The literary criticism of Tamara Hundorova largely has been an open secret, limited, until the appearance of this book, mostly to scholars and literati who read Ukrainian. Those who have read her works in the original are well aware of the expansive breadth and depth of her knowledge regarding the literary processes of Ukrainian literature from its historical inception to the present day, particularly the phenomenon of postmodernism, the primary subject of this book, which originally appeared in Ukrainian in 2005. In her writing, Hundorova demonstrates that she is extremely well read in literary criticism in general and on postmodernism in particular, citing numerous significant thinkers such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Epstein, Frederic Jameson, Linda Hutcheon, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Susan Sontag, among others, all of whom allow her to place the individual authors, groups, and movements in the Ukrainian literary scene within the context of world literature and thought.

The book includes a four-page author's preface, a ten-page bibliography, and a useful six-page index of proper names encountered in the text. The intriguing cover design comprises a reproduction from Viacheslav Poliakov's series of photographs of roadside sculptures entitled “Lviv-God's Will” (the name of a bus route whose name, of course, has greater if somewhat ironic philosophical implications). The photo from the series can be found online and is conceptually explained by the artist at https://via-poliakov.com/. The meat of Hundorova's volume is comprised of five overarching parts with various subchapters under each section. The main rubrics include: 1) Chornobyl and Postmodernism (40 pp.); 2) Post-Totalitarian Trauma and Ukrainian Postmodernism (51 pp.); 3) The Postmodern Carnival (53 pp.); 4) Faces and Topoi of Ukrainian Postmodernism (111 pp.); and 5) Postscript (35 pp.), the latter of which comments on the end of both the macrocosmic worldwide phenomenon and its microcosmic Ukrainian iteration.

The book in general will be useful both to literary theoreticians and thinkers as well as to students and a general literary audience interested in pre- and post-independence developments in Ukrainian literature. Readers will become acquainted with a number of the major and most influential Ukrainian figures under discussion in the volume, including Yuri Andrukhovych, Viktor Neborak, and Oleksandr Irvanets of the innovative and bombastic Bu-Ba-Bu literary performance group; the highly philosophical and stylistically dense poet, prose writer, and artist Yurko Izdryk, better known in Ukraine just by his last name; the profound contemplator of national and individual trauma in his works (particularly the Stalin-instigated Holodomor of the early 1930s and the Chornobyl nuclear disaster in 1986) Yevhen Pashkovsky; the leading proponent of feminism, the poet, prose writer and political and cultural essayist Oksana Zabuzhko; and the preeminent poet and prose writer of eastern Ukraine, Serhiy Zhadan, one of whose major themes in his writings Hundorova describes as homelessness in the post-apocalyptic, post-industrial wasteland of eastern Ukraine. Other figures who have chapters devoted to them include the “polymorphic” (in Hundorova's estimation) prose writer from Ivano-Frankivsk, Taras Prokhasko; masters of the grotesque—the prose writers Volodymyr Dibrova and Bohdan Zholdak, as well as playwright and artist Les Podervianskyi, who are all discussed together in a single chapter; the “pop postmodernist” (as Hundorova describes him) poet Volodymyr Tsybulko; and to Hundorova's mind “the most consistent avant-gardist in Ukrainian literature” New York Group émigré writer Yuriy Tarnawsky. Many other writers are discussed passim or in more detail by the author as well as the phenomenon of various literary groupings from the late 1980s and 1990s such as The Lost Letter from Kyiv, Bu-Ba-Bu and Lu-Ho-Sad from L΄viv, and the Red Cart from Kharkiv.

Hundorova's effective logical organization of the volume allows her to present a quite complete and well-rounded picture of major literary processes that have happened in Ukraine. Her first two rubrics on post-Chornobyl discourse (Part One) and post-totalitarian trauma (Part Two) set the broader stage for a narrower focus that follows on the postmodernist carnivalization of Bu-Ba-Bu (Part Three) and individual authors in Part Four. Hundorova virtually touches all the bases in her erudite and thought-provoking discussions that indicate her capacious mind, her encyclopedic knowledge, and an articulate stylistic phrasing of formulations in her writing. Kudos to the English translation by Sergiy Yakovenko, which is eminently readable along with fine editing and proof-reading. His translation is accurate and smooth, and just as stylistically elegant as the original. The book adds to the ever-increasing library of books of criticism on contemporary Ukrainian literature available in English that include: Mark Andryczyk's The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction (2012), Maria Rewakowicz's Ukraine's Quest for Identity: Embracing Cultural Hybridity in Literary Imagination, 1991–2011 (2018), and Oleksandra Wallo's Ukrainian Women Writers and the National Imaginary: From the Collapse of the USSR to the Euromaidan (2020). Hundorova's book preceded all three of these when first published in Ukrainian in 2005 and provides the first and deepest theoretical underpinnings for an understanding of Ukrainian Postmodernism.