The Moscoviad

The Moscoviad, Andrukhovych’s most successful book, translated into many languages, was written in Spring 1992 on the banks of Lake Starnberg outside Munich – and is surprisingly topical today.

Neo-authoritarian Russia, strident nationalism, the mystification of the Communist era, chauvinist kitsch, ideological pressures – all these ghosts are sent packing in a Carnevalesque spectacle and amidst panic-filled laughter.

Otto von F., a student of literature from the West Ukraine, lives in Moscow, that »rotten heart of a half-dead empire«. In the students' residence of the renowned Gorki Institute, the poetic hopes from the Soviet provinces sit together, the future representatives of young national bodies of literature, composing Medieval Yiddish poems, Ukrainian verses, and stanzas for Uzbek songs. We are in the early 1990s, the mood is agitated, and vodka is running short. Otto von F. senses quite physically that all the seams are about to tear, that the countries and peoples, each a cosmos or continent of its own, are fast drifting apart.

One wet day in May, he sets out to buy gifts in »Children’s World«, directly adjacent to the KGB’s Lubjanka prison. His mind befuddled by alcohol he takes the wrong entrance, gets lost in countless corridors and stairwells, and ends up in the tunnels with the sewers. He finally lands in the hands of the secret service men, who in the depths of the building are breeding an army of rats. What happens to Otto von F. in the catacombs under the Kremlin, on the tracks of the secret government subway, is something we are told by Yuri Andrukhovych, his Virgil through Moscow’s hell, who at some point puts a merciful end to the ghastly specter and gets Otto von F. on a train back to Kiev.

»The Moscoviad, which was first published in 1993, is Andrukhovych’s third novel to be translated into English, after his debut, Recreations, and Perverzion, which is probably his best work. [...] By introducing irreverent postmodern aesthetics to a culture which has often taken itself too seriously, his work represents a watershed in Ukrainian literature.« Times Literary Supplement

»The literary dormitory at Moscow University becomes a kind of Russian Grand Hotel, serving the last supper of empire to a host of writers gathered from every corner of the continent, and beyond. Young poets from Vietnam, Mongolia, Yakutia, Uzbekistan, Russia, and Ukraine assemble to study, drink, frolic, and explore each other and the decaying city around them. When the supper turns into a bacchanal, who’s surprised? [...] Part howl, part literary slapstick, part joyful dirge, charged with the brashness of youth, betraying the vision of the permanent outsider, Andrukhovych’s novel suggests that literature really is news that stays news. Funny, buoyant, flamboyant, ground-breaking, and as revelatory today as when it was first published in Ukrainian, The Moscoviad remains a literary milestone. In spirit and intellectual brio Andrukhovych, whose irreverence makes Borat seem pious, is kin to the great Halldor Laxness and the venerable David Foster Wallace.« Askold Melnyczuk