One summer afternoon in northern England in 1946, when Ann Colley was a child, she met a man from Czechoslovakia named Dr. Novak. This encounter launched her lifelong fascination with Central and Eastern Europe, one that resulted in her spending two years, in 1995 and 2000, teaching at universities in Poland and Ukraine.
In “The Odyssey and Dr. Novak,” Ms. Colley records personal experiences, interactions with colleagues and descriptions of the landscape, creating a composite portrait of these countries at a time when each is struggling to chart its course after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. She recalls moments that are disturbing, absurd, discordant, frustrating, humorous, and endearing – a missing parrot flying in through the window; a robber on a train threatening her life; clouds of smoke from Chornobyl hanging over Kyiv.
Ms. Colley’s journey ends with her return to the figure of Dr. Novak when she searches in the archives of the Harvard Divinity School Library for letters sent from Prague in 1945 – letters that, just like her memoir, speak of a past that pursues the present.
“Ann C. Colley’s ‘The Odyssey and Dr. Novak’ brilliantly combines an insider’s perspective with an outsider’s objectivity. She tells an adventurous story of teaching, living, and traveling throughout Poland and Ukraine at a time between the fall of the Soviet Union and the resurgence of the Russian threat,” wrote Joyce Gleason, professor of economics, University of Nebraska
“Often lyrical, Ann C. Colley’s personal Odyssey exposes the reader to historical and political facts as well as to other aspects of East European cultures. Her sharp eye for detail, her candor, and her illuminating insights will benefit readers interested in studying and traveling to that part of Europe,” noted Regina Grol, professor emerita of comparative literature, SUNY-Empire State College
The Times Literary Supplement’s review said: “This is a nuanced, subtle, and luminous reading of a region whose past is full of suffering. Colley only wrote her book after the times veered back towards despair, notably in Ukraine, where the conflict with Russia of the past four years has lost the country not only Crimea and the industrial east but also many citizens’ lives. Colley writes with elegance. She has an impressionistic, magpie way of building up her story – a joke here, a street encounter there. [The memoir] is never far away from a considered reflection on where politics is going.”
Ms. Colley is a SUNY Distinguished Professor at the State University College of New York in Buffalo. She has written extensively on 19th century British literature and culture, and has published with presses including Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, the University of Georgia Press, Macmillan, Ashgate, Palgrave and the Cambridge University Press. She has taught abroad on Fulbright Fellowships in Poland and Ukraine, and has traveled throughout South America, Central America, Nepal, Turkey, Morocco, Africa, Cape Verde, New Zealand, Armenia, Belarus, Hungary, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Ukraine.
Always nostalgic for the landscape of home, she often returns to England, where she spent the first 13 years of her life. In the summers, she lives in the wilderness of Nova Scotia. She can be found online at Ann-C-Colley.com.