Depeche Mode

by Serhiy Zhadan

Overview

In 1993, tragic turbulence takes over Ukraine in the post-communist spin-off. As if in somnambulism, Soviet war veterans and upstart businessmen listen to an American preacher of whose type there were plenty at the time in the post-Soviet territory. In Kharkiv, the young communist headquarters is now an advertising agency, and a youth radio station brings Western music, with Depeche Mode in the lead, into homes of ordinary people. In the middle of this craze three friends, an anti-Semitic Jew Dogg Pavlov, an unfortunate entrepreneur Vasia the Communist and the narrator Zhadan, nineteen years of age and unemployed, seek to find their old pal Sasha Carburetor to tell him that his step-father shot himself dead. Characters confront elements of their reality, and, tainted with traumatic survival fever, embark on a sad, dramatic and a bit grotesque adventure.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781909156869
Publisher:	Glagoslav Publications Limited
Publication date:	04/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Serhiy Zhadan is one of the key voices in contemporary Ukrainian literature: his poetry and novels have enjoyed popularity both at home and abroad. He has twice won BBC Ukraine's Book of the Year (2006 and 2010) and has twice been nominated as Russian GQ's 'Man of the Year', in their writers category. Writing is just one of his many interests, which also include singing in a band, translating poetry and organising literary festivals. His works have been translated into German, English, Polish, Serbian, Croatian, Lithuanian, Belorussian, Russian, Hungarian, Armenian and Swedish.Zhadan's work explores the changes he has witnessed as a representative of the immediate post-Soviet generation in Ukraine. His poetic style and masterful wordplay have led critics to dub his trademark approach "verbal jazz", a description that reflects his unique authorial voice. Zhadan stands as a witness to a time of great social change through the eyes of Ukraine's dispossessed youth. Never one to bow to convention, since giving up university teaching in 2004 Zhadan was an activist in 2006's Orange Revolution. In 2008 the Russian translation of his novel Anarchy in the UKR was shortlisted by the National Bestseller Prize in Russia.

Read an Excerpt

The referee’s completely pissedhe doesn’t like our Metalist

15.02.04 (Sunday)

When I was fourteen and had my own views about life, I first loaded up on alcohol. Up to the gills. It was really hot and the blue heavens swam above me, and I lay dying on a striped mattress and couldn’t even get drunk, because I was only fourteen and simply didn’t know how. In the last fifteen years, I’ve had more than enough reasons to dislike this life: from the beginning, from when I first began to become aware of it, it seemed a vile and mean thing, it immediately began creating lousy situations that you try not to remember but cannot forget. For my part, of course, I never made any special demands, my relations with life were okay, in spite of its clinically idiotic nature. For the most part, unless there was some new governmental initiative, I was satisfied—with the circumstances in which I lived, the people I knew, the ones I saw from time to time and had dealings with. For the most part they didn’t bother me, and, I expect, didn’t bother them. What else? I was satisfied with how much money I had, which is not to say that I was satisfied with the amount as such —I never really had any dough at all—but I was satisfied with the basic principle of how it circulated around me— from childhood I noticed that banknotes appear when you need them, roughly in the bare minimum required, and normally things worked out: they work out fine, of course, if you haven’t lost all sense of decency and at least keep up some appearances—meaning that you brush your teeth, or don’t eat pork if you’re a Muslim; then the angel with black accountant armbands and dandruff on his wings appears with strange regularity to refill your current account with a certain sum in local currency, just enough, on the one hand, to prevent you from croaking and, on the other, to stop you from screwing around too much and messing up your reincarnation by buying tankers of oil or cisterns of spirits. I was satisfied with this arrangement, I understood the angels and supported them. I was satisfied with the country in which I lived, the amount of shit that filled it, which in the most critical aspects of my life in this country reached up to my knees and higher. I understood that I could very well have been born in another far worse country, with, for example, a harsher climate or an authoritarian form of government ruled not simply by bastards, like in my country, but by demented bastards who pass on their rule to their children along with a foreign debt and domestic obscurantism. So I considered my fate not to be so bad, and I didn’t worry too much about these things. For the most part I was satisfied with everything, I was satisfied with the television picture I saw through the windows of the apartments in which I lived, which is why I tried not to change the channel too quickly, because I had noticed that attention from the reality installed around me always resulted in some predictable nastiness or simply more of life’s routine crap. Reality on its own is cool, but it’s a complete bummer once you start going over the post-game statistics, when you analyze your own and reality’s major indicators and see that it committed more fouls than you did but only your side got penalized. If anything really oppressed me it was the television screen’s constant, insistent demands for unnatural sexual relations with me—to put it simply, to screw me by taking advantage of my social rights and Christian duties. I’ve lived my fifteen years of adult life cheerfully, taking no part in the construction of civil society, never turning up at a polling site, and successfully avoiding contact with the oppressive regime, if you know what I mean. I had no interest in politics, no interest in economics, no interest in culture, no interest even in the weather forecast—this was maybe the only thing in the country that inspired trust, but I had no interest in it anyway.

Now I’m thirty. What has changed in the last fifteen years? Almost nothing. Even the external appearance of this… president hasn’t changed much; in any case his portraits are airbrushed today in the same way as they were before, even I noticed that. The music on the radio has changed, but by and large I don’t listen to the radio. Clothes have changed, but the eighties, as far as I can tell, are still in fashion. Television hasn’t changed, it’s still as sticky and irritating as lemonade spilled on a parquet floor. The climate hasn’t changed, the winters are just as long, and the springs just as long-awaited. Friends have changed, meaning that some have disappeared forever, and others have appeared to take their place. Memory has changed—it has become longer, but not any better. I hope there will be enough of it for about another sixty years of extended pragmatic apathy and unshakeable equanimity of spirit, which is what I wish for myself. Amen.

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