Serhiy Viktorovych Zhadan (Ukrainian

Ukrainian language

Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet....

: Сергі́й Ві́кторович Жада́н; born 23 August 1974) is a Ukrainian

Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

 poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. Born in Starobilsk

Starobilsk

Starobilsk is a town near Luhansk in Ukraine. The settlement has been known since 1686. The city status was given in 1938. Population is 22,040 ....

, Luhansk Oblast

Luhansk Oblast

Luhansk Oblast ) is the easternmost oblast of Ukraine. Its administrative center is Luhansk. The oblast was established in 1938 and bore the name Voroshilovgrad Oblast in honor of Kliment Voroshilov....

, he graduated from Kharkiv University

Kharkiv University

The University of Kharkiv or officially the Vasyl Karazin Kharkiv National University is one of the major universities in Ukraine, and earlier in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union...

 in 1996, then spent three years as a graduate student of philology

Philology

Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...

. He taught Ukrainian

Ukrainian literature

Ukrainian literature is literature written in the Ukrainian language. Ukrainian literature had a difficult development because, due to constant foreign domination over Ukrainian territories, there was often a significant difference between the spoken and written language...

 and world literature from 2000 to 2004, and thereafter retired from teaching. He lives and works in Kharkiv

Kharkiv

Kharkiv or Kharkov is the second-largest city in Ukraine.The city was founded in 1654 and was a major centre of Ukrainian culture in the Russian Empire. Kharkiv became the first city in Ukraine where the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was proclaimed in December 1917 and Soviet government was...

.

Zhadan has translated poetry from German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

, English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

, Belarusian

Belarusian language

The Belarusian language , sometimes referred to as White Russian or White Ruthenian, is the language of the Belarusian people...

, and Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

, from such poets as Paul Celan

Paul Celan

Paul Celan was a poet and translator...

 and Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski

Henry Charles Bukowski was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles...

. His own works have been translated into German, English, Polish

Polish language

Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...

, Serbian

Serbian language

Serbian is a form of Serbo-Croatian, a South Slavic language, spoken by Serbs in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and neighbouring countries....

, Croatian

Croatian language

Croatian is the collective name for the standard language and dialects spoken by Croats, principally in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Serbian province of Vojvodina and other neighbouring countries...

, Lithuanian

Lithuanian language

Lithuanian is the official state language of Lithuania and is recognized as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.96 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 170,000 abroad. Lithuanian is a Baltic language, closely related to Latvian, although they...

, Belarusian, Russian, Hungarian

Hungarian language

Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....

, Armenian

Armenian language

The Armenian language is an Indo-European language spoken by the Armenian people. It is the official language of the Republic of Armenia as well as in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The language is also widely spoken by Armenian communities in the Armenian diaspora...

 and Swedish

Swedish language

Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...

.

In March 2008, the Russian translation of his novel Anarchy in the UKR made the short list of the National Bestseller Prize. It was also a contender for "Book of the Year" at the 2008 Moscow International Book Exhibition.

His novel Anthem of Democratic Youth has been adapted for the stage and is being performed at the Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theater in Kyiv.

Critical estimation

Zhadan's prose is so poetic, his free verse so prosaic. It is difficult to assign a genre to his work: memoir, travelogue, timely or untimely meditation - or a mixture of all these, centered on the themes my generation and our epoch.

There is no summarizing the spicy, hot, sweet, vicious improvisations of Sergei Zhadan - this is verbal jazz. When you read him, you fear for contemporary Russian literature: of those now writing in the Russian language, there is none among them who is so infernally free (and above all, free from "writerly" prose, from the tendency to "produce an impression").

Poetry

• General Yuda (Генерал Юда), 1995.
• Pepsi (Пепсі), (1998).
• The very best poems, psychedelic stories of fighting and other bullshit: Selected Poems, 1992-2000 (Вибрані поезії), 2000.
• Ballads of the War and Reconstruction (Балади про війну і відбудову), 2000.
• The History of Culture at the Beginning of the Century (Історія культури початку століття), (2003)
• Maradona (Марадона), 2007.
• Ethiopia (Ефіопія), 2009.
• Lili Marlene (Лілі Марлен), 2009.

Prose

• Big Mac (Біґ Мак; short story collection), 2003.
• Depeche Mode (Депеш Мод), 2004.
• Anarchy in the UKR, 2005.
• Anthem of Democratic Youth (Гімн демократичної молоді), 2006.
• Voroshylovhrad (Ворошиловград), 2010.

Compilations

• Capital (Капітал), 2006 - includes everything but The History of Culture at the Beginning of the Century, Big Mac, and Maradona.

Anthologized poetry

• Stanislav+2 (Станислав+2), 2001.
• "Ch" Time - Verses on Chechnya and Not Only (Время `Ч`. Стихи о Чечне и не только), 2001.
• We Will Not Die in Paris (Мы умрем не в Париже), 2002.
• The History of Culture (История культуры), 2004.
• The Unknown Ukraine (НеИзвестная Украина), 2005.

External links

The poetry of Serhiy Zhadan Profile at Vavilon.ru Entry at Speaking in Tongues Entry at Net Literature Zhadan's blog Verses translated by A. Pustogarova Zhadan reading "Fungi of the Donbass" in Donetsk Zhadan reading "Lukoil" in Poland Large collection of materials about Zhadan Translations by Elena Fanailova

Elena Fanailova

Elena Nikolayevna Fanailova is a Russian poet.Born in Voronezh, she graduated from the Voronezh Medical Institute and earned a degree in journalism from Voronezh State University. She worked for six years as a doctor at Voronezh Regional Hospital...