Trafika Europe 7 - Ukrainian Prayer

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

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