Modernisme Ukrainien began with a fairly simple problem.
Living in France, I wanted to give Ukrainian books to people around me and realised how difficult it was to find the kind of Ukrainian literature I actually wanted them to discover.
There are, of course, translations of the great nineteenth-century classics. Writers such as Taras Shevchenko and Lesya Ukrainka are fundamental to Ukrainian culture. But for a reader who does not already know Ukrainian history, much of that literature can require a considerable amount of context.
At the other end of the spectrum, there is contemporary Ukrainian fiction. Much of it is very good, but contemporary literature is increasingly cosmopolitan. Its cities, relationships, professions and cultural references often belong to a world that feels familiar whether the author comes from Kyiv, Paris, Berlin or New York.
I wanted something in between.
Literature that was unmistakably Ukrainian, but already modern.
For me, that meant the Ukrainian modernism of the early twentieth century, and particularly the generation now associated with the Executed Renaissance.
A Ukrainian modernity
The 1920s were an extraordinary period for Ukrainian culture.
Writers were experimenting with form, language, cinema, urban life, psychology, absurdism and the European avant-garde. Their characters travelled by train, lived in rapidly changing cities, argued about art and politics, fell in love, failed, drank, worked, dreamed and tried to understand a world being transformed around them.
It is a period that feels surprisingly close to us.
At the same time, the literature could only have come from Ukraine.
That combination is what interested me.
A French reader can recognise the modern world in these books without first studying several centuries of Ukrainian history, while still encountering something culturally distinct from French, Russian or Western European literature of the same period.
The tragedy, of course, is that this cultural explosion was brutally interrupted. Many of the writers, artists and intellectuals of the period were imprisoned, executed or otherwise destroyed by the Soviet system.
One of the symbolic centres of that generation was the Slovo Building in Kharkiv, created to house Ukrainian writers and cultural figures. Its residents included some of the most important names of the Ukrainian avant-garde, and its history eventually became inseparable from the history of the Executed Renaissance itself.
That world became the starting point for Modernisme Ukrainien.
The first books
The initial series was built around five authors and works that, for different reasons, seemed to me particularly good introductions to this period.
One of the central figures is Mykola Khvylovy, one of my favourite Ukrainian writers. His fiction combines psychological tension, political disillusionment and literary experimentation in a way that still feels remarkably contemporary. The Sanatorium Zone became one of the key works in the series, together with other texts that help show the range of his writing.
Another personal favourite is Maik Yohansen.
Yohansen is an extraordinary figure even by the standards of the Ukrainian avant-garde. His name does not immediately sound Ukrainian, and his work does not resemble what an international reader might stereotypically expect from Ukrainian literature either.
The Journey of the Learned Doctor Leonardo is playful, experimental, absurd and formally adventurous. To me, Yohansen belongs naturally beside the broader international traditions of literary avant-garde, surrealism and modernist experimentation. He is one of those writers whose obscurity outside Ukraine seems particularly difficult to justify once you actually read him.
The series also includes better-known classics of Ukrainian modernism such as Valerian Pidmohylnyi, whose The City is one of the defining Ukrainian urban novels of the period.
What mattered to me was not to build an academic canon, but a readable one: books that could make someone curious enough to continue exploring.
A free way into the series
Whenever possible, I try to make at least one book in a publishing series freely available.
The reason is practical.
If I am asking someone to discover an author, a language tradition or an entire literary period they may never have encountered before, it makes sense to remove the first barrier.
For Modernisme Ukrainien, a volume of stories by Hryhorii Kosynka is available as a free introduction to the series, including downloadable digital editions.
The intention is not simply promotional. Free books are part of the publishing model itself. They allow readers to enter the project without first deciding whether an unfamiliar Ukrainian writer from a century ago is worth buying.
Read first. Decide afterwards.
A home for the series
Modernisme Ukrainien also has its own dedicated website at ukrmodernizm.abvx.xyz.
The site exists because I do not want the series to be reduced to a collection of Amazon product pages.
It provides a common home for the authors, books, background material and the broader idea behind the project. As the series develops, it can also become a place for essays, historical context, free texts and other companion material around Ukrainian modernism.
This is part of a broader approach I use in publishing: books should be supported by their own infrastructure when that infrastructure helps readers understand what they are looking at.
The series continues
Modernisme Ukrainien was never intended to stop with the original five books.
A sixth addition has already expanded the series with Geo Shkurupii, another important and highly distinctive figure of Ukrainian modernism.
And there are many more writers from this period I would like to bring into the project.
Among the authors and works I am considering are Arkadii Liubchenko, including Vertep, and Oleksa Slisarenko, including works such as The Black Angel and The Alchemist, alongside other writers whose books remain far less visible internationally than they deserve.
The list will continue to grow gradually.
I do not want to publish the entire period mechanically or attempt to reconstruct a complete historical library. The series remains curated. I choose books that I personally find interesting and that I believe can work for a contemporary reader encountering Ukrainian literature from outside Ukraine.
Why this series exists
Modernisme Ukrainien is ultimately not only about preserving literature.
It is about changing the point from which Ukrainian literature is encountered.
Ukraine does not begin with folklore and nineteenth-century poetry, and it does not jump directly from there to contemporary novels written during or after the current war.
There was a modern Ukraine in between.
It had experimental writers, urban novelists, futurists, intellectual provocateurs, absurdists and avant-garde artists who were participating in the same cultural transformations that were happening elsewhere in Europe.
Many of them were later killed.
Their work survived.
Modernisme Ukrainien is my attempt to give some of those books another route into the world, beginning with French readers and continuing from there.