In Serhiy Zhadan’s tragicomedy A Harvest Truce, brothers Anton and Tolik reunite at their family home to bury their mother. Isolated without power or running water on the front line of a war ignited by Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, the brothers’ best hope for success and survival lies in the declared cease fire—the harvest truce.
In 1993, tragic turbulence takes over Ukraine in the post-communist spin-off. As if in somnambulism, Soviet war veterans and upstart businessmen listen to an American preacher of whose type there were plenty at the time in the post-Soviet territory. In Kharkiv, the young communist headquarters is now an advertising agency, and a youth radio station brings Western music, with Depeche Mode in the lead, into homes of ordinary people. In the middle of this craze three friends, an anti-Semitic Jew Dogg Pavlov, an unfortunate entrepreneur Vasia the Communist and the narrator Zhadan, nineteen years o... continue
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