20 Years Since Stas Perfetskyi Returned to Ukraine: What Events Yurii Andrukhovych's Character Predicted

20 years since the return of a character from Yurii Andrukhovych's novel Perversion.

Yurii Andrukhovych, a Ukrainian novelist, essayist, and poet, is often described as one of the central figures in the development of Ukrainian literary postmodernism, and as someone who opened up Ukrainian literature to European readers. His 1997 novel Perversion depicts the life of a Ukrainian intellectual in Europe and his relationships with local people.

The novel ends on an open note, and after the political climate cooled in Ukraine — following the Orange Revolution and the presidential election — Andrukhovych symbolically "brought back" the character, portraying him as an emigrant hesitant about coming home.

On how the author explored the problem of 'returning' in literary form back in 2005, and how the Ukrainian intelligentsia reacted — read on in this DeTalks article.

Where He Was and Where He Vanished: A Brief Plot Summary

Stas Perfetskyi is a character from Perversion, a 1997 novel that's ironic, farcical, at times erotic, and dense with symbolism. The book begins 'at the end': a mysterious publisher figure, signing only with the initials Yu. A., narrates, in the style of a noir thriller, the mysterious disappearance of Stas Perfetskyi, 'a Ukrainian poet well known in Lviv.'

According to Yu. A., Perfetskyi disappeared from his room at Venice's White Lion Hotel the night before his birthday, March 10.

The novel describes how Perfetskyi took almost nothing with him, leaving even his glasses on the writing desk, with only his shoes, pointed toward the exit, left on the windowsill of a window thrown open onto the unknown.

The publisher goes on to note that Italian investigators worked two theories: murder and suicide. The latter was doubted due to the inconclusive physical evidence gathered from Perfetskyi's hotel room after his disappearance. According to the publisher, the investigation was called off carelessly, after experienced Venetian divers spent a week searching in vain for the poet's body in the dark waters of the Grand Canal.

The novel itself, according to publisher Yu. A., is a first-person retelling of Stas Perfetskyi's adventures in Venice. In the plot, the Ukrainian is in Munich, where a prostitute lures him to a sectarian gathering of emigrants of various nationalities. After dancing, prayer, and rituals, the protagonist loses consciousness after inhaling incense.

Acquaintances — Ada Citrina and the mute Dr. Janus Maria Riesenbock — pick him up from the police station. Since Perfetskyi, a well-known writer, had earlier been invited to give a lecture at a symposium in Venice, all three travel there together. Sailing through the city by boat, Ada Citrina tells the protagonist about Venice's landmarks, and Perfetskyi realizes he's fallen in love. Later that day, they sleep together.

After several days at the symposium and much reflection, Perfetskyi wanders the island of San Michele looking for a priest to confess to. Father Antonio Delcampo agrees to hear him out, so Perfetskyi tells him about his feelings for Ada and about his intention to commit the greatest sin — murder. He clarifies, though: murdering those who want to kill him.

The two settle in at a cemetery under cypress trees, play music, talk about Ukraine, and drink heavily — a total of 12 toasts are made. Perfetskyi spends the novel's final night with Ada Citrina. Along the way, they're joined by her drunk husband, who'd been in the bathroom the whole time.

The next morning, Stanislav wakes up anxious and, after climbing down a ladder to get home, turns on a voice recorder and records a 'farewell' message.

In it, he describes his 'suicide' as an aesthetic act that no one should be blamed for, notes the direction his shoes were pointing, thanks his listener, says goodbye, and asks them to listen — to life, to angels, to the splash of water.

Andrukhovych plays with his audience, teasing them with an open ending and giving full license for theories and speculation about the character's fate. There was no splash of water; the documents are fake; and the hotel Perfetskyi supposedly jumped from closed two hundred years earlier. Some claim to have spotted Stas at a Playboy exhibition, or in a Roman Catholic church.

Where He Was, and How He Came Back

The 2005 poem describes Perfetskyi's return in vivid, sprawling imagery: forty names' worth of neuroses and old wounds, four suitcases of expired receipts and love letters, each heavier than the man himself, each abandoned at a different station or border crossing, now being picked over by the intelligence services of Albania, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Transylvania, who try, with mixed success, to decode his lyrical ciphers scrawled on postage stamps, or to reconstruct his DNA from stray traces on old bandages, tampons, stockings, and scalps —

before arriving at its central line: Stas Perfetskyi is returning to Ukraine.

That's how begins Andrukhovych's 2005 poem 'Stas Perfetskyi Povertaietsia v Ukrainu' ('Stas Perfetskyi Returns to Ukraine'). Even though the campaign turned out to be just a warm-up for the Patriarch's next project, 'Andrukhoid Plus' — a literary-musical event spanning four concerts in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, and Lviv — the announcement captured the spirit of the era and its social and political shifts.

As mentioned earlier, the timing of Perfetskyi's return is turbulent, and hardly accidental. Andrukhovych himself writes in the poem about the character's own thoughts on this.

In the poem, Perfetskyi reflects that it's time to come back, listing out a string of changes he plans to make once he does — dissolving parliament, adopting the euro, passing a lustration law, reforming spelling rules, and swapping his hair color from orange back to green — while noting that a new generation of students no longer even remembers his name.

Perfetskyi, in turn, predicts the dissolution of parliament by President Yushchenko in 2007, the 'lustration law' of 2014, the new spelling reform of 2019, and the shift in 'presidential colors' from orange to green.

How the Ukrainian Intelligentsia Reacted to Perfetskyi's Return

Anton Kushnir, at the time a third-year student at KNU's Institute of Journalism and now a serviceman, wrote about Andrukhovych's poem, describing it as something that should have been expected — the drums had quieted, the barricades were gone, the harshest graffiti had been painted over, and former exiles, some with tarnished reputations, were streaming back into Ukraine en masse, writes Anton Kushnir about Andrukhovych's poem 'Stas Perfetskyi Povertaietsia v Ukrainu.'

Kushnir argues that Perfetskyi 'seeks special guarantees' before his return.

Kushnir has questioned why Perfetskyi would deliver his speech in front of the European Commission, the European Court, the European Bank, and the International Tribunal in The Hague right at this particular moment, almost simultaneously with Andrukhovych's own appearance before the European Parliament, wondering what had stopped Perfetskyi from giving that same speech a year, two, or three years earlier, and what kind of image-management was really at play, while at the same time crediting Perfetskyi with the status of 'the most famous exile of conscience.'

Perfetskyi left and returned right at the intersection of a political moment, amid a shift in political leadership and public mood, but Anton Kushnir believes the issue isn't really about power or its potential control.

Kushnir has argued that to pull this off, Perfetskyi would have had to become an entirely different version of himself and let go of his old self, which isn't easy given his age, his image, and simply his attachment to a persona he'd cultivated and suffered for — one that once felt rebellious, revolutionary, and, to some, still seems 'perfect' — concluding that he suspects Perfetskyi simply couldn't manage it, notes the author.

Asked by a DeTalks journalist what he would ask Perfetskyi today, Anton Kushnir gave the following answer.

"Where did he serve? Because if nowhere, what is there to talk about with him?"

That same year, 2005, following the events of the Orange Revolution, journalist Otar Dovzhenko wrote about Andrukhovych for Ukrainska Pravda.

Dovzhenko has argued that a poet who'd been so visibly present around the turbulent events, appearing on air, including live broadcasts, and involved in writing an open letter about pop culture and crime slang — in short, a poet who'd played his part and said his piece — would now need to follow through and answer the question of what comes next, at least for those who look to him for direction, adding that this was exactly why the announcement of the 'Andrukhoid' project gave him a slight nervous shudder: would the Patriarch's first post-revolutionary move be a triumph or a flop?

he added.

According to him, Andrukhovych 'elegantly extracted himself' from the difficult position of being expected to offer an immediate creative response to the Revolution, instead placing Perfetskyi himself, 'presumably inseparable, in the author's mind, from the author as lyrical hero,' as a kind of favored offering 'on the altar of revolution.'

How a Literary Character Described a Problem of National Scale

Kushnir calls Perfetskyi 'the most famous exile of conscience,' at a time when the question of emigration — and especially return from it — is especially pressing. As far back as 2005, Perfetskyi was already giving voice to a problem that now afflicts an entire segment of the population, if not more than one. Recent research, including data from the Operational Data Portal, puts the number of Ukrainian migrants worldwide at around seven million, including 6.2 million in Europe alone.

In the novel, Perfetskyi reflects on his own country's dangerous state of infection — infected, as he sees it, by poverty, foolishness, passivity, and despair — noting that there are generally two ways to treat an infected organism: to heal it, or to isolate it as thoroughly as possible from those who consider themselves healthy, with the second option being far more practical and clean, like an amputation.

He goes on to suggest that this second approach has been chosen for him, so that someone now effectively bars him from his own home — someone with only a rough idea of who he really is and what's actually happening to him, yet who nonetheless already claims to know exactly what to do with him, says Perfetskyi in the novel.

These words apply to the way anyone 'returning' from somewhere is treated, at any point in time, coming back to their homeland. Today, 20 years later, those returning are usually coming from the front, and that readjustment is far harder and more complex than a return from 'European disappearance.'

Perfetskyi's description of someone barring him from his own home, someone with only a rough sense of who he is and what he's been through, captures something true about one of today's largest and most vulnerable groups — servicemembers — and how they're treated in civilian, 'other' reality.

The author's response to both sharp political events and to slow-moving problems that take decades to resolve feels fairly forced and predictable. Over years of creative work and public visibility, Andrukhovych has taken on a status that all but obligates this kind of response. Otar Dovzhenko makes this same point.

Perfetskyi is Yurii Andrukhovych's golem. In Perversion, the Patriarch alludes to politics in a way his character later 'predicts' upon his return. Back in 2005, Andrukhovych was already calling on his compatriots to come home, and he backed that call with more than words — he changed 'his own world' to make it happen, bringing 'the most famous exile of conscience' back from 'voluntary exile.'

The complexity of this image, and how closely tied it is to something local and distinctly Ukrainian, is reflected in the fact that, according to the author himself, Perversion is his most difficult work to translate. Andrukhovych's character became a composite image not just of emigrants, but of anyone who's ever wondered whether they'd be accepted back.

In the novel, Perfetskyi remarks that he'd been away so long that, in the end, nothing had really changed at all.