Daily Wand

When your country is robbed by violence, wounded and wounded by decades, even centuries of foreign violence, exhausted by hunger, plundered by Sovietism, bathed in strontium, the duty of an artist is not to turn away from this pain, but to bear its burden upon oneself, to see and tell, to call each of these evils by name in the hope of finally speaking out, crying out, shouting out what lies like a heavy stone on the soul of an entire people. The trauma of history, like individual trauma, cannot be overcome until we give it a voice. A voice that cries out for what has been experienced. This is exactly what Yevhen Pashkovsky does with his novel “The Daily Rod” – he gives a body to this voice, a body that convulses, twitches and fevers, but it refuses to be silent, because its duty is to bear witness, holding firmly to the daily rod of the word, which alone can free us from the heavy burden of the past.

The novel is published in an updated author’s edition. The author asks that all previous versions be considered invalid.