When I spoke with the Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan this past summer, at a café in the ninth district of Vienna, I found him much gentler than I had imagined him to be. As a public persona, Zhadan is sexy and tough and the lead singer of a ska band called Sobaky v Kosmosi, or Dogs in Outer Space. His music is post-proletarian punk, his poetry is lyrical, and his novels recall William Burroughs and the Beats, with the occasional intrusion of Latin American-style magical realism. Yet in person Zhadan was a self-reflective conversation partner and a careful listener. He is conscious of his role as the unofficial bard of eastern Ukraine—and still more conscious of the moral responsibility he bears for his words. There are not many people from his part of the world whose words reach beyond its borders.

Zhadan is among a handful of Ukrainian authors whose work has been widely translated. His most recent novel, “Voroshilovgrad,” won the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature in Switzerland; he has drawn enthusiastic audiences in Austria, Germany, Poland, and Russia. After one of Zhadan’s poetry readings in Warsaw, a Polish journalist commented that he had never seen so many young women in the city wearing short skirts in March. Rebellious and racy in а James Dean sort of way, Zhadan sometimes appears as an enfant terrible—although, at forty-two, he is past enfant-terrible_ _age. Similarly, it is possible to read “Voroshilovgrad” as a bildungsroman, though the protagonist and narrator, Herman, is past bildungsroman age. “I’m thirty-three years old,” he begins.

I’ve been living on my own for a while, and quite happily, too. I rarely see my parents and have a good relationship with my brother. I’ve got a completely useless degree. I’ve got a dubious job. I’ve got enough money to support the lifestyle I’m used to. It’s too late to get used to anything else. I’m more than happy with my lot.

Like Zhadan, Herman is from a small town near Voroshilovgrad—a city that, since the fall of the Soviet Union, is no longer called Voroshilovgrad but, rather, Luhansk (in Ukrainian) or Lugansk (in Russian). It’s located in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. After attending university in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, Herman is hired by a friend there as a political consultant of some nebulous kind. He edits speeches, organizes seminars about democracy, and distracts attention from the money his friends are laundering. In sum, Herman is upwardly mobile. Since he does not trust the banks, he hides his money inside a volume of Hegel.

Herman’s older brother, Yura, still lives in their home town, near no-longer-Voroshilovgrad. Yura owns a gas station, where he and two old friends repair cars. One of them, Kocha, is a former petty criminal. The other, a former soccer star, is called Injured in Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Wheeler’s beautifully rendered English version; a more literal translation would be Traumatized. One hot summer morning, Herman’s cell phone rings. It’s Kocha: Herman’s brother has disappeared. And so Herman sets out for the gas station. In other words, Zhadan explained to me, “he returns to the past, where for him the future begins.”

The trip is longer and more difficult than it should be. Herman’s friends, the money-launderers with the Charlie Parker CDs who are driving Herman in their old black Volkswagen, turn back on the way. Eventually a bus passes, and Herman gets on, joining “women in bras and sweatpants with bright makeup and long fake nails, tattooed guys with wallets hanging from their wrists . . . and kids in baseball caps and athletic uniforms holding bats and brass knuckles.” He intends to stay at the gas station for just a few hours, to clarify things. After a day, though, things are no clearer, and so he makes plans to stay for one more day—and then two more days, and then, perhaps, a week. He falls into timelessness, a bit like Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain.” He visits his brother’s accountant, Olga, who takes him to a bar around the corner from a disco where, years before, he lost his virginity. He meets a couple of guys who have a biplane, and want to purchase—in the sense of expropriate—the gas station. He has wandered into a turf war: Injured and Kocha are counting on Herman not to sell them out to the biplane guys, to hold on to the gas station, which is, after all, their whole life.

The Donbas is where the rough kids are—it’s where the rough kids stayed. Zhadan himself did not stay there: like Herman, he moved to Kharkiv. But his parents and his brother and many of his friends stayed. He visits often, even now, when there is a war going on. Approximately eight thousand people have been killed since the war began, in the spring of 2014. More than one and a half million people have fled their homes and are now refugees. “Voroshilovgrad,” though set in 2009, has become the novel of our present moment, an intimate sojourn in a long-neglected Soviet borderland that is now threatening to bring about the fall of Europe.

Located deep in southeastern Ukraine along the Russian border, the Donbas is a post-industrial mining region known for its territorial allegiance. The dominant language is Russian, although Ukrainian is also common, as is surzhyk, the name for fusions of the two. In the early modern period, the Donbas was already a kind of Wild West: the untamed steppe served as a refuge for Cossacks fleeing Polish oppression; later, it beckoned to persecuted Jews, religious minorities, dekulakized peasants, criminals, gold-seekers—fugitives of all kinds. By the twentieth century, it was a “politically unmanageable . . . frontier land, where inner yearnings for freedom, wild exploitation, and everyday violence have competed for domination,” as the historian Hiroaki Kuromiya describes it, in his book “Freedom and Terror in the Donbas.” Under Stalin, the Donbas became the setting for the Stakhanovite movement, the forging of super-workers who could fulfill the Five-Year Plan in four years. This acceleration of time had a dark side: even by Stalinist standards, Kuromiya writes, “the terror of the 1930s in the Donbas was extraordinary.”

Stalin died; the super-workers disappeared; the Soviet Union fell. The nineteen-nineties brought mafia and oligarchy to the Donbas, and saw the rise of a local hoodlum turned kleptocrat, Viktor Yanukovych, who, in 2010, was elected President of Ukraine. (Yanukovych, not by chance perhaps, shared a strategic adviser with Donald Trump: Paul Manafort, who appears to specialize in P.R. for thuggish oligarchs with Presidential aspirations.) By then, time had slowed down. The factories were closed. In the novel, Herman returns to a world that remains deeply familiar, in part because nothing has changed. “I’ve always had the sense that after 1991 people in the Donbas . . . didn’t allow time to move along in a natural way,” Zhadan told me. The result was “blacked-out places, temporally anomalous zones.”