Оксана Забужко: Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex

“Hi!” she shouts happily.

“Hello there!” say I.

Oksana Zabuzhko was born in 1960 in Ukraine. She made her poetry debut at the age of twelve, yet, because her parents had been blacklisted during the Soviet purges of the 1970s, it was not until the perestroika that her first book was published. She graduated from the department of philosophy of Kyiv Shevchenko University, obtained her PhD in philosophy of arts, and has spent some time in the USA lecturing as a Fulbright Fellow and a Writer-in-Residence at Penn State University, Harvard University, and University of Pittsburgh. After the publication of her novel Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (1996), which in 2006 was named “the most influential Ukrainian book for the fifteen years of independence,” she has been living in Kyiv as a freelance author. She has authored seventeen books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, which have been translated into fifteen languages. Among her numerous acknowledgments are the Global Commitment Foundation Poetry Prize (1997), the MacArthur Grant (2002), the Antonovych International Foundation Prize (2008), the Ukrainian National Award, the Order of Princess Olha (2009), and many other national awards.

Halyna Hryn is an author, translator, editor, and researcher. She is the editor of Hunger by Design: The Great Ukrainian Famine and Its Soviet Context , translator of the novels Peltse and Pentameron by Volodymyr Dibrova, editor of the journal Harvard Ukrainian Studies , and a lecturer at Harvard’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She received her PhD from the University of Toronto. Her research interests center on Soviet Ukrainian literature and cultural politics of the 1920s.

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Text copyright © 1996 Zhoda

English translation copyright © 2011 by Amazon Content Services LLC

Cover art © Rostyslav Luzhetskyy

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.

Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko was first published in 1996 by Zhoda in Kyiv as Pol´ovi doslidzhennia z ukraïns´koho seksu .

An excerpt from Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex appeared in AGNI 53, Spring 2001.

Translated from the Ukrainian by Halyna Hryn.

First published in English in 2011 by AmazonCrossing.

Published by AmazonCrossing

P.O. Box 400818

Las Vegas, NV 89140

ISBN-13: 9781611090086

ISBN-10: 1611090083

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010918615