S5E5 and all video recordings are available on our YouTube.

Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature is a video series for anyone interested in literature and the culture of books and reading. Each month, host David A. Goldfarb will present a new topic in conversation with an expert on that author or book or movement in Polish literature. More about the Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature series and the timeline.

Sofia Andrukhovych (b. 1982) is one of the most interesting writers from Ukraine whose work is just now entering the English language. She has written three books of short prose, three novels, a novella and a children’s book, as well as essays. Her novel Felix Austria (2014) won the BBC Ukrainian Book of the Year Award, and in 2015 she was awarded the Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski Prize. In her novel Amadoka (2020), Sofia Andrukhovych explores her country’s painful history through the fates of three women. She interweaves the war in eastern Ukraine with the repression under Stalin and sheds light on Jewish-Ukrainian relations and the Holocaust under German occupation. The author’s latest novel, Catananche (2024), is dedicated to the trauma of war.

In this episode, we focus on her novel soon to come out in an English translation by Vitaly Chernetsky from Harvard University Press, Felix Austria, which describes the relationship between Adela, the daughter of a wealthy physician in Hapsburg Stanislaviv—the author’s birthplace now known as Ivano-Frankivsk—and her servant, Stefa, who is emotionally like a sister to Adela, but at the same time separated from her by class. The novel is full of rich sensuous detail that reveals Ukraine’s cultural ties to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and to Europe more generally. We also touch on her monumental novel, Amadoka, which has a translation by Daisy Gibbons under contract with Simon and Schuster. We discuss the relationship between author and translator, and as the author is calling in from Kyiv, we talk about how a novelist can write in wartime.

Sofia Andrukhovych in English Translation:

Sofia Andrukhovych. Felix Austria. Tr. Vitaly Chernetsky. Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature. HURI Books. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2025.

Sofia Andrukhovych. Amadoka. Tr. Daisy Gibbons. London: Simon and Schuster, UK. Forthcoming 2026.

Interview with the author about Amadoka:

Oleksandr Mymruk. Sofia Andrukhovych: to survey a large territory, you need to step back in space, time, and emotion. Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter website. Tr. Vasyl Starko. December 5, 2024.

Film based on Felix Austria:

Felix Austria! Dir. Christina Sivolap, 2021. (Ukrainian with English subtitles).

Vitaly Chernetsky is a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas. A native of Odesa, Ukraine, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and has been translating poetry and prose into English since the mid-1990s. His translations into English include Yuri Andrukhovych’s novels The Moscoviad (2008) and Twelve Circles (2015) and a volume of his selected poems, Songs for a Dead Rooster (2018, with Ostap Kin), a book by the Ukrainian artist Alevtina Kakhidze, Zhdanovka (2006), two children’s books by Romana Romanyshyn and Andriy Lesiv, Sound (2020) and Sight (2021), and Winter King, a poetry collection by Ostap Slyvynsky (2023, with Iryna Shuvalova). Translation of Sophia Andrukhovych’s novel Felix Austria is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in 2025.

David A. Goldfarb, Host & Producer
Bartek Remisko, Curator and Executive Producer
Natalia Iyudin, Producer