Serhiy Zhadan has emerged as a leading literary figure in contemporary war-torn Ukraine. His writing reflects struggles with identity including ethnicity, language, and political allegiance that are faced by the citizens of a nation under attack. Serhiy Zhadan\u2019s books feature characters affected by the war in Donbas, the region of Ukraine where he grew up. These books include the poetry collections Book of Quotations and Why I\u2019m Not on Social Media and the novels Voroshilovgrad and Orphanage. They contain profiles of people who, among other characteristics, navigate territory, both physical landscape and linguistic.<\/p>\n
Readers can identify with the struggles of his characters and find reflections of themselves in his poetry. So many of his poems tell stories. His emotional poem \u201cSearch,\u201d about a woman who has lost her brother to the war, from the collection Why I\u2019m Not on Social Media is an example.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe wrote, they were all caught in one round of fire.<\/p>\n
Then some of them returned \u2013<\/p>\n
to recover the dead. Or rather what was left<\/p>\n
of them. The legs were the biggest problem. Everybody<\/p>\n
needs two legs. That\u2019s how they assembled them \u2013<\/p>\n
so each had two legs. It was best \u2013 if they were both<\/p>\n
about the same size.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the same poem when the woman comes away with hurt fingers after trying to play her deceased brother\u2019s guitar, readers can relate to her sadness in the loss of a loved one.<\/p>\n
The decision of an individual to stay or leave the country is dealt with in his work. In his new book of criticism Serhiy Zhadan Black Romantic Ivan Dzyuba begins with Zhadan\u2019s first collection of poetry Book of Quotations. He speaks of \u201cescape as an act of conscious, fateful choice.\u201d In Zhadan\u2019s later work, the characters make the choice to escape the war rather than to stay and face violence and an uncertain future.<\/p>\n
The decision of an individual to stay or leave the country is dealt with in his work.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In a SoHo event that featured an interview between Keith Gessen of N + 1 and Serhiy Zhadan, Gessen asked Zhadan how he decides whether to write a novel or write a poem. Zhadan said that if the character\u2019s story is revealed to him, he will write a novel, but if it is only a glimpse at the character\u2019s life, he finds it more appropriate for a poem.<\/p>\n
In the interview, Zhadan read from his book Why I\u2019m Not on Social Media, translated into English by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps in What We Live For, What We Die For: Selected Poems (forthcoming from Yale University Press 2018.) He read a profile of Anton, who someone said \u201cwas shot at a roadblock, \/ one morning weapon in hand, somehow accidentally.\u201d He also read \u201cDeath is frightening, it scares you,\u201d from the poem \u201cRhinoceros.\u201d He is a dynamic reader and attracts crowds of over a thousand in Ukraine, a number that is almost unheard of for poetry readings in the United States. Mesopotamia, a book of translations of Zhadan\u2019s prose by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler, will also be released in 2018 by Yale University Press.<\/p>\n
The Landscape Influences the Characters\u2019 Identities<\/h2>\n
Landscape is equally prominent in Zhadan\u2019s poetry. The poems in Why I\u2019m Not on Social Media often take place in cities, where the landscape influences the characters\u2019 identities. There is the tattoo artist, the Adventist, and the blogger. Landscape and politics play an important role in Zhadan\u2019s novel Voroshilovgrad (Deep Vellum Publishing 2016). The novel achieved popularity and was translated into English by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler. Gessen called it one of the best novels of the post-Soviet landscape. In the novel, the protagonist Herman goes on a quest to find his brother who has disappeared and in doing so journeys through Ukraine\u2019s landscape and his memories, piecing together an identity for himself.<\/p>\n
Landscape is equally prominent in Zhadan\u2019s poetry. The poems in Why I\u2019m Not on Social Media often take place in cities, where the landscape influences the characters\u2019 identities<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Zhadan explained that he knew the character of Herman could fill a novel. Herman\u2019s character and quest create a plot so strong that when Zhadan was working with the translators he was able to draw a map of the route that Herman took through Ukraine in search of his brother.<\/p>\n
Isaac Wheeler spoke to me about the creation of Herman\u2019s character in Voroshilovgrad during the process of translation. He said: \u201cThe genius of Voroshilovgrad lies in how the reader experiences this evolution not through Herman\u2019s internal monologue, which is mostly used to define his starting point, but through the landscape itself [\u2026] Herman\u2019s evolution has something in common with Zhadan\u2019s political thought, his emphasis on the responsibilities that come with being a citizen. Zhadan once said, \u2018Many people who had never taken their citizenship, their status as citizens seriously before they suddenly realized that they have a Ukrainian passport and are citizens of this country. They have their country and its independence.\u2019\u201d (Deutsche Welle interview, Oct 2, 2014)<\/p>\n
A Subject of Debate and Conflict in Contemporary Ukraine<\/h2>\n
Language has been an issue in Ukraine for centuries and continues to be a subject of debate and conflict in contemporary Ukraine. Ukrainian and Russian are independent languages, but they share similar grammatical structure. If you understand either Ukrainian or Russian, it is not a given that you understand the other. Rather than navigate separate linguistic territories, in some regions of Ukraine a mixture of both is spoken. Zhadan himself lives in Kharkiv, a predominantly Russian-speaking city in Eastern Ukraine, but writes in Ukrainian.<\/p>\n
The novel Orphanage that was released this year can be described as a Ukrainian version of Cormac McCarthy\u2019s The Road as Pasha goes on a journey to a boarding school to pick up his nephew. Afterwards, they move through the war-torn region, encountering people pushed together in basement hideaways. In Orphanage, characters navigate linguistic territory. There are Russian-speaking Ukrainian patriots.<\/p>\n
Zhadan\u2019s work can be read as literature that stands separate from the political situation because of its masterful writing, but it can also be read with the society that inspired it in mind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Yara Arts Group has a long history of working with Zhadan. In 2017, they staged 1917\/2017: Tychyna, Zhadan, and the Dogs at La MaMa in New York. In the performance, Zhadan\u2019s poetry was compared to Pavlo Tychyna\u2019s poetry written during the war in Ukraine after the communist revolution and Zhadan and his band the Dogs performed poetry about the current war. The poetry was meant to incite audience members into action. \u201cKnow your rights!\u201d Zhadan raised his fist.<\/p>\n
Zhadan\u2019s work can be read as literature that stands separate from the political situation because of its masterful writing, but it can also be read with the society that inspired it in mind. His characters struggle in a hostile and violent landscape to search for, understand, and define their Ukrainian identities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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