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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

The Return of Joseph Roth

13 November, 2012 - 00:00

The Smoloskyp Publishers has released a collection of prose titled White Cities by Joseph Roth, one of the best German prose writers of the twentieth century. Quite a sentimental fact in Ukraine’s literary life, considering that in his short lifetime Roth wrote 16 novels, countless short stories, reports, and reviews. Like Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Bruno Schultz, he came from Halychyna (Galicia), then part of Austria-Hungary. He was born in 1894, in Brody, and he would portray the empire’s collapse apocalyptically, like Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, and Franz Kafka. He was haunted by a feeling of total confusion, surrounded by a world in which age-old principles and structures were falling apart, and this feeling caused his untimely death in a military hospital in Paris, May 27, 1939.

White Cities includes, in addition to a series of stories and sketches, an excerpt from Roth’s last novel, Die Kapuzinergruff (The Capuchin Tomb), written in 1938. This is the German author’s third meeting with the Ukrainian readership. During his lifetime, his Hotel Savoy was published in Ukrainian in Kharkiv and in 1981, Vsesvit carried a Ukrainian version of Zipper and His Father, probably one of his best-known novels.

This collection owes its appearance largely to the translator, Ihor Andrushchenko, who told The Day’s Hanna Lobanovska that he is preparing for publication the full text of The Capuchin Tomb.

 

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