A Bizarre Heart. Novellas

The “Non-Canonical Canon” series is a way to talk about all those writers we never truly knew — whose texts we read without understanding the reality and context in which they were created. The series brings together a wide range of Ukrainian authors and works, each accompanied by reading guides from Ukrainian literary scholars.

Iryna Vilde was a writer, feminist and author of the novel The Richynsky Sisters. Her collection A Peculiar Heart consists of intimate, psychologically rich texts from the 1930s that capture both the atmosphere of the era and the depth of human emotion.

Each text is filled with tenderness and melancholy, with sensitivity toward the “elusive otherness” of every individual. This is literature about people searching for themselves in relationships, memory and language.

It is literature with a “light style, like a spring hat,” combining erotic openness, familial intuition, irony of fate and “girlish” tenderness — as poet Bohdan Ihor Antonych once described the collection. A Peculiar Heart is not always made up of novellas in the classical sense, but rather emotionally precise snapshots of life, at times framed as literary letters or confessional monologues. It is precisely this fluidity that makes the reading experience feel alive and unexpected.