Deeply reflective stories with existential and socially critical overtones.

Prose, Short stories

The Culmination of Summer is a collection of eleven short stories in which Alexej Sevruk guides the reader through Mikulov, glass atria where workers are hired to sweep leaves, and his native Ukraine. The characters pass through these settings hesitantly, as if uncertain whether they still belong in the world they must inhabit. Sevruk’s scenes are precise, stripped of unnecessary sentimentality or self-pity; even in the most difficult moments—whether the COVID pandemic or the war in Ukraine—a sense of self-irony is maintained. In some stories the author experiments with language, as in “The Old Kyiv Legend”, while in others he returns to the observational style that proved so successful in his previous acclaimed novel, A European Woman. The first two-thirds of the collection feature more traditionally structured stories, after which the author becomes more experimental and switches between genres. The book contains something rare today: a language which is alive, rich and unflinching, and a style which reminds us that you need more than just a subject to create literature.

Alexej Sevruk (1983) is a poet, novelist, journalist, and translator born in Kyiv, Ukraine. He has lived in the Czech Republic since the age of twelve, having moved there with his parents as part of the government’s programme to repatriate Volhynian Czechs and their relatives. He studied Ukrainian and Slavonic studies at Charles University. He has translated the works of Yurii Andrukhovych and Serhiy Zhadan into Czech and Patrik Ouředník’s experimental prose Europeana into Ukrainian. He was the editor-in-chief of the literary translation monthly Plav and has written for several Czech and international journals, magazines, and anthologies.