In 2014, when Russia annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, the Russian satirist Vladimir Sorokin wrote about the reaction of his friends to the fighting that followed. "I can't believe that Russia and Ukraine are fighting. It's like a nightmare," said one. Another added: "All of us Russians are sitting in a huge theatre, watching a play called Ukraine. And you can't leave the theatre!"
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Now we are all watching, as transfixed and horrified as Sorokin and his friends. But what we are seeing, behind the news, is something more enduring: a representation of the character and qualities of Ukraine and its people. It is a place that, because of its unique geopolitical location and turbulent history, has been richly recorded in books and stories for many years, and continues to inspire writers today. BBC Culture set out to explore Ukraine's literary history, and speak to writers who know it best.
Boris Dralyuk is a Ukraine-born writer and translator, now living in the US. When asked about how Ukraine is represented in writing, he identifies one of the fathers of its literature as Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), "the national poet of Ukraine, a sort of Pushkin-like figure who was born into serfdom, whose talent bought him his freedom." One of Shevchenko's poems is A Cherry Orchard by the House (1847): "A tiny little lyric," says Dralyuk. "It won't strike you as brilliant poetry, but for Ukrainians, it's the very image of home. It just lodges in your heart and you can't shake it."
Taras Shevchenko, known as "the national poet of Ukraine", is one of the fathers of the country's literature (Credit: Getty Images)
He also names the poet Lesya Ukrainka (1871-1913), who was influenced by Shevchenko and was, says Dralyuk, "a kind of proto-feminist figure [and] you can tell by her choice of pseudonym that she was very much, if not a nationalist then a patriot. Her image has been on Twitter frequently, because Ukrainian women have shown so much courage [recently], so she's become a symbol of that kind of resistance."
Neither Shevchenko nor Ukrainka, however, is well known outside Ukraine. It's disappointing, if apt, that some of the best-known early portrayals of Ukraine in literature are by outsiders, particularly those depicting the Crimean War of the 1850s. This conflict between Russia and an alliance including Britain and France was described by commentators as a "boozy fiasco" characterised by "notoriously incompetent international butchery." In England, the poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson depicted a suicidal British mission during the war in his most famous poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1854), which portrayed with bitter irony the stupidity of the army leadership ("Someone had blundered") and admiration for the soldiers following their orders ("Stormed at with shot and shell/…/ into the mouth of hell/ rode the six hundred").
Patriotic, proto-feminist poet Lesya Ukrainka has become a symbol of resistance in Ukraine (Credit: Alamy)
From the Russian side, the Crimean War produced probably the world's first war correspondent, when a young officer in the Russian army with an interest in literature filed reports on the siege of the port of Sevastopol in 1854-55, and for the first time signed his full name to his writing: Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy. His three "Sevastopol sketches" show Tolstoy’s qualities in an early form: a blend of politics and personalities, rigorous historical reconstruction, and an acute eye for larger-than-life characterisation.
Ukraine is a country with an innate sense of humility, a great sense of humour, and a very healthy self-regard – Boris Dralyuk
The sketches read like fiction, full of life and death, but for Tolstoy "the hero of my story, whom I love with all my heart and soul," was "the truth". He didn’t care whether his sketches offended anyone – "all the characters are equally blameless and equally wicked" – and they made him into a literary celebrity. "I failed to become a general in the army," he wrote, "but I became one in literature."
The Crimean War produced, from the Russian side, perhaps the world's first war correspondent: Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Credit: Alamy)
The examples of Tolstoy and Tennyson illustrate the enduring image of Ukraine as a place not just divided but torn by conflict. What we now call Ukraine – it has been an independent nation for only three decades – was historically a crossing point from West to East. In the 19th Century, western Ukraine was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the East was ruled by Russia. In the early 20th Century, it was briefly united as the Ukrainian People's Republic, before once more being split between Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania, and then becoming part of the Soviet Union. One way of looking at its tempestuous history is that that western Ukrainian city now known as Lviv was known variously as Lvov, Lwów or Lemberg, depending on who was in charge at the time.
Another way is to listen to Ukraine-born writer and humorist Mikhail Bulgakov, who once reflected wryly that in the years after 1918, in his home city of Kyiv "there were 14 [changes of power], 10 of which I experienced personally." Bulgakov's own contribution to the literature of Ukrainian conflict is his first major work The White Guard (1925), which takes place during one of those battles for control of Kyiv, and follows the misfortunes of the once-wealthy Turbin family. (The book fell foul of Soviet censors for its failure to include a communist hero.)
Mikhail Bulgakov's first major work, The White Guard, takes place during a battle for the control of Kyiv (Credit: Getty Images)
Even today, Ukraine produces writing that reflects ongoing wars: Dralyuk names one of the country's most important contemporary poets as Lyuba Yakimchuk, who, he says, "was a refugee from Donbas, from the war zone, and she has written very movingly about that experience". Her 2016 poem Crow, Wheels highlights the apparent never-ending escalation of conflict: "When the city was destroyed, / they started fighting over the cemetery."
A melting pot of cultures
But we do Ukraine an injustice if we focus on its literature of conflict and ignore its other qualities. One of its most distinctive traits is that, because of the country's status as an East-West meeting point, it is a melting pot of cultures, particularly in the western cities like Lviv and Odessa. Ukraine-born Jewish writer Isaac Babel (born 1894) made his name as one of the key figures in 20th-Century literature through a relatively sparse output before he was killed as part of Stalin's terror campaign in 1940. Babel wrote that "no iron can pierce the heart with the force of a [full stop/period] put in just the right place," and although he too wrote about war – in his Red Cavalry sequence – it's his Odessa stories that conjure most beautifully the character of melting-pot Ukraine.
Dralyuk, who was born in Odessa, has translated Babel's stories into English. The Odessa stories are mostly about the Jewish gangster community and capture its energy and unpredictability in a way that make them read like a European Damon Runyon. One passage, where the narrator falls foul of gang kingpin Benya Krik (who "got his way because he had passion, and passion rules the world"), could be straight out of Runyon's Broadway stories:
"He kept on crying and stomping on me. My wife saw how much this upset me and commenced screaming. She started at half past four and didn't finish till eight. And how she gave it to him, oy, how she gave it to him! You should have seen it!"
"Yes, yes, that's what I was emulating for sure," says Dralyuk. "Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, and Jewish-American authors like Bernard Malamud." One of the secondary losses arising from the Russian invasion, fears Dralyuk, is that "the Russian language you see in Babel's stories, which is part of Ukrainian culture… will shrink inevitably, because those who speak both languages will probably make an effort to speak Ukrainian rather than Russian. And that forecloses a whole rich tradition that could have remained open. I would much rather Ukraine be allowed to develop as a multilingual, multicultural place, which is what it was for the last 30 years."
Ukraine-born Jewish writer Isaac Babel captured the character of melting-pot Ukraine in his Odessa stories (Credit: Getty Images)
In Babel's stories, Odessa is presented with both affection and humour. It is, he wrote in 1916, the "most charming of cities in the Russian Empire… where the living is light and easy." Its diversity is shown in "steamers from Newcastle, Cardiff, Marseille and Port Said; there are Negroes, Englishmen, Frenchmen and Americans." But on the other side of society, the "powdered wives" of the city's "plump and ridiculous bourgeoisie… succumb to the passionate caresses of temperamental students of medicine and law." Overall, Babel adds playfully, "the reader will say, 'It sounds like Odessa is a city like any other, and you, sir, are simply biased in the extreme.'"
In fact, this cynicism and self-mockery is perfectly in keeping with what the Ukraine-born novelist Józef Wittlin in 1946 called the "abhorrence of solemnity" and "dislike of all manner of pomp" in his beloved city of Lviv. Like Babel, he adored his city's diverse, colourful population: "an extraordinary mixture of nobility and roguery, wisdom and imbecility, poetry and vulgarity." The Czech-French novelist Milan Kundera identified this as a quality more widely in central Europe: its people, he said, "represent the wrong side of history. They are its victims and outsiders. It is this disabused view of history that is the source of their culture, of their wisdom, of the 'nonserious spirit' that mocks grandeur and glory."
Does this "nonserious spirit" apply to Ukraine too? "I think so," says Dralyuk. "It's a country with an innate sense of humility, a great sense of humour, and a very healthy self-regard. The valorising of the marginal, the wily, the trickster figure, the person who makes it by hook or by crook" – the sort we see in Babel's stories – "is ingrained in the culture. And what makes Ukrainian literature special is that it treats those figures with a great deal of nuance. I think it's part and parcel of the Ukrainian mentality – there's a wryness to the Ukrainian frame of mind."
A turbulent century
Making a similar point is Ukraine-born poet and translator Nina Murray, whom BBC Culture also spoke to about the country's literature. "There's a long-standing humorous tradition [in Lviv], because it's always been a mixed city where different classes of people made fun of each other. But also the Jewish writer Sholem Aleichem is from Lviv and he was a great humorist. I'm biased because I'm from there [too]!"
Contemporary Ukrainian writers too share the "nonserious spirit." Dralyuk identifies the writer Andriy Lyubka's 2015 novel Carbide as a timely example: "It's just wonderful. It's one of these bandit stories, where a history teacher decides to dig a tunnel under the Ukrainian border and sneak all 40 million Ukrainians into the EU."
The books share a theme of irrecoverable loss, like missing parts of our own past that we cannot know any more because the living memory is gone – Nina Murray
What other qualities does contemporary Ukrainian writing exhibit, and what can it tell us about the country? For Murray, some of the books she has translated "share a theme of irrecoverable loss, like missing parts of our own past that we cannot know any more because the living memory is gone". This may not be surprising given the losses Ukraine has suffered in its turbulent century. Ukrainian literature, she says, can explore "what it feels like to have that hole behind you, and creative attempts to fill it".
Murray notes that since 2014, "the Ukrainian government put more resources into translating modern Ukrainian literature overseas, which is why we're now seeing that investment paying off." For her, one of the key voices is Oksana Zabuzhko, who "became very famous in Ukraine back in the 90s. She published this short novel called Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (1996). And it was the first novel that was by a woman, about a woman navigating the postcolonial psyche, including in her relationships to Ukrainian men and other men. So she wrote about things that had never been written about before."
Oksana Zabuzhko's 1996 novel, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, made her famous in her home country (Credit: Getty Images)
Perhaps the best known internationally of contemporary Ukrainian writers is Andrey Kurkov, whose most recent novel Grey Bees (2018) is set in the "grey zone" that arose between Russian separatists and Ukrainian troops in the South-East of the country following the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Kurkov's approach to the conflict is indirect: his hero, the beekeeper Sergey, has one of his hives impounded by Russian authorities, and when it's returned to him, it no longer works as a home for its bees. As gentle, naive Sergey travels from Donbas to Crimea, he encounters people representing modern Ukraine. They are generous, kind, resilient: all qualities we have seen in abundance under the present crisis.
BBC Culture asked Murray and Dralyuk to recommend other modern Ukrainian writers who are published in English but less well-known than Kurkov. "There's a great book by a poet called Iryna Shuvalova," says Murray. "It's called Pray to the Empty Wells, [and] some of the poems reflect the process of comprehending the 2014 invasion and war." Dralyuk suggests Yuri Andrukhovych, a more established writer whose works include The Moscoviad and Twelve Circles, and who writes "in a kind of surrealist vein, very jocular, very satirical, that can explain the nature of the Ukrainian mentality and its history".
Andrey Kurkov is perhaps the best-known internationally of Ukraine's contemporary writers (Credit: Sergei Supinsky/ Getty Images)
The Polish writer Ryszard Kapuściński was present at the independence of Ukraine in 1991. In his book Imperium, he wrote that "the future of Ukraine will develop in two directions: in terms of its relations with Russia, and in terms of its relations with Europe and the rest of the world". Writing from and about Ukraine cannot unify those two directions but it can help us understand them. Dralyuk and Murray are passionate about helping non-Ukrainians to use its literature to understand this country which has too often been in the news for the wrong reasons. One work, only recently translated into English, which Dralyuk enthuses about is Kyiv-born Lev Ozerov's Portraits Without Frames (1999), which provides short vivid portraits in verse of 50 key Ukrainian and Russian figures, including Isaac Babel, Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova.
"It's a very important book [that] hasn't received much attention," says Dralyuk. "But it's the work of a man whose identity is front and centre now on our screens. Like [Volodymyr] Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, Ozerov was a Soviet-born Jewish person in the territory of Ukraine, who was as loyal to his Ukrainian identity as he was to his identity as a Russian writer. If only we had time to read it – we have a lot of other things to do! – I think the book would give us a very valuable perspective on what it means to be Ukrainian. It's not just being some hardcore nationalist who drapes himself in the flag," he adds. "It's having respect for the extremely diverse multilingual culture of the second-largest country in Europe."
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