Viktor Domontovych’s 1928 novel survived Stalin’s purges, Soviet censorship, and nearly a century of neglect. Euromaidan Press publishes an exclusive excerpt.

The Girl With The Teddy Bear, now published in English for the first time by Dedalus Books in a translation by PEN Award-winning translator Steve Komarnyckyj, is a cult classic of Ukrainian modernism.

First published in 1928 by the private Kyiv publishing house Siayvo, with the endorsement of the Neoclassicist poet Mykola Zerov—who would himself be executed by Stalin in 1937—the novel has been compared to Nabokov’s Lolita and Ivan Klíma’s A Summer Affair.

It does not flinch from the harshness and inconsistencies of Soviet life. The novel opens in late 1922 during the famine years, with its protagonist Varetskyi living in grim poverty. The windows of his apartment are not glass but plywood.