Bread and dreams
What did Ukraine look like almost a hundred years ago? How did people live when they found themselves in the midst of revolution, rapid modernisation and profound social change? What did they dream of, what did they fear, and how did they cope with a world that was changing faster than they could keep up with?
Bread and dreams offers a glimpse of this Ukraine through the eyes of three writers who were part of it. Mariia Halych, Yurii Yanovskyi and Valerian Pidmohylnyi portray it from three very different perspectives.
Pidmohylnyi, author of The City, now considered a cult classic in Ukraine, explores the human psyche with remarkable insight, examining what happens to a person’s convictions when confronted with hunger, poverty and uncertainty about the future. Yanovskyi’s early prose springs from an entirely different sensibility, shaped by his fascination with the avant-garde, Futurism and cinema. Halych, in turn, writes about the experiences of women who were supposed to be emancipated and independent in the new society, even as reality often contradicted such promises.
This diversity makes Bread and dreams much 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. This is precisely why, almost a hundred years later, these stories do not read like tales from an entirely alien world.
Halych, Yanovskyi and Pidmohylnyi belonged to the generation now known as the Executed Renaissance. The 1920s were a period of extraordinary growth in Ukrainian literature, marked by experimentation with new forms and an intense engagement with European modernity. Stalinism brought this process to a brutal end: many writers and artists were murdered or imprisoned, others were forced to conform to Socialist Realism, and their works disappeared from official circulation for decades.
Returning to this literature today offers an opportunity to discover Ukraine through its own texts and to encounter a world that remained beyond the reach of successive generations of readers for decades.
