Martians on Khreschatyk. Literary Kyiv of the 20th century

Walking around Kyiv, it is easy to recognize numerous locations described in poems and novels of the beginning of the 20th century. The apartment numbers have changed somewhere, the facades have been painted in a new way, and sometimes the street names have changed, but if you look closely, you can imagine how Tychyna and Kurbas sat at the same table in the "Cell of Arts" on Horodetskyi St., a little further, in Pidmogilny's office, whether he was meeting or not all of artistic Kyiv, and in the basement of the "Continental" hotel, irreconcilable skydivers, symbolists and spiralists met for coffee. In the evening Khreshchatyk, real "Martians" were walking, and in Heorhiivskyi Lane, the mysterious artistic Theosophical Nine was looking for new horizons.

Vira Aheieva's new book is a journey through the literary Kyiv at the beginning of the 20th century. The author will show Kyiv through the eyes of avant-garde artists, rebellious emancipators, and bohemian poets, Kyiv, in which they lived and created, despite everything that was happening around, Kyiv, which survived, preserving its history and future.

About the author

Vira Aheieva is a professor at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy National University, and Shevchenko Prize laureate.

The author of the books "Behind the Empire Scenes", "Women's Space: Feminist Discourse of Ukrainian Modernism", "Poetics of Paradox: the Intellectual Prose of Viktor Petrov-Domontovych", "Apology of Modernism: Outline of the 20th century", "Roads and Crossing", "The Pattern on the Stone. Mykola Bazhan: Biography of a (Non-)Soviet Poet" and others.