My Flag Was Pee’d on by a Cat
Miy prapor zapisyav kotyk
Author: Lena Lyahushonkova
Illustrations: —
For readers: Adults
Language: Ukrainian
Publisher: Urbino
Year of publication: 2025
Edition type: Hardcover
Number of pages: 336
Dimensions: 130 × 200 mm
Weight: 350 g
ISBN: 978‑617‑8618‑00‑1
Awards: BBC Book of the Year 2025
Description:
“‘My Flag Was Pee’d on by a Cat’ is the author’s attempt to depict her life in a small settlement near Luhansk. It seems as though time there has stopped, stuck between hopeless Soviet‑era backdrops and the difficult 1990s. An impenetrable wall has formed between present‑day life and new realities, with information often drawn from television (of course, via Russian channels), newspapers like ‘СПІД‑Інфо’ or ‘Fakty’, and above it all stand unwavering beliefs: ‘Because we’ve always done it this way’, ‘Because you’re a girl’, ‘You must live so that no one envies you’, ‘We didn’t live well — so don’t even start’. The text is a sustained irony and satire, sometimes at the edge of common sense. It is especially difficult for those who are ‘not like that’, ‘the smartest’, or generally ‘it will be hard to live with your character’. It is a world where sick children are taken to a ‘magic grandpa’ who rolls them with an egg, where a girl is born ‘to be a helper’, and where unpresentable family secrets (for example, someone’s Jewish origin) are carefully hidden. The text is full of humor (sometimes dark), and occasionally impresses with its tragic elements. It includes fleeting memories of times when whole families were arrested for mentioning that they ate bread, and the survivors lived between reality and their internal, unceasing terror that ‘the documents might be bad’. No, ‘My Flag…’ was not written with the intention of ‘finally understanding Donbas’. ‘My Flag Was Pee’d on by a Cat’ is all of us, sometimes on different sides of the wall.”
Urbino Publisher
