In the most straightforward reading, the novel "The City" by Valerian Pidmohylny is the story of an ambitious young man who moves from the village to Kyiv and builds a new life there. He is often compared with the hero of Maupassant's "Dear Friend" and the self-confident and indiscriminate conquerors of social heights from Balzac's stories. However, for Podmohylyny, this is not just a career story. He places the life of Stepan Radchenko in the historical and cultural context of Ukraine at that time.
Radchenko, a marginal foreigner, purposefully shapes himself throughout the novel, gets an education, and joins the intellectual and creative elite. The surrounding world seems to him more and more complicated.
Among other things, the novel "The City", written in 1927, testified to a significant achievement of the national revolution: the return of urban space under Ukrainian cultural jurisdiction. The era of humiliating self-restraint within the framework of domestic rusticity was left behind, and Kyiv once again became the center of a powerful artistic renaissance.
About the series "Non-canon canon"
Thinking about the canon of Ukrainian literature, only a few names from the school curriculum come to mind: Shevchenko, Franko, and Nechuy-Levytskyi. Although in reality, this list is much more extensive and more diverse.
Before you are the series "Non-canon canon", with the help of which we want to talk about all those we did not know, whose texts we read without understanding the context of the reality of the time. Before you are a series designed to rediscover familiar strangers. You will find a range of Ukrainian authors and their works - from Pidmohylny and Barhyany to Khvylovy and Johansen, from an elegant intellectual novel to a dynamic adventure, from innovative urban prose to psychological texts.
Keys accompany each text for reading from Ukrainian literary experts. They will tell you what to pay attention to and help you look at the texts of Ukrainian classics in a new way.