The Blue Album

On the night between April 25 and 26, 1986, one of the reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, in present-day Ukraine, exploded, releasing an immense toxic cloud into the sky, as dense as the silence of the Moscow government about the event.

Despite the institutions' underestimation of the risk, two young parents set out on a journey to the Red Zaz to give birth to their baby girl far from that cloud, in the House with the vineyard near the border with Moldova.

They are two teachers, in love with Ukrainian literature but forced to cultivate it almost in secret, much like the forbidden Christmas, to the extent that they create a portrait of Lesia Ukrainka – the greatest Ukrainian-language poet, banned by the Bolsheviks – with a pyrograph, and keep it “almost as if it were the icon of a Madonna without a child.” Yaryna spends her childhood in the House of sand, which crumbles around its inhabitants like almost everything in the Soviet Union, in a climate of industrious serenity.

And, once she reaches the right age, she arrives at the House in the air: the university dormitory in Kyiv where she finally studies literature, becoming passionate about Italian literature. In the meantime, the Berlin Wall has fallen.

An autobiographical testimony and at the same time a courageous narrative transfiguration of the fate of an entire people, The Blue Album is a novel full of pride and poetry, which through its protagonists opens our eyes to great History.

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Yaryna Grusha was born in Ukraine in 1986. Since 1995, she has been visiting Italy thanks to the “Children of Chornobyl” project. Graduated in Italian studies, since 2018, she has been in charge of the Ukrainian Language and Literature course at the State University of Milan. She has curated translations into Italian of classics and contemporary works, including Poets of Ukraine (with Alessandro Achilli, Mondadori, 2022), Donbas is Ukraine (Linkiesta 2023), Dimension Kyiv (Rizzoli 2023), and The Song of the Forest by Lesia Ukrainka (Mondadori 2024). With a group of friends, she curated the diary of Victoria Amelina, the Ukrainian writer killed in Kramatorsk in 2023 (in Italy it was published by Guanda under the title Watching Women Watch the War).