Literary Diary 2020-2024

Literary Diary contains a detailed account of the writing of Yuriy Tarnawsky’s The First-
Person Dilogy-Sebastian in a Dream and The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, -the trials
and tribulations the author went through, striving to reach the undefined goals. In
particular, it explains the rules he developed in the first novel for structuring the text,
aiming to render a text-based equivalent of the music-based rules of J. S. Bach’s
Goldberg Variations. It is intended for readers with strong interest in the craft of writing,
and is suggested to be consulted after reading the novels.

Yuriy Tarnawsky has published more than three dozen books of fiction, poetry, drama,
essays, and translations in Ukrainian and English, most recently The First-Person
Dilogy. An engineer and linguist by training, he has worked as computer scientist,
specializing in Artificial Intelligence at IBM Corporation as well as Professor of Ukrainian
Literature and Culture at Columbia University. He lives with his wife Karina in the New
York City metropolitan area.