Amadoka: a concert of contemporary ensemble music based on the novel by Sofia Andrukhovych

The project, a transmedial translation of Sofia Andrukhovych’s Amadoka into contemporary classical music, began in 2021 when curator Veronika Yadukha, together with the TRANSLATORIUM team, envisioned a collaborative project that would transpose a significant work of contemporary Ukrainian literature into a concert, capturing the novel’s unspoken dimensions through music.

Immediately, composers Albert Saprykin, Boris Loginov, and Maxim Kolomiiets joined the project to bring this vision to life. Since that time, the team has successfully staged performances of the resulting compositions in Ukraine, Germany, and the USA.

Amadoka by Sofia Andrukhovych, originally published in Ukrainian in 2020, weaves through the complicated tapestry of Ukrainian history with personal stories. The author deals with three traumatic eras: Stalinist repressions of Ukrainian intelligentsia at the beginning of the 20th century in the USSR, the incarnation of the Holocaust during World War II in Ukraine, and the Russian invasion of the country’s east and southeast in 2014. The novel’s central metaphor, reflected in its name, is a grand lake that existed in antiquity in today’s Podillia region of Ukraine. Much like the lake, people and cultures are vulnerable to oblivion, which is both one of the book’s themes and something that Ukrainian culture strives to avoid.