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Trafika Europe 7
in narratives that include powerful satire, black humor,
pulp fiction, magical realism, autobiographical prose,
and many other modes of writing, always imbued with
a deep lyricism. He also has penned a number of books
on aspects of the cultural history and legends of his
adoptive home city of Lviv, which is the locus of the
action of his Borgesian novel
Tango of Death
, excerpted
here. The novel follows the fate of four close friends – a
Ukrainian, a Pole, a German, and a Jew, from pre-WWII Lviv
to the present day – with an intricate plot that revolves
around an ancient manuscript that encodes the mystery
of eternal life. It is one of the first post-independence
Ukrainian novels dealing squarely with the horrors of the
Shoah in Ukraine.
5
The Hutsul poet from the Carpathian Mountains
Taras
Melnychuk
(Тарас Мельничук, 1939-1995), with a light
and ironic philosophical style, often wrote in free verse (a
rarity in Ukrainian poetry until the 1980s). He was forced
to abandon his university studies in Soviet times for his
free-spirited, nonconformist views. He worked for lengthy
periods of time as a lumberjack and in the building trades