A01=Oleksii Nikitin
Author_Oleksii Nikitin
Category=DS
Category=DSB
Category=FJM
Category=FT
Category=FV
Category=NHWR7
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_fiction
eq_historical-fiction
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
forthcoming
Kyiv
Nazi occupation of Ukraine
Oleksii Nikitin
Russian aggression
Russian occupation
Ukraine
Ukrainian literature
Ukrainian novel
Ukrainian-Jewish
World War II
Product details
- ISBN 9780674304215
- Dimensions: 127 x 203mm
- Publication Date: 27 Oct 2026
- Publisher: Harvard University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In the wake of the horrors of civil war, the Holodomor, and Stalin’s purges, the young Jewish boxer Ilya Goldinov and his wife, Feliksa, are looking ahead to a brighter future in Kyiv. Ilya, the top heavyweight boxer of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, is primed for victory as champion of the entire Soviet Union. Feliksa, a country girl and a star athlete in track, is deep in training for a major race. Then the Nazi invasion in the summer of 1941 changes everything.
The Face of Fire offers a tapestry of Ukrainian life under the brutal Soviet and Nazi regimes—all based on declassified People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) files and Oleksii Nikitin’s family archive.
Oleksii Nikitin, a former physicist and journalist, is one of the most prominent Russian-language writers in Ukraine today. His novels include Istemi, Madzhong, Victory Park, Sanitar s Institutskoi, and Ot litsa ognia. Catherine O’Neil is Associate Professor of Russian at the United States Naval Academy and translator of Juliusz Slowacki’s Agamemnon’s Tomb: A Polish Oresteia. Dominique Hoffman has taught courses in Russian language, history and culture. Her previous translations include Yaroslav Hrytsak’s The Forging of the Nation and Olena Stiazhkina’s Cecil the Lion Had to Die.
