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mariacallous · 2 years ago

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At the National Opera of Ukraine in Kyiv recently, I watched a performance of an opera by the Ukrainian composer Mykola Lysenko. The work, charming and comic and an escape from the grimness of Russian missile attacks, is called Natalka Poltavka, based on a play by Ivan Kotliarevsky, who pioneered Ukrainian-language literature in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. Operas by Verdi, Puccini and Mozart, and ballets such as Giselle and La Sylphide, are on the playbill, despite the almost daily air raid sirens. But there is no Eugene Onegin in sight, nor a Queen of Spades, and not a whisper of those Tchaikovsky staples of ballet, Sleeping Beauty or Swan Lake. Russian literature and music, Russian culture of all kinds, is off the menu in wartime Ukraine. It is almost a shock to return to the UK and hear Russian music blithely played on Radio 3.

This absence, some would say erasure, can be hard to comprehend outside Ukraine. When a symphony orchestra in Cardiff removed the 1812 Overture from a programme this spring, there was bafflement verging on an outcry: excising Tchaikovsky was allowing Vladimir Putin and his chums the satisfaction of “owning” Russian culture – it was censorship, it was playing into Russia’s hands. Tchaikovsky himself was not only long dead, but had been an outsider and an internationalist – so the various arguments went. It took some careful explanation to convey that a piece of music glorifying Russian military achievements, and involving actual cannons, might be somewhere beyond poor taste when Russia was at that moment shelling Ukrainian cities – particularly when the families of orchestra members were directly affected.

In fact, such moments have been rare in western Europe. Chekhov and Lermontov continue to be read and Mussorgsky to be performed. Russian culture has not been “cancelled” as Putin claims, and Russian-born musicians and dancers with international careers continue to perform in the west – assuming they have offered a minimum of public deprecation of the killing and destruction being visited on Ukraine. Only the most naive would decry the removal of Valery Gergiev from international concert programmes. The conductor, who is seen as close to Putin, backed the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 (unrecognised by most UN countries), has declined to condemn the current full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and has a history of using his artistic profile in the service of the Russian state, such as conducting concerts in Russian-backed South Ossetia in 2008 in the wake of the Russo-Georgian war.

Inside Ukraine, though, things look very different. For many, the current war with Russia is being seen as a “war of decolonisation”, as Ukrainian poet Lyuba Yakimchuk has put it – a moment in which Ukraine has the chance to free itself, at last, from being an object of Russian imperialism. This decolonisation involves a “total rejection of Russian content and Russian culture”, as the writer Oleksandr Mykhed told the Lviv BookForum recently. These are not words that are comfortable to hear – not if, like me, you spent your late teens immersed in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Chekhov stories; not if you have recently rekindled your love of Russian short fiction via George Saunders’ luminous book, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain; not if you adore Stravinsky and would certainly be taking a disc of The Rite of Spring to your desert island.

The context for this rejection has to be understood, though: Ukrainians are emerging from a history in which the Russian empire, and then the Soviet Union, actively and often violently suppressed Ukrainian art. This has worked in a number of different ways. It has included the absorption of numerous Ukrainian artists and writers into the Russian centre (such as Nikolai Gogol, or Mykola Hohol in Ukrainian), and the misclassifying of hundreds of artists as Russian when they could arguably be better described as Ukrainian (such as the painter Kazimir Malevich, who was Kyiv-born but Russian, according to the Tate). It has meant that writing in Ukrainian has at times been proscribed – Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko, was banned from writing at all for a decade by Tsar Nicholas I. This silencing has encompassed the extermination of Ukrainian artists, like the killing, under Stalin, of hundreds of writers in 1937, known as “the executed renaissance”. Behind all of this stands horrific events such as the Holodomor, the starvation of about 4.5 million Ukrainians in 1932-33 in their forced effort to produce grain on Stalin’s orders.

This history places Ukraine in a very different position in relation to Russian culture than, say, Britain found itself in relation to German and Austrian art during the second world war, when Myra Hess programmed Mozart, Bach and Beethoven in her National Gallery concerts during the Blitz. “We have had cultural occupation, language occupation, art occupation and occupation with weapons. There’s not much difference between them,” the composer Igor Zavgorodniy tells me. In the Soviet period, Ukrainian culture was allowed to be harmlessly folksy – and Ukrainians, caricatured as drunken yokels dressed in Cossack trousers, were often the butt of belittling jokes. But Ukraine was not expected or allowed to carry a high culture of its own. At the same time, Russian artistic achievement was lauded as the very apex of human greatness. “We were raised in a certain piety towards the Russian literature,” explains the playwright Natalya Vorozhbit, who was educated in the Soviet period. “There wasn’t such piety towards any other literature.”

Putin himself has effectively doubled down on all this through his constant insistence, in his essays and often rambling speeches, that Ukraine has no separate existence from Russia – no identity, no culture at all, except as an adjunct of its neighbour. Indeed, his claim of Russia’s cultural inseparability from Ukraine is one of his key justifications for invasion. At the same time the Russian instrumentalisation of its artistic history is breathtakingly blatant. In occupied Kherson, billboards proclaiming it as a “city with Russian history”, show an image of Pushkin, who visited the city in 1820. Ukrainian artists also object to how, in a more general way, the projection of Russia as a great nation of artistic brilliance operates as a tool of soft power, a kind of ambient hum of positivity that, they would argue, softens the true brutality of today’s invasion. In Ukraine, there is a generalised cry of “bullshit” in relation to the myth of the “Russian soul”.

Some Ukrainians I speak to hope that one day, beyond the end of the war, there will be a way of consuming Russian literature and music – but first the work of decolonisation must be done, including the rereading and rethinking of classic authors, unravelling how they reflected and, at times, projected the values of the Russian empire. In the meantime, “My child will be perfectly all right growing up without Pushkin or Dostoevsky,” says Vorozhbit. “I don’t feel sorry.”

For many Ukrainians I encounter, the time for Russian literature will come again – when it can be critically understood as simply another branch of world culture, and as neither an unduly oppressive, nor overwhelming, force. At the National Opera House, I ask the choreographer Viktor Lytvynov when he thinks Tchaikovsky – a composer he loves – will be back on the programme. “When Russian stops being an aggressor,” he says. “When Russia stops being an evil empire.”

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medellyn · 2 years ago

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#books #culture #margaret atwood #ukraine #world news

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fathergalyn · 2 years ago

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hedge4hogs · 6 years ago

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Very interesting and informative discussion with Peter Watts about human and post-human mind and does those words even means something. He talked about give mind and ilon mask and how we all already have multiple personalities inside our consciousness. And if we could completely copy our mind into "hard drive", does it means we will need to kill our flash original to continue exist as cyber persona? #25bookforum #bookforum #lviv #books #peterwatts #львів #букфорум #питервоттс (at Lviv Croissants) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bn_cYdWHedI/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=io6ph9uwpc97

#25bookforum #bookforum #lviv #books #peterwatts #львів #букфорум #питервоттс

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mariacallous · 2 years ago

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LVIV, Ukraine—One of the most profound images to come from the siege of Sarajevo was the stark image of the cellist Vedran Smailovic playing Tomaso Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor every day at noon, sitting elegantly and defiantly in black tie in the midst of the wreckage of Bosnia’s National and University Library.

The library had been bombed by Bosnian Serbs on Aug. 25, 1992, destroying 90 percent of its 1.5 million volumes of precious books, including rare Ottoman editions. A 32-year-old librarian was killed that night as she desperately tried to save books. The scene of book pages burning and ashes rising in the air was an indelible image of the cruelty of war and a symbol of cultural destruction.

The beautiful, Moorish-inspired City Hall building, called Vijecnica, which housed the library, was more than a place to find books—it was a potent symbol of multicultural ethnicity. That, above all, is what the Serbs tried to destroy: the cultural ethos of what made up Bosnia.

A similar phenomenon is happening now in Ukraine. Russia seeks to destroy Ukrainian identity, and that includes monuments, libraries, theaters, art, and literature.

In the many conflicts I have covered, art and literature are essential to morale—to civilians struggling to live moment by moment through the attempted destruction of their country, as well as to the soldiers fighting on the front lines to defend their culture and history. It is also the basis of historical memory: what is remembered, what is forever kept.

Early this month, shortly before Russia began its latest wave of terror in Ukraine—featuring missile and Iranian-made kamikaze drone attacks on civilians in Kyiv, missile strikes on civilian infrastructure in Lviv, and other assaults elsewhere in the country—I went to one of the most remarkable literary festivals I have ever attended: the three-day Lviv BookForum.

Lviv, in western Ukraine, is a glorious baroque city that over the years has been part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Poland, and the Soviet Union, as well as having been besieged by the Nazis. Throughout it all, this wondrous city has endured.

The idea to have a literary festival in the midst of a vicious war is representative of Ukrainians’ defiance. Among the many who gathered in Lviv to attend in solidarity were Ukrainian writers such as the former political prisoner Stanislav Aseyev and Diana Berg, who lost her home twice in Mariupol; the Ukrainian novelist and human rights activist Victoria Amelina; and the British barrister and author Philippe Sands, who wrote one of the most powerful books on the origins of genocide, East West Street.

Also attending were the historian Misha Glenny; the disinformation expert Peter Pomerantsev and his father, Igor Pomerantsev, a dissident Soviet poet; the French American novelist Jonathan Littell; the award-winning nonfiction writer Nataliya Gumenyuk; and two extraordinary British doctors, Henry Marsh and Rachel Clarke, who came to Ukraine to bear witness to the atrocities. There were many others: philosophers, bloggers, activists.

It was an interesting mix of cultures, but the stars of the event were by far the Ukrainian writers, who read and told stories with courage and brutal honesty. The literary scholar Oleksandr Mykhed told the audience that on Feb. 24, the day of the Russian invasion, he realized: “You could not protect your family from a rifle with your poems. You could not hit someone with a book—you could try, but it won’t work with the crazy occupiers from Moscow. I lost belief in the power of culture, lost interest in reading.”

Shortly after that realization, Mykhed enrolled in the army; a week later, he lost his family home to a bomb.

But even in Lviv—relatively peaceful until the recent attacks—the war was not far away. In between sessions, we wandered the cobblestoned streets, passing the historic Garrison Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, honoring the fallen soldiers. One night, on my way home from dinner, I saw a crowd of young people gathered around a guitar player, who was belting out the Ukrainian national anthem. It was powerfully emotional. Everyone stood with their hands on their hearts, under an enormous full moon, singing at the top of their lungs in Ukrainian: “Ukraine’s freedom has not perished, nor has her glory. … Upon us, fellow Ukrainians, fate shall smile on us once more.”

The next day, one of my fellow panelists was Amelina, the Ukrainian novelist and author of the books Fall Syndrome and Dom’s Dream Kingdom. I first met Amelina in Berlin at a conference for human rights monitors. Since the war started, she stopped writing novels and started investigating war crimes. In her backpack, she carries tourniquets—her work often takes her to front lines throughout the country.

“While Russian occupiers try to destroy the Ukrainian elite, including writers, artists, and civil society leaders, the free world needs to hear and amplify the Ukrainian voices,” she said. “Then we have a chance not only to defend Ukraine’s independence this time in history but also truly implement the ‘never again’ slogan for the continent.”

Amelina told me of a recent visit to Izyum, in eastern Ukraine, after the Ukrainian Armed Forces had liberated it. She met with the parents of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a Ukrainian children’s book author who was abducted from his house during the Russian occupation.

Volodymyr’s father mentioned to Amelina that before being abducted, his son hid his war diary under the cherry tree in the garden. Amelina helped the grieving father dig the diary up and later brought it to the Kharkiv Literary Museum.

“I chose the museum because it holds the first editions and manuscripts of my favorite writers executed by the Soviet regime in the 1930s,” she said. “I hope Volodymyr Vakulenko is still alive and his diary [doesn’t] start the collection of manuscripts of another generation of Ukrainian writers murdered by the empire.”

During one of our panels, we were joined on Zoom by a 27-year-old poet named Yaryna Chornohuz, who called in from the front line. As well as being a gifted writer, Chornohuz is a reconnaissance soldier and combatant in the 140th Reconnaissance Battalion of the Ukrainian Marine Corps.

“My position now is a combat medic of the reconnaissance combat group,” she said. “I’ve been on the front line since 2019. Now it’s my 14th month of rotation in [the] Luhansk and Donetsk region.”

She proudly told us that her unit took part in the defense of Severodonetsk, Bakhmut, and Popasna. In March, she took part in engagements in villages north of Mariupol. Now she’s participating in a counteroffensive on Lyman and Yampil.

Listening to her, I thought of how when I first went to cover a war, long ago in Bosnia, I carried with me a pocket-sized book of poems by the World War I poets Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves. Somehow, the poignancy and pain of the poetry helped me understand the brutality of war in a more profound way.

In Lviv, I felt an intense solidarity among the writers who had gathered. “Intellectuals from all over the world coming together in Ukraine to discuss how justice and truth can prevail is already part of the solution,” Amelina told me.

That night, some of us boarded an overnight train to Kyiv in high spirits, carrying bags of fruit and bottles of whiskey. We arrived after dawn in the capital, unaware that we would soon witness Russian President Vladimir Putin’s wrath: missile attacks on Lviv, Kyiv, and other Ukrainian cities. We were sent to bomb shelters, waiting it out with locals along with their children and pets. Plates of cookies and tea were brought out; people pulled out books and computers. A seminar that was meant to take place in the hotel upstairs carried on in a corner of the parking garage that was our new home for the time being.

And I kept thinking of something that Mykhed had told listeners only a few days before in Lviv. “More talented writers of the next generations will take this raw material and make a beautiful novel about it,” he said. “But being in the center of the hurricane, you just try to grab the tiniest moments of your grief, the tiniest moments of your scream.”

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mariacallous · 2 years ago

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Ten writers appearing at the Lviv BookForum, run this year in partnership with the Hay festival, discuss why we need books more than ever

Tetyana Ogarkova: ‘We write and read to understand reality’

Ukrainian literary scholar and journalist

War takes away the ability to speak from many. Many writers say that they cannot write. A number of readers claim that they cannot read. The reality of war is something that can deprive you of the most important things – your life, your time and your capacity to think. It is difficult to write, to think and to dream when a missile hits the very heart of your reality.

But literature is still important. We write and read to understand reality. We write and read to invent a reality. When there is a war, you desperately need both.

When there is a war and you lose something valuable, if not everything valuable, you might think that everything is meaningless. In a way, war and violence are the pure absence of meaning.

That’s why there is no excuse for someone who starts an aggressive war. But those who defend themselves have to search for the meaning of their resistance every single day.

They say that wars are won by those who stand on the battlefield under heavy artillery fire and do not retreat. But no one can bear this if he does not understand the meaning of his resistance. Before being invincible on the battlefield, you have to find the words to justify your future victory.

Literature, among other things, provides us with an opportunity to find these words.

Yuval Noah Harari: ‘Peace begins in the mind of a poet’

Israeli professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of books including the global bestseller Sapiens

Wars are usually fought over stories. People think that like wolves and chimpanzees, we fight over territory. But that is rarely true. Wolf packs and chimpanzee bands fight over hunting grounds and fruit trees, without which they would starve to death. Humans fight over the fantasies that they attach to certain places. Israelis and Palestinians don’t really need Jerusalem in order to eat. Hitler didn’t invade Poland because Germans ran out of space to build houses. If people really fought over territory, then Russia – the largest country in the world – should also have been the most peaceful. What do Russians need more territory for?

Most wars originate in the mind of some poet. The generals come much later, and while they think they obey the laws of realpolitik, they actually follow the dreams of a mythmaker. What drove Putin to invade Ukraine are fairytales about imaginary threats, and fantasies about power and glory. The war can ultimately be traced to the stories Putin loved as a child in the 1950s, and to the stories Russian children still learn at school today.

But peace too begins in the mind of some poet, able to see a better world through the smoke of war. When the cannons roar, the muses must speak louder than ever, and be extra careful about what they say. In the midst of carnage, we are tempted to sow the seeds of future hatred. But it’s our responsibility to sow the seeds of future concord.

Alim Aliev: ‘The written word is an island of freedom in the storm of repression’

Ukrainian deputy director general of the Ukrainian Institute and co-founder of CrimeaSOS

Last week, the Russian occupation court of Crimea sentenced my friend Nariman Dzhelal to 17 years in prison. Dzhelal was falsely accused of blowing up the gas pipeline on the peninsula, but the real reason he was sentenced, I believe, is that he was the most powerful and courageous voice of Crimean Tatars – the indigenous people of Ukraine..

Dzhelal has been behind bars for a year, and during this time he has become an author of prose and poetry. There are more than 140 Crimean political prisoners like him, and some of them write texts in Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar languages, which my colleagues and I have published in the anthology Crimean Fig. The written word has become an island of freedom in the storm of repression.

Crimean Tatar literature has gone underground, with authors writing under pseudonyms and using Aesopian language to write about life under occupation, as well as historical topics. Some writers get together and hold meetings in private apartments where they read poetry and prose for a limited circle of “their people”. This helps preserve the Crimean Tatar language, which today is endangered, according to Unesco, and is a cornerstone of the identity that Russian colonial policy is trying to destroy.

Philippe Sands: ‘Literature allows us to imagine across time and place’

British and French lawyer and author of books including the recently released The Last Colony

A month after the war against Ukraine began, a friend wrote to say that the Russian language translator of my book East West Street, on the origins of genocide and crimes against humanity in Lviv, in Ukraine, had been arrested. A lifelong defender of human rights, she was detained on the edge of Moscow’s Pushkinskaya Square, heading for the spot associated with acts of solitary, peaceful protest. She wanted to read a poem, written out on a large piece of paper.

The police spotted the rolled-up paper poking from her backpack. They stopped her and asked to see the paper. They read lines drawn from a poem, Listening to the Horrors of War. They were written in 1855, by renowned poet Nikolay Nekrasov, owner and editor of Sovremennik, a literary magazine, who had been inspired by stories submitted to him by Leo Tolstoy, recently returned from the war in Crimea. Nekrasov published them as the Sevastopol Sketches.

The translator was duly arrested. She was charged with “discrediting the current special operation by reading the text that Nekrasov wrote at the tail-end of the Crimean war, having been influenced by Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches.”

Literature allows us to think and imagine, across time and place. It helps us to understand, as Tolstoy hoped with his Sketches, that the horrors and futility of war allow only one hero: truth.

Rachel Clarke: ‘Bearing witness in a time of war is profoundly necessary’

British palliative care doctor and author of Dear Life

Even in a chaotic, overwhelmed NHS hospital, I am struck anew every day at work by the medicinal force of storytelling. There is morphine for pain, silk for lacerations, electricity to jolt broken hearts back to life – but so often a doctor’s most transformative act is the one in which they stop and listen to a patient’s story. In turn, a doctor’s words can encourage, console, instil hope, assuage fear. Titrated carefully, dosed just right, words can even take a dying patient from the depths of despair to a place of hope or serenity. I’m not sure any drug has more power.

War, in this respect, is surely like illness. Amid the fracturing of normal life, the losses and upheavals, the new uneasy state of uncertainty and fear, telling one’s own story has immense therapeutic potential. Bearing witness in a time of war may be perilous, courageous, reckless or defiant. It is also profoundly necessary.

Samar Yazbek: ‘Writing truth offers justice to the oppressed’

Syrian author of novels including The Crossing and Planet of Clay

When facing destruction, our weapons are our words and our freedom to use them. Literature exposes the ugliness of war and its impact on human destiny, always looking to the future. It will not stop the war, but it will confront its ugliness with its aesthetics and imaginative vision. Literature strips the face of war and delves into the horrors of its brutal machine and its impact on the tragic fate of man.

For me, when the popular uprising began in Syria and then the war followed, I did not hesitate for a moment in my full commitment to the act of writing – about war and against war – through my novels, my documentaries and my journalism, not only because writing against war and violence is part of inventing a better future, but because writing against war and about war is an attempt to make our words part of an act of justice and a movement for change. No matter how slight, writing truth offers justice to the oppressed. ***

Volodymyr Yermolenko: ‘Literature during the war is both a blasphemy and a duty’

Ukrainian philosopher, journalist, and presenter of the podcast Explaining Ukraine

Literature during the war is a blasphemy because the reality of the war cannot be expressed in words. The war makes you speechless, silent. You can never express the pain of loss of your beloved ones. Or the horror of the mass graves and burnt cars with people inside. Or the abyss of mothers who lost their children. Any attempt to break this silence of mourning seems to be blasphemous.

Yet literature during the war is also a duty. We have a duty to speak, to witness, to confess, to make testimonies. Evil which is buried in silence is an evil that will return. Ukrainians know this all too well. The attempt of genocide we are facing now from the Russian invaders is horrible not only because it is an embodiment of cruelty, but also because it is an embodiment of the repeated cruelty. Previous crimes in this region were kept in silence for too long, and people who attempted to tell its stories were sent to jails or killed en masse. Therefore, we should break this vicious circle of silence. This makes literature an act of revolt against evil.

Victoria Amelina: ‘There are wounds only stories can heal’

Ukrainian novelist, essayist and human rights activist

War erases stories: war criminals kill, then hide the evidence in hopes that the world will never learn even their victims’ names. After liberating each town, Ukrainians work hard to recover the names of the dead, bury them with dignity, and tell the world their stories. Often we succeed, but not always. As I write this, on my way to Izyum to document war crimes, the occupiers may well be destroying the evidence of genocide in Mariupol. Despite all our efforts, too many stories will never be known. As a human rights activist, I document war crimes and advocate for justice. Yet, as a writer, I know there are wounds only stories can heal.

Oleksandr Mykhed: ‘Without the ability to write, I wouldn’t be here’

Ukrainian literary scholar, curator of art projects, and author of I Will Mix Your Blood with Coal

With a full-scale invasion, it’s difficult for me to focus on reading and listen to the undertones of moralising in great literature. A full-scale war shows everything with crystal clarity and adds fragility to the usual way of life and the people themselves.

A library of several thousand books is a burden that you cannot take with you while being evacuated. Only the memories of the books read can fit into an emergency bag. And with frequent relocations of a displaced person, these memories get lost.

However, the fear of Russian invaders of our books and culture restores my faith in the power of literature. Every time, the first thing they do in the occupied territories is rename the settlements in the Russian manner, bring back Soviet symbols, and purge libraries. The occupiers seek out “harmful” books as if they were as dangerous as flesh-and-blood “subversives”.

Literature does not fight, but writers have gone to war and are defending the country. At the same time, defenders who have not tried their hand at writing previously are trying to articulate their experience through books.

I still find it difficult to read. But without the ability to write and record the horrors of a full-scale invasion, I wouldn’t be here.

Margaret Macmillan: ‘Books can help us understand war’

Canadian history lecturer at the University of Oxford and author of The War that Ended Peace

Do we need to ask? War makes us confront our own mortality as well as the best and the worst in human nature. Books can help us understand. In the first world war ordinary French soldiers ordered copies of Tolstoy’s War and Peace to try to make sense of their grinding war in the trenches. Or we can escape, at least in our imaginations, our own wars. In the second world war two of the most popular books in English were Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley, about lives and sorrows in a declining Welsh mining town and Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, about that earlier great war. You may love or hate Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s fable The Little Prince, published in the dark days of 1943 and one of the world’s best-sellers of all time. While it ends in the death of the wandering prince it also promises that wisdom can be found and love may, in the end, triumph. Hope matters too.

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