Valerii Shevchuk. Birds From The Invisible Island

Valerii Shevchuk

Work proposed for translation:

Birds From The Invisible Island 
Short stories (1969–1985)
Length: 448 pp.
Copyright: Heirs: mandrushchenko@gmail.com

Valerii Shevchuk (1939–2025) is a famous Ukrainian writer, translator, literary critic, one of the key Ukrainian writers of the 20th century. He received his education at the Faculty of History and Philosophy of the University of Kyiv. He was actively involved in writing throughout the sixties, publishing many prose works. He participated in the protest against the mass repressions of 1965, for which he was fired from his job, and later, due to unfavourable political circumstances, he was forced to write “in a drawer”. The situation changed in the 1980s, when both his famous novels and important short prose were published. In 1987, he was awarded the Shevchenko Prize for his novel Three Leaves Behind the Window. He actively wrote and published his works also during the time of independent Ukraine. Throughout his life, Valeri Shevchuk systematically engaged in literary studies and translations of ancient Ukrainian literature.

The short works included in the collection Birds from the Invisible Island touch on the themes of existential experience of nature, religious experience, good and evil, freedom and bondage, imaginary and real. The writer moves freely and fascinatingly between the real and the fantastic, the ordinary and the bizarre, the rational and the intuitive, weaving them together in the space of his texts: The events included in the collection of stories take place in the Cossack era, which the author, as a historian, knows perfectly well. At the same time, time and space here are quite conditional, and the style of revealing the theme of freedom and moral choice hints at the existentialist tradition present in the author’s work, which he successfully weaves into the baroque style of writing. At the same time, his characters speak to the reader in a language understandable to him, revealing to contemporaries the drama of a distant historical era.