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.
5 places →
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.
5 places →