The Passion Collection follows Olesia Pidobidko through a series of “passions”—not to be confused with love—from age six to twenty-five and development into a self-aware, confident woman who has managed to survive for a quarter century without “having started a family, to say nothing of giving birth to a child.” The tone is sarcastic, but no less serious, for the protagonist has achieved something that, if not rare, was still unusual in late-1990s Ukraine. 

Pointedly using her protagonist’s relationships with men as windows onto her character, Sniadanko snubs her nose at the notion that women are valued as members of society to the degree to which they fill a relational roles: mother, sister, girlfriend, daughter, wife, secretary. Rather, Olesia’s “passions” are secondary to her true maturation. She is in charge of her own story and has the power to at least control how she reacts. She rejects her father’s admonishment that “they won’t buy the cow if they can get the milk for free” and is able to move away from a life where her father makes all decisions for the family and sees his ultimate responsibility as finding the next man to make all decisions in her life. Instead, she enters a life in which she makes her own choices: professional, sexual, and personal. 

Published in Polish, Russian, German, Czech, and Hungarian. Portions have been published in English. Translation sample available.

Key words: popular fiction, Bildungsroman, women, social commentary,

Original publication: «Колекція пристрастей, або Пригоди молодої українки», Piramida, 2000

Anticipated word count: 65,000

English rights holder: Haymon Verlag