul Verlaine and Federico García Lorca.

At thirty-seven, Victoria Amelina was one of Ukraine’s most promising young writers, on the verge of a major international career, when Russia’s full-scale invasion against Ukraine broke out. On hearing the news, Victoria, who was traveling in Egypt with her ten-year-old son, headed home. After dropping him off with her mother in Krakow, she hurried back to her native Lviv, where she joined her fellow citizens as a full-time volunteer, collecting supplies to aid the soldiers on the front lines. On seeing the horrors of war up close, Victoria decided that wasn’t enough, so she signed up with Truth Hounds, a decade-old human rights organization committed to documenting war crimes. She began a new book, War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War, in which she wrote about the women who had set aside their own lives in order to document war crimes. On June 27th, Victoria was dining in a restaurant near the front lines when a missile struck and Victoria herself became the victim of a war crime.

Prismatic and polysemous, On the Road to Lviv invites us on an odyssey across Ukraine in the hour of war. “This chronicle/ Took shape the day the war began, which was/ My 65th birthday,” writes legendary traveler, war correspondent, memoirist and poet Christopher Merrill. At once deeply personal yet rooted in history so recent you can almost see the smoke billowing from the ruins of Mariupol, the poem is equal parts chronicle, a document of war crimes, and a sober self-reflection in which the poem’s speaker examines his own engagement with Ukraine as a “democratic-minded” Westerner “determined to develop/ Civil societies around the world.” Not since Byron’s Mazeppa has there been an English-language poem comparably engaged with Ukrainian history, appearing here en face with Nina Murray’s masterly translation into Ukrainian.

Set in Ukraine and Crimea, this unique autobiography offers a fascinating, detailed picture of life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Tsarist Russia. Goldenshteyn (1848-1930), a traditional Jew who was orphaned as a young boy and became a shochet (kosher slaughter) as a young man, is a master storyteller. Folksy, funny, streetwise, and self-confident, he is a keen observer of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, both Jewish and non-Jewish. His accounts are vivid and readable, sometimes stunning in their intensity.

The memoir is brimming with information. Goldenshteyn’s adventures shed light on communal life, persecution, family relationships, religious practices and beliefs, social classes, local politics, interactions between Jews and other religious communities (including Muslims, who formed the majority of Crimea’s populace), epidemics, poverty, competition for resources, migration, war, modernity and secularization, holy men and charlatans, acts of kindness and acts of treachery. In chronicling his own life, Goldenshteyn inadvertently tells a bigger story—the story of how a small, oppressed people, among other minority groups, struggled for survival in the massive Russian Empire.

Until now, only a small circle of Yiddish-speaking scholars had access to this extremely significant primary source. This translation is a game-changer, making the treasure trove of information contained in these pages accessible to academics and ordinary readers alike. Informed by research in Ukrainian, Israeli, and American archives and personal interviews with the few surviving individuals who knew Goldenshteyn personally, The Shochet is a magnificent new contribution to Jewish and Eastern European history.

This is the first book to explore Odesa’s cosmopolitan spaces in an urban context from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Leading scholars shed new light on encounters between Jewish, Ukrainian, and Russian cultures. They debate different understandings of cosmopolitanism as they are reflected in Odesa’s rich multilingual culture, ranging from intellectual history and education to music, opera, and literature. The issues of language and interethnic tensions, imperialist repression, and language choice are still with us today. Moreover, the book affords a historical view of what lay behind the Odesa myth, as well as insights into the Jewish and Ukrainian cultural revivals of the early twentieth century.

Ivan and Phoebe chronicles the lives of several young people involved in the Ukrainian student protests of the 1990s—otherwise known as the Revolution on Granite or the First Maidan and investigates the difficulties and absurdities of a society swiftly shifting from subjugation to revolution to post-Soviet rule.

Don’t Close Your Eyes, a collection of Hanna Melnyczuk’s drawings created during Russia’s war on Ukraine, attempt to process what is happening to the country her parents left in 1945. Influenced by her work on children’s books, these drawings convey events through colored pencil and watercolor. Melnyczuk draws as a way to understand the unfathomable acts of war, and images that line her mind unfurl onto paper. When the people plead “close the sky!” her work closes the sky with needle and thread. The destruction of buildings and bricks begin to reveal the bodies beneath. These drawings bring to the fore the death and horror of war through the filter of time and distance, expressing the emotions of one viewing the war from afar, depicting what can only be seen in the mind’s eye. Proceeds of this book will be donated to the war and recovery efforts.

Ukraine may be the only country on earth that owes its existence, at least in part, to a poet. Ever since the appearance of Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar in 1840, poetry has played an outsized role in Ukrainian culture. “Our anthology begins: Letters of the alphabet go to war and ends with I am writing/ and all my people are writing,” note the editors of this volume, acclaimed poets Carolyn Forché and Ilya Kaminsky. “It includes poets whose work is known to thousands of people, who are translated into dozens of languages, as well as those who are relatively unknown in the West.”

Translated with the utmost of care by Amelia Glaser and Yulia Ilchuk, A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails is a guidebook to the emotional combat in Ukraine. These stunning poems of witness by one of Ukraine’s most revered poets are by turns breathless, philosophical, and visionary. In a dark recapitulation of evolution itself, Kruk writes: “nothing predicted the arrival of humankind…./ nothing predicted the arrival of the tank…” Her taught, lean lines can turn epigrammatic: “what will kill you will seduce you first,” or they can strike you like Lomachenko’s lightening jabs: “flirt, Cheka agent, bitch.”