Zviroslov

Tania Maliarchuk first published Zviroslov (Bestiary) in 2009. It took two years to write and became her fifth book of prose, a book of stories. Maliarchuk was already a skillful storyteller of her own stories, and now it turned out that she is also a passionate collector of other people's stories. And a good collector will never show all the artifacts he has collected at once; he will save the best for the chosen ones and for later. Not a single work in this book is what it pretends to be. The text here turns so quickly into subtext that you'll have to try to catch up.

When Tania presented the collection at the time, she recalled working on it: the impetus was her move from Ivano-Frankivsk to Kyiv. Every day she saw dozens of city women who looked like each other, going about the same business in the same typical neighborhoods.

Tania diversified their lives by making these women the protagonists of her stories. There are eight Kyiv stories in Zviroslov, one in Lviv (as if to emphasize Kyiv), and one about the Myronivka transit station.

Hanna Uliura