What’s in our love for Yuri Izdryk

Ukrainian poet Yuri Izdryk has finally received the Shevchenko National Prize, Ukraine’s highest literary honor award. Formally, he received it for his poetry book “Kolektsia” (“Collection”) (2023), which includes works that received more than 600 likes after being published on Facebook. The book was illustrated with his own graphics. Although the regulations of the prize require choosing a specific creative work to be nominated for, it has long been perceived as a merit-based award for writer’s broader abilities or contributions.

I first met Izdryk in 2013 when I interviewed him via correspondence because the author did not want to meet journalists in-person. The reason for the conversation was the release of his online poetry collection “Yu.” At the time, I was completing my postgraduate studies in literary theory and had to justify my choice to analyze Izdryk’s “Dead Diary” (his wittily named blog) in my articles focused on literature of the Internet. My senior academic colleagues debated with me and tried to persuade me that it wasn’t literature, while I argued that a work’s literary value didn’t depend on whether it existed in a physical book. Well, now we have both the books (over ten poetry collections of these “network poems” have been published since then) and the Shevchenko National Prize in Literature.

The author, however, seems to not care about any of this. As he has repeatedly stated in his interviews and speeches, it is fundamentally important for him to “be getting a real kick out of it,” that is, to enjoy life itself, whatever it may mean at any given moment to do so. That’s the reason Izdryk continues to write books, produce melancholic stand-up comedy, exhibitions, and music collaborations. All these for his own creative pleasure.

If the prize regulations permitted more flexibility in the nominations, what exactly would Izdryk be awarded for?

“Kolektsia” by Yuri Izdryk. Meridian Czernowitz, 2023 

For boldness

Today, many creative initiatives and projects realized in the late 1990s and early 2000s seem to be strikingly bold and punk. No matter who you ask “How did you dare to do this back then?” to, they all respond as if they had agreed upon the same response, “We didn’t know how not to.” The exhibitions, the events of the Impreza Biennale, and the concept of the literary magazine “Chetver” (“Thursday”) look crazy and avant-garde from today’s perspective. Nowadays, they don’t do things like that because everyone is concerned about  established “formats” or concepts.

Izdryk, on the other hand, hasn’t stopped and continues to boldly test wherever his fanciful creative drive leads him. He played Orpheus in the post-apocalyptic archaeological opera “Chornobyldorf,” which won the Royal Philharmonic Society Award in the Opera and Musical Theatre category in the United Kingdom. He starred as a former colonel of Defence Intelligence of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine (GUR) in the feature film “Rock Paper Grenade” and won the “Golden Dzyga” (Ukrainian Film Academy Award) for Best Supporting Actor. He made a book of nude photography with photographer Nastya Telikova at the age of 58. He experiments as a vocalist with the band Dead Cock, paints on matchboxes with nail polish, and travels around the country with stories and poems about death and love.

For self-irony

I believe what makes this creative movement possible is that Izdryk doesn’t take himself too seriously. He mocks his own status and accomplishments, speaks freely about alcoholism and unrequited love, shows no pride in his awards or books, and always seems to intentionally “lower the bar of expectations” while, ironically, being a true perfectionist and aesthete. Even the most popular, unapologetically pink collection of poems, “Lazy and Tender,” begins with an introduction from the author that feels more like an apology: it’s just versification, he explains, and “I have never considered it to be real poetry, and never will.”

Meanwhile, more than one hundred different performers have already set Izdryk’s poetry (he wrote about three thousand in ten years) to music. The three-dimensional and vivid image of the beautiful lady with whom the lyrical hero is in love, the genuine tenderness and romance of his lyrics truly ask to be sung. In Izdryk’s opinion, the Ukrainian band Lilovyi has done the best job so far with their album “Tilky rai” (“Only Paradise”).

The author himself thrives on stage. From the cultural history of the late twentieth century, we know quite well about Izdryk’s piano concerts and musical cycles (it’s a shame they are only recorded in bohemian legends). Biographers often note that he graduated from music school with a degree in cello and was a guitarist in a student rock band. His collaboration with poet Hrytsko Semenchuk, under the name DRUMТИАТР, rocked dance floors not only at literary festivals, but also actively performing between 2010 and 2016 at shows across Ukraine. Izdryk mentions that he would like to release a music album “in the end.”

RELATED: Zelensky Awards Ukraine’s 2025 Shevchenko National Prize Winners

For his voice

Even if he reads a shopping list, the audience will be captivated because Izdryk’s voice is a separate value for his fans. He himself admits that when he goes on stage, “a kind of stage animal turns on and talks to women in the audience. It’s surely not me talking to them.” It’s a good excuse, but be careful. He has admitted in the past that he has always wanted to have his own sect. Not surprising with such charisma (the word, by the way, comes from the Greek χάρισμα, meaning “grace, divine gift”). 

Yuri Izdryk, Kalush, Jan. 2022

In addition to author readings, Izdryk offers intellectual gifts to the public, sharing the results of his self-education in sociology, cultural anthropology, and neurochemistry. He has even appeared on the radio a few times. Recently, he launched a podcast project called Fifty Shades of Music on Urban Space Radio.

For silence

Despite his naturally increasing misanthropy, Izdryk had enough love and mercy to leave social media in time. He has never commented on the current events (except for the legendary appeal to millennials during the pandemic), and, in recent years, he has not even published poems or links to announcements of his events. His secluded life in Kalush is occasionally interrupted by live performances, where the audience witnesses a stylish, witty, and sexy author. And yet nobody knows what our favorite poet eats for breakfast, who he votes for, or who he follows on social media. Thank God (who, as we know thanks to Izdryk, exists in every one) for that.

For inaccessibility

At a certain point, Izdryk left big cities behind and returned to his native Kalush. He doesn’t write columns, doesn’t comment on everyday life, and appears online only as an author. His “Dead Diary” was released and every poem has its own cover, like a record. According to the author himself, the writing style was modified according to the network rules; that is, no capital letters, simple vocabulary, bare minimum of punctuation marks, and preferably no more than three stanzas. He is selective in communication, carefully considering every single interview request, and never says too much—even when he’s exceptionally candid. Izdryk claims that his best work is his own image, and it’s hard to agree more. Every time you see him, you’re amazed by how this perfectly crafted stage persona is an extension of its creator, with the color of his shoelaces complementing the color of his waistcoat.

Yuri Izdryk, Kalush, Jan. 2022

For good taste

For more than a decade, we have talked a lot about taste and style, the way they relate to each other, and how they can be defined. For me, one of the great manifestations of Izdryk’s taste is “Chetver,” the magazine of texts and visions, which Izdryk created and edited for thirty years. The archive is now available on Postimpreza.

“Chetver” turned out to be something absolutely unique. It was the creation of contemporary Ukrainian literature out of nothing, the demiurge in its purest form. When you know the process from the inside and how much an attentive editor’s hand means in the final version of the text, you begin to look at the first volumes of “Chetver” a little differently—as a space for creating the literary process and discourse, a kind of crucible from which famous and recognizable names crystallized for all of us.

High shelf world literature

The first edition of Izdryk’s novel “Wozzeck” (1997) sold out within a week, and if the Shevchenko National Prize were awarded for a magnum opus, this would undoubtedly be the work. It is a novel that cannot be retold, and it is a must-read to understand what Ukrainian culture was like at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (or at least in solidarity with the legendary “Treatise on Assholes”). The novel is as global as possible in the sense that it could easily have been written in French, German, or Polish. We were lucky that Izdryk wrote it in Ukrainian.

As Australian literary scholar of Ukrainian origin Marko Pavlyshyn wrote, “Wozzeck” is a work that does not center on the specifics of the national culture in which it is set. Perhaps, it asserts the regularity, naturalness, and normality of Ukrainian culture, primarily because it remains the carrier of the work, and does not become its theme.”

In the mid-nineties, Izdryk had no doubt that Ukrainian culture was European, modern, and avant-garde. He effortlessly embodied all of this in his writing, thereby creating “an elegant, sovereign portrait of postmodernism, crafted from within by an author who masterfully controls its style of thinking and expression.”

Although the author himself is skeptical about the possibilities of translating this type of prose,“Wozzeck” was translated by Marko Pavlyshyn and published in English in 2006 by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. As early as 1998, “The Island of the KRK and Other Stories” were published in Polish translation in Literatura na Świecie. Izdryk’s poetry has also been widely translated into Polish, Belarusian, and English. In 2019, a bilingual collection of poetry, Smokes,” translated by Roman Ivashkiv and Erin Moure, was published by Lost Horse Press.

Izdryk states that his prose is auto-psychotherapy, and it is hardly worth reading for others. And yet the Old Lion Publishing House released a large, luxurious collection of his selected prose titled “Linyvi i nizhni” (“Lazy and Tender”) in 2024, and the book launch was attended by several hundred young people, a third of whom were reading his novels, not the online poems embroidered on girls’ handbags and printed on T-shirts. When you read “AMTM,” a novel in short stories from 2005, in this collection, on the one hand, you can’t believe that this text is twenty years old (because it is very modern, and even the war is so prominently present that it is impossible not to notice it), and on the other hand, you see how much Ukrainian literature, language, and reality have changed over these twenty years. 

In this reality, Izdryk, with all his provocative photo shoots, intertextual prose, and massively popular online poems, wins the Shevchenko Prize for Literature. 

But that’s not why we love him, of course. 

Photo credit: Oleksandr Naselenko

Translation: Iryna Saviuk

Copy editing: Matthew Long