While the pathetic, clever and bleary-eyed Violetta prepares for death in Kyiv, I am reading a novel in Berlin.

No, my friend Violetta hasn't been pathetic for days, since the war of aggression, and she doesn't utter the word "death".

She just says, "I'm trying to get everything done today.

You know, maybe I won't be able to do it tomorrow."

Anna Prizkau

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Of course you can't answer that - I can't in the safety of Berlin.

Therefore say: Do you know Valerian Pidmohylnyj?

I'm reading his book right now.

"Sure, of course!

And since we're talking about books: I'm sending you my manuscript, it's not quite finished yet, but it has to be published if something happens to me.

Now don't cry."

What should I do?

“Just keep reading Pidmohylnyj!

And tell me how it is later!”

Valerian Pidmohylnyi, then.

And his novel "The City", which takes place in Kyiv a hundred years ago and is now being published in German for the first time.

Pidmohylnyj, a writer and editor of a Kiev cultural magazine, wrote this book in Ukrainian.

That was in 1927. After that he was not allowed to write much longer, and from 1930 he was hardly allowed to publish.

And in 1935 he was convicted of alleged membership in a terrorist organization.

He had to go to the Solovetsky Islands, where Lenin's terror, which later became Stalin's Great Terror, began.

Because this camp on the islands was the model for the Gulag system.

Pidmohylnyj was executed there two years after his sentence.

He was only 36 years old.

The village boy transforms

"The City" begins on a ship.

The pretty village boy Stepan dreams of Kyiv, of the studies that await him and of the big, wide world.

Also on board is Nadijka, whom Stepan thinks is the prettiest.

And yes, this falling in love on a ship immediately reminds you of Flaubert, of the beginning of L'Éducation sentimentale, of Frédéric Moreau falling in love with Madame Arnoux on a Seine steamer, and also of Flaubert's language – she is as musical as Pidmohylnyj's.

Or the other way around.

When Stepan arrives in Kyiv, he first moves into a barn belonging to the Hnidy merchant family.

Stepan milks cows and fetches water, in winter he chops wood - that's the deal, because he doesn't pay any rent.

“The City” initially seems like a tender novel about Stepan's first, great love for Nadijka.

But then the village boy transforms – a little more every day in this town.

He now wants to become a writer and takes his short story “The Razor” to the most important critic in Kyiv, Mychajlo Lichtschein.

He looks for him in the "Information Office", there is a secretary there: "She led Stepan through a dark corridor, and he trembled like a young thief who sneaks into someone else's apartment for the first time at night." Stepan talks about himself , so convinced of his talent, he breathes out fear but breathes in hope, which brutally destroys the lights because he has no time for amateurs.

Suddenly, evil gleams in young Stepan:

He first shreds his short story in the park and goes to Nadijka to shred her too: he rapes her.

Nadijka howls and Stepan screams: "It's your fault!"