When the author and podcaster Viv Groskop first visited Ukraine, she travelled there from Moscow, on a long train that ran eventually beside a field of sunflowers. They were, she recalls in her lovely and modestly scaled memoir, like a ‘blast of sunshine screaming: “Welcome to Ukraine! You are no longer in Russia!”’
The year was 1994, and Groskop had been in the former USSR for a little under a year. A modern languages undergraduate at Cambridge, she had decided to take her year abroad in St Petersburg. Until she got there, she had barely thought of Ukraine. It was one of a bunch of newly independent states; it hadn’t come up on her course. But then she fell in love with a Ukrainian guitarist visiting St Petersburg for a gig, and found herself burning to visit that young country of sunflowers.
The book recounts the year or so leading up to her trip to Ukraine, in which Groskop mainly mooches around St Petersburg, smoking, drinking beer and teaching the odd English class to locals. In a way, nothing much happens. She meets her lover in a murky club. The intensity of his beauty nearly makes her laugh out loud. Then she finds his name funnier still: Bogdan Bogdanovich, meaning Gift of God, son of Gift of God. She is so smitten she is impatient for him to reject her; get it over with. But he doesn’t, and they fall into a relationship powered by her obsessive love.
As Bogdan travels to and from St Petersburg, Groskop soaks up the city, its language and new-minted customs.
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