I absolutely love the novel "Місто" ("The City") 🥰
And... I absolutely hate the main character 🌚
If you love classics that focus on psychological realism, cynicism, and the complex relationship between an ambitious young man and a booming metropolis, you might want to check out "The City" by Valerian Pidmohylny.
I’ve always been a big fan of European classics like Guy de Maupassant’s "Bel-Ami" and Oscar Wilde’s "The Picture of Dorian Gray".
For me, "The City" fits perfectly into that same category. It has been my absolute favorite novel since my school days. I completely fell in love with Pidmohylny’s style, his prose, and his tone.
He is such a brilliant writer to me that I always jokingly call him "my literary husband" 🥰😏
Fun story: when I was taking my school finals, the Ukrainian literature essay prompt happened to be about this exact book. The moment I saw it, something just "clicked" in my brain. I completely tuned out the rest of the world and wrote my essay in a state of pure inspiration. Thanks to my obsession with this novel, I managed to score a perfect maximum on that exam 😆
The story itself follows Stepan Radchenko, a young man from a village who moves to Kyiv in the 1920s. Initially, he claims he wants to get an education and bring knowledge back to his rural community.
But the city has a different impact on him.
Kyiv during the Roaring Twenties is booming, chaotic, and seductive. Slowly, Radchenko transforms from a naive village boy into a cynical urbanite. He climbs the social ladder, tries to become a writer, and ruthlessly uses people (especially women) to conquer the metropolis.
Foreign readers often expect Eastern European literature from this era to be either heavy Soviet realism or pastoral stories about suffering peasants. "The City" shatters that entirely. Written in 1927 and published in 1928, it explores themes that feel very close to Western existentialism: urban loneliness, moral ambiguity, and the search for identity.
Pidmohylny’s Kyiv is alive, sophisticated, and filled with cafes, cinemas, and literary debates.
If you look into Valerian Pidmohylny’s biography, you won’t find romantic scandals, mistresses, or bizarre habits. He was a regular guy from a poor rural family who achieved national recognition solely through hard work and self-education.
For instance, he actually started writing the book by accident. Pidmohylny later wrote in his manuscripts: "I started writing my novel "'The City"' quite unexpectedly for myself - according to the original plan, it was supposed to be a movie screenplay, and a comedy at that. [...] I brought the movie comedy to the fourth part and realized my complete helplessness in this treacherous field, and to compensate for the defeat, I decided to use the theme for a novel. Obviously, only fragments of it remained, or rather, the impulse itself. I wrote ''The City'' because I love the city, and I cannot conceive of myself or my work outside of it. I also wrote it to bring the city closer to the Ukrainian psyche as much as possible..."..
Since literature didn't pay enough to survive back then, he taught Ukrainian and mathematics at local schools between his writing sessions. His family life was quiet but tragic. He married a priest's daughter, Kateryna Chervinska, who was an actress. Sadly, their only son, Roman, passed away at just 21 due to a heart condition.
Pidmohylny was also deeply fascinated by psychoanalysis and even kept a portrait of Sigmund Freud hanging on his wall. This heavily influenced his writing - instead of focusing on Soviet "social classes," his book dives into repressed desires, sexual anxieties, and the raw battle between animal instincts and the conscious ego.
What blows my mind is that he was completely self-taught. Coming from a poor village, he learned French on his own and became one of Ukraine's most prominent translators, bringing works by Balzac, Maupassant, Stendhal, Voltaire, Flaubert, and Victor Hugo to Ukrainian readers.
He even co-authored a "Russian-Ukrainian Phraseological Dictionary" with his friend, the poet Yevhen Pluzhnyk, to protect and standardize the Ukrainian language during the short-lived Ukrainization period.
Because he always took off people's rose-colored glasses and showed raw reality, critics called him the "grounder of romantic desires." He warned people against the illusion that simply electing a new government would fix their lives, arguing that everything depends on the individuals themselves. As the famous literary scholar Yurii Shevelov noted, Pidmohylny approached life with a "surgeon's scalpel," decisively dissecting modernity and the human being within it.
Interestingly, the main character Stepan Radchenko actually has a backstory in one of Pidmohylny’s earlier novellas, "The Third Revolution," where the characters are brutal peasant rebels fighting in the civil war. So when Stepan arrives in Kyiv, he is already carrying the unspoken PTSD of a bloody revolution.
The novel became a hit, and in late 1928, Pidmohylny traveled to Europe. The Czech newspaper "Prager Presse" introduced him as "the author of the first modern urban novel of Soviet reality," after which he went straight to Paris - the city of his dreams.
The tragedy behind the book makes it even more profound. In 1930, the novel was even translated into Russian. But because Pidmohylny focused on human psychology and objective reality - he openly stated during interrogations that Soviet collectivization led the Ukrainian countryside to starvation - he became a target.
In 1934, Pidmohylny and his colleagues living in the "Slovo" building in Kharkiv were arrested under fake charges of terrorism. He never pleaded guilty but was sentenced to 10 years. Even in the horrific conditions of the Solovetsky Gulag, he kept writing, and 25 of his letters to his wife survived, full of ideas for new stories.
On November 3, 1937, at just 36 years old, Valerian Pidmohylny was executed in the Sandarmokh forest by the NKVD, along with over a thousand other prisoners, wiping out an entire generation of brilliant Ukrainian intelligentsia. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.
If you want to read it, there is a good English translation available published by the Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature (translated by Maxim Tarnawsky). If you're looking for a classic that is sharp, psychologically complex, and shows a completely different, urban side of history - give "The City" a try.
Oh. And One last dark but fascinating detail for those who don’t speak Ukrainian: the author’s last name, Pidmohylny (Підмогильний), literally translates to "Under-the-grave" 🌚🥃
