«Spirit Territory» is an environmental satirical novel, conceived and written by Angelina Yar and Oleg Andros in 2008, with later revisions in view of modern realities. We, the two co-authors, criticized Ukrainian politicians, «investors» of capital development and putin’s militaristic policy, even when it was not mainstream. And all this grotesque is complemented by the mystique and beauty of old Kyiv and its nature.
«Spirit Territory» is a story which describes social and political disturbances in Kyiv in the 2000s. A tribute to those tumultuous years, when several hundred Kyivans gathered together and tore down fences around barbaric buildings. (That years a sincere and unpaid rush of the masses and subcultural youth occured).
This novel is a mystical, near-religious and romantic story about «searching for oneself»; laughter culture embodied in satirical sketches. And also this is a futuristic text on the topic of how Russia would threaten to intervene if there was an «environmental revolution» in Kyiv and the seizing of the entire island by rebels.
This book, like a scalpel, cut through several abscesses of the metropolitan Ukrainian society of that time at once. The opposition of the people of Kyiv to the big capitalist developers (for sure, supporters of the «free market» will see anarchism roots in the book). The confrontation of good and evil of biblical proportions, which continues over the Face of Kyiv. The confrontation between urban infrastructure unsuitable for an ecological lifestyle and the first representatives of the cycling community.
And also the novel describes the ghosts that wander the Lysa Hora Mountain, and the parallel world of the big city, which is always invisibly nearby; life of politicians and city officials who «sell» natural areas and historical monuments and at the same time wear embroidered traditional shirts.
Essay after essay, episode after episode, we laugh at the absurdity of political life, and admire the majesty of Nature and the sincere motivations of revolutionaries.
This book is a literary manifesto of the eco-initiative, which we founded in the same 2008 and which in 2016 became a non-government organization called the Independent Journalists’ Union «Nature first».
We thank to the team that worked on the book: literary editor Leonid Kononovych, artists Natalya Zhurakovska and Oleh Smal, designer Serhiy Piontkovsky.
