voroshilovgrad (zhadan, tr. reilly costigan-humes, isaac wheeler)

Voroshilovgrad is the old Soviet name for the city of Luhansk, which is currently a Ukrainian town under attack by Russian forces. Zhadan’s novel is set not long after the fall of the Soviet Union, when this town, set in a sea of wheat, was something of a Wild West land, bickered over by gangsters, locals and smugglers. The novel follows the journey of Herman who lives in Karkhiv. His brother owns a petrol station, which is a going business, on the outskirts of Luhansk. When his brother disappears to Amsterdam, for reasons which are never entirely clear, Herman returns to his childhood home to take charge. There he finds himself caught up in the shenanigans, going on an increasingly Pynchonesque journey into the netherworld of the border. This is a hallucinogenic space, where the dead walk amongst the living and the living scrap for territory. Once again we are on the farflung edges of European project. Herman has a pseudo job in Kharkiv, working for a nebulous political outfit. The sort of Macjob that so many young aimless people have in the Western world. He has no real need of a petrol station which is being targeted by gangsters, but he finds a cause there, and the cause traps him. At one stage on his journey, Herman finds himself in a travelling convoy of Tibetans and Mongolians, drifting across the Eurasian plain, in the general direction of the EU. This is where the continental plates collide. To the west, Europe, with its property. To the east, Asia, with its vast, uncharted peoples and spaces. Zhadan has Herman tread water in the lawless middle, but it is notable that this lawless middle is a place where finds himself feeling increasingly comfortable. A decade before The Orphanage, Voroshilovgrad offers a more hermetic, dreamy vision of the space that emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union, one where camaraderie and local feeling still held sway. At the same time it illustrates the porous nature of this frontier between West and East, (perhaps akin to the lands of Pamuk’s Snow), a place whose borders are intangible and, as a result, a recipe for trouble.