The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Gablevych, Lyuba Komar-Prokop, and Ivan Shtul’ re-created for me Lviv in the time of the Nazi occupation and the Ukrainian underground of the time; Oleksiy Zeleniuk (Pastor) and Romana Simkiv (Roma) gave me a tour of the resistance field hospitals; Vasyl Kuk (Lemish), Marichka Savchyn (Marichka), and Ivan Kryvutskyi (Arkadij) filled in dozens of gapsin the historical landscape. Irena Savytska-Kozak’s (Bystra) help was nothing but priceless—it was precisely the three days I spent recording our conversations in her welcoming Munich home that finally “decided” Gela’s fate; so was the assistance of Orest-Metodiy Dychkovsky (Kryvonis), with whom I consulted about the combat operations in “Adrian’s Last Dream” (his analysis of that chapter is one of the greatest authorial joys of my life).
    Archives were the other important source of historical information. As fatally disorganized as the Ukrainian archives are, they remain, for a writer, a gold mine of vintage details—things you could never make up on your own. My deepest thanks to Volodymyr Vyatrovych, director of the SBU State Archive; the indefatigable “guardian” of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the US collection in New York, Oksana RadyshMiyakovska; the staff of the National Museum of History of the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 (Kyiv); the Liberation Struggle of Prykarpattya Museum (Ivano-Frankivsk); and the library of the Lviv Academic Gymnasium, in affiliation with the Lviv Polytechnic National University (Lviv). I also thank my permanent field-expert consultants: Oleksandr Bondarchuk in physics, Dmytro Finkelstein in mathematics, Yevgen Karas’ in the antique trade, and Bohdan Yuzvyshyn in forensics. A separate thanks to Vasyl’ Ivanovych (Ivano-Frankivsk) for the gift of a field trip to the bunker “Groma” and the hideout “Boyeslava” when I needed the wintertime locations for Room 6. And, finally, I owe special gratitude to my first readers and critics, who supported me over the entire distance, and without whom it may not have been conquered at all—Rostyslav Luzhetsky and Leonid and Tetyana Plyushch.
    In the course of working on
The Museum
, I wrote another book,
Notre Dame d’Ukraine
, which took more than two years; a variety of small routine projects took up, altogether, almost another entire year; and if it were not for writers’ residencies which kindly accommodated me (God bless them!) I would probably still be working on
The Museum
now. Here is the list of the places where almost two-thirds of the novel was written—I owe eachindividual recognition: Ledig House (Omi, NY), Cerrini-Schloessl (Graz, Austria), Villa dei Pini (Boglasco, Italy), Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (Germany), Literaturhaus Krems (Austria), Baltic Center for Writers and Translators (Visby, Sweden), Villa Hellebosch (Belgium), Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), Villa Sträuli (Winterthur, Switzerland), Kuenstlerdorf Schoeppingen (Germany), and Villa Decius (Krakow, Poland).
    I would like to give special thanks to the Baltic Center’s director, Lena Pasternak, who found a room for me every time I, gone off the schedule again, called her with a desperate cry for help, and Ilke Froyen from Het Beschrijf in Brussels, to whose attention and understanding I owe my rescue in the eleventh hour of my novelistic odyssey (when there were already production deadlines I was about to miss). My heartfelt thanks also goes to my agent, Galina Dursthoff, who through all these years did everything possible to ensure I could work without disruption.
    And finally I thank everyone who has patiently waited for this book, whether I’ve met you or not: you have also helped me write it.

RESOURCES
    F or those who need a bit of extra help navigating the historical context of the novel’s episodes from 1943 to 2004, and after reading
The Museum
would like to expand their knowledge, I am providing here a list of widely available books (not archival materials or government publications intended for very small expert audiences) that I have found helpful.
     
    Alekseeva, Liudmila.
Istoriia inakomysliia v SSSR: noveishii period.
Vilnius, Moscow: Vest’, 1992.
    Andrew, Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin.
The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West.
London: Penguin Books, 2000.
    Andrusyak, Mykhailo.
Braty hromu.
Kolomyia: Vydavnychopolihrafichne tovarystvo ‘Vik’, 2001.
    Blan, Elen.
Rodom iz KGB: sistema putina.
Kyiv: Tempora, 2009.
    Davies,