Dreams (2025)
About the authors
Oleg Andros is a Kyiv-based eco-activist, musician, photographer, and candidate of political sciences. He loves to travel in his civilian life. Since February 24, 2022, he has been serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. He is the author of the books Territory of the Spirit (co-authored with Angelina Yar) and People Were Here. Oleg’s war memoirs were included in the anthology of contemporary prose by graduates of the Litosvita school, Return (2025), Almanac 2023 the Vasyl Palamarchuk Military Short Prose Competition by the Bilka Publishing House (2025), and the collection of the first military literature competition “4.5.0.” held by the International Renaissance Foundation in cooperation with the Staryi Lev Publishing House (2025).
Klavdiya Kunytska is a Kyiv-based eco-activist, artist, and traveler. She is a volunteer with the public organization Independent Journalists Union “Nature First” and its project “Cat Town.” She is one of Oleg’s companions on his hitchhiking trips.
The book by Oleg Andros and Klavdiya Kunytska, “Dreams” (a collection of short stories).
A collection of short stories united by the theme of “magical Kyiv,” human relationships against the backdrop of fantastic technologies and futuristic predictions.
Several stories are about falling in love against the backdrop of Kyiv landscapes, informal parties, a pandemic, and an inevitable war.
Their leitmotif is the fragile romance that we can lose at any moment. One of the stories is an example of the cyberpunk genre about a post-apocalyptic future. There is also a parable about two worlds — happiness and human wars, separated by a wall.
The collection will interest fans of “light” science fiction, cyberpunk, and magical realism.
For most readers, veteran literature is associated exclusively with military prose—documentary texts and memoirs about life on the front lines, combat operations, or the difficulties of returning to civilian life. We often overlook the simple fact that today's soldiers are our former neighbors and acquaintances, whom we met at work, political events, or parties; and that for some of them, literary creativity was an outlet even before they had to take up arms or a remote control. Many years ago, Oleg Andros was already well known in Kyiv circles as an eco-activist, journalist, photographer, musician, and author. His multiple identities always reinforced each other and helped him find inspiration in his active everyday life. Therefore, the collection you now hold in your hands is a reflection of this multifaceted experience and numerous interests, from raves to cyberpunk, seasoned, on the one hand, with personal memories of pre-war life and, on the other, with a mature veteran's view of events in the country. Thus, the thematic diversity of this book reflects the person behind it more than ever. Traveling with the author from the very real artistic hamlet of Obyrok to the fantastic world of biotechnology and from the streets of Kyiv to totalitarian societies, drawing equally on the surrounding reality, dreamlike journeys, and philosophical parables, one can feel that this collection is both an island and part of a large mainland. Supplemented by Klavdiya Kunytska's stories with their magical urban realism and a love of cats shared by both authors, Oleg Andros's “Dreams” unfolds before you pages of happiness and pain, nostalgia and loneliness, music and war, inviting you into a new universe that is so poignantly similar to ours and yet so elusively changeable.
The streets of Kyiv, over which spring cats fly and where the footsteps of friends can still be heard, futurism and cyberpunk, poignant romance and parables — this collection brings together the bright moments of peaceful life and the fantasy worlds born in the shadow of war. Here, everyone will find something for themselves — fantastic, nostalgic, or sensual.
Memories from the nineties intertwine with the thoughts of robots after a nuclear war, and magical realism and flying cats with canonical cyberpunk. Andros and Kunitska don't just mix genres, they go beyond the boundaries of each of them. Personally, I was interested to see how what I considered to be only my personal memories and impressions turned out to be collective: from the island of Obryok to vegan paganism on Lysa Hora.
Dreams (2025)