Lightnings. Turtledove. Short Stories

The “Non-Canonical Canon” series is a way to talk about those we didn’t know, whose texts we read without understanding the context of their time. It brings together a wide range of Ukrainian authors and their works. Each text is accompanied by reading guides by Ukrainian literary scholars.

The works of Mykhailo Yatskiv, a member of the early 20th-century modernist group “Moloda Muza”(“Young muse”), combine elements of modernity and tradition, realism and modernism. This duality is evident both in his writing and in his life — a tension between the aesthetic and the political, between art for art’s sake and the turbulent reality faced by individuals at the beginning of the last century.

This edition brings together Yatskiv’s works that reflect this range: from the novella Turtledove — one of the few texts in Ukrainian literature to engage with the experience of the First World War — to short stories where the central focus is the psychology of creativity.