Arabesques – Serhiy Zhadan

[Yale University Press; 2026]

Translated from the Ukrainian by Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

Throughout the growing subset of Ukrainian literature chronicling life in the country since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the specific sonic nature of the war is inescapable. In books such as Andrey Kurkov’s Diary of an Invasion, Artem Chapeye’s The Ukraine, and Yevgenia Belorusets’ War Diary, the noise is constant: the whir of air raid sirens, the explosion of nighttime missile strikes, the buzz of drones overhead. But in Arabesques, a new collection of short stories by Serhiy Zhadan, a poet, novelist, and—poignantly—lead singer of a ska punk band, the war unfolds as something altogether more sinister: silence.

Translated from the Ukrainian by Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler, Arabesques features twelve narrowly focused vignettes set in war-time Kharkiv, brief snapshots from the lives of its residents that provide a roving gaze of a city at war. Zhadan’s home for decades, and unlucky in its proximity to the Russian border, Kharkiv has been attacked relentlessly by Russia. Having stayed in the city for much of the war, Zhadan himself enlisted in Ukraine’s National Guard in 2024. For all of this, the violence in most stories in Arabesques is unfolding elsewhere, just out of sight. But its consequences are omnipresent, visible most obviously in bombed-out buildings but also scattered like afterthoughts in everyday life: sleeping pills, scars, and bloodstains.

In Zhadan’s telling, the war is a powerful force of rupture, forging a clear line between the pre-war past and the present. Many characters in Arabesques are alienated, cut off from friends, family, or colleagues, whose absence often goes unexplained. Many are quiet and lonely. Their memories have turned unreliable. One man exchanging stories with a high school friend finds himself drawing a blank: “I try to remember what things were like, what we all did, what made us happy. And I just can’t.” The stories recall the disturbing disappearances and lapses in time in Patrick Modiano’s novels, whose narrators are constantly seeking to piece together snuffed-out memories, missing persons, and amnesic gaps that never really add up. Only in Zhadan’s stories, there’s never any doubt about the reason for this rupture. It is always the war.

Yet, as time passes, life falls back into a new normalcy. A woman in “The Minute Hand” listens to her ex-husband talking about the beginning of the war: “She remembered those weeks very well, remembered fear being displaced by apathy and despair by irony.” The city’s residents create new systems and methods for coping, and their lives, despite everything, go on. As in his 2017 novel The Orphanage, following one teacher’s quest through a post-apocalyptic war zone to pick up his nephew, Zhadan emphasizes how everyday people adjust their lives to violence.

The most haunting throughline in Arabesques is the disappearance of so many people. In “Victory: Rip It Out Like Your Enemy’s Heart,” two boys wander the city in search of adventure. They visit the stadium where they used to play soccer, but there are no longer enough kids to form a team. “Everyone just kind of scattered,” one of the boys explains. Stackhouse Wheeler, a poet and translator of Ukrainian and Russian literature, preserves the colloquial speech of Zhadan’s many characters. One soldier’s mother reprimands her: “Everyone loves children… It’s just that not everyone wants to take care of them. I mean you can’t even take care of your own dog, you dumped him on me.”

The silence of once-bustling locations in Kharkiv, such as the city’s market, is now a reminder of what’s missing. One woman looks out her window to make sure the trees are still there, but all she can see is absence: “Streetcar tracks overrun by grass, everything behind the generous greenery comes clearly into view, everything remains close, visible, yet something is lacking, missing; a kind of emptiness emerges beyond all this, a certain disconnect, an incongruity.”

The stories in Arabesques are packed full of similes. The city “lay[s] like an animal with a snapped spine—you’re both itching to help and scared to come close.” Later, it is “[l]ike a seaside town right before the start of the season.” One semi-abandoned apartment building is “dank and empty, like a store in a small village.” As for death, it “is like a streetcar now—all that matters is where you’re supposed to get off, not how you got on.” This overabundance of similes suggests Zhadan is searching for a new language, a new means of expressing just how changed his city is. Nothing resembles itself anymore, but there aren’t yet words for such things.

The war has brought uncertainty and destruction not only to the past and the present, but to the future, too. Most children left the city long ago, and the schools now lie empty. In “Beasts,” former teacher Pal Ivanych has been tasked with supervising one such abandoned school. Without telling anyone, he moves in, spending his days reading in the overgrown schoolyard. One morning, while he’s still asleep, the school is shelled, and Pal is buried beneath the wreckage. After a group of volunteers frees him, Pal asks “Why do they target schools?…This is an educational institution.” One of the volunteers responds, “Exactly.”

In the absence of people and noises, more attention is granted to the passing of the seasons. The sun, the wind, and the animal world pay no heed to the war: “The birds could continue squawking, filling the morning silence and ignoring this emptiness. Someone had forgotten to warn them. They were left in the dark.” Zhadan’s tone drifts between the quietly observant and the laconic, with many of his characters hesitant to draw any conclusion about this new world they’re seeing: “The trees were tall, their crowns made some noise somewhere up there, high in the air, something was happening above them, something crucial was transpiring.” 

Zhadan saves his most luminous writing for his descriptions of the natural world. The view from a tenth-floor building offers one character bewitchment: “Early evenings continue to enchant with their tranquility; time’s touch is akin to tree bark—warmed by the summer, infused with sun.” But the natural world, in all its magnificence, is no real substitute for all that’s been lost. In these stories, the quiet resurgence of nature is not a trade at all. It’s simply what has happened.

Through these vignettes, the noises that Kharkiv is missing—voices chattering, music playing, cars honking—speak most loudly. Yet, in this silence, the city begins to reveal its softness. One character, looking out over the city, sees things more clearly now: “The more you look at it, the more mysterious and hidden chambers reveal themselves, the more voices you hear, and the more motion and joy you feel.” For all its silence, Zhadan’s Kharkiv, ground down by war, is not only resilient, but beautiful.

Eamon McGrath is a writer based in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, the Chicago Review of Books, and other places.