Ukraine has gone through difficult times on the way to becoming independent, and it is still fighting for it. For everyone who is interested in Ukraine and wants to learn more about the country – this list is for you.
Aharon Appelfeld - The story of a life
When Aharon Appelfeld was seven years old the Nazis occupied Czernowitz, his hometown. They penned the Jews into a ghetto and eventually sent whoever had not been shot or starved to death on a forced march across Ukraine to a labor camp. As men, women, and children fall away around them, Aharon and his father miraculously survive, and Aharon, even more miraculously, escapes from the camp shortly after he arrives there.
Amelia Glaser - Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary
Borderlands?
Glaser shows how writers working in Russian,
Ukrainian, and Yiddish during much of the nineteenth century and the early part
of the twentieth century were in intense conversation with one another. The marketplace
was both the literal locale at which members of these different societies and
cultures interacted with one another and a rich subject for representation in
their art.
Andrew Wilson - The Ukrainians: unexpected nation
Concentrating on the complex relationship between Ukraine and Russia, the book begins with the myth of common origin in the early medieval era, then looks closely at the Ukrainian experience under the tsars and Soviets, the experience of minorities in the country, and the path to independence in 1991.
Anna Reid - Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine
The book explores Ukraine’s struggle to build itself a national identity, an identity that faces up to a bloody past, and embraces all the peoples within its borders.
Anne Applebaum - Red Famine: Stalin’s war on Ukraine
In 1932-33, nearly four million Ukrainians died of starvation, having been deliberately deprived of food. It is one of the most devastating episodes in the history of the twentieth century. With unprecedented authority and detail, Red Famine investigates how this happened, who was responsible, and what the consequences were.
Askold
Krushelnycky - An Orange Revolution: A Personal Journey Through
Ukrainian History
In December 2004, the world watched as hundreds
of thousands of Ukrainians gathered to defy the results of a transparently
rigged presidential election. The security forces threatened violent
repression. But the demonstrators stayed and, as international pressure grew,
the corrupt old regime that had been supported by Putin's Kremlin was deposed.
Diane Chandler - The road to Donetsk
It is 1994 and an idealistic Vanessa Parker
enters the world of international aid, bringing with her youth, beauty and
passion to do good in the ‘Wild East’ of Ukraine after the sudden collapse of
communism. The country and its people completely win her heart. In a world
where millions of dollars can either wash away in a moment’s corruption, or
turn around the lives of the neediest, Vanessa is then forced to pit her own
naive desire to make a difference against the chaos of a country in transition
Ihor Ševčenko - Ukraine Between East
and West
The book Ukraine
Between East and West presents twelve essays that explore the
development of Ukrainian cultural identity under the disparate influences of
the Byzantine Empire and Western Europe.
Iryna
Tsilyk&Artem Chekh - Awesome Ukraine: Interesting Things You Need To Know
Awesome Ukraine is more than a guide! Simply
put, it is all that is awesome about Ukraine - from national dishes to
historical facts, symbols, mythology, popular culture, and much more.
Janet Skeslien Charles - Moonlight in Odessa: A novel
Odesa, Ukraine, is the humor capital of the
former Soviet Union, but in an upside-down world where waiters earn more than
doctors and Odessans depend on the Mafia. A wry, tender, and darkly funny look
at marriage, the desires we don’t acknowledge, and the aftermath of
communism, Moonlight in Odessa is a novel about the choices
and sacrifices that people make in the pursuit of love and stability.
Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything is illuminated
A young man sets out to find the woman who may
or may not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man
haunted by memories of the war; an amorous dog, and a young Ukrainian
translator who speaks in sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a
quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.
Larry Wolf - The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture
Galicia was created at the first partition of
Poland in 1772 and disappeared in 1918. Yet, in slightly over a century, the
idea of Galicia came to have meaning for both the peoples who lived there and
the Habsburg government that ruled it. Indeed, its memory continues to exercise
a powerful fascination for those who live in its former territories and for the
descendants of those who emigrated out of Galicia.
All her life, Safi's parents have dreamed of
returning to Grandpa's native village in Crimea. But exchanging their sunny
Uzbekistan house for a squalid camp is more like a nightmare. Will the return
to a country where no one welcomes them tear Safi's family apart, or can this
strange land ever become home?
Marci Shore - The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution
While the world watched the uprising on the
Maidan as an episode in geopolitics, those in Ukraine during the extraordinary
winter of 2013–14 lived the revolution as an existential transformation: the
blurring of night and day, the loss of a sense of time, the sudden disappearance of fear, the imperative to make choices. Marci Shore provides a
lesson about human solidarity in a world, our world, where the boundary between
reality and fiction is ever more effaced
Marina Lewycka - A Short History of
Tractors in Ukrainian
Lewycka tells the side-splittingly funny story
of two feuding sisters, Vera and Nadezhda, who join forces against their
father's new, gold-digging girlfriend Valentina. The sisters' campaign to oust
Valentina unearths family secrets, uncovers fifty years of Europe's darkest
history and sends them back to roots they'd much rather forget.
Mikhail Bulgakov- The White Guard
Set in Kyiv, Ukraine, beginning in late 1918, the novel
concerns the fate of the Turbin family as the various armies of the Ukrainian
War of Independence – the Whites, the Reds, the Imperial German Army, and
Ukrainian nationalists – fight over the city of Kyiv. Historical figures such
as Pyotr Wrangel, Symon Petliura, and Pavlo Skoropadsky appear as the Turbin
family is caught up in the turbulent effects of the October Revolution.
This romanticized historical novella
describes the life of an old Zaporozhian Cossack, Taras Bulba, and his two
sons, Andriy and Ostap. The sons study at the Kyiv Academy and then return
home, whereupon the three men set out on a journey to the Zaporizhian Sich (the
Zaporizhian Cossack headquarters), where they join other Cossacks and go to war
against Poland.
Orest Subtelny - Ukraine: A history
This book was published as the definitive
history of what was at the time a state within the USSR. In the years since we
have seen the dismantling of the Soviet bloc and the restoration of Ukraine's
independence - a time of celebration for Ukrainians throughout the world, and
of tumultuous change for those in the homeland.
Paul Robert
Magocsi - A
History of Ukraine
Although the new state of Ukraine came into
being as one of many formed in the wake of the Revolution of 1989, it is hardly
a new country. Paul Robert Magocsi tells its story from the first millennium
before the common era to the declaration of Ukrainian independence in 1991,
with a balanced discussion of political, economic, and cultural affairs.
Paweł
Pieniążek - Greetings
from Novorossiya: Eyewitness to the War in Ukraine
Polish journalist Pawel Pieniazek was among the
first journalists to enter the war-torn region of eastern Ukraine and Greetings
from Novorossiya is his vivid firsthand account of the conflict. He
was the first reporter to reach the scene when Russian troops in Ukraine
accidentally shot down a civilian airliner, killing all 298 people aboard.
Rachel Seiffert - A boy in winter: A novel
Rachel Seiffert's prose is intertwined with
rare compassion, courage, and emotional depth, an unflinching story is told: of
survival, of conflicting senses of duty, of the oppressive power of fear and
the possibility of courage in the face of terror.
Richard Sakwa - Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands
Richard Sakwa unpicks the context of conflict
Ukrainian identity and of Russo-Ukrainian relations and traces the path to the
recent disturbances through the events which have forced Ukraine, a country
internally divided between East and West, to choose between closer union with
Europe or its historic ties with Russia.
Robert
Conquest
- The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and Terror-Famine
The Harvest of Sorrow is the first full history of one of the most horrendous human
tragedies of the 20th century. Between 1929 and 1932 the Soviet Communist Party
struck a double blow at the Russian peasantry: the dispossession and
deportation of millions of peasant families, and the abolition of private
ownership of land and the concentration of the remaining peasants in
party-controlled "collective" farms. This was followed in 1932-33 by
a “terror-famine”.
Roman Szporluk - Russia, Ukraine, and the breakup of the Soviet Union
The key to understanding what was unimaginable
in November 1989 yet became a reality in December 1991, Szporluk says, lies in
understanding the relationship between Ukraine and Russia. With this in mind, he
offers insightful new perspectives on many critical questions surrounding the
decline and fall of the Soviet system
Serhii Plokhy - The Gates of Europe: A history of Ukraine
Situated between Europe, Russia, and the Asian
East, Ukraine was shaped by the empires that have used it as a strategic gateway between East and West - from the Romans and Ottomans to the Third Reich
and the Soviet Union, all have engaged in global fights for supremacy on
Ukrainian soil. Each invading army left a lasting mark on the landscape and on
the population, making modern Ukraine an amalgam of competing cultures.
Serhy Yekelchyk - Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation
The first Western survey of Ukrainian history
to include coverage of the Orange Revolution and its aftermath, this book
narrates the deliberate construction of a modern Ukrainian nation,
incorporating new Ukrainian scholarship and archival revelations of the
post-communist period.
Zhadan employs both prose and poetry to address
the disillusionment, complications, and complexities that have marked Ukrainian
life in the decades following the Soviet Union’s collapse. Following a
kind of magical-realist logic, his stories expose the grit and burden of
stalled lives, the universal desire for intimacy, and a wistful realization of
the off-kilter and even perverse nature of love.
Tim Judah - In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine
Making his way from the Polish border in the
west, through the capital city and the heart of the 2014 revolution, to the
eastern frontline near the Russian border, seasoned war reporter Tim Judah
brings a rare glimpse of the reality behind the headlines.
Timothy Snyder - The Reconstruction of Nations
Timothy Snyder traces the emergence of four
rival modern nationalist ideologies from common medieval notions of
citizenship. He presents the ideological innovations and ethnic cleansings that
abetted the spread of modern nationalism but also examines recent statesmanship
that has allowed national interests to be channeled toward peace.
Timothy Snyder - Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
Bloodlands is a new kind of European history,
presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two
aspects of a single history, in the time and place where they occurred: between
Germany and Russia, when Hitler and Stalin both held power.
Vasily Grossman - Everything Flows
Everything Flows is Vasily Grossman’s final testament, written after the Soviet authorities suppressed his masterpiece, Life, and Fate. The main story is simple: released after thirty years in the Soviet camps, Ivan Grigoryevich must struggle to find a place for himself in an unfamiliar world. But in a novel that seeks to take in the whole tragedy of Soviet history, Ivan’s story is only one among many.
Yevgen Nikiforov&Polina
Baitsym - Ukraine: Art for Architecture
In the times when the Ukrainian art sphere was
regulated by the Soviet institutions, local monumental and decorative arts
existed at the frontier of the Party’s propaganda and the artistic thirst to
experiments. Nowadays, Ukrainian mosaics are wrested out of the architectural
context of the country in both literal and metaphorical ways.
Żanna Słoniowska - The House With the Stained-glass Window
Amid the turbulence of 20th century Lviv, meet four generations of women from the same fractious family, living beneath one roof and each striving to find their way across the decades of upheaval in an ever-shifting city. More important even than these four women though is the character of the city of Lviv, the city of markets and monuments, streets and spires, where history and the present collide, civilizations clash, and stories rise up on every corner.
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