The Night Reporter

Author’s Preface

Author’s Preface

I started writing this novel in 1979, and in 1980 I finished it along with a planned sequel. I didn’t have high hopes for publication. I couldn’t write a crime novel about the Soviet era in the way the situation required at the time. It would have been very boring for me and, ultimately, I didn’t read anything about any courageous police investigators. I was brought up on foreign detective novels and read tons of them, mostly in Polish and Czech.

At that time, the first part of my novella Maidens of the Night was already lying in my desk drawer going nowhere. The authorities wouldn’t let me publish it. Then piles of paper copied from the new story were added to it, and I was too lazy to reprint the entire text. I printed out only one section and sent it to the magazine Dnipro in Kyiv and dropped it off at the magazine October in Lviv. The editor of Dnipro, Volodymyr Drozd, told me he wasn’t interested in a story about Lviv. Roman Ivanychuk, who headed the prose department at October, said it wasn’t suitable for them either.

The piles of paper had to wait for better times. So, I forgot about them. However, since the 1990s it would have been possible to publish all of it. But I had certain doubts about whether it was worth publishing. So I recently dove back into those piles of paper, began to reread them, and saw that it actually was quite a decent story. I typed it into my computer, refined it, enriched it with realities I had no idea about in the Soviet era, and here it is for you.

My hero is a journalist who gets into various and sometimes dangerous adventures. He drinks and smokes. And he smokes because I also smoked at that time. My passion for cigarettes lasted only four years, and I was seduced into smoking by a girl with whom I had a fling. The affair ended, and my smoking ended with it.

But I just couldn’t say goodbye to my hero, because all my habits coincided too much with his. How could I not drink if the hero of the story is a tippler? Together we are a single whole. And when he falls into the arms of an elegant babe, I fall into her arms with him. Fortunately, when they smack him on the noggin, I don’t have to take painkillers.

Now with inconsolable distress I look at another pile of paper, where the continuation of this tale has been hidden, and I’m pondering whether I should undertake completing and reprinting it....

Yuri Vynnychuk

THE FIRST DAY

Thursday

September 22, 1938