Mapped
Death and the Penguin
Andrey Kurkov
Post-Soviet Kyiv in the mid-1990s: a broke city where the zoo gives its animals away, a lonely writer keeps a king penguin in his flat, and a job writing obituaries pulls him into a quiet, lethal machinery of favours and funerals. The map runs from the residential streets of the centre out to the zoo on Prospekt Peremohy and down to the frozen Dnieper.
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Odessa Stories
Isaac Babel
Babel's dazzling stories bring to life the Jewish underworld of Odessa in the years around the Revolution, above all the flamboyant gangster king Benya Krik. The real city is their stage: the Moldavanka, the poor Jewish quarter that is the gangsters' realm, the bustling port and its draymen, the taverns where the raids are planned, and the bourgeois centre along Deribasovskaya that the King's men so gorgeously rob.
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Taras Bulba
Nikolai Gogol
Gogol's fierce romance of the Zaporozhian Cossacks follows the old warrior Taras Bulba and his sons Ostap and Andriy from their studies in Kyiv out onto the steppe, to the Cossack stronghold of the Sich on the Dnipro, and into a savage war against the Poles. The geography is the wide Ukrainian steppe: the academy at Kyiv, the island fastness of the Sich near present Zaporizhzhia, the besieged Polish town of Dubno, and the Dniester cliffs where Taras meets his end.
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The Radetzky March
Joseph Roth
Roth's elegy for the Austro-Hungarian Empire follows three generations of the Trotta family, ennobled after the first Trotta saves the young Emperor's life at Solferino, down to the aimless grandson Carl Joseph, an officer posted to a dreary garrison on the empire's eastern edge as it drifts toward 1914. The heart of the book is that Galician frontier near the Russian border, drawn from Roth's own Brody: the border garrison, the shabby town of gambling and debt, and the front where the last Trotta dies, while Solferino and imperial Vienna stand at the empire's other poles.
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The Street of Crocodiles
Bruno Schulz
In the provincial Galician town of his childhood, the narrator conjures a dreamlike, autobiographical world around his eccentric father, a textile merchant whose shop and mind decay into ever more fantastical metamorphoses. Schulz roots his hallucinatory prose in the real Drohobycz: the cinnamon-scented family house, the father's cloth shop on the market square, the town's ancient heart, and the shabby, garish new commercial district he calls the Street of Crocodiles.
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The White Guard
Mikhail Bulgakov
The winter of 1918–19 in Kyiv, as the German-backed Hetmanate collapses and Petliura's Ukrainian nationalists close on the City, seen through the Turbin family and their friends, officers of a cause already lost. Bulgakov maps his own Kyiv: the family house on the steep Andriyivskyy Descent, the gymnasium where the volunteers muster, the shops and panic of the centre, the Golden Gate and St Sophia, and the Dnieper down which the beaten forces retreat.
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