Title (in English): Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex
Original (Ukrainian): Польові дослідження з українського сексу
Author: Oksana Zabuzhko, a prominent Ukrainian novelist, poet, and essayist
https://www.amazon.com/Fieldwork-Ukrainian-Sex-Oksana-Zabuzhko/dp/1611090083 https://www.amazon.com/Fieldwork-in-Ukrainian-Sex/dp/B0083S572C/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0
First published in Ukraine in 1996, translated into English in 2011, Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex shattered the silence of the post-Soviet literary landscape. It was quickly hailed as “the most influential Ukrainian book of the first 15 years of independence” and became an underground classic, smuggled across borders in memory, in photocopies, and in whispered conversations.
Zabuzhko does not write “just” about love or abuse. She writes about the body as a battlefield, about intimacy as an extension of colonial trauma, about how personal pain and national pain intertwine. Her narrator — a Ukrainian writer abroad, locked in a destructive relationship — mirrors Ukraine itself: fighting to define her own identity after centuries of domination, always told what she should be, never allowed to simply be.
The novel dares to say what was unspeakable:
• That female sexuality in Ukraine is political.
• That the silencing of women’s voices echoes the silencing of nations.
• That liberation — whether of a woman from abuse or of a country from empire — is never gifted, only seized.
Today, while russian missiles burn libraries, publishing houses, and bookstores, Zabuzhko’s words remind us why the written page is dangerous to tyrants: it speaks the truth about domination, about power, about resilience. Just as Zabuzhko dissected the hidden violence beneath love and culture, we dissect with her the violence beneath imperial “brotherhood” and “shared history.”
Reading Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex in our bookclub is not only an act of literary exploration — it is an act of resistance. Zabuzhko arms us with language to describe what was long kept silent, showing that the struggle of one woman can echo the struggle of an entire nation.
Revolutionary Reader – We Call On You!
Come prepared: this book is raw, uncomfortable, uncompromising. But it is also liberating. Together we read it not as detached academics, but as participants in the ongoing fight for Ukraine’s survival — where every word becomes a weapon, and every story carries the weight of history.
Still haven’t joined the Club?
Check out uabook.club and follow instructions or fill out the form directly.
by Lysychka-
1 comment
Oksana Zabuzhko is a famed Ukrainian writer of the post-Soviet era. She takes the most personal, intimate parts of human life – love, sex, trauma – and connects them to questions about culture, politics, social norms and national identity. She was one of the first Ukrainian authors after independence to speak openly about female sexuality, power, and abuse, and she did so in a way that was not just about gender but about Ukraine itself, a country struggling to reclaim its voice after centuries of physical domination and cultural annihilation.
Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, the Ukrainian bestseller, is an intense novel that follows a Ukrainian writer, living and teaching in the U.S., as she navigates a toxic and abusive relationship with a fellow Ukrainian artist, Mykola. But this personal story of love, desire, and power dynamics in a deeply flawed relationship soon becomes something larger: a reflection on Ukraine itself, its struggle to find her place, and the ways women, like nations, are forced to fight for survival, even though officially they have equal rights. The author’s fractured identity – torn between what she is and what others want her to be – mirrors the country’s own post-Soviet struggles and what it means to be both Ukrainian and a woman in a world that is used to ignoring them both.
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