{"id":13966,"date":"2022-09-17T06:38:48","date_gmt":"2022-09-17T06:38:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/the-moscoviad-by-yuri-andrukhovych-reviews-and-recommendations\/"},"modified":"2022-09-17T06:38:49","modified_gmt":"2022-09-17T06:38:49","slug":"the-moscoviad-by-yuri-andrukhovych-reviews-and-recommendations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/the-moscoviad-by-yuri-andrukhovych-reviews-and-recommendations\/","title":{"rendered":"“The Moscoviad” by Yuri Andrukhovych – Reviews and recommendations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ukrainian literature is in demand at the moment, for perfectly understandable and deeply tragic reasons. After browsing through books by Andrei Kurkov, Serhiy Zjadan and now Yuriy Andrukhovych during the year, I dare to state that contemporary Ukrainian literature has a value far beyond informing us of what life looks like from that side. The match for literary twists, clever satire and linguistic excess will take a long time to find. “Moskoviad” by Andrukhovitj is from 1993 and is therefore not about the ongoing war, but from a rather odd angle the novel nevertheless focuses on very current issues. I will come back to that, but first an outline of the novel, to the extent that such a thing is possible. On the galley before breakfast In a student dormitory in Moscow, Ukrainian Otto von F. lives together with an unlikely gang from all over the Soviet Union. They all go to the author’s studies. We follow our man through a day, but also through large parts of Russian history, where both Lenin, Catherine the Great and Tsar Nicholas II appear, together with a number of other more or less famous dead who somehow do not want to settle down in the grave. On this special day, Otto is going to buy toys for children of some friends, before he is going to meet a friend to carve a newspaper for Ukrainians living in Moscow. Instead, he ends up in the galley already before breakfast, after he has had a loving encounter with a budding female writer in the ladies’ shower. Or was it rape? Here, as in so many other places in this novel, there are strongly conflicting interpretations. As the hours pass, von F. constantly stumbles into life-threatening situations, from which he miraculously and in increasing intoxication gets out. The empire gathers in the catacombs The last part of the day and of the novel takes place in a catacomb-like universe beneath Moscow. In gigantic halls, veins of the eternal Russia meet in an ugly mixture of obscene orgy and high-pitched pathos. And this is where the novel touches on the present, as a speaker proclaims that what was divided after the fall of the Soviet Union must be reunited into one kingdom. Andrukhovych hardly has prophetic gifts, it is probably more about the fact that the idea of \u200b\u200breuniting the Russian Empire is as old as the fall of the Soviet Union. Or older. The visions of Otto von F. are on a completely different level: “Weren’t you supposed to have a sword, or at least a can opener on you?” he asks when he is imprisoned in a cage, while huge, flesh-turned underground rats roam behind a very thin wall. For Otto, it’s about surviving the day and getting to the train station as soon as possible to catch the first train home to Kyiv. Otto von F. prays for the post-Soviet skepticism of great ideologies and eternal, holy fatherlands. Everyday craze and melodrama The author builds the story on contrasts like the one above, or between beautiful dreams and harsh realities. Depictions of gray everyday life, mud and dirt slide seamlessly into melodrama or scenes reminiscent of Dante’s “Inferno”. While the language is playful, ironic and with an eye for funny details. How this strange mixture turns into literary gold is a matter for alchemists. Have I been clear enough? In “Moskoviaden”, now unknown linguistic flourishes and cheeky political satire sprout from a vodka-marinated surrealism. More! news reviewer Photo: Cappelen Damm Title: “Moskoviaden” Author: Jurij Andrukhovytsj Genre: Novel Number of pages: 186 Publisher: Cappelen Damm Published: Autumn 2022 Hi! I am chief critic of fiction at news. Feel free to read my book reviews of “V\u00e5kenetter” by Christine Nitter, “Matrix” by Lauren Groff or “Invictus” by Sunniva Lye Axelsen.
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Ukrainian literature is in demand at the moment, for perfectly understandable and deeply tragic reasons. After browsing through books by Andrei Kurkov, Serhiy Zjadan and now Yuriy Andrukhovych during the year, I dare to state that contemporary Ukrainian literature has a value far beyond informing us of what life looks like from that side. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13967,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[7298,7296,225,224,7297],"class_list":["post-13966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-andrukhovych","tag-moscoviad","tag-recommendations","tag-reviews","tag-yuri"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13966\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}