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This book offers a glimpse of what life was like in the city of Kyiv in the 1920s before Stalin's reign of terror got underway. Valerian Pidmohylny was just one of the many gifted writers active in the sophisticated literary circles of the city at that time. He and others were sent to camps and then assassinated in the 1930s when Stalin began his purges.

The City is the story of how a young man from the countryside, newly arrived in Kyiv, discovers his passion for writing.

As I read, I posted many favourite passages in the updates. I'm including them here in the body of the review because they give a good summary of the essentials of the novel—which almost reads like a memoir of Pidmohylny's own beginnings as a writer.

page 50 "Everything new that he saw fit easily into his mind in ordered layers, tied by thousands of threads to what he had read and to what he could surmise."

page 52 "But he had taken the first step and had immediately shown the essential skill of a writer: the ability to separate oneself into layers, to examine oneself through a microscope, categorize oneself according to possible themes, to treat one’s own “I� as material."

page 68 "you think I’m lonely and don’t know what to do with my money. But look here,� he pointed at his library “I have lots of books. I like to buy them, and read them, too. And you know there are those who buy books but don’t read them! Buy them and put them on a shelf. That’s silly, don’t you think? But someday you’ll see that reading books is far more interesting than doing the things that are described in them yourself."

page 90 "She fell silent, falling under the spell of her own words, overcome with the sadness of her own story, as if hearing it for the first time from a stranger’s lips. Because when it takes shape in words, a recollection acquires a previously unknown reality. In the interplay of sounds it acquires a sharp edge, very different from its peaceful existence in silent thought"

page 95 "he confirmed that infinitives were to never be split, and sentences were not to end in prepositions, even if there seemed to be good reason for them to...re the prohibitions against dangling participles, it was concluded that as a matter of fact, the theory that it seemed likely that in many cases various and sundry expressions could often be deleted from a sentence with no discernible effect on its meaning was true."

page 155 "it didn’t matter that these impressions were lying around his soul in a pile of raw fibers: life never offers anything all wrapped up, it is just hints and fragments, the elements of the montage that need to be arranged, spliced, and refined, into that final product called a work of art. Life only offers the clay that needs to be shaped by the hands and vision of an artist. He knew this but he could not find the core"

page 175 "Those for whom their first experience of the world and their fascination with it came from books will always see them as eternal protean and living benefactors. He wanted not only to read books but to feel them around him and so he envied anyone who had a library and secretly hoped that somehow somewhere he would have one of his own consisting of thousands of volumes stacked floor to ceiling among which he could live"

page 180 "doing and thinking about something else, he would forget about writing..But sometimes,unexpectedly, there would appear in his head an image part of a phrase a fragment of a description that hovered in his thoughts for a moment without beginning or end, filling him with a great unexplained joy. These were brief, almost content-less letters from the unknown...incomprehensible but gratifying messages from a distant land"

The City doesn't seem to be available to buy or borrow from a library but the English translation is accessible on these links:




Thanks to goodreads friends Katia and Vesna for introducing me to this excellent book.