The soldier Bohdan wakes up in a hospital in Kyiv. He has survived an encounter with Russian soldiers in Mariupol, but his face is battered into the unrecognizable, his memory erased. A woman visiting calls herself Romana and claims to be his wife. She wants to restore his memories by telling him his story and where he comes from.
This is the opening of the epic novel Amadoka by Ukrainian Sofia Adrukhovytch. In the novel, Andrukhovytch takes the reader on a journey through a hundred years of Ukrainian history, told through a family of three generations. In a story that is never linear, but rather moving in time and perspective, constantly taking new and unexpected twists and turns, she relays Stalin’s reign of terror, the persecution of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, the holodomor famine, Nazi occupation and finally Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea and Donbas. Many of these national traumas has long been suppressed, and Andrukhovytch elegantly explores the significance of memories and how they are shaped.
Sofia Andrukhovytch is a leading voice of a new generation of Ukrainian writers. The author of eight award winning novels, children’s books and translations of authors such as Kazuo Ishiguro and J. K. Rowling, she has gained readers worldwide with the masterful Amadoka.
Erika Fatland has written several books from the region that formerly made up the Soviet Union. A master of articulating how the past affects the present, she is currently working on a book from Ukraine. She will join Andrukhovytch for a conversation about memory and suppressed Ukrainian history.
The conversation will be in English.
