Tango of Death

By Yuri Vynnychuk

Translated from the Ukrainian by Michael Naydan and Olha Tytarenko

Translation edited by Ludmilla A. Trigos

Published by Spuyten Duyvil

May 9 2019 (originally published in 2012)

474 pages

ISBN# 978-1949966336

Summary by Uliana Pasicznyk

This remarkable novel by one of Ukraine’s most prolific and popular writers, Yuri Vynnychuk, takes place primarily in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. Complex in structure and rich in content, the novel intertwines two stories that unfold over two time periods and then converge. One takes place in independent Ukraine, from the early 1990s into the 2000s; that story is told in the book’s numerically numbered chapters. The other goes to the time between the end of World War I and 1943; that story unfolds in the book’s alphabetically ordered chapters.

Before the two stories in their alternating chapters (1, followed by A; 2, followed by B; etc.) begin, a single page describes a key scene: four young men in a wartime bunker are about to blow themselves up, as enemy soldiers wanting to take them captive rapidly approach.

The first story opens in the time period closer to our own, on the eve of Ukraine’s independence. We meet the central figure of Yarosh as a student and budding scholar. Soon he is married and a father, experiencing family troubles and academic challenges, followed by new romantic and sexual adventures. He has become an expert in Arcanium, an ancient and obscure language and culture. In his research Yarosh learns of an extraordinary piece of music which, if heard by someone just before death and heard once again in another life, can bring back memory of the previous one. Yarosh’s subsequent search for this melody, the “Tango of Death,” will take mysterious twists and turns and lead to astonishing connections and revelations.

 

The other story, in the earlier, interwar period, centers on four characters whom we meet as boys.  Each lost his father in the battle at Bazar in 1921, where Ukrainian National Republic forces were routed by the Bolsheviks, who then executed hundreds of captured UNR soldiers. They are fast friends, despite being of different nationalities: Orest (Orko) Barbaryka—a Ukrainian; Yos (Yosko) Milker— a Jew; Jas (Jasko) Bilewicz—a Pole; and Wolff Yeger, —a German. The four youngsters are at home in their native Lviv and the surrounding region of Galicia. So, too, are their mothers (fast friends as well), as well as their families and acquaintances. But important political developments are underway, and tensions surface and grow as the outbreak of WWII approaches.

 

In the more recent period, Yarosh’s research has sparked a growing attachment to Danka, a young researcher also fascinated by Arcanium who happens to be the girlfriend of Yarosh’s son, Marko (which, of course, will complicate things). Yarosh’s investigations will lead to his meeting an elderly one-armed man named Milkner—Yosko Milkner. Once an accomplished violinist, he still has one gifted and promising violin student, Yarka. He especially wants to teach her to play a certain haunting melody, but she finds it too frightening and overwhelming, and protests that she cannot.

 

Back in the earlier period, the lives of the four young friends are in full progress. At this point, the story abounds with vivid and detailed episodes and depictions of life in interwar Lviv, from the realistic to legendary, from outlandishly humorous to magical and unbelievable. Each boy is developing his interests and talents, having adventures, and beginning to search for his calling in life. We learn most about the Ukrainian boy, Orest, for it is his diary that is telling the story of the earlier period. In it Orest confides that he has fallen in love with Leah, sister of his Jewish friend Yosko, who returns his affection. The four young men continue to support and rely on one another (as do their mothers), even as wartime separates them and tragedy and horror loom. Yosko, who has become a gifted violinist, is rounded up along with other Jews and taken to a Nazi concentration camp at Yaniv, outside Lviv. He escapes the fate of others there by playing in the camp’s orchestra, particularly the haunting “Tango of Death,” the melody the camp commander ordered it to play as prisoners were being shot. But Yosko’s sister Leah, who has become Orest’s wife, is not spared: she is shot and dies in the concentration camp, having heard the “Tango of Death” being played. As the war intensifies and Nazi and Soviet forces battle to control Lviv and Ukraine, the four friends take different paths of resistance, surviving to meet again in occupied Lviv. They resolve to join the partisans fighting for Ukraine against both the Nazis and the Soviets. That brings them and us to the scene of the four in the bunker which began the novel, and Orest’s diary ends (the book’s chap. Z).

 

In the final chapters, all in the more recent period, Yarosh, elderly Milkner, and young violinist Yarka come together again. The mystery and magic of the “Tango of Death” are about to be revealed, to them and to us. Yarka at last plays the mysterious melody that had so frightened and overwhelmed her. The novel’s two time periods are about to converge: Danka comes through the door, and Yarosh sees that she is, in fact, Leah.

 

The novel includes many other extraordinary incidents and characters—among them, encounters with a KGB agent and the real and very successful Ukrainian mystery writer Andrii Kurkov (a personal friend of the author’s), and a scene with whirling dervishes in Istanbul—which add to its hilarity and richness. For English readers, the similarity in the names of some of the major characters, and use of the names’ diminutives, may be confusing. Lexicon and language add particular texture to the narrative, which occasionally includes Yiddish, Polish, and German words, as well as Ukrainian ones distinctive to Lviv and Galicia. The novel’s Ukrainian original included a glossary of such terms; the translation provides footnotes instead.

 

The “Tango of Death” is a real piece of music, which can be found on the internet today. There was in fact a Nazi concentration camp in Yaniv. The photo in the book of the orchestra playing there is an archival one.

 

Aspects of the book recall other literary works: for instance, the magical scenes taking place in Lviv’s Ossolineum (now Stefanyk) Library are reminiscent of ones in the Aedificium in Umberto Ecco’s The Name of the Rose. The “arcane” aspect and search for mysterious symbols and texts of the past by studying “Arcanium” bear comparison to Dan Brown’s Da Vinci’s Code.

 

Chosen the BBC’s Ukrainian Book of the Year in 2012, Tango of Death has been hailed as the first Ukrainian “universal” novel, as well as the first to deal with the Holocaust (Shoah) in an encompassing way. For all the satiric humor in this work, it does not whitewash history: for instance, it describes the ways the people of Lviv reacted to the Nazis’ and Soviets’ treatment of the Jews, some of which were absolutely reprehensible. Some reviewers have criticized the author for having given an unrealistic and unbalanced portrayal of relations between the four ethnic groups the boys represent, arguing that Ukrainians in Lviv (and Galicia overall) did not live equitably with Jews, that ethnic Germans were few, and that Poles lorded over other ethnic groups. To some critics, what the city’s Jews experienced during WW II in Lviv, as elsewhere, was so uniquely horrendous that not dealing with it head-on is morally unacceptable. Few critics dispute that this is an erudite novel remarkable in its amalgam of history, drama, humour, anguish, and mysticism, including the lure of reincarnation.

 

Yuri Vynnychuk is a gifted, multifaceted, and versatile author (of children’s books and a cookbook, as well as other novels and tales). He is certainly also a true devotee of his city of Lviv, uniquely knowledgeable about its history, communities, and people. This extraordinary novel is testimony to that talent and devotion.