This novel captures the fractured, flickering and ambiguous image of a Ukrainian province – the Polesia region – through the memories of an elderly woman.

Literary fiction

The narrator, Maria, was born to a Ukrainian peasant mother and a Czech prisoner of war. Her chronicle, composed of powerful images and fragmentary stories, follows the fate of the central family and various other characters and figures who make up a colourful mosaic of life in the Zhytomyr Oblast from the 1920s to the present day. The narrative canvas is partly tattered, burnt and therefore incomplete, splintering into smaller, more personal stories, brutally interrupted by the dramatic arcs of Eastern Europe.

Alexey Sevruk (1983) is a poet, novelist, journalist and translator. Born in Kiev, 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 the Faculty of Philosophy of Charles University. He has translated the works of Yurii Andrukhovych and Serhiy Zhadan into Czech and Patrik Ouředník’s experimental prose Europeana into Ukrainian. As the editor-in-chief of a literary monthly, he has also written for several domestic and foreign journals, magazines and anthologies. He works as an archivist at the Museum of Czech Literature.