The Shipwright

The Shipwright is Yurii Yanovskyi’s dazzling 1928 novel of youth, art, cinema, and nation-making in Soviet-era Odesa. Set at the famed Odesa Film Studio—the “Soviet Hollywood” of its day—it captures the experimental energy of early Soviet film through a story that is unmistakably Ukrainian.

Presented as the memoir of an aging filmmaker interwoven with letters, recollections, and sailors’ tales, The Shipwright moves between the studio, the sea, and imagined worlds created on screen. While a group of young artists shape narratives of maritime life and collective memory, the deeper question animating the novel is what kind of story—and what kind of nation—they are building. Yanovskyi turns filmmaking, writing, and shipbuilding into linked acts of creation: each constructs a vessel for memory, identity, and the future.

The Shipwright is also a landmark portrayal of Ukrainian-language Odesa, a city more often represented through Russian imperial and Soviet cultural frames. Its characters echo figures from the world of Ukrainian cinema, including Oleksandr Dovzhenko, while its layered structure reflects on the artifice of narrative.

Long celebrated as a classic of Ukrainian neoromantic prose and often included on the lists of important Ukrainian books of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, The Shipwright appears here in English translation for the first time, presenting to new readers one of the most inventive works of modern Ukrainian literature.