Martians on Khreschatyk. Literary Kyiv of the 20th century | Vera Ageeva

Walking through Kyiv, it is easy to recognize numerous places described in poems and novels of the beginning of the 20th century. Although house numbers may be changed, facades repainted, and street names sometimes changed, however, if you look closely, you can imagine how Tychyna and Kurbas sat at the same table in the "Cellar of Arts" on Horodetskyi Street. A little further, in Pidmohylnyi's office, almost all of artistic Kyiv gathered, and in the basement of the "Continental" hotel, irreconcilable skydivers, symbolists and spiralists met for coffee. Real "Martians" were walking along Khreshchatyk, and a mysterious artistic theosophical nine was looking for new horizons in Georgiivsky Lane.

Vira Ageeva's new book is a journey to literary Kyiv of the beginning of the 20th century. The author will show Kyiv through the eyes of avant-garde artists, rebellious emancipators, bohemian poets - Kyiv, in which they lived and created, regardless of everything that was happening around, Kyiv, which survived, preserving its history and future.

Vira Ageyeva is a professor at the National University "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy" and laureate of the Shevchenko Prize. She is the author of such books as "Behind the Scenes of the Empire", "Women's Space: Feminist Discourse of Ukrainian Modernism", "Poetics of Paradox: Intellectual Prose of Viktor Petrov-Domontovych", "Apology of Modernism: Outline of the 20th Century", "Roads and Middle Cross", " A pattern on a stone. Mykola Bazhan: biography of a (non-)Soviet poet" and others.