Starting his career in 1990, his verses revolutionized Ukrainian poetry: they were less sentimental, reviving the style of 1920s Ukrainian avant-garde writers like Semenko or Johanssen. And they drew upon his homeland: the industrial landscapes of East Ukraine.Voroshilovgrad (the Soviet name forLuhansk) tells a story of a young man called Herman who left his home city Starobilsk (in the Luhansk region) but who has to come back to his native lands to protect something that belongs to him.[3] Based on the book,Yaroslav Lodygin directed the award-winning movieThe Wild Fields (Дике поле, 2018).
Zhadan is an internationally known Ukrainian writer, with 12 books of poetry and 7 novels, and winner of more than a dozen literary awards. In March 2008, the Russian translation of his novelAnarchy in the UKR made the shortlist of the National Bestseller Prize. It was also a contender for "Book of the Year" at the 2008 Moscow International Book Exhibition. In 2009, he won the Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski Literary Prize. In 2012,Gunshot and Knife won Ukrainian rating "Book of the Year" for fiction. His 2010 novelVoroshylovhrad won him the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature in Switzerland, BBC Ukrainian's "Book of the Decade" award and Brücke Berlin Prize. His selected poemsDynamo Kharkiv won Ukrainian "Book of the Year." (2014) His bookMesopotamia won the Angelus literature prize in 2015, the Award of the President of Ukraine "Ukrainian Book of the Year" in 2016.
From 2016 to 2019, he was a member of the Taras Shevchenko National Award Committee of Ukraine.[4]
His novelAnthem of Democratic Youth has been adapted for the stage and performed at the Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theater in Kyiv.
Since 2004, Zhadan has worked with Yara Arts Group from La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York, contributing to the shows: "Koliada: Twelve Dishes" (2005), "Underground Dreams" (2013–2014), "Hitting Bedrock" (2015) and "Radio 477!" (2023). Zhadan and the Dogs appeared at La MaMa in Yara's "1917–2017: Tychyna, Zhadan and the Dogs," (2017), directed by Virlana Tkacz, which received two New York Innovative Theatre Awards, for best music and best musical.
His poems "Spy," "Chaplain" and "Needle," translated by Tkacz and Phipps were part of "Blind Spot," an installation by Mykola Ridnyi and Serhii Zhadan for the Ukrainian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale May–July 2015.
Zhadan collaborated with Kharkiv-based music bandLuk. Most of Luk's Ukrainian-language songs included lyrics based on works by Zhadan (in particular the first albumTourist zone is based on Zhadan's playMerry Christmas, Jesus Christ).
The tribute albumKhor monholskykh militsioneriv (Mongolian police choir) was released in 2008. The songs include lyrics by Zhadan, performed by Kharkiv musicians.
Since 2007, Zhadan has collaborated with another Kharkiv band, Dogs in Outer Space (Ukrainian:Собаки в космосі), now known asZhadan and the Dogs (Ukrainian:Жадан і собаки). They have released the albumsThe Army Sports Club (Sportyvny Klub Armiyi, 2008),Weapons of the Proletatiat (Zbroya Proletariatu, 2012),Fight for Her (Byisya za neyi, 2012),Dogs (Sobaky, 2016),Madonna (2019), andLead (Vedy, OSTRhino, 2022)
In 2021, Zhadan recorded a full-length album titled "Fokstroty" with Yuriy Gurzhy, a Ukrainian-born, Berlin-based musician, DJ, and producer.
Serhiy Zhadan at "Rock for change" rally in Kharkiv, 2013
Zhadan's active involvement in Ukrainian politics began while a student and has continued throughout the various political crises in Ukraine. In 1992, he was one of the organizers of Kharkiv neo-futuristic literary group "The Red Thistle".[19][20] He participated in the 2004Orange Revolution demonstrations against corruption and voter intimidation in the presidential run-off elections, was the commandant of a tent camp inKharkiv. The protests resulted in a revote ordered by Ukraine's Supreme Court. He has repeatedly expressed sympathy for anarchists, and in many of his works there are "left" motifs.[21]
In 2013, he was a member of the coordination council ofEuromaidanKharkiv, part of the nationwide protests and violent clashes with police.[22][23] In the aftermaths of the5-day Maidan revolution, which resulted in Russian-backed President Yanukovych’s resignation, he was assaulted outside the administration building in Kharkiv.[24]
Since 2014, Zhadan has made numerous visits to the front lines of the Eastern Donbas region involved inarmed conflict with Russian separatists. In February 2017, he co-founded Serhiy Zhadan Charitable Foundation to provide humanitarian aid to front-line cities.
When asked, Zhadan has described his political commitments in the following manner:
You’re often described as ‘left-wing’ – is that accurate? I have never described myself as left-wing but I’m always being told I belong among the left-wingers! It’s all nonsense. Dividing people into left and right in modern Ukraine is not very constructive. I am a citizen of Ukraine who loves his country and tries to help.
Would you say you were a ‘nationalist’ or a ‘patriot’? I’m not a nationalist. A patriot — yes. I’m a patriot and I love my country, my homeland. But the term ‘patriot’ in modern Ukraine and modern Europe has various connotations. I encounter this in Europe and America, where some members of the public equate ‘patriot’ and ‘nationalist’, or take a ‘patriot’ to be a conservative right-winger. But this is very inaccurate. In Ukraine, ‘patriot’ is a synonym for a person who is on the side of our soldiers on the frontlines — someone who supports our country.
Why wouldn’t you call yourself a nationalist? Because I have known Ukraine’s nationalist movement since the 1980s. I have a lot of friends in the nationalist movement, but the ideas of nationalism do not correspond to my vision of Ukraine. Ukraine is much more complicated, and much less clear-cut.[25]
Rostislav Melnikov and Yuriy Tsaplin of theNew Literary Review wrote in 2007:
Zhadan's prose is so poetic, his free verse so prosaic. It is difficult to assign a genre to his work: memoir, travelogue, timely or untimely meditation – or a mixture of all these, centered on the themesmy generation andour epoch.[28]
Kirill Ankudinov, writing forVzglyad.ru in June 2008, said:
There is no summarizing the spicy, hot, sweet, vicious improvisations of Serhiy Zhadan – this is verbal jazz. When you read him, you fear for contemporaryRussian literature: of those now writing in the Russian language, there is none among them who is so infernally free (and above all, free from "writerly" prose, from the tendency to "produce an impression").[29]
How Fire Descends: New and Selected Poems by Serhiy Zhadan, translated from the Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps. Foreword by Ilya Kaminsky, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023).
Mesopotamia by Serhiy Zhadan, prose translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes & Isaac Stackhouse Wheele poetry translated by Viralna Tkacz and Wanda Phipps, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).ISBN978-0-300-22335-4
Voroshilovgrad by Serhiy Zhadan, translated by Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler and Reilly Costigan-Humes, (Dallas: Deep Velum, 2016)ISBN978-1-941920-30-5
Depeche Mode by Serhiy Zhadan, translated by Miroslav Shkandrij (London: Glagoslav Publications, 2013).ISBN978-1-909156-88-3
A Harvest Truce: a play by Serhiy Zhadan, translated by Nina Murray
^""Червона фіра": 20 років по тому".ЛітАкцент – світ сучасної літератури (in Ukrainian). 5 May 2012. Archived from the original on 7 May 2012. Retrieved27 January 2020.
