Third volume of Yuriy Tarnawsky's selected works is released (03/18/01)

Third volume of Yuriy Tarnawsky's selected works is released

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. - With the publication of "Ne Znaju" (I Don't Know), the Kyiv-based publishing house Rodovid has completed the three-volume set of the Ukrainian American author Yuriy Tarnawsky's selected works in Ukrainian. The earlier volumes were "6x0" (1998), Mr. Tarnawsky's collected plays, and "Yikh Nemaye" (They Don't Exist, 1999), collections of poetry from the years 1970-1999.

"I Don't Know" contains Mr. Tarnawsky's first novel, written in Ukrainian, "Shliakhy" (Roads, 1956), excerpts from his seven books of fiction written in English, and the memoir ("a short literary autobiography") "Bosonizh Dodomu i Nazad" (Running Barefoot Home and Back).

"Roads" deals with the issues of growing up in post-World War II Germany. It is a declaratively existentialist work, and, when it first came out, was acclaimed as a bold new step in Ukrainian literature by such critics as Yuriy Lavrinenko and Ihor Kostetsky.

The best known of Mr. Tarnawsky's English-language books is the novel "Three Blondes and Death," published by Fiction Collective in 1993. It received wide coverage in American press and was praised for its uncompromising modernism. Harry Polkinhorn (American Book Review), for instance, compared it to a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's or Walter Gropius' skyscraper towering over the cottages of contemporary fiction. An earlier work, "Meningitis," was singled out for its unique and chilling use of language.

In "Running Barefoot Home and Back," Mr. Tarnawsky sketches out his development as a writer - from his early years of voracious reading in Ukraine, through the formative ones in DP camps and German high-school, to the Spanish and English-language influences in America. It describes the emergence of the New York Group of Ukrainian émigré writers, the author's career as a linguist/computer scientist and professor of Ukrainian literature at Columbia University, his sojourn in Spain, and his renewed contact with Ukraine and the disillusionment to which it has led.

The cycle of six plays "6x0" is patterned on classical Greek drama, and deals with the topic of the death of love, which is treated in a manner analogous to the death of the hero in Greek tragedy. One of the plays, "Not Medea," was staged at New York's Mabou Mines theater in a laboratory production directed by the well-known Ukrainian actor and director Hryhoriy Hladiy (Gregory Hlady) in 1998. In his review of the staging that appeared in The Ukrainian Weekly, the composer and critic Leonid Hrabovsky called it a decisive step in the history of Ukrainian theater and the play a living proof of the vitality of Ukrainian drama.

"They Don't Exist" contains 10 separate collections and constitutes Mr. Tarnawsky's second volume of collected poetry; the first volume, "Poems About Nothing and Other Poems on the Same Subject," which contains nine separate collections, came out in 1970. The new book includes the cycle "This Is How I Get Well," which first appeared in a bilingual English/Ukrainian edition in 1978, and "U ra na," published as a book in Ukraine in 1992, that in a personal way deals with Ukraine's history. It ends with another book-length poem "Misto Kyiv ta Yam" (The City of Sticks and Pits), which is related to the cycle of plays "6x0."

The artwork for all three books was done by Oleksander Dubovyk, one of the outstanding contemporary Ukrainian artists who resides in Kyiv. The books are available directly from the publisher at 18000 S. Mullen Rd., Belton, MO 64012; fax, (816) 322-4228; e-mail, [email protected]. For more information see the website at www.rodovid.net.

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