In the course of working on The Museum, I wrote another book, Notre Dame d’Ukraine, which took more than two years; a variety of small routine projects took up, altogether, almost another entire year; and if it were not for writers’ residencies which kindly accommodated me (God bless them!) I would probably still be working on The Museum now. Here is the list of the places where almost two-thirds of the novel was written—I owe each individual recognition: Ledig House (Omi, NY), Cerrini-Schloessl (Graz, Austria), Villa dei Pini (Boglasco, Italy), Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (Germany), Literaturhaus Krems (Austria), Baltic Center for Writers and Translators (Visby, Sweden), Villa Hellebosch (Belgium), Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), Villa Sträuli (Winterthur, Switzerland), Kuenstlerdorf Schoeppingen (Germany), and Villa Decius (Krakow, Poland).
I would like to give special thanks to the Baltic Center’s director, Lena Pasternak, who found a room for me every time I, gone off the schedule again, called her with a desperate cry for help, and Ilke Froyen from Het Beschrijf in Brussels, to whose attention and understanding I owe my rescue in the eleventh hour of my novelistic odyssey (when there were already production deadlines I was about to miss). My heartfelt thanks also goes to my agent, Galina Dursthoff, who through all these years did everything possible to ensure I could work without disruption.
And finally I thank everyone who has patiently waited for this book, whether I’ve met you or not: you have also helped me write it.
RESOURCES
For those who need a bit of extra help navigating the historical context of the novel’s episodes from 1943 to 2004, and after reading The Museum would like to expand their knowledge, I am providing here a list of widely available books (not archival materials or government publications intended for very small expert audiences) that I have found helpful.
Alekseeva, Liudmila. Istoriia inakomysliia v SSSR: noveishii period. Vilnius, Moscow: Vest’, 1992.
Andrew, Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin. The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West. London: Penguin Books, 2000.
Andrusyak, Mykhailo. Braty hromu. Kolomyia: Vydavnychopolihrafichne tovarystvo ‘Vik’, 2001.
Blan, Elen. Rodom iz KGB: sistema putina. Kyiv: Tempora, 2009.
Davies, Norman. Europe at War 1939–1945: No Simple Victory. London: Macmillan, 2006.
Eco, Umberto. Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism. Translated by Alastair McEwen. Orlando: Vintage, 2008.
Kosyk, Volodymyr. The Third Reich and Ukraine. New York: P. Lang, 1993.
Lanckoronska, Karolina. Wspomnienia wojenne. Krakow: Znak, 2002.
Nakonechnyi, Ievhen. ‘Shoa’ u L’vovi. Lviv: Piramida, 2006.
Onyshko, Lesia. Kateryna Zarytska: molytva do syna. Lviv: Svit, 2002.
Poliuha, Liubomyr. Shliakhamy spohadiv, 1944–1956. Lviv: Piramida, 2003.
Pliushch, Leonyd. History’s Carnivaclass="underline" A Dissident’s Autobiography. New York: Harcourt, 1979.
Savchyn Pyskir, Maria. Thousands of Roads: A Memoir of a Young Woman’s Life in the Ukrainian Underground During and After World War II. Translated by Tatyana Plyushch. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001.
Sannikov, Georgij. Bol’saa ohota: razgrom vooruzhennogo podpolia v Zapadnoj Ukraine. Moscow: Olma-Press, 2002.
Shingariov, Vladimir. Moskal’ i banderovtsy. Full-length manuscript published on Gulyai-Pole, December 2009. http://www.politua.su/moskalibanderovcy.
Viatrovych, Volodymyr. Stavlennia OUN do ievreiv: formuvannia pozytsii na tli katastrofy. Lviv: Ms, 2006.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Oksana Zabuzhko was born in 1960 in Ukraine. She made her poetry debut in 1972, but her parents’ blacklisting during the Soviet purges prevented her first book from being published until the 1980s. She earned her PhD in philosophy from Kyiv Shevchenko University and has taught as a Fulbright Fellow and writer-in-residence at Penn State University, Harvard University, and the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of seventeen books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, which have been translated into fifteen languages and have garnered numerous awards. Her novel Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex was named “the most influential Ukrainian book for the fifteen years of independence.” She lives today in Kyiv, where she works as a freelance writer.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Nina Shevchuk-Murray was born and raised in the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv and holds a master’s degree in linguistics from Lviv National University. In 2006, she completed her graduate work in creative writing at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Since then, Nina has been working as a translator of Russian and Ukrainian literature. Her translations of Ukrainian poetry have appeared in AGNI Online and Prairie Schooner; she is a regular contributor to Chtenia, a quarterly journal of Russian literature. In 2010, she translated from Russian a novel by Peter Aleshkovsky, Fish: A History of One Migration.
Praise for The Museum of Abandoned Secrets
“Many books at the top of the bestseller list today are not necessarily distinguished by the quality of their language. In Ukraine, however, a book that has been the number-one bestseller since it was published is not only an exception to this rule, but quite the opposite. Oksana Zabuzhko’s The Museum of Abandoned Secrets is so rich and precise in its language, and also so political and demanding, that one cannot help wondering what is different about Ukraine.”
“The Museum of Abandoned Secrets is a magnum opus, in which everything that the armory of literature can provide is mobilized against the forces of darkness: strong emotions, the power of pathos, the most compelling images… A novel of power—and a powerful novel.”
“Pugnacious, feverish, brilliant—with her 759-page novel about the history of Ukraine in the twentieth century, Oksana Zabuzhko has thrown open a window in her homeland. She is already celebrated as a second Dostoyevsky, but above all she has triggered an intense debate about social relationships and their roots in the past that people have yet to come to terms with.”