The City

Valerian Pidmohylnyi’s The City was a landmark event in the history of Ukrainian literature. Written by a master craftsman in full control of the texture, rhythm, and tone of the text, the novel tells the story of Stepan, a young man from the provinces who moves to the capital of Ukraine, Kyiv, and achieves success as a writer through a succession of romantic encounters with women.

At its core, the novel is a philosophical search for harmony in a world where our intellectual side expects rational order, whereas the instinctive natural world follows its own principles. The resulting alienation and disorientation reflect the basic principles of existential philosophy, in which Pidmohylnyi is close to his European counterparts of the day.

Author Biography

Valerian Pidmohylnyi (1901–1937) was one of the most prominent Ukrainian modernist writers, translators, and literary scholars of the early twentieth century. Three years after his arrest by the Soviet authorities in 1934, Pidmohylnyi was executed in Sandarmokh (Karelian Republic) with over 1,000 other prominent Ukrainian writers, poets, intellectuals, and activists in what later was dubbed the Executed Renaissance. Maxim Tarnawsky is Professor of Ukrainian Language and Literature at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The All-Encompassing Eye of Ukraine: Ivan Nechui-Levyts´kyi’s Realist Prose and Between Reason and Irrationality: The Prose of Valerijan Pidmoyl´nyi, and the translator and the editor of Ukrainian Literature: A Journal of Translations. Maxim Tarnawsky is Professor of Ukrainian Language and Literature at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The All-Encompassing Eye of Ukraine: Ivan Nechui-Levyts´kyi’s Realist Prose and Between Reason and Irrationality: The Prose of Valerijan Pidmoyl´nyi, and the translator and the editor of Ukrainian Literature: A Journal of Translations.