“Bread and dreams”. Book launch and events in Kraków and Warsaw
Ukraine in the 1920s was a place of literary experimentation, fascination with the city and modernity, but also of hunger, poverty, and rapid social change. “Bread and Dreams”, a collection of short stories by Mariia Halych, Yurii Yanovskyi, and Valerian Pidmohylnyi, presents this era through the eyes of writers who lived through it. Their literature, their dreams, and Ukraine’s “Our Twenties” were the focus of two events dedicated to the book in Kraków and Warsaw.
“Bread and Dreams” offers three distinct perspectives on Ukraine almost a century ago and on people trying to find their place in a world being rapidly transformed by revolution, modernization, and new ideas.
What did this reality look like? The protagonist of a story by Mariia Halych leaves her village because, as she is told, “you can’t make a living from the land anymore. You have to go out into the world and look for work.” In the city, she tries to make ends meet by selling cigarettes on the street. She is hungry and cold, constantly moved on from one place to another, yet it is there that she searches for a new life.
The protagonist of Valerian Pidmohylnyi’s “The Problem of Bread” would like nothing more than to read, take evening walks, and reflect. Reality, however, confronts him with a far more basic problem:
“I don’t need much – just enough to survive. I like reading, taking evening walks, thinking, and I see no good reason why I should give all that up because of my stomach.”
In Yurii Yanovskyi’s work, we encounter yet another Ukraine – one fascinated by the city, cinema, the avant-garde, and the possibilities of a new literature. In “Ma’s Romance”, we read:
“To you I sing a hymn, my great city! [...] I have breathed different air on other streets, streets that were not yours. I have looked into the eyes of other streetlamps, not yours, but there is no other city like you.”
Three writers, three distinct literary sensibilities, and one world captured at a moment of dramatic change. Pidmohylnyi observed the human psyche and moral choices with remarkable attentiveness. Yanovskyi’s early prose grew out of a fascination with the avant-garde, cinema, and modernity. Halych explored, among other things, the experiences of women who were expected to be emancipated and independent in the new society, even though everyday life often contradicted these promises.
During the Warsaw event, Elżbieta Kwiecińska drew attention precisely to this clash between the promise of modernity and the actual experience of Halych’s protagonist. Leaving a traditional rural environment and moving to the city does not automatically bring emancipation. The protagonist gains work and independence, but pays for them with exhaustion, poverty, and insecurity.
This is why “Bread and Dreams” is more than a literary record of its time. Behind its portrait of Ukraine a century ago are stories of people whose plans, convictions, and ideas about their own lives collide with a rapidly changing reality.
Where does the title “Bread and Dreams” come from?
During the Warsaw launch, Marcin Gaczkowski, co-editor of the volume and one of the instructors at the Polish-Ukrainian “Words into Words” Translation School, explained the meaning behind the book’s title.
As he put it, the “dreams” are those of the generation of the 1920s – dreams about Ukraine and about the culture they were trying to create. “Bread”, meanwhile, evokes Pidmohylnyi and serves as a reminder that lofty ambitions are much easier to pursue once our most basic needs have been met. Gaczkowski also pointed to a third dimension of the title: the situation of translators themselves, who may dream of giving classic texts a new life, but still have to “earn their bread”.
This tension – between everyday life and ambition, necessity and desire – runs throughout the collection.
Not only the “Executed Renaissance”: “Our Twenties”
Another important topic of the discussion was the very name given to the era. Jaryna Cymbał, a scholar and popularizer of twentieth-century Ukrainian literature, spoke about the term “Our Twenties”, which has become increasingly widespread in Ukraine over the past decade.
As she explained, the idea is to shift the emphasis. The term “Executed Renaissance” directs our attention primarily towards the later tragedy of this generation. “Our Twenties” allows us to see what came before: a period of extraordinary creative energy, experimentation, and the building of a modern Ukrainian culture. Another source of inspiration was the widely recognizable idea of the “American Twenties”: Ukrainian scholars wanted to show that their own 1920s were every bit as intense and diverse.
This perspective is particularly well suited to “Bread and Dreams”. It allows us to read Halych, Yanovskyi, and Pidmohylnyi not only through the prism of what happened later, but to see them as young people who wrote, debated, experimented, and tried to imagine the future.
Only later was this world brutally cut short. Pidmohylnyi was murdered during the Stalinist repressions. Halych stopped publishing; while working as a librarian in the 1930s, she was forced to remove even her own books from the library’s collections. Yanovskyi survived the period of terror, but his later work was written under radically different circumstances.
A literature being rediscovered
The events also devoted considerable attention to the ways in which Ukrainian literature of the 1920s is returning to readers today – in Ukraine and in Poland.
“These authors not only wrote in this language; in writing, they were also creating the language itself,” Marcin Gaczkowski said when discussing the challenge faced by the translators. These texts were modern in their own time, and their authors were searching for a language capable of expressing new experiences: the city, cinema, and a changing society.
The Polish translations of the stories collected in “Bread and Dreams” were produced as part of the Polish-Ukrainian Translation School “Words into Words”. Over the course of six months, the School’s participants worked on texts written almost a century ago, learning not only how to read them but also, as Gaczkowski put it, how to “write [them] anew” in Polish.
Book launches in Kraków and Warsaw
The publication of “Bread and Dreams” was accompanied by two events. On 16 September at NIĆ. Kawiarnio-księgarnia in Kraków, Jaryna Cymbał, Marcin Gaczkowski, and Mateusz Mejza discussed the book in a conversation moderated by Joanna Majewska-Grabowska.
On 18 September at the Ukrainian House in Warsaw, Jaryna Cymbał, Marcin Gaczkowski, and Elżbieta Kwiecińska took part in a discussion moderated by Sasza Iwaniuk.
“Bread and Dreams” is available from the Mieroszewski Centre online bookshop.
