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A VIOLIN FROM THE OTHER RIVERSIDE

A VIOLIN FROM THE OTHER RIVERSIDE

$24.00Price

ISBN: 979-8-9865715-3-9

Pub Date: Mar. 2023

Pages: 216


By Dmytro Kremin

Svetlana Lavochkina, translator


A Violin from the Other Riverside is a bilingual collection by an outstanding Ukrainian poet of the post-World War II generation, Dmytro Kremin. It is a philosophical bow strung with a Ukrainian timeline arrow: its nock in the prehistoric Pontic steppe; its fletching made of Scythia, Ancient Greece, and Rome; its shaft of the Cossack lore. The arrow’s sharp point is aimed at the warfare which Ukraine has been subjected to by Russian occupiers since 2014. Passionate yet impartial, the Violin performs a complex tune of elements and temperaments, epic and drama, love and hate, universal and personal, wisdom and folly. Each poem is akin to a dictionary entry on Ukraine composed in complex and intellectually laden—yet colourful and virtuosic—light-footed verse. Kremin proved to be prophetic in his harbingering of Ukraine’s martyrdom and glory as the world battlefield of darkness and light.


    Reading through this collection is like making a trip through history and meeting heroes and underdogs, folk figures and legends, which will spark not only readers’ imaginations but also an awareness of Ukraine’s ancient and more recent histories. Initially, readers—particularly Western ones—may stand at the edges of history, place, and lore and gaze confusedly, maybe even curiously, into the deep annals of Ukraine’s existence. By the time they reach the journey’s end, however, readers are fully immersed in Ukraine’s colorful, virtuosic, and often overlooked and underdiscussed regions, peoples, and stories.

    —Nicole Yurcaba, World Literature Today


    Dmytro Kremin (1953 – 2019) was an award-winning poet, journalist, essayist, translator, songwriter, civil activist, scholar, and one of the most prominent contemporary literary personalities of the post-World War II generation in Ukraine. Born and raised in a picturesque Transcarpathian village, Kremin started writing poetry at an early age. His student years were marked by literary experimentation and artistic resistance to the Brezhnev regime of mediocrity and conformism. Upon graduation, Kremin moved to Mykolayiv in the south of Ukraine, where he became one of the stalwarts of Ukraine’s national and cultural revival. His work is famed for uniting history and modernity as well as intertwining ardour and objectivity in the portrayal of his homeland in its joys and sufferings. In 1999, Kremin was the recipient of the Taras Shevchenko Prize, the highest literary distinction in Ukraine.



    Svetlana Lavochkina is a Ukrainian-born novelist, poet, and translator residing in Germany. She was runner-up for the Paris Literary Prize, and finalist in both the Tibor&Jones Pageturner Prize and the Million Writers Award. Her novel in verse, Carbon, was published by Lost Horse Press in 2020. In 2022, Carbon in Ukrainian self-translation was announced as a prize-winner in the international Lviv Literary Prize, The Winged Lion. Since the onset of the war, Lavochkina has been continuously raising awareness of Ukraine in Germanophone mass media.



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