Recreations

Yuri Andrukhovych was born in 1960 in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. He began publishing in literary journals in 1982. In 1985, together with Viktor Neborak and Oleksandr Irvanets, he founded the popular literary performance group "Bu-Ba-Bu" (Burlesque-Bluster-Buffoonery). This association was a seminal part of the literary culture of the 1980s, and its members continue to be active. Andrukhovych's first book of poetry, Sky and Squares, appeared in 1985. Military service in 1983 and 1984 inspired him to write a series of seven "army stories" that were published in 1989. The life of a soldier in the "Red Army" was the subject of his screenplay for A. Donchyk's film Oxygen Starvation (1992). From 1989 to 1991 he pursued advanced studies in Moscow at the M. Gorky Literary Institute. At that time he published two more poetry books, Downtown (1989) and Exotic Birds and Plants (1991, new edition 1997). Andrukhovych's reputation as a prose writer (and, for some readers, his notoriety) was established after the publication of his three short novels Recreations (1992; the English edition 1998), The Moscoviad (1993; the English edition 2008), and Perversion (1996; the English edition Perverzion 2005). This original trilogy of novels was subsequently followed by Twelve Rings (2003) and the autobiographical The Secret: Instead of a Novel (2007). In his essays, which he began to publish in the mid 1990s, Andrukhovych often draws upon his travels in central and eastern Europe to muse over the peculiarities of Europe's past and current cultural landscapes, focusing much of his attention on the eastern regions of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, most notably, his native Galicia. His collections of essays include Disorientation on Location (1999), The Devil is Hiding in the Cheese (2006), and My Europe (2001), which he co-authored with the Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk.