"Lexicon of intimate cities" is one of the most extensive works of Yuriy Andruhovych. A tireless traveler of Ukraine, Europe, and America, the author tells us 111 stories about 111 cities with which he was lucky enough to experience happy and not so good but always intimate - in the broadest sense - adventures. Arranged alphabetically by geographical name, these diverse texts – from essays and short stories to prose poems – together form an autobiographical atlas of the writer's world. In addition, each "lexical" adventure is clearly inscribed in spatial and time coordinates, allowing the reader to follow the author in 111 private-historical leaps from the mid-60s of the last century to the present day.
It is hardly worth expecting from this atlas, this extremely subjective "manual of geopoetics and cosmopolitics" objective characteristics of Kyiv and Lviv, moscow and Warsaw, New York and Yenakiieve. But you can find more artistically essential things in it: the atmosphere, mood, images, smells, and tastes of favorite cities and places, as they were imprinted in the author's memory. As well as brief observations and more profound reflections, lyricism and sadness, irony and sarcasm - everything that makes our communication with the world acquire signs of intimacy.
