| Sanitar s Institutskoi |
The Orderly from Institutska street. Novel. Lyuta Sprava. Ukraine 2016. 150 pages |
| Awards: |
2016 Longlist Big Book |
| Foreign rights: |
Italy/ Mondadori (excerpt) |
The Orderly from Institutska Street is the story of two friends from Kyiv, the poet Yurka Nezgoda and the artist Nikolai Umanets. They belong to the generation formed in the first years of Independent Ukraine. In the 1990’s Nezgoda and Umanets were prominent members of the bohemian Kyiv art scene. Later, Umanets became a commercially successful artist and Nezgoda – the editor-in-chief of a glossy magazine. Their lives rarely touch politics; each in his own way tries to cope with the problems of contemporary life that always plague Ukrainians. Nezgoda’s brilliance, his depression, his morbid obsession with a mythical historical progenitor, is chronicled through the point of view of his detached and ironic friend Umanets. But in the end the heroes meet again on Kyiv’s Maidan Square. Umanets is with the protesters, while Nezgoda tries to stay neutral. But it is Nezgoda who gets pulled into the swirl of events in the novel. He dies as an orderly, trying to move the wounded to safety under fire. Umanets watches his friend die on live television.
The author considers the Ukrainian events of the beginning of the 21st century as another link in the historical chain of episodes of Ukraine‘s struggle for independence, which has been going on, now fading, now escalating, for several centuries.
Nikitin about the novel:
«Ukraine has always been situated in the center of a cruelly-mounted historical framework and it is continually looking to the past. But its past history is not exactly a story of triumphs. This is a cyclical focus on bad history, on bad experiences that need to be overcome. The success of Ukraine’s protest movement was due to its refusal to cling to the past, its ability to find something new, to reject the burden of its negative expe- rience.»
In 2019, five years after Maidan, the novel was the only Russian-language novel to be included in the list of “best texts about Maidan.”
