03 April 2026
(PHOTO: Intent/Natalia Dovbysh)
Yuri Andrukhovych 's book Twelve Hoops was presented to Odesa residents at the Hrushevsky Odesa Regional Universal Library.
The book, published by Vivat, is an intellectual prose about memory and identity, about the thin line between life and death, about mysticism, post-Soviet chaos, and a person trying to find himself in the midst of all this.
"Twelve Hoops is a novel-labyrinth in which the Carpathians turn into a territory of existential search, and the fear of facing one's own self becomes the main test. This is the writer's fourth novel. For this novel, Yuri Andrukhovych won the Angelus Literary Prize for Central Europe in 2006. The title of the work comes from Bohdan-Ihor Antonych's poem "Elegy on the Keys to Love," which refers to "twelve hoops of spring."
Yuriy Andrukhovych is a Ukrainian poet, prose writer, translator, representative of postmodernism in literature, and essayist. He holds a PhD in philology. He lives and works in Ivano-Frankivsk.
The plot of the novel is the story of a group of eight people who find themselves abandoned in a mountain resort in the Ukrainian Carpathians. One of the novel's protagonists, Artur Pepa, was invited by an unfamiliar owner of the company for which he had been creating advertising slogans to visit his resort in the Dzyndzul meadow. The company was flown by helicopter to a house that had everything - food, entertainment, and even a maid - except for the owner. Who knew that a few days in the mountains would turn into a fatal adventure? The storyline also includes a kind of love triangle: the relationship between Austrian photographer Karl-Josef Zumbrunnen and Ukrainian translator Roma Voronych, Arthur's wife.
Yuriy Andrukhovych's creative work is formally divided into two main streams: poetry and prose. His poetic debut took place in the first half of the 1980s and culminated in the publication of the collection Heaven and Squares. Among Yuriy Andrukhovych's prose works, the first to be published was a series of short stories entitled Left, Where the Heart Is, which is almost a factual account of the author's service in the army, a kind of "free book" that he read during his guard duty.
Кирило Бойко