Oksana Zabuzhko: The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Oksana Zabuzhko was born in 1960 in Ukraine. She made her poetry debut in 1972, but her parents’ blacklisting during the Soviet purges prevented her first book from being published until the 1980s. She earned her PhD in philosophy from Kyiv Shevchenko University and has taught as a Fulbright Fellow and writer-in-residence at Penn State University, Harvard University, and the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of seventeen books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, which have been translated into fifteen languages and have garnered numerous awards. Her novel Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex was named “the most influential Ukrainian book for the fifteen years of independence.” She lives today in Kyiv, where she works as a freelance writer.

Nina Shevchuk-Murray was born and raised in the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv and holds a master’s degree in linguistics from Lviv National University. In 2006, she completed her graduate work in creative writing at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Since then, Nina has been working as a translator of Russian and Ukrainian literature. Her translations of Ukrainian poetry have appeared in AGNI Online and Prairie Schooner ; she is a regular contributor to Chtenia , a quarterly journal of Russian literature. In 2010, she translated from Russian a novel by Peter Aleshkovsky, Fish: A History of One Migration .

“Many books at the top of the bestseller list today are not necessarily distinguished by the quality of their language. In Ukraine, however, a book that has been the number-one bestseller since it was published is not only an exception to this rule, but quite the opposite. Oksana Zabuzhko’s The Museum of Abandoned Secrets is so rich and precise in its language, and also so political and demanding, that one cannot help wondering what is different about Ukraine.”

“ The Museum of Abandoned Secrets is a magnum opus, in which everything that the armory of literature can provide is mobilized against the forces of darkness: strong emotions, the power of pathos, the most compelling images… A novel of power—and a powerful novel.”

“Pugnacious, feverish, brilliant—with her 759-page novel about the history of Ukraine in the twentieth century, Oksana Zabuzhko has thrown open a window in her homeland. She is already celebrated as a second Dostoyevsky, but above all she has triggered an intense debate about social relationships and their roots in the past that people have yet to come to terms with.”

“As an attempt at the archeology of memory it sets the world on fire, as a romance novel it is touching, and as a vivisection of social and political injustices in late- and post-communist Ukraine it has a virulence that is difficult to surpass.”

“Violence and fear lie in the bones of generations of Ukrainians, and what power do the ostracized dead have over the living? Oksana Zabuzhko writes about this heavy subject as lightly and freshly as the main female character talks.”

“This book is a spectacular intellectual success. It is driven by the belief that intellectual and political freedom is the only thing worth fighting for, apart from love, of course. Equipped with an almost megalomaniacal imagination and defiant humor, the author invents dreamlike parallel collateral campaigns, illuminates culture, society, and politics in multiple perspectives, and makes ghostly excursions into the past… With The Museum of Abandoned Secrets , Oksana Zabuzhko has written both herself and Ukraine into the scabby heart of Europe.”

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Text copyright © 2009 by Oksana Zabuzhko

English translation copyright © 2012 by Nina Shevchuk-Murray

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

The Museum of Abandoned Secrets was originally published in 2009 by Fact, Kiev, as Музей покинутих секретів . Translated from Ukrainian by Nina Shevchuk-Murray.

Published by AmazonCrossing

P.O. Box 400818

Las Vegas, NV 89140

ISBN-13: 9781611090116

ISBN-10: 1611090113

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012946025