What was the fate of Stanislav Perfetsky—poet, provocateur, and hero of Ukrainian underground culture? Evidence points to suicide. But some whisper murder. Some suggest the grand Eastern European tradition of coerced suicide. It may even be related to the religious cult ceremony he happened upon in Munich . . . or that job as a dancer in a strip club for older women.

Or, then again, it may not.

Perverzion constructs Perfetsky's final days using a mishmash of relics, from official documents to recorded interviews to scraps of paper. Perfetsky, the personification of the Ukrainian artistic superman—he used his masterful musicianship in a collaboration with Elton John during the pop star's secret sojourn in Ukraine—is bound for Venice to participate in a seminar to save the world from absurdity. On the way he becomes a Ukrainian Orpheus descending into the decadence of the West, navigating through surrealistic adventures and no less surrealistic seminar topics as he charges head up (and pants down) toward his fate.

YURI ANDRUKHOVYCH was born in 1960 in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. He is the author of numerous short stories and three volumes of poetry, and currently co-edits the journal Thursday. His other books include Recreations.

MICHAEL M. NAYDAN is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Penn State University. He is the coeditor of From Three Worlds: New Writing from Ukraine and translator of The Complete Early Poetry Collections of Pavlo Tychyna. With Slava I. Yastremski, he has translated Marina Tsvetaeva's After Russia and Igor Klekh's A Land the Size of Binoculars, also published by Northwestern University Press.