Depeche Mode

Kharkiv 1993. Soviet war veterans and newly wealthy businessmen listen to an American revival preacher in a concert hall. Advertising agents occupy former Komsomol offices. The youth radio station of the eastern Ukrainian metropolis collaborates with London to produce a feature on the Irish folk music group Depeche Mode and the role of the harmonica in the fight against capitalist oppression. Through this hybrid scene wander three friends – Dog Pawlow, Vasya Communist, and the first-person narrator Zhadan, nineteen years old and unemployed – in search of their buddy Sasha Sparkplug. His stepfather has committed suicide. Their search leads them to a decaying factory site, where they steal a Molotov bust, to a friendly dealer in the Roma district, and finally by commuter train to the Pioneer Camp Chemik, where Sparkplug works as a counselor. When Zhadan finally meets him, he cannot bring himself to tell him the truth.

Depeche Mode is the debut novel of the Ukrainian Rimbaud and plunges readers into the anarchy of the post-Soviet transitional period.