Length of Days Paperback by Volodymyr Rafeyenko

Product Details

• Publisher: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (2023-02-07)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 352 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780674291201
• Item Weight: 368.55 grams
• Dimensions: 20.32 x 12.7 x 2.29 cm

The Length of Days: An Urban Ballad is set mostly in the composite Donbas city of Z—an uncanny foretelling of what this letter has come to symbolize since February 24, 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Several embedded narratives attributed to an alcoholic chemist-turned-massage therapist give insight into the funny, ironic, or tragic lives of people who remained in the occupied Donbas after Russia’s initial aggression in 2014.

With elements of magical realism, Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s novel combines a wicked sense of humor with political analysis, philosophy, poetry, and moral interrogation. Witty references to popular culture—Ukrainian and European—underline the international and transnational aspects of Ukrainian literature. The novel ends on the hopeful note that even death cannot have the final word: the resilient inhabitants of Z grow in power through reincarnation.

About the Author

Volodymyr Rafeyenko is a Ukrainian writer, poet, translator, literary and film critic. Although he initially wrote and published in Russian, his novel Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love was his first in Ukrainian. His work has been recognized with a Peterson Literary Fund award, the Volodymyr Korolenko Prize, and the Visegrad Eastern Partnership Literary Award, as well as shortlisted for the 2023 EBRD Literature Prize and longlisted for the Taras Shevchenko National Prize. Rafeyenko is a research scholar at the University of Pittsburgh and writer-in-residence at City of Asylum in Pittsburgh.

Sibelan Forrester is the Susan W. Lippincott Professor of Modern and Classical Languages and Russian at Swarthmore College. She has published translations of fiction, poetry, and scholarly prose from Croatian, Russian, and Serbian. Her own research includes women’s and gender studies, South Slavic literature, folklore, science fiction, Russian Silver Age poetry, and the history and theory of translation.

Marci Shore is Associate Professor of History at Yale University.