Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex

Called “the most influential Ukrainian book for the 15 years of independence,” Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex became an international phenomenon when it shot to number one on the Ukrainian bestseller list and remained there throughout the 1990s. The novel is narrated in first-person streams of thought by a sharp-tongued poet with an irreverently honest voice. She is visiting professor of Slavic studies at Harvard and her exposure to American values and behaviors conspires with her yearning to break free from Ukrainian conventions. In her despair over a recently ended affair, she turns her attention to the details of her lover’s abusive behavior. In detailing the power her Ukrainian lover wielded over her, and in admitting the underlying reasons for her attraction to him, she begins to see the chains that have defined her as a Ukrainian woman – and in doing so, exposes and calls into question her country’s culture of fear and repression at the very time that it wrestled its way toward independence.

“Language — any language — that’s what I would call the capital love of my life: nothing else has the power to synthesize music and myth, two things without which the world would be a totally unlivable place.” — Oksana Zabuzhko

Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex was first published in Ukraine in 1996, unleashing a storm of controversy and propelling the author to national fame. It topped the bestseller list in Ukraine for more than ten years, making it the most successful Ukrainian-language book of the nineties in every regard. Today, Oksana Zabuzhko is one of the few authors in Ukraine (and the only Ukrainian-language writer) to make a living exclusively from her writing.