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The long-awaited updated edition from our Ukrainian Classics series returns to readers in a new binding!

In 2017, Osnovy published the first edition of Valerian Pidmohylnyi’s novel The City (Misto), illustrated by Maksym Pavliuk. This edition contributed to making Ukrainian literary modernism fashionable and encouraged a wide audience to read Ukrainian novels.

Maksym Pavliuk created the illustrations for the novel during his first year of living in Kyiv, experiencing the new city alongside Stepan Radchenko. The perspective of a street artist, personal emotions, dreams, and urban experience became the key to the novel’s visual style—the very style that made you fall in love with this edition.

We have preserved the open-spine binding, as it allows the double-page illustrations to be viewed more clearly and makes the book more durable.

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The protagonist of the novel, Stepan Radchenko, arrives in Kyiv by a Dnipro river steamboat to pursue his studies. Like many other young men and women who, in the 1920s, flocked from the countryside to the city by the thousands, he dreams of “conquering” Kyiv. Stepan adapts to urban life, becomes involved with women, and learns how to be a writer.

Written in 1927, The City is a striking example of the urban novel. Valerian Pidmohylnyi’s innovation lies in the fact that the city itself also emerges as one of the novel’s protagonists: it is ultimately Kyiv’s influence that determines Stepan’s fate. In this book, for the first time since 1929, we reproduce the authentic text of the novel’s second lifetime publication, as this version most likely reflects the author’s intent to the greatest extent.

At the same time, the punctuation has been brought into line with the norms of contemporary Ukrainian literary language.

The new edition is accompanied by an afterword by Yaryna Tsymbal, written especially for this publication. Maksym Pavliuk’s illustrations, created in the style of urban graffiti, organically integrate the text of the 1920s into the 2020s of the twenty-first century.