As I read, on the plane, Norman Davies’s Europe at War, which I bought at Heathrow; watched Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn, Edvins Snore’s The Soviet Story, Ihor Kobryn’s Unity on Blood (the first systematic attempt at presenting the thirty-year-long Ukrainian catastrophe of the twentieth century); as I encountered for the first time the memoirs of Nikolai Nikulin, published finally in 2007 after decades of “underground” existence, and those of a nameless woman in 1945 Berlin (Eine Frau in Berlin), and dozens upon dozens of new books finally giving voice to those whose truth had never been heard, I experienced every time something akin to the thrill of a volunteer who, as she works over an earthquake site, hears the same methodical chipping of pickax against rock all around her. The more of us who are here, the faster the rubble will be cleared—and the less poison from the bodies of those crushed underneath will seep into new generations.
When I began working on The Museum, purely Ukrainian publications that could provide the basis for clothing the skeleton of Gela Dovgan and Adrian Ortynsky’s story were few and far between. The main documentary source I relied upon was the so-called oral history—the one preserved by being told. Thus, my first and deepest thanks are to the veterans—the witnesses and heroes of the tragedy that was the 1940s, who agreed to meet with me and be interviewed; each to his or her own degree has given pieces of their own lives to my characters. Some of these people are no longer with us, and I am deeply grateful for having had the chance to know them. Without them, this book could never have been written:
Bohdan and Daria Gablevych, Lyuba Komar-Prokop, and Ivan Shtul’ re-created for me Lviv in the time of the Nazi occupation and the Ukrainian underground of the time; Oleksiy Zeleniuk (Pastor) and Romana Simkiv (Roma) gave me a tour of the resistance field hospitals; Vasyl Kuk (Lemish), Marichka Savchyn (Marichka), and Ivan Kryvutskyi (Arkadij) filled in dozens of gaps in the historical landscape. Irena Savytska-Kozak’s (Bystra) help was nothing but priceless—it was precisely the three days I spent recording our conversations in her welcoming Munich home that finally “decided” Gela’s fate; so was the assistance of Orest-Metodiy Dychkovsky (Kryvonis), with whom I consulted about the combat operations in “Adrian’s Last Dream” (his analysis of that chapter is one of the greatest authorial joys of my life).
Archives were the other important source of historical information. As fatally disorganized as the Ukrainian archives are, they remain, for a writer, a gold mine of vintage details—things you could never make up on your own. My deepest thanks to Volodymyr Vyatrovych, director of the SBU State Archive; the indefatigable “guardian” of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the US collection in New York, Oksana RadyshMiyakovska; the staff of the National Museum of History of the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 (Kyiv); the Liberation Struggle of Prykarpattya Museum (Ivano-Frankivsk); and the library of the Lviv Academic Gymnasium, in affiliation with the Lviv Polytechnic National University (Lviv). I also thank my permanent field-expert consultants: Oleksandr Bondarchuk in physics, Dmytro Finkelstein in mathematics, Yevgen Karas’ in the antique trade, and Bohdan Yuzvyshyn in forensics. A separate thanks to Vasyl’ Ivanovych (Ivano-Frankivsk) for the gift of a field trip to the bunker “Groma” and the hideout “Boyeslava” when I needed the wintertime locations for Room 6. And, finally, I owe special gratitude to my first readers and critics, who supported me over the entire distance, and without whom it may not have been conquered at all—Rostyslav Luzhetsky and Leonid and Tetyana Plyushch.
In the course of working on The Museum, I wrote another book, Notre Dame d’Ukraine, which took more than two years; a variety of small routine projects took up, altogether, almost another entire year; and if it were not for writers’ residencies which kindly accommodated me (God bless them!) I would probably still be working on The Museum now. Here is the list of the places where almost two-thirds of the novel was written—I owe each individual recognition: Ledig House (Omi, NY), Cerrini-Schloessl (Graz, Austria), Villa dei Pini (Boglasco, Italy), Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (Germany), Literaturhaus Krems (Austria), Baltic Center for Writers and Translators (Visby, Sweden), Villa Hellebosch (Belgium), Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), Villa Sträuli (Winterthur, Switzerland), Kuenstlerdorf Schoeppingen (Germany), and Villa Decius (Krakow, Poland).
I would like to give special thanks to the Baltic Center’s director, Lena Pasternak, who found a room for me every time I, gone off the schedule again, called her with a desperate cry for help, and Ilke Froyen from Het Beschrijf in Brussels, to whose attention and understanding I owe my rescue in the eleventh hour of my novelistic odyssey (when there were already production deadlines I was about to miss). My heartfelt thanks also goes to my agent, Galina Dursthoff, who through all these years did everything possible to ensure I could work without disruption.
And finally I thank everyone who has patiently waited for this book, whether I’ve met you or not: you have also helped me write it.
RESOURCES
For those who need a bit of extra help navigating the historical context of the novel’s episodes from 1943 to 2004, and after reading The Museum would like to expand their knowledge, I am providing here a list of widely available books (not archival materials or government publications intended for very small expert audiences) that I have found helpful.
Alekseeva, Liudmila. Istoriia inakomysliia v SSSR: noveishii period. Vilnius, Moscow: Vest’, 1992.
Andrew, Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin. The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West. London: Penguin Books, 2000.
Andrusyak, Mykhailo. Braty hromu. Kolomyia: Vydavnychopolihrafichne tovarystvo ‘Vik’, 2001.
Blan, Elen. Rodom iz KGB: sistema putina. Kyiv: Tempora, 2009.
Davies, Norman. Europe at War 1939–1945: No Simple Victory. London: Macmillan, 2006.
Eco, Umberto. Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism. Translated by Alastair McEwen. Orlando: Vintage, 2008.
Kosyk, Volodymyr. The Third Reich and Ukraine. New York: P. Lang, 1993.
Lanckoronska, Karolina. Wspomnienia wojenne. Krakow: Znak, 2002.
Nakonechnyi, Ievhen. ‘Shoa’ u L’vovi. Lviv: Piramida, 2006.
Onyshko, Lesia. Kateryna Zarytska: molytva do syna. Lviv: Svit, 2002.
Poliuha, Liubomyr. Shliakhamy spohadiv, 1944–1956. Lviv: Piramida, 2003.
Pliushch, Leonyd. History’s Carnival: A Dissident’s Autobiography. New York: Harcourt, 1979.
Savchyn Pyskir, Maria. Thousands of Roads: A Memoir of a Young Woman’s Life in the Ukrainian Underground During and After World War II. Translated by Tatyana Plyushch. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001.
Sannikov, Georgij. Bol’saa ohota: razgrom vooruzhennogo podpolia v Zapadnoj Ukraine. Moscow: Olma-Press, 2002.
Shingariov, Vladimir. Moskal’ i banderovtsy. Full-length manuscript published on Gulyai-Pole, December 2009. http://www.politua.su/moskalibanderovcy.
Viatrovych, Volodymyr. Stavlennia OUN do ievreiv: formuvannia pozytsii na tli katastrofy. Lviv: Ms, 2006.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photograph © Ivan Put, 2008
Oksana Zabuzhko was born in 1960 in Ukraine. She made her poetry debut in 1972, but her parents’ blacklisting during the Soviet purges prevented her first book from being published until the 1980s. She earned her PhD in philosophy from Kyiv Shevchenko University and has taught as a Fulbright Fellow and writer-in-residence at Penn State University, Harvard University, and the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of seventeen books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, which have been translated into fifteen languages and have garnered numerous awards. Her novel Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex was named “the most influential Ukrainian book for the fifteen years of independence.” She lives today in Kyiv, where she works as a freelance writer.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Photograph © Nina Shevchuk-Murray
Nina Shevchuk-Murray was born and raised in the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv and holds a master’s degree in linguistics from Lviv National University. In 2006, she comp
leted her graduate work in creative writing at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Since then, Nina has been working as a translator of Russian and Ukrainian literature. Her translations of Ukrainian poetry have appeared in AGNI Online and Prairie Schooner; she is a regular contributor to Chtenia, a quarterly journal of Russian literature. In 2010, she translated from Russian a novel by Peter Aleshkovsky, Fish: A History of One Migration.
Praise for The Museum of Abandoned Secrets
“Many books at the top of the bestseller list today are not necessarily distinguished by the quality of their language. In Ukraine, however, a book that has been the number-one bestseller since it was published is not only an exception to this rule, but quite the opposite. Oksana Zabuzhko’s The Museum of Abandoned Secrets is so rich and precise in its language, and also so political and demanding, that one cannot help wondering what is different about Ukraine.”
—Kultur Spiegel
“The Museum of Abandoned Secrets is a magnum opus, in which everything that the armory of literature can provide is mobilized against the forces of darkness: strong emotions, the power of pathos, the most compelling images… A novel of power—and a powerful novel.”
—Deutschlandradio
“Pugnacious, feverish, brilliant—with her 759-page novel about the history of Ukraine in the twentieth century, Oksana Zabuzhko has thrown open a window in her homeland. She is already celebrated as a second Dostoyevsky, but above all she has triggered an intense debate about social relationships and their roots in the past that people have yet to come to terms with.”
—Schweizer Radio DRS
“As an attempt at the archeology of memory it sets the world on fire, as a romance novel it is touching, and as a vivisection of social and political injustices in late- and post-communist Ukraine it has a virulence that is difficult to surpass.”
—Ilma Rakusa, NZZ
“Violence and fear lie in the bones of generations of Ukrainians, and what power do the ostracized dead have over the living? Oksana Zabuzhko writes about this heavy subject as lightly and freshly as the main female character talks.”
—WDR
“This book is a spectacular intellectual success. It is driven by the belief that intellectual and political freedom is the only thing worth fighting for, apart from love, of course. Equipped with an almost megalomaniacal imagination and defiant humor, the author invents dreamlike parallel collateral campaigns, illuminates culture, society, and politics in multiple perspectives, and makes ghostly excursions into the past… With The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, Oksana Zabuzhko has written both herself and Ukraine into the scabby heart of Europe.”
—Berliner Zeitung
Copyright
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2009 by Oksana Zabuzhko
English translation copyright © 2012 by Nina Shevchuk-Murray
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
The Museum of Abandoned Secrets was originally published in 2009 by Fact, Kiev, as Музей покинутих секретів. Translated from Ukrainian by Nina Shevchuk-Murray.
Published by AmazonCrossing
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781611090116
ISBN-10: 1611090113
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012946025
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