The Shipwright by Yurii Yanovskyi

The Shipwright by Yurii Yanovskyi

The Shipwright is Yurii Yanovskyi’s dazzling 1928 novel of youth, art, cinema, and nation-making in Soviet-era Odesa. Set at the famed Odesa Film Studio—the “Soviet Hollywood” of its day—it captures the experimental energy of early Soviet film through a story that is unmistakably Ukrainian.

Presented as the memoir of an aging filmmaker interwoven with letters, recollections, and sailors’ tales, The Shipwright moves between the studio, the sea, and imagined worlds created on screen. While a group of young artists shape narratives of maritime life and collective memory, the deeper question animating the novel is what kind of story—and what kind of nation—they are building. Yanovskyi turns filmmaking, writing, and shipbuilding into linked acts of creation: each constructs a vessel for memory, identity, and the future.

The Shipwright is also a landmark portrayal of Ukrainian-language Odesa, a city more often represented through Russian imperial and Soviet cultural frames. Its characters echo figures from the world of Ukrainian cinema, including Oleksandr Dovzhenko, while its layered structure reflects on the artifice of narrative.

Long celebrated as a classic of Ukrainian neoromantic prose and often included on the lists of important Ukrainian books of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, The Shipwright appears here in English translation for the first time, presenting to new readers one of the most inventive works of modern Ukrainian literature.

Yurii Yanovskyi (1902–1954) was one of the leading neoromantic voices of the Ukrainian literary rebirth of the first half of the twentieth century. Associated with the writers’ organization Vaplite, he published poetry, short stories, novels, and plays. Several of his works were banned or rewritten under Soviet censorship during the independence movement of 1917–1920. Ian Ross Singleton is the author of Two Big Differences and a translator of literature from the Ukrainian and Russian languages. He teaches Writing and Critical Inquiry at SUNY Albany and served as nonfiction editor at Asymptote.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780674309173
ISBN 10	0674309170
Title	The Shipwright
Author	Yurii Yanovskyi
Series	Harvard Library Of Ukrainian Literature
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Harvard University Press
Number of pages	500
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.