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.
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.”
In this temporally anomalous wasteland everything existential emerges through the physical: a bit of soccer, a lot of sex, still more violence. The material objects Zhadan describes with an almost grotesque precision—wooden icons of Christian Orthodox martyrs, a Manchester United pendant, a pair of Bosch electric scissors—serve as missing words amid laconic dialogue. It is not only words that are missing. People call the Donbas the “Bermuda Triangle,” Yevhenii Monastyrskyi, a twenty-three-year-old graduate student in history from Luhansk and fan of Zhadan, told me: objects, years, people—like Herman’s brother—disappear all the time there. Many of those who remain have survived beatings of various kinds. “We all wanted to become pilots,” Herman says, of his friends from childhood. “The majority of us became losers.” And not only losers, Zhadan wants us to understand, but damaged losers, their torsos, limbs, and faces inscribed with scars. “I looked more closely at the rest of my old friends, their bodies battered by hard lives and the fists of their rivals,” Herman says.
The tattoos pairing freedom and terror offer a nontrivial insight: absolute power has always been only a hair’s breadth away from total anarchy. In “Voroshilovgrad,” the law’s very absence becomes, itself, a menacing presence. “Ukrainian life is based not on law, but on rules,” the Ukrainian novelist Taras Prokhas’ko once wrote. “The main rule is that the law can be broken.” In this respect, the Donbas is like all of Ukraine, only more so.
On November 21, 2013, Yanukovych, under pressure from Russian President Vladimir Putin, unexpectedly declined to sign an association agreement with the European Union. For many Ukrainians this felt like the end of their future. Hundreds of people, students in particular, gathered on the Maidan, the large square in the center of Kiev, to protest. Around 4 a.m. on November 30th, Yanukovych sent his riot police to beat up the students. He was counting, it seems, on the parents’ pulling their children off the streets. Instead the parents joined their children there. The next day more than half a million people came to the Maidan, insisting, “They cannot be permitted to beat our children.”
“The government has blood on its conscience and has to answer for it,” Zhadan said a few days later, in an interview with the young Polish journalist Paweł Pieniążek. All that winter the stakes, and the violence, increased. The Maidan became an elaborate parallel polis, with kitchens and open universities and medical clinics and clothing distribution, drawing millions of people of all generations and ethnicities. Yanukovych’s riot police used water cannons in sub-freezing temperatures. His goons kidnapped and tortured protesters. “Maidan” came to mean an impassioned revolt against arbitrariness and tyranny. “This is not a disco—it’s a real revolution,” Zhadan told Pieniążek. The revolution reached its climax in February, when Yanukovych’s snipers massacred nearly a hundred people on the Maidan. The day after the shooting stopped, Yanukovych fled to Russia.
After the Maidan’s victory in the Ukrainian capital, the population in eastern Ukraine remained divided. Russian “tourists” began arriving from across the border to take part in “anti-Maidan” demonstrations. On February 26th, Zhadan posted on YouTube, in both Russian and Ukrainian, a six-minute appeal to the residents of Kharkiv. “Don’t listen to the propaganda,” he said. “There are no fascists, no extremists. None of that is true. Come over to our side.” Three days later, on March 1st, Zhadan was led away from a demonstration in Kharkiv bloodied, his head bashed in. The poet was cavalier. “I’m a grownup—it’s hard to stun me with a blow to the head,” he said in an interview later that month.
Zhadan’s appeal succeeded in Kharkiv, but not in the Donbas. In the spring of 2014, “separatists” took over large parts of the mining region. It was difficult to say, at first, exactly who the separatists were. They formed a motley crew of territorial patriots, fascists, anti-fascists, local hoodlums, Russian volunteer soldiers, mercenaries, revolutionaries, Kremlin special forces, gangsters, and warlords who declared themselves to be fighting against a Nazi junta in Kiev (which did not actually exist). Many separatists harbor an inchoate nostalgia for both the Soviet Union and the tsarist empire, and the distinction between Russian imperialists and local anarchists is vague at best.
Today the former Voroshilovgrad falls within the territory of the self-declared Lugansk People’s Republic—an entity which, Zhadan wrote in May, 2014, “exists exclusively in the fantasies of the self-proclaimed ‘people’s mayors’ and ‘people’s governors.’ ” The latter form a cast of characters that could easily be drawn from his novel: Zhadan provides telling depictions of men in tracksuits with stretched-out tattoos, glass eyes, and missing fingers. (The missing fingers are not part of the magical realism: Vyacheslav Ponomarev, the forty-something separatist who in April, 2014, declared himself the “people’s mayor” of Slovyansk, has two fingers missing from his left hand.)
In “Voroshilovgrad,” Zhadan describes a kind of war zone at the Ukrainian-Russian border near Rostov: men wearing camouflage and balaclavas and carrying Kalashnikovs, occasionally taking a hostage or two. He describes omnipresent violence at a time when there is no war—a backdrop of brutality, accepted as a given. “You know, before the war, all of these things naturally appeared entirely different: the border with Russia, the army fatigues, the daily readiness for fighting,” Zhadan told me in a letter. “There was no catastrophism in all of that.” (I wrote to Zhadan in Polish about a novel he had written in Ukrainian and I had read in English. He answered me in Russian. The whole situation was very Ukrainian.)
The balaclavas and Kalashnikovs and the culture of gangsters are connected to bottomless corruption. The word, or rather one of the words, for corruption in Russian is prodazhnost’ (in Ukrainian, prodazhnist’); it means “saleability” and refers to the understanding that everything and everyone can be bought. A peculiar relationship between prodazhnost’, “saleability,” and chestnost’, “honesty,” belongs to the essence of the Donbas. Where there is no trust in the system, trust in one’s friends is essential. Where there is no law, personal solidarity is paramount. And so what is important is not for whom one votes but how one treats one’s friends. Chestnost’ is related both etymologically and conceptually to chest’, “honor.” What is so striking about Herman’s experiences amid the savagery of the Donbas is the absence of duplicity. “Voroshilovgrad” is an unsentimental novel about human relationships in conditions of brutality in which there is not a single act of betrayal.
Herman is willing to risk everything for his missing brother, for Injured and Kocha, for Olga, for spectres of times past, even when this appears to make no sense. While attempting to escape from the biplane guys, Herman finds himself on a private train, where the train’s “authority” gives him some advice: “You’ve got this crazy idea in your head that the most important thing is to stay here, not give an inch—you’re clinging to your emptiness. There’s not a fuckin’ thing here! Not a single fuckin’ thing.” Yet Zhadan wants us to understand that there is something to stay for. In his prose there is no nostalgia, but there is genuine affection, rough and profound. Even in this brutish habitus, there is trust, loyalty, and love. The graduate student I spoke with, Monastyrskyi, prefers the Donbas to Lviv, where he lives now, precisely for the chest’ and chestnost’ that supercede a more conventional bourgeois morality. For all its violence, Monastyrskyi insists, “the Donbas is full of joy and mercy—and empathy.” And he loves Zhadan for portraying these people who don’t have a lot of words more authentically than anyone else, for showing us that “these people are beautiful, beautiful in their ugliness.”
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