The Illness

The “Non-Canonical Canon” series is a way to talk about those we did not 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 novel The Illness portrays the life of Kyiv’s intelligentsia and artistic circles in the 1920s. The protagonist, factory director Ivan Orlovets, lives an orderly and rational life: work, home, family and the steady construction of a “bright post-revolutionary future.” Yet beneath this apparent stability lies fragility.

One evening at the opera, where he is dragged by friends, he sees the famous singer Iryna Zavadska. This encounter overturns his life and confronts him with a question: if the new era is so promising, why does a person live a gray, impoverished and unhappy life? In this novel Pluzhnyk explores the “illness” of his generation — the gap between ideal and reality.