In 1996, the daring novel "Field Studies in Ukrainian Sex" was published in Ukraine, and immediately made waves in the Ukrainian literary world: it tells the story of a talented Ukrainian poet and her painful relationship with an equally talented Ukrainian painter, against the backdrop of her academic stay in the United States, which allows her to observe Ukraine and Ukrainianness from a distance, but also forces her to explain herself and Ukraine to American students and lecturers who have difficulty distinguishing between Ukraine and Russia. Against the backdrop of the new independence, just five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in the face of the long shadows that Soviet culture still cast over Ukraine, Oksana Zbozhko wrote a striking, largely autobiographical text that demanded not only national independence but also female independence, and that drew breathtaking lines between the centuries-old national struggle of Ukrainians against the empires that enslaved and abused them one after another, and the struggle of women (in general) and Ukrainian women (in particular) for their freedom and dignity, against broken, violent, and oppressed men themselves. Since its publication, the book has influenced an entire generation of creators in Ukraine, has become one of the central and important works in post-Soviet Ukrainian literature, and has been called "the Bible of Ukrainian feminism," as explained in the author's introduction to the book's 25th anniversary.