The Girl with the Teddy Bear first published in 1928 and sometimes compared with Nabokov’s Lolita or A Summer Affair by Ivan Klima was a groundbreaking novel and is now seen as a cult modernist classic. Ipolit is roasting barley grains to make ersatz coffee in his squalid Kyiv apartment one day in 1922 when he hears a knock at the door. A Red Army soldier he doesn’t recognise is stood on his doorstep bringing a breath of the wild air of the Steppe. It turns out to be an old acquaintance whose dream of relaunching a mothballed factory leads Ipolit into an obsessive love affair with a disturbed young girl. It is as unflinchingly honest as D.H. Lawrence in its depiction of obsessive love and human intimacy and a remarkably courageous debut novel in a totalitarian society. AUTHOR: Viktor Domontovych was a pen name used by Viktor Petrov (1894-1969) an enigmatic Ukrainian scientist, author and possible Soviet spy. His work conveys the difficulty of human intimacy in a Ukraine occupied by the totalitarian soviet state and indeed the problematic nature of human love.
