Dystopian Ukraine novel, written on Facebook during protests, gets English translation

Kaharlyk by Oleh Shynkarenko, a novel that began as Facebook posts to evade censors, tells story of man whose brain is controlled by Russian army

A book that the Ukrainian writer Oleh Shynkarenko published in chunks on Facebook during the Maidan square protests in order to avoid censorship has been translated into English for the first time.

The journalist and author began writing his vision of an alternate reality in which Russia has conquered Ukraine while protests were ongoing in Kiev. Index on Censorship, which publishes an extract from the first English translation in its latest magazine, said that the story grew out of a blog in 2010. In it, he joked about hoping there were radicals prepared to kill the then-president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. Shynkarenko was subsequently interrogated by security services and found entries on his blog deleted, he believes by the security services. He later turned to Facebook to tell his story of a post-apocalyptic future, echoing the violence of the “Euromaidan” protests in 2013 and 2014 in 100-word snippets.

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