OLENA CHEKAN – The Quest for a Free Ukraine - Bohdan Rodyuk Chekan (Ed.)

Olena Chekan (1946-2013) was a famous Ukrainian actress and journalist. Her first on-screen role was in Solaris, a film by Andrei Tarkovsky. She gained prominence through her own theatrical performances about the creativity and poetry of eminent Slavic poets and writers such as Marina Tsvetaeva, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Taras Shevchenko. This first book was edited by her son Bohdan Chekan and collects a large number of her later interviews with outstanding personalities in European arts and politics such as Václav Havel, André Glucksmann, Yuri Shevchuk, Boris Nemtsov, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Akhmed Zakayev, Valentyn Sylvestrov, Krzysztof Zanussi, Igor Pomerantsev and Oleg Gordievsky.
”This first book about Olena Chekan, worldwide, is due to the efforts of her son Bohdan, who painstakingly reviewed and cataloged his mother’s archives, and immediately convinced me of the cultural-political necessity of its publication. The present book is dedicated first and foremost to Olena Chekan’s role as a journalist. A second book, to be published in early 2016, will be devoted to her work as an actress and author in Ukrainian film and theater”. Robert Jelinek
DER KONTERFEI 015 / Paperback / English / 96 pages / Limited edition of 400 copies / € 9,90 / ISBN 978-3-903043-04-6 / Release Date: October 2015