Ukrainian poet, prose writer and essayist Yuri Andrukhovych was born in 1960 in Stanislav (Ukraine). He is the one credited with having radically renewed Ukrainian poetry in mid 1980's. The poetical group The Bu-Ba-Bu (Burlesque-Blaster-Buffoonery) established by him and his friends, poets Viktor Neborak and Olexandr Irvanets, has forever buried the accepted standards of 'socialist realist' poetry, proposing a new poetical quality, dominated by literary game, carnivalism, urbanism, and total aesthetical freedom.
Andrukhovych's poems represented in his main poetry collections – The sky and Squares (1985), Downtown (1989) and Exotic Birds and Plants (1991) - can be described as the first stage of his poetical maturing, which was characterized by fluctuation between post-symbolist, neo-classicist, and post-modern aesthetics. It was right after the book of 1991, when the poet declared moratorium on poetry ("Writing poetry after the age of 30 is like committing a crime," he said) and contracted a marriage with prose. As a result of this successful marriage 4 novels and a novella appeared. They secured his reputation as the most successful Ukrainian prose writer and… unexpectedly brought him back to poetry.
At the dawn of the new millennium the muse of American poetry came to Andrukhovych. After that encounter there was nothing left of the former manneristically courtly, carnivalesque poet, except for the eternal spirit of the poetical experiment and the poetical game. The poet rejected syllabic-tonic verse and went into free poetic forms – verse libre and poetry in prose. In 2004 the author plans to publish a new book with the results of his poetic experiments. But here we start with Yuri Andrukhovych of 1980's – beginning of 1990's, translated into English by Vitaly Chernetsky, Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps.
Publications
The sky and Squares (poems, 1985);
Downtown (poems, 1989);
Exotic Birds and Plants (poems, 1991);
Spurensuche im Juli (Deutsch) (poems, 1995);
Recreations (novel, 1997);
Moskoviada (novel, 1997);
Perversia (novel, 1997);
Recreations (English) (novel, 1998);
Disorientation on Location (essays, 1999);
"Central-Eastern Revision" in My Europe (essays, 2001);
Das letzte Territorium (Deutsch) (essays, 2003).
On Lyrikline you can find additional information (in German) about Yuri Andrukhovych and hear him read his poems.
