The City - Valerian Pidmohylnyi

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The City

by
Valerian Pidmohylnyi

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Title:	The City
Author:	Valerian Pidmohylnyi
Genre:	Novel
Written:	1928 (Eng. 2025)
Length:	474 pages
Original in:	Ukrainian
Availability:	The City - US
	The City - UK
	The City - Canada
	Die Stadt - Deutschland

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

Ukrainian title: Місто
Translated and with introduction by Maxim Tarnawsky

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Our Assessment:

B+ : spirited and engaging

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Books Abroad	.	Summer/1955	Peter Odarchenko
Frankfurter Rundschau	.	12/8/2022	Christian Thomas
Die Zeit	.	13/4/2022	René Schlott

From the Reviews:

"The novel City belongs among the most outstanding works of Ukrainian literature of the twentieth century. In this work Pidmohylny has given a deep psychological picture of the development of the main character, Stepan, a peasant boy, who by his hard work, overcoming great difficulties, has become an educated person and a prominent writer." - Peter Odarchenko, Books Abroad

"Unbestritten ist Die Stadt der Roman einer vibrierenden Übergangszeit. (...) Die Stadt, sein einziger Roman, zugleich sein Hauptwerk, war ursprünglich als Drehbuch geplant, als Filmkomödie – und komödiantische Elemente beleben auch den Roman, dessen Sprachgewalt evident ist, dessen Sprachfuror tollkühne Bilder und Vergleiche freisetzt, verwegene, allerdings auch verquere. Das A und O des Kiew-Romans Walerjan Pidmohylnyjs ist ein Schriftstellerroman, in dem es ein Autor wahrhaftig nicht leicht hat, zumal in einem wenig vorteilhaft dargestellten Literaturbetrieb." - Christian Thomas, Frankfurter Rundschau

"Stepan ist ein Grübler, ein Ekel gegenüber Frauen, ein an sich selbst, an Kiew ("Die Stadt hat sich um mich geschlungen. Ich bin in ihr untergegangen.") und dem Leben Verzweifelnder. In seinem ironischen und impulsiven Charakter vereinen sich Züge von Thomas Manns Felix Krull und Erich Kästners Fabian. Sein rast- und ruheloses Streifen durch die Stadt wiederum erinnert an Knut Hamsuns Hunger. Pidmohylnyj, der als Schüler das Glück hatte, Französisch zu lernen, arbeitete später als Übersetzer der Werke von Balzac, Stendhal und Maupassant ins Ukrainische. Der Einfluss der französischen Romanliteratur auf sein eigenes Werk ist unübersehbar. Und so muss Pidmohylnyjs Meisterwerk Die Stadt den Vergleich mit den anderen großen Metropolenromanen der Moderne nicht scheuen." - René Schlott, Die Zeit

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

The city of the title is Kyiv, with the novel opening with twenty-five-year-old Stepan Radchenko coming to the big city, a huge change from the village-life he had known so far. He's been a sheep hand, a rebel -- fighting in 1919 against the Denikin forces of the White Army --, and administrator of the village bureau of a trade union; he had also built up the local public library, "2,178 volumes that he had personally catalogued", picked from the remains of the collections of the local rich landowners -- "the largest rural library in the district". He's very bright, and has studied hard, but he wonders whether he has done the right thing, worried that he'll be overwhelmed by the city, and thinking to himself:

Why didn't he sign up for the education courses in the provincial town near his village ? What was the point of these childish dreams of Kyiv and the Institute ?

It is the 1920s, the time of the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union, and with his arrival in the city Stepan is: "crossing the frontier of the future" -- though as a poet-friend later tells him:

It will reveal itself to you. This one in particular. You know what our city is ? It's a historical corpse, rotting for centuries. It needs to be aired out.

And among the first lessons Stepan learns, as he does the rounds to take the examination that will get him a place at the Institute, is that:

The city is a wonder. On the outside, it's all hustle and bustle -- life in the city, it seems, bursts forth like a mountain spring, with the energy of lightning. But inside, in the dim offices of various institutions, it drags along like an old wagon, entangled in thousands of rules and regulations.

Stepan has no problem passing his exam and getting a place at the Institute. He also finds a place to stay, with the Hynidyis -- whose son, Maksym, had finished his studies at the same Institute two years earlier -- and, from the first, settles in to his new environment quite well. He can't even be bothered to attend the first few weeks of class -- but that hardly matters, as things only really get rolling at summer's end, and once he immerses himself in his studies he excels at them. Here as also later he doesn't really make friends; his classmates: "were of interest to him only as coworkers" -- though they soon come to rely on him, because he's on top of all the subjects and everything else going on at the Institute. The full-scale immersion is typical of Stepan:

Each day that passed was filled to the brim with content, leaving no room for doubts or hesitation. Stepan was developing his strengths, burning brightly, because such was his nature: he could take the oars in a race and move the boat without resting, until, in the end, the oarlocks themselves would give out.

But after quick early success -- a rare perfect score his first year --, his academic career flames out as he loses interest in it. There have been women on the side, but that's not the reason, neither are drink or drugs, nor even ... capitalism. No, as friend Borys realizes:

     "I dropped out," Stepan admitted sheepishly.
     Borys grimaced.
     "So you got caught up in something ? Literature, no doubt."

Indeed: literature. As his library-work back in the village suggests, Stepan always had some affinity for books, and among his first endeavors when he got to the city was to submit some of his own writing for publication -- but at the time the early rejection seemed to be enough to get him off that wayward path and he turned to his studies instead. But with time he had come to realize:

Instead of building him up with new knowledge, his first year at the Institute, brilliantly accomplished from all perspectives, had, it seemed, resulted in the destruction of the wisdom he had brought with him from the village. Suddenly, he felt that his brain was dressed only in the most shameful rags, and this feeling troubled him, since it degraded his dignity. Most of all, he was troubled by deficiencies in a field that was not even part of his Institute's studies at all but a personal and somewhat sensitive nature -- namely, literature. It had become his closest and most important concern, for reasons that he did not really want to analyze in detail, justifying his enthusiasm, instead, with the substantial argument that a familiarity with literature was the primary characteristic of a cultured person.

And it turns out that he apparently does have some talent, and that there are those who do want to publish his work. Not only that, but, remarkably -- and to his own surprise (and, even more so, the reader's) --:

Literature, it turned out, was not only a noble pursuit, but a lucrative one as well -- that is, it was doubly worthwhile.

While he has always managed to get by -- adequately, if not always comfortably -- literary success means he no longer has to watch his karbovanets and kopecks quite so carefully; indeed, that he can indulge himself some (though even when he's willing to pay, some things -- like a nicer room -- prove hard to come by). But success also comes at a cost: he publishes a book, and: "this book turned writing into an obligation, a duty, a solemn pledge that he must keep" -- and, of course, he then finds that he can't. He struggles, trying everything, but the results are always the same -- so also:

The results of all these attempts at deprivation were always the same: on paper --a few lines of text crossed out, among innumerable drawings of trees, houses, and faces; in his heart -- bitterness and fatigue.

       And yet even as he suffers from this overwhelming writer's block, he continues to enjoy literary success, as he's appointed editor of a literary journal. He throws himself into the job -- so much to do: "Work, work, and more work !" -- and has the skills to handle this kind of organization.
       If Stepan has a weakness, it's following through: he manages well -- intensely, even -- for a while, at his relationships, studies, or work, but sooner or later his enthusiasm peters out, usually completely. An extreme case is when he proposes to one of his girlfriends -- coming to his senses in less than a day -- but as his time at the Institute showed, sometimes he can dedicate himself to tasks for an extended period. Eventually, however .....
       Eventually, he comes to see one of the flaws in his own previous efforts -- and, perhaps, to some extent, in how he has led his life --: "he had not encountered a single person -- and what was worthy of attention other than people ?" He is determined, then: "He would write a novel about people" -- and, indeed, his mind and imagination whirring, he spins it out nicely in his mind's eye. Pidmohylnyi captures this stage of the creative process very nicely -- including the summing-up by a poet-friend of Stepan's:

     "You've probably started writing something, haven't you," he asked.
     "Almost," Stepan answered. "I'm thinking it through."
     "Oh, that's the happiest time, the springtime of creativity," the poet sighed. "It's like Platonic love, so to speak, and then comes the tiresome boredom of family life."

Stepan is on a roll -- for a while -- and, indeed, even when he finally first sits down to write it goes extremely well -- but, amusingly (and surely predictably), by the second day, he's blocked:

He knew what to write and he knew how he should write it, but a chasm had developed between his intentions and the paper. He felt a disinclination to writing itself, an unfounded hostility to the very act of moving pen across paper.

Mind you, it works out in the end: Pidmohylnyi has Stepan, after some soul- and other searching, seeming to get his act together and seem to shake off the restlessness and dissatisfaction that has defined him so far, with Pidmohylnyi closing the novel with the claim that:

Then, in the silence of the lamp on his desk, he went on to write his novel about people.

I'd apologize for the spoiler if I had even reasonable faith that Stepan actually managed to follow through. Pidmohylnyi suggests there's some personal growth here, but prominent throughout The City is Stepan's limited engagement with people, and one wonders how he could write about them when his ties with any are so limited, and so easily cut.
Near the end of the novel, poet Vyhorskyi leaves the city to wander about and see more of Ukraine, and Stepan comes to feels melancholy -- though less because of the absence of the actual person:

Now that he no longer saw him, he felt even more deeply the qualities they shared that had attracted them to each other. His feelings were as agitated as his reason. He and the poet were both immensely restless, changeable, and insatiable.

       Stepan considers writing the poet: "an enormous, heartfelt letter" -- but the now-vagabond has no address it could be sent to. When he does finally receive an envelope from Vyhorskyi, it's only a submission of two poems for the journal -- "but not a word for him. That was when the poet ceased to exist for him".
       Stepan similarly puts the other significant relationships in his life behind him, abandoning in one way or another everyone that he was, at some point, closer to. In some cases, he does so for good reason -- such as with Maksym, the son of his former landlords, whose life takes some unfortunate turns. Elsewhere, reality dashes any hopes and dreams he had fantasized about -- as when he finally again seeks out the girl from the same village he had met and briefly gotten close to on the boat traveling to Kyiv. And when he is desperate to connect again with the girl that he had proposed to (and then quickly dumped), well, that proves impossible as well.
       Stepan has several quite intense relationships with women, including with the landlady at his first Kyiv residence, Maksym's mother, but as with so much else, his follow-through is limited. He also ultimately treats all of them very poorly -- for all his passion, he's a grade-one cad, too.
       Despite the novel's the title, the city mostly remains backdrop: if not a novel about people, such as Stepan wants to write, The City is almost completely a one-man show, focused essentially entirely on Stepan. And just as the people around him only limitedly affect him, so too the city itself only has so much of an influence. At times it gets to him -- "'It's unnatural, all this,' sighed Stepan. 'Everything in the city is somehow unnatural.'" -- but mostly it comes down to him. Stepan notes: "Everything is strange here. The people -- the life" -- but it's his own inability to adapt -- not so much to the city and city-life, he does fine enough with that, but to people and to some sort of everyday-life -- that leave him set apart.
       Divided into two parts, The City is ultimately the novel of (its protagonist) becoming a writer. In the first part, Pidmohylnyi still has Stepan resist it. Despite an obvious bookishness, Stepan doesn't immediately throw himself fully into a literary life. Sure, back in the village he painstakingly organized that library, and, sure, he writes and submits some stories for publication almost as soon as he reaches the big city, but his ambitions here are mostly directed elsewhere. So also at the time:

Stepan thought differently. Stories were just empty amusement, entertainment. You could survive just as well without them.

Sure, tellingly, even then: "at home, before a week had passed, he had written two more stories" -- but then he is also able to leave well enough alone for quite a while. It takes him some time before he realizes the truth of what Maksym already told him early on:

You're still young -- I don't mean you're foolish. Not at all. But someday you'll see that reading books is far more interesting than doing the things that are described in them yourself.

The City is not quite a Bildungsroman. Yes, Stepan has some illusions dashed along the way, but there is limited personal growth of any sort. Pidmohylnyi's conclusion suggests Stepan may have finally gotten it all together and is ready to move on to the next stage of his life -- and yet the Stepan presented here still leaves doubts, at least in this reader's mind, that he'll really manage to complete 'his novel about people' (much less that it could be convincing). As a novel about one person, a character-portrait of an already nearly fully-formed adult who adapts, at least in most ways, very easily to the abrupt change from small-town provincial life to that in the bustling metropolis, The City is more successful; indeed, for all his restlessness (and much of his behavior, especially towards women), Stepan is an interesting character to follow and the novel always engaging.
Despite its title, The City is very self-centered, very much on Stepan. There are some specifics that tie it nicely to its locale and time -- the housing situation, in particular, is well conveyed -- but otherwise Pidmohylnyi's is an almost surprisingly more timeless and familiar (becoming a writer)-tale. Time and place might could have been explored and utilized considerably more, but even as is The City is a good and satisfying novel.

- M.A.Orthofer, 16 June 2025

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Links:

The City:

Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute publicity page
Osnovy Publishing publicity page
Guggolz Verlag publicity page

Reviews:

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of literature from Russia and countries of the former Soviet Union
See Index of Books Written Between 1900 and 1945

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About the Author:

Ukrainian author Valerian Pidmohylnyi (Walerjan Pidmohylnyj; Валер'ян Петрович Підмогильний) lived 1901 to 1937.

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