Artist in Exile: Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s “Signals of Being” (Ukraine)

It is the early days of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Tensions rise as the residents of a small co-op community outside of Kyiv find themselves in increasingly desperate circumstances, surrounded by occupying Russian forces. Pinched between Bucha and Borodianka, cut off from aid, and unable to escape, their attempts at survival rely on connection: a cellphone signal in the forest, their bonds with each other, and, ultimately, new understandings of what it means to be Ukrainian.

These are the circumstances magical postmodernist Volodymyr Rafeyenko places us in as his latest work, Signals of Being: A Play in Three Acts, is brought to life this March on the Alphabet City stage. Volodymyr is one of Ukraine’s most notable novelists. Weaving Shakespeare with both Ukrainian literary classics and contemporary works, Signals of Being stages a captivating dramatic interpretation of a country at war. This program features a three-person staged reading of the play, as well as a conversation between Volodymyr and his literary translator, Mark Andryczyk.

The performance will be followed by a public reception for all attendees and artists. 

You can purchase a copy of Volodymyr’s book, Signals of Being, at City of Asylum Bookstore.

About the Author:

Volodymyr Rafeyenko is an award-winning Ukrainian writer, poet, translator, and literary and film critic from Kyiv, Ukraine. He graduated from Donetsk University with a degree in Russian philology and culture studies. From 1992 to 2018, he wrote his works in Russian, was mainly published in Russia, and was considered a representative of Russian literature. Following the outbreak of Russian aggression in Ukraine, Volodymyr left Donetsk and moved to a town near Kyiv. There, he wrote Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love, his first novel in the Ukrainian language, which was shortlisted for the Taras Shevchenko National Prize—Ukraine’s highest award in arts and culture. Volodymyr learned Ukrainian from scratch and has dedicated himself to speaking Ukrainian, rather than Russian, his mother tongue, as an act of resistance and perseverance. Among other recognitions, he is the winner of the Volodymyr Korolenko Prize for the novel Brief Farewell Book (1999) and the Visegrad Eastern Partnership Literary Award for the novel The Length of Days (2017). Volodymyr’s prose is full of phantasmagorical images and storylines, as well as explicit and implicit allusions to well-known texts. He is sometimes called the “magical postmodernist” due to the intertextuality and richness of his prose. He is a Research Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh and a Writer-in-Residence at City of Asylum with his wife, Olesia Rafeyenko, since June 2023.

About the Translator:

Mark Andryczyk administers the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, and teaches Ukrainian literature at its Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. He has a PhD in Ukrainian Literature from the University of Toronto (2005). His monograph The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2012. Andryczyk is editor, compiler, and a translator of The White Chalk of Days, the Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology (Academic Studies Press, 2017)—republished by Penguin in 2022 as Writing from Ukraine: Fiction, Poetry and Essays since 1965. He has translated eleven essays by Yuri Andrukhovych for the award-winning publication My Final Territory: Selected Essays (University of Toronto Press, 2018). He is the translator of Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s novel Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love (Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature, 2022) and the editor, compiler, and a translator of Ukraine 22: Ukrainian Writers Respond to War (Penguin, 2023). His most recent translations are Taras Prokhasko’s Earth Gods: Writings from Before the War (Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature, 2025), for which he was one of three co-translators, and Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s Signals of Being or Berbum Caro Factum Est (Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature, 2025).

About Your Visit: 

The in-house restaurant, Cucina Alfabeto, is closed on Tuesdays, but a cash wine bar will be available.