Bohdan Nyzhankivskyi. Black Days And White Nights

Bohdan Nyzhankivskyi

Work proposed for translation:

Black Days And White Nights
Short stories (1936–1955)
Length: 120 pp.
Copyright: Heirs: ip.bohdan.nznkwsky@gmail.com

Bohdan Nyzhankivskyi (1909–1986) is a Ukrainian writer and poet. He came from a famous Galician theatrical family. His first collection of short urban stories Street (1936) made him a famous writer. He belonged to the literary group The Twelve, which positioned itself as the youngest Lviv literary bohemia of the 1930s. During the Soviet and German occupations of Lviv, he worked as a journalist and co-created the small-form theatre-cabaret Veselyi Lviv. Bohdan Nyzhankivskyi spent the second half of his life in the USA. He was a member of the literary organisation Slovo, wrote short stories and novellas, but more lyrical and satirical poems. Love for his lost homeland became one of the key themes for his contemporary work. All his life, the writer remembered his hometown, which was not only the subject of vivid nostalgia, but also became a theme for important texts.

The heroes of the collection Black Days and White Nights are street people: workers, vagabonds, thieves, terrorists, bandits, gamblers. An everyday, but at the same time dramatic interaction unfolds between them: tense dialogues, the struggle for the sphere of influence, the vagaries of mood, fights, flirting with death. Nyzhankivskyi knows how to turn a typical situation of the urban rabble into a rich story about the challenges that the human “self” encounters when it finds itself at a moment of dramatic choice. At these unexpected psychological borders, his characters often turn from negative, albeit for a moment, into positive characters. A feature of Nyzhankivskyi’s texts is laconicism, short, fragmentary dialogues, no descriptions, just a little reflection, equally laconic, put into the mouths of the characters, but with an unchanging light shade of longing for the lost beloved city.