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Honorable Mention - American Association for Ukrainian Studies (AAUS) 2018-2019 Book Prize Having exploded on the margins of Europe, Chornobyl marked the end of the Soviet Union and tied the era of postmodernism in Western Europe with nuclear consciousness. The Post-Chornobyl Library in Tamara Hundorova's book becomes a metaphor of a new Ukrainian literature of the 1990s, which emerges out of the Chornobyl nuclear trauma of the 26th of April, 1986. Ukrainian postmodernism turns into a writing of trauma and reflects the collisions of the post-Soviet time as well as the processes of decolonization of the national culture. A carnivalization of the apocalypse is the main paradigm of the post-Chornobyl text, which appeals to \"homelessness\" and the repetition of \"the end of histories.\" Ironic language game, polymorphism of characters, taboo breaking, and filling in the gaps of national culture testify to the fact that the Ukrainians were liberating themselves from the totalitarian past and entering the society of the spectacle. Along this way, the post-Chornobyl character turns into an ironist, meets with the Other, experiences a split of his or her self, and witnesses a shift of geo-cultural landscapes.

Havingexploded on the margins of Europe, Chornobyl marked the end of the Soviet Unionand tied the era of postmodernism in Western Europe with nuclear consciousness.The Post-Chornobyl Library becomes a metaphor of a new Ukrainian literature of the 1990s,which emerges out of the Chornobyl nuclear trauma.

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.-With the publication of \"Ne Znaju\" (I Don't Know), the Kyiv-based publishing house Rodovid has completed the three-volume set of the Ukrainian American author [Yuriy Tarnawsky]'s selected works in Ukrainian. The earlier volumes were \"6x0\" (1998), Mr. Tarnawsky's collected plays, and \"Yikh Nemaye\" (They Don't Exist, 1999), collections of poetry from the years 1970-1999. \"They Don't Exist\" contains 10 separate collections and constitutes Mr. Tarnawsky's second volume of collected poetry; the first volume, \"Poems About Nothing and Other Poems on the Same Subject,\" which contains nine separate collections, came out in 1970. The new book includes the cycle \"This Is How I Get Well,\" which first appeared in a bilingual English/Ukrainian edition in 1978, and \"U ra na,\" published as a book in Ukraine in 1992, that in a personal way deals with Ukraine's history. It ends with another book-length poem \"Misto Kyiv ta Yam\" (The City of Sticks and Pits), which is related to the cycle of plays \"6x0.\"

The remaining three essays are devoted to film, an art form that, according to Mr. [Yuriy Tarnawsky], has had a profound influence on him as a writer. The films Mr. Tarnawsky discusses are emblematic works of modernist cinema: Pier-Paolo Pasolini's \"Teorema,\" Ingmar Bergman's \"Persona,\" Michelangelo Antonioni's \"L'Eclisse\" and Alexander Dovzhenko's \"Arsenal.\" The Bergman article appears to crack the enigma of the introductory passage with the mysterious boy in the morgue that has perplexed and confused both critics and cinema lovers ever since the film's release 50 years ago. In the \"L'Eclisse\" essay Mr. Tarnawsky censures Martin Scorsese for not recognizing Dovzhenko as the originator of the Poetic Cinema School.

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. - The Kyiv publishing house Rodovid which in 1998 released [Yuriy Tarnawsky]'s collection of plays \"6 x 0\" has just published a book of his poetry called \"Yikh Nemaye\" (They Don't Exist). The 430-page book constitutes the second volume of Mr. Tarnawsky's collected poetry - 10 separate cycles and book-length poems written after the appearance of his first book of collected poetry, \"Poems About Nothing and Other Poems on the Same Subject,\" which was published in 1970.

Mr. [Yuriy Tarnawsky] was introduced by Vira Bodnaruk, head of the Institute's Literary Committee, who said Mr. Tarnawsky is \"not only at the forefront of American avantgarde literature, but also of the Ukrainian émigré literature.\" The event marked the launch of Mr. Tarnawsky's new book of fiction/'Short Tales,\" which is available in both English and Ukrainian.

\"Like Blood in Water\" consists of five pieces: \"screaming,\" \"former pianist fitipaldo,\" \"the joys and sorrows of r. york,\" \"pavarotti-agamemnon\" and \"surgery\" - all rendered in the lower case. The mystery is this: Why does Mr. [Yuriy Tarnawsky] call these pieces \"mini-novels\"? In my judgment, there is only one way to read this book: we must read it as we would read a modern poem. On my part, I found a pattern in \"Like Blood in Water\" which I never saw in any of his earlier books, or, for that matter - in any other book. The first piece, titled \"screaming,\" has a surrealist quality. Even though Rilke Roark and Alba live in a world unlike our own, we still can recognize them from our dreams and from our nightmares, \"former pianist fitipaldo\" starts that way, however, as this mininovel progresses, it enters a quantum world: logic as we know it - even a perverted logic of surrealism - stops to exist. Instead, we enter a world of string theory and its multiple dimensions where cause and effect are no longer applicable. Here, although \"a soccer field is empty, its right side dissolves in void.\" Although \"the players are all gone,\" holes are left in their places like a light that flashes, signaling the existence of neutrinos or bosons in a particle collider. When we begin reading \"the joys and sorrows of r. york\" - could this be an allusion to Goethe? We are not surprised upon entering a new world. Here a bus becomes a carp, \"its body bending this way and that, wrinkles forming on its shiny metal skin first on one side, then on the other.\" Even beer, the beverage that we like to drink on warm summer days, here acquires the personality of a being, sighing mysteriously. The former pianist does not fit in his world, in spite of the root in his name. Indeed, there is something \"cosmological\" about the breaking up of Fitipaldo 's family, something analogous to modern physics. His family is \"going away for good.\" They are, we are told, \"between ... Fitipaldo and the vanishing point on the horizon.\" Furthermore, there seem to be some forces which direct the behavior of and relationship between his wife, his daughter and his son. His wife leans forward, \"her head bent down, protruding beyond her body, as if she were walking against a strong wind, but in reality ... because of the vast space and emptiness before her and her determination to get away.\" As if guided by Newton's law of gravity, the big suitcases in her hands seem light, \"as though (they) were tending to rise like helium-filled balloons.\" The law of gravity also seems to exist between her, her daughter and her son. Each one seems to relate according to his or her size and to the distance between them.

He also writes about myriad other subjects, such as the irony of a situation (\"the rose tattoo\"), political farce (\"lenin's brain\"), perverted sex (\"bobby and bobbi\"), loneliness (\"missing\"), unfulfilled love (\"an earthquake in the heart\"), failure in life (\"ax. robat\") - to name only few. And the unifying factor of all these themes is alienation. upon a closer inspection, these words of introduction appear much deeper. Like a magician, Mr. [Yuriy Tarnawsky] distorts our attention, uncovering the obvious and hiding the essential, thus forcing us to use our own knowledge and our own imagination. He tells us that the persona's name is Rock, a rather common name and, at the same time, a synonym for stone. But it introduces through evocation a Christian theme. [Peterson] is formed by two distinct words: \"Peter\" or \"Perros\" in Greek, and \"son,\" which is a homonym of \"sun\" - a heavenly body. We think of association between Peterson and St. Peter - the rock upon which Jesus promised to build his Church. But despite this promise, man, like Rock Peterson, continues to suffer existential exile. In the words of Jean Paul Sartre's paradox, \"he is to freedom condemned.\" After this teller's voice, we no longer hear him. But we see with our own \"mind's eye\" these pictures. We ask ourselves, \"Who is this tall young man, wearing a jacket that was fashionable in 1930s, whose arms 'are bent at the elbows and hands balled into fists'; who creates the impression that one is looking at a child's pathetic little fists balled as a protection against the huge hostile world?\" We ask ourselves such questions as the images keep changing, as new pictorial themes appear. We ask these questions and we sort them out into a powerful narrative - until we begin to imagine someone's struggles, someone's life. The best way to describe this story is by imagining that somehow it jumped out from the book and assumed an independent life.

Tupko reviews Short Tails by Yuriy Tarnawsky.

The cycle of [Yuriy Tarnawsky]'s six plays titled \"6 x 0,\" is a definite contribution to modernist Ukrainian drama. Sequentially the third of these plays, \"Not Medea,\" was recently brought to the U.S. in the author's English-language version, as an experimental, work-in-progress production. \"Not Medea\" is not simply yet another myth set in modern times. Mr. Tarnawsky's attitude to the classical story is complex and highly individual. The epigraph in the play reads: \"Warning: Written with body fluids. Made in Ukraine.\" The structure of the play, its fabric of motives and motivations, is quite complex and multi-layered. Mr. HIady also introduced into the play another actress, Laila Maria Salins, a professional opera singer (mezzo soprano). One of Ms. Salin's functions was to sing, to her own accompaniment on the piano, some lines from Mahler's \"Kindertotenlieder\" (\"Songs of Dead Children\"), an obvious allusion to Medea's situation. Toward the end of the play, the spectators were treated to the opening of the well-known and richly associative Chaconne for solo violin by Bach.