Praise for With Madonna in Kyiv
People sometimes ask about the uses of literature. Simply: these are the uses. Askold Melnyczuk brings a lifetime of reading to bear on the world as he finds it, on the history that shapes us, and on the thrust and counter-thrust of his moral imagination. Sharply written, topically compelling, With Madonna in Kyiv, reminds us that against all odds lucid passion may yet prevail.
Sven Birkerts, author of The Miro Worm and the Mysteries of Writing, National Book Critics Circle Award for Reviewing
With Madonna in Kyiv, Askold Melnyczuk’s remarkable compendium of cultural commentary and literary criticism–inspired by Ukraine, past and present, and ranging across centuries and continents–moves this reader to an effusion of nouns, not adjectives: values, freedom, identity, morality, conscience. These are the matters Melnyczuk takes up and challenges us to center in our own lives. He quotes Joseph Conrad’s dictum that a writer should “make you see.” Melnyczuk goes beyond, pressing us to think, feel, and act—as we must, he reminds us, in our beautiful broken world, to live with hope.
Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize for Biography
Renowned editor, novelist, poet, translator, essayist, and publisher, Askold Melnyczuk has for decades held a singular place in US and international literary culture. A writer whose “first language was Ukrainian but [whose] native tongue is English,” he has long sustained a passionate defense of Ukrainian literature and culture, a commitment grown ever more invaluable in the face of Russia’s violent onslaught. An astute critic of Anglophone novelists and poets (Bellow, Gass, Naipaul, J. Graham, L. Brock-Broido), Melnyczuk is a shrewd guide to so-called world literature (Gogol, Babel, Achebe, Tokarczuk). Among its many virtues, this collection offers a powerful defense of fiction – which “allows writers to prospect theories of causality, another word for which is karma.” Taking his cue from Ukrainian writers (Bohdan Boychuk, Oksana Zabuzhko, Serhiy Zhadan) as well as long-admired friends and luminaries (Heaney, Walcott, Brodsky), Melnyczuk emerges in these ranging essays as a consummately engaged man of letters: full of heart, savvy, wisdom, savage indignation, and tender remembrance. With catholic tastes and Buddhist commitments, Melnuczuk embraces complexities without diluting what’s essential. What news from poetry, from literature? What stay against confusion, despair? What horizons of engagement, of joy, of rage, of solidarity? Melnyczuk is an infallible guide to what matters, in literature and in life. He makes illuminating, surprising connections – between the Dark Room Collective (a group of young African American poets who are now leaders in the arts) and The New York Group of diasporic Ukrainian poets; between Ukraine and Gaza; between Medford, MA and Beirut. ‘How do we live in a world ruled by neither grace nor justice?” he asks. “A writer’s task is to make himself as capable a vehicle as possible.” So Melnyczuk has written; so has he done.
Maureen McLane, author of My Poetics, National Book Critics Circle Award for Reviewing