Stories of Survival

How to Demystify Nationalism

Let me begin with essays, especially ones written in the heat of the moment, i.e. after the Russian incursion into Ukraine. ‘The Longest Journey’ by Oksana Zabuzhko (translated into Polish by Katarzyna Kotyńska, Agora 2023) draws on personal experience. Zabuzhko, an accomplished Ukrainian novelist, found herself in Warsaw literally on the eve of the invasion. She was supposed to set off on a promotional tour devoted to the publication of her collection of essays ‘Planet Wormwood’ (translated by Katarzyna Kotyńska and Anna Łazar, Agora 2022). In the morning, she received a phone call from Kyiv. “(...) Something had happened, and it is not that we hadn’t expected it. But, with our whole selves, to the depths of our minds, invoking the childhood magic, we silently, in our souls, begged for this thing not to happen. And in the next conscious moment, I was looking at myself in the mirror in the hotel bathroom, thinking: oh well, I’m grounded, how am I going to get home now?...” Zabuzhko had no way of returning home for a good few months.

However, she did not waste that time: she travelled (and continues to travel) intensively across Poland and Europe, trying to explain to the confused EU inhabitants why Putin had actually decided to destroy Ukraine and the Ukrainians. She did so in meeting after meeting, passionately and with focus. ‘The Longest Journey’ is also a fruit of this effort.

This book can be read as a kind of pendant to ‘Planet Wormwood’, filled with erudite essays, firmly embedded in local Ukrainian cultural contexts. ‘The Longest Journey’ contains much more direct text, almost shouted rather than written, both furious and factual. On the one hand, it is an attempt to re-tell the same story of Russia’s persistent and insidious attempts to liquidate the Ukrainian world since the 19th century (while simultaneously trying to convince, or frighten, the West that this is being done out of imperial necessity and out of sincere love for the liquidated people).

This time, however, the text is as powerful and succinct as can be. On the other hand, the text strives to capture a unique historical moment, when a calamity turns out to trigger global effects, transforming the deepest social perceptions and mythologies (not only among Ukrainians): “These are historical changes, much like tectonic movements. It is precisely such changes that determine the fate of nations. All other changes that political scientists are trying to describe, including revolutions and the redrawing of political maps, derive from these existential changes: those that occur in the mass consciousness. In fact, these changes are most difficult to observe, and sociology does not know adequate mechanisms. Literature continues to be the only useful tool for capturing them. (...) And that is why I do not call this war a second campaign. Or, as the European media does it, the ‘Russian invasion of Ukraine’. (...) And I don’t even call it the ‘Russian-Ukrainian’ war: this term is far too local. I call it ‘the third world war’.”

History sometimes comes full circle in peculiar ways. “Rock music meant almost everything to me. My friends and I would mostly listen to Pink Floyd, mainly on Polish radio, by the way. (...) When Soviet troops entered Afghanistan, the Polish radio aired songs from Pink Floyd’s album ‘The Wall’. It was an anti-military album, the album was about the collapse of the wall (...),” Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak recalls in a conversation with Polish translator and writer Iza Chruślińska in a book-long interview entitled ‘Understanding Ukraine’ (Krytyka Polityczna 2022). Today, the former Pink Floyd leader Roger Waters smoothly assumes the ‘anti-imperialist’ role of a spokesman, promoting Russia’s interests, thus turning out to be no less than an ignoramus and a fool. However, Hrytsak is worth reading not only because he liked the same music bands in his youth as we did (or at least I did): he is simply an outstanding intellectual, with a sober perspective on the complex processes involved in the emergence of Ukrainians’ national identity.

‘Understanding Ukraine’ is an expanded and updated edition of his book that was originally published in 2009 (now with the theme of the war added), i.e. even before the Euromaidan in Kyiv (2013-2014). Paradoxically, there are some advantages to this fact: the interview is slow-paced, its tonality balanced, with no urgent matters to resolve. Thanks to these features of the text, the reader receives an unemotional lecture on the meanders of Ukrainian history, clearly explaining the differences between Ruthenia and Russia, between the religious and linguistic community and the political communities of eastern Slavdom, between Galicia and the rest of Ukraine. Also, thanks to Chruślińska’s attentive questions, Hrytsak takes us step by step through the formation of the Ukrainian nation (which, for a historian from Lviv, is equivalent to an ideological ‘escape to the West’ and ‘westernisation’ of Ukrainian lands), and he does not hush up difficult moments, such as when the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists joined the Fascist International.

Importantly, ‘Understanding Ukraine’ helps readers to realise why Ukrainians have survived as a political nation under the extremely unfavourable conditions imposed by the Russian (and subsequently Soviet) imperial project. And why the Russian-speaking inhabitants of eastern Ukraine did not greet Putin’s troops with flowers but rather with anti-tank missiles fired from hand-held launchers.

An interesting choice to complete this set is Mykola Riabchuk’s book entitled ‘Fourteenth from the End. Tales of Modern Ukraine’ (translated by Katarzyna Kotyńska, Andrij Saweneć, Joanna Cieplińska, Andrzej Jekaterynczuk, Michał Petryk, Olena Szelążyk-Komenda, Marek S. Zadura, Mateusz Zalewski, published by Znak 2022). Riabchuk, who is a writer, literary critic, essayist and an important figure in Ukrainian intellectual life, as well as a long-standing chair of the jury of the Angelus Central European Literature Award, wrote the texts for this volume after the democratic revolution of 2013-2014 and Russia’s armed annexation of Crimea and parts of Donbas.

He attempts to explain the phenomenon of Ukrainian social and national cohesion in the face of war, something that struck Western observers as unexpected. He also decodes the language used by Russia to describe its own actions, full of Orwellian justifications for the aggression (such as ‘special operation against the Nazis’), placing this language in the context of the tradition of imperial discourse that has so adeptly mesmerised Western observers for centuries. The ‘imperial knowledge’, produced and disseminated by powerful imperial institutions for centuries, has had a strong impact on Western media, academia, popular culture and public opinion. It was not only accepted but evolved into the norm. In fact, the international community is not accustomed to listening to the marginal voice of second-rank subordinate nations and, instead, lends a listening ear to the message from the imperial ruling nations: these ‘superior’ nations are unconditionally recognised as important and a priori assumed to have authority. In practice, this means that whatever lies come from the mouths of Putin and Lavrov, the international media will gladly disseminate them around the world, encouraging everyone to take and discuss them seriously, instead of immediately calling the chutzpah and the liars by their true names, Riabchuk observes, and I am immediately reminded of those rambling explanations that emerged in the early days of the war, whereby one should not ‘offend Russia’, which ‘felt provoked’ and has the right to ‘protect Russian-speaking citizens’.

What is perhaps most interesting about Riabchuk’s book are his efforts to demystify the word ‘nationalism’, which, in the Polish context, has an unambiguously rotten ring to it. However, in Riabchuk’s writing (and in publications by other Ukrainian intellectuals), ‘nationalism’ comes out as rather close to identity-building patriotism, which does not use the criterion of blood and faith, but, instead, the appropriate pathos of symbols and the criterion of readiness to sacrifice private happiness for the sake of the community (or perhaps something else is true: private happiness is not possible when the community remains unhappy).

A Thriller About the Limits of Humanity

Of course, Ukrainians were not surprised by the genocidal aggression coming from Russia. Certainly not after the experience of the Great Famine (1932-1933). Disasters of famine are not new to Europe: the last one happened in the northern regions of Sweden and Finland in 1866-1868 and was caused by relatively natural causes (i.e. two long and harsh winters in succession, with an exceptionally cold summer in between, coupled with infertile soils and a policy of financial austerity). However, Ukrainians - both in Ukraine and in the South-Russian Kuban - were starving amid the continent’s most fertile soils, intentionally deprived of grain for sowing, terrorised by Soviet stormtroopers and the military. Stalin decided to kill two birds with one stone, achieving collectivisation and ethnic cleansing at the same time. Several million people, mostly villagers, paid the price of their lives for these ideas because the aim was to destroy traditional villages. As a result of this genocide, areas in central Ukraine lost more than 25% of their population. However, the world was not to learn about this crime and, incidentally, its perpetrators were never held accountable for their deeds. “The truth about the Holodomor was concealed in the Soviet Union. This, in a way, compounded the national trauma among the Ukrainians. It was only towards the end of the USSR that the authorities began to admit that the Great Famine had actually happened. For a long time, however, they denied that it had been an orchestrated, deliberate top-down effort, targeting primarily Ukraine,” writes Maciej Piotrowski, translator of Vasyl Barka’s ‘The Yellow Prince’ (KEW 2022), in the afterword to the novel.

‘The Yellow Prince’, written by Barka in the late 1950s while in exile in the USA, was published in 1962 (in Ukraine, the book was not officially released until 1991). It is an attempt to sum up the fate of the Ukrainian countryside during the Holodomor, exemplified by the tragic story of one family. When writing the book, Barka drew on his own memories (he survived the famine in Kuban) and the existing testimonies of the victims. He aimed to create a social fresco, a kind of epitaph combined with an accusatory act where, to quote Czesław Miłosz, “the words are written down, the deed, the date. ” And he succeeded: as a factual narrative, its essence distilled from the suffering of millions, ‘The Yellow Prince’ has a powerful impact on the reader, especially when Barka paints landscapes of solitude and destruction and truly picturesque collective scenes. However, it must be remembered that this novel was written ‘for a cause’ and, as such, its tone and manner are somewhat reminiscent of the novellas written by Polish positivists in the late 19th century. And yet, this does not stay in the way of the reader’s experience as long as we remember that Barka primarily intended to perpetuate the memory of the mass murder: in the late 1950s and early 1960s, no one could expect that the Moscow colossus would collapse under its own weight barely three decades later.

It is also worth checking how contemporary Ukrainian literature deals with the legacy of the Holodomor. We can do so by looking at Tanya Pyankova’s ‘The Age of Red Ants’ (translated by Marek S. Zadura, Mova 2023): a sultry, disturbing prose drawing on the convention of a psychological novel. The three protagonists are trying to survive terror and starvation in a village somewhere near Poltava in central Ukraine, but they are not on the same side of the barricade. Dusya does her utmost to feed herself and her children. Svyryd, in turn, collaborates with the authorities and abuses his position to sexually assault women. Sola is the wife of a collectivisation official, depressed after the death of their child: she refuses to see and hear anything, even though the lives of the local people depend on her husband’s will. The fates of these people become intertwined in a dramatic knot. In fact, the book is a terrifying thriller about the boundaries of humanity.

These boundaries are also dealt with in ‘The Path of Light: The Story of a Concentration Camp in Donetsk’ by Stanislav Aseyev (translated by Marcin Gaczkowski, KEW 2022), an autobiographical account of almost three years of confinement ‘awaiting trial’ in an officially non-existent prison located on the site of a former factory. Aseyev, a journalist and blogger, was arrested in 2017 at the age of 28 by the special services of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic. Like other prisoners, he was tortured, including the application of electric shocks, and his human dignity was trampled on. The oppressors tried to break him and scar him psychologically, striping him of his personality and forcing him to do hard physical labour. The prison earned the nickname of the ‘Donetsk Dachau’. “It is no coincidence that the nightmare of totalitarianism is repeated as a tragic farce in the Russian world and mafia-controlled parastatals,” writes Marcin Gaczkowski, translator of ‘The Path of Light’. “Since 1991, the orphans abandoned by the USSR, among them politicians, columnists and military officers, have nurtured the ‘ethos of the Chekist’ - caring less about the methods and more about the results. After ‘Isolation’ [the nickname name of the Donetsk prison - editor’s note], shots in the back of the head and mass graves, we can be certain: Russia’s military success would entail the official restitution of gulags and slave labour, with mass terror on inhuman land. Dzerzhinsky’s statue would return to KGB headquarters in Lubyanka.” Aseyev’s harrowing book, sincere to the point of extreme pain, should therefore be understood not only as a testimony but also as a kind of guarantee: yes, this is what the Russians would do to all Ukrainians after a victorious war, to ‘liberate’ them from being Ukrainian and to hug them to their dead heart.

Oral Prose

Somewhere, however, normal life is (or perhaps was) also going on. In ‘The Plan to Fix Ukraine’ (translated by Aleksandra Brzuzy, Maciej Piotrowski, Ziemowit Szczerek, Ha!art 2023), poet and novelist Les’ Beley takes us onto a journey through Ukrainian daily life: sometimes down-to-earth and concrete, sometimes grotesque, absurd and baroquely pompous. Beley’s short stories are first and foremost examples of ‘short-wave listening’ (to use Miron Białoszewski’s term), or oral prose that draws on colloquial speech and street life. It has hundreds of characters, each having their own few words to say. The book, which is best read bit by bit, at random, has the background of the perverse, ironic conceptualism of the late Soviet avant-garde, known for example from Vladimir Sorokin’s outstanding ‘The Queue’ (a novel consisting of nothing but dialogues, without attribution to characters).

Another, quite different example of ‘real-life prose’ can be found in ‘Before the Raspberries Ripen’, a novel by Eugenia Kuznetsova (translated by Iwona Boruszkowska, Znak 2023). This, in contrast, is an attempt to adopt a popular literary genre for her own purposes. Kuznetsova applies the patterns of the so-called ‘women’s novel’: in a house located in a semi-rural area, somewhere near Kyiv, lives 96-year-old Theodora. The house is long past its prime: the roof is leaking, the paint is peeling off, the floors are warped by dampness and the outside is overgrown with wild thickets. Naturally, the house is a symbol of a family that has left it to drift around the world, and its members got lost in their own lives. In early summer, Theodora is visited by three granddaughters who intend to stay with her for a few months to sort their lives out. This gives rise to a peculiar, extended form of family reunion, mainly with women at the centre, that will turn everything upside down.

While this novel could have turned into terrible kitsch, Kuznetsova has avoided this path. Instead, she uses her rather tarry, foolhardy sense of humour, and on the other hand, a kind of melancholy that is unprecedented in this kind of ‘heartening genre’: the merrier the novel gets, the stronger the notes of sadness and fatalism that often befall people at existential crossroads. Add to this the subtle, unusual portrayals of the heroines, and you have a book that comes quite as a surprise to the reader: no, this is definitely not another kind of ‘dacha over the pool’, to invoke the title of the Polish novel by M. Kalicińska.

The final novel in this overview is quite unusual: written by a Ukrainian author but in the Spanish language, addressing the complex problem of emigration. ‘Displacement’ (Desencajada) by Margaryta Yakovenko (translated by Agata Ostrowska, ArtRage 2022) is a largely autobiographical story about a family migrating from Mariupol to the Iberian Peninsula in the late 1990s (when the author was seven years old). ‘Displacement’ is a subtle study of cultural alienation: the narrator is granted Spanish citizenship after a 20-year wait. Paradoxically, this official act triggers some inevitable re-evaluation in her mind, for instance in the context of bilingualism: “My inner world lives in parallel in two languages, completely different from each other, and I switch between them, depending on what is needed. When I speak Spanish, I have a different intonation than when I speak Russian. The modulation changes, and so do the vowels and even the timbre of my voice. It feels like I am home to two identities, two roles living inside me. While bilingualism offers a refuge, it is also a curse.” The inevitable duality of the personality, difficult to ‘glue together’, also becomes a curse.

‘Displacement’ is not devoted to some abstract problem: in fact, millions of migrating Ukrainians (and not only them, of course) will face a similar situation (or have faced it already). Mandatory participation in the culture of the host country will not necessarily be seen by migrants as a privilege of a new civilisation: it might just as well be viewed as a punishment for being exiled from their homeland. And we need to bear that in mind.. ©℗