In just over a month, the brutal invasion of Ukraine by its largest neighbour, Russia, from which it achieved independence in 1991, has upended and destabilised the second biggest country in Europe.
In addition to the needless deaths and displacement of thousands of civilians, the razing of irreplaceable towns and cities, and the annexation and appropriation of land, what is also at stake is the erasure of culture: language, music, art, sculpture, architecture, film, literature.
Historically, the main players of Ukrainian literature widely translated into English and other languages have been categorised foremost as Russian writers: Ukraine being part of the Russian empire for several hundred years (despite several nationalist uprisings) and Russian the official language for that time. Many Ukrainian artists and writers traditionally migrated to Moscow and St Petersburg to find work and connections; the Ukrainian language was suppressed during centuries of tsarist autocracy.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the reversal of imperialist censorship came a flowering and expansion of Ukrainian culture during the 1920s, heightened by the Ukrainian war of independence from 1918-1921; a period of history famously documented by Kyiv-born Mikhail Bulgakov, in his 1927 novel The White Guard.
From 1928, Stalin rejected his predecessor Lenin’s New Economic Policy and put in place forced collectivisation. By 1933 the purging of the Ukrainian intelligentsia had begun, intensifying as the decade continued: those murdered, disappeared or imprisoned and exiled were later given the name the Executed Renaissance.
Bulgakov was heavily influenced by an earlier Ukrainian writer, Nikolai Gogol, author of the play The Government Inspector and the novel Dead Souls, as well as short stories The Nose and The Overcoat. Gogol wa born in Sorochynsti in Poltava, central Ukraine, and as a young man sought his fortune in St Petersburg. Yet his work owed much to his native country. His early stories, published in 1831 and 1835, were known collectively as Ukrainian Tales; his later stories St Petersburg Tales.
Isaac Babel, born in the southwestern Ukrainian port of Odesa in 1894, has been acclaimed as “the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry”. He made his name with Red Cavalry (its backdrop the 1920 Polish-Soviet War, featuring a Jewish commissar in a Cossack regiment) and Odessa Tales: blistering stories of life in Odesa’s ghetto, Moldanka. Babel met his fate as a result of trumped up NKVD charges during one of Stalin’s purges and was executed in a Moscow prison as an enemy of the state in January 1940.
The tumultuous 20th century frames Ukraine’s past 30 years. Since 1991 there has been a resurgence of culture and of books written in, and translated from, Ukrainian, as well as prominent Ukrainian authors who write in Russian.
Of these, the best known internationally is probably Andrey Kurkov. Since the invasion began on February 24th, Kurkov has written impassioned, angry dispatches from Ukraine and frequently posting missives on Twitter – not just of the ongoing atrocities, but also photos of his pet hamster and cat.
Animals feature prominently in Kurkov's work. His 1996 bestseller, Death and the Penguin (translated into English by George Bird and published by Vintage in 2001), is a political satire of the now post-Soviet and independent Ukraine in the mid-1990s – a country in danger of sliding into sleaze and corruption. Anti-hero Viktor, a frustrated short story writer, is offered a sinister newspaper job as an obituarist of high-profile figures who have not yet died – but very soon will. His moral dilemma and subsequent danger are observed with melancholy stoicism by his adopted penguin, Misha.
Kurkov's recent book is translated by Odesa-born Boris Dralyuk, who has also been responsible for new, stunning translations of the work of Isaac Babel. Grey Bees (2018, Maclehose Press) is a wry commentary on Russia's 2014 annexation of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine. The episodic, fabular novel recounts the odyssey by truck of a safety inspector and part-time beekeeper, Sergey. Along with his beloved hives, Sergey journeys through the "grey zone" between loyalist and separatist forces from Donbas in eastern Ukraine to Crimea in search of an old friend and a haven for his precious bees: a trip fraught with peril and disillusion.
Oksana Zabuzhko was not able to publish until the 1980s as her parents had been blacklisted during the Soviet purges. She has been feted with numerous awards and hailed as Ukraine's leading public intellectual. From her sensational 1996 stream-of-consciousness novel, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (translated by Halyna Hryn, Amazon Crossing, 2012); to The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (translated by Nina Shevchuk-Murray, Amazon Crossing, 2012), an epic connecting three generations of women to 60 years of Ukrainian history; and her most recent work, the short story collection Your Ad Could Go Here (translated by Nina Murray and Halyna Hryn, Amazon Crossing, 2020), Zabuzhko writes in sharp, frequently irreverent prose of how historic repression and violence enact themselves on women's bodies and psyches.
Serhiy Zhadan has been called "one of the most important creators of European culture at work today". Often billed as "Ukraine's rock star poet", Zhadan is a literary polymath – a poet, songwriter, novelist, essayist and translator, a chronicler of his times. Mesopotamia (translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes, Wanda Phipps, Virlana Tkacz and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler, Yale University Press, 2018), with nine stories and 30 poems, is "one of the most astounding novels to come out of modern Ukraine" according to author Gary Shteyngart. Here, in a newly independent Kharkiv directly on the border with Russia, life is experienced in a rush of energy and despair, where every moment could be the last.
Zhadan's latest novel, The Orphanage (translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler, Yale University Press, 2021), is a richly metaphorical work that draws on elements of Dante's Inferno to depict an eastern Ukraine besieged by Russian-backed separatists.
A heartrending family saga and a monument to the victims of history, Sweet Darusya: A Tale of Two Villages by Maria Matios (translated by Michael Naydan and Olga Tytarenko, Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) is a novel about a small village situated on the Ukrainian-Romanian border and the inhabitants who remain there, through Soviet oppression and tyranny to post-independence.
Yuri Andrukhovych's The Moscoviad (translated by Vitaly Chernetsky, Spuyten Duyvil, 2008) is a landmark, darkly funny novel about an outsider Ukrainian poet stuck in a Moscow university with a host of other international writers as the Soviet Union collapses around them. What can they do but live to excess? The power of literature is foregrounded in brash, tender, slapstick fiction. "The empire betrayed its drunks. And thus doomed itself to disintegration."
Lauded as "Trainspotting meets Rebecca Solnit's Field Guide to Getting Lost", Markiyan Kamysh's Stalking the Atomic City: Life Among the Decadent and Depraved of Chernobyl (translated by Hanna Leliv and Reilly Costigan-Humes, Pushkin Press) publishes in July. Kamysh is the son of a Chernobyl disaster liquidator who died in 2003. Since 2010 he has, with dozens of others, illegally explored the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Referring to themselves as "stalkers", Kamysh and colleagues evade border patrols and military police to explore the desolate villages and settlements abandoned since the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster of spring 1986.
The rest is a hypnotic work of impressions, facts and photographs, documenting Kamysh’s decade underground. Its timing could not be more pertinent.
