Serhij Zhadan

This is an earlier collection from the previous one I reviewed at the end of 2023. These poems were translated from the Ukrainian in 2019, from poetry written by Zhadan between 2001 and 2015.

The poems in this collection are somewhat longer than those in the new volume, but it didn't deter me. They are a good introduction on the poet and his work. I love this guy's poetry. Period.
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"TAKE ONLY WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT"

Take only what is most important. Take the letters.
Take only what you can carry.
Take the icons and the embroidery, take the silver,
Take the wooden crucifix and the golden replicas.

Take some bread, the vegetables from the garden, then leave.
We will never return again.
We will never see our city again.
Take the letters, all of them, every last piece of bad news.

We will never see our corner store again.
We will never drink from that dry well again.
We will never see familiar faces again.
We are refugees. We’ll run all night.

We will run past fields of sunflowers.
We will run from dogs, rest with cows.
We’ll scoop up water with our bare hands,
sit waiting in camps, annoying the dragons of war.

You will not return, and friends will never come back.
There will be no smoky kitchens, no usual jobs,
There will be no dreamy lights in sleepy towns,
no green valleys, no suburban wastelands.

The sun will be a smudge on the window of a cheap train,
rushing past cholera pits covered with lime.
There will be blood on women’s heels,
tired guards on borderlands covered with snow,

a postman with empty bags shot down,
a priest with a hapless smile hung by his ribs,
the quiet of cemetery, the noise of a command post,
and unedited lists of the dead,

as long that there won’t be enough time
to check them for your own name.

———————————————————… (mais)

Voroshilovgrad, an hallucinatory novel by Ukrainian Serhij Zhadan novelist and poet Serhij Zhadan, was written several years before the Russian invasion of the country. And yet, the book is rife with a feeling of the precariousness of the Ukrainian state in the post-Soviet era. Our protagonist Herman has a steady if somewhat shady job in a large city. But he gets a call from an old friend that his brother has suddenly disappeared, presumably to Amersterdam, urging Herman to come out to his home town and "take care of business" in his brother's absence. The "business" turns out to be a small but profitable gas station on the outskirts of the town, located on Ukraine's eastern steppes, now known as Luhansk but formerly known, during the Soviet Era, as Voroshilovgrad. The station is under seige from mysterious forces who want to force Herman to sell it, perhaps (although exact reasons remain obscure) because there is natural gas to be found in the area. There is barely a character in the story who is not mysterious and rough around the edges. Stories of the past are always blurred by secrets and mythology. The representatives from the federal government who make periodic appearances are more likely to be gangsters than legitimate government officials. Or else they're both. Travels across the empty stretches of this country are always hazardous. The people Herman runs into could be from anywhere, and the sights that pass before his eyes, especially at sundown and after dark, swirl into hallucinations and dreams.

Gradually, though, Herman begins to find a sense of purpose as he gains a sense of comradeship with the old friends he reconnects with, and through the stories they tell him. What he'd thought would be a quick in and out to "take care of business" before returning to his old life becomes a commitment to this off-kilter community. At one point, an old soccer team, on which Herman had been a young player on a team of old veterans, reassembles for a rowdy game against a local rival. Later, Herman comes upon the graves of some of these teammates in the local cemetery. Had he been playing soccer with ghosts? It is central to the essence of the novel that this question is never taken up again. Herman seems to simply shrug the discovery off as irrelevant.

The writing is often laced with multiple metaphors that don't quite work. A metal rod brought down on the hood of a car makes a sound like to tolling of Easter Bells. Spider webs described as floating in the air, as if anchoring a metal fence to the ground. The come, at times, so fast and furious that eventually I could only decide that the effect was purposeful, as if telling us that no impressions can be trusted. Although the metaphors can also be precise: "He was giving me an angry, prickly look, but it was somehow detached from his personality, as though he was wearing anger-tinted contact lenses."

The overall theme of the book to me seemed clearly to be the struggles of these far flung areas of Ukraine to make sense of their post-Soviet existence, already several decades in the past but still casting a difficult shadow over everything. It's obviously no coincidence that the book's title harkens back to the town's Soviet name. And then there is this seeming (from our current remove and perspective) foreshadowing of events to come:

"It was obvious what Ernst was thinking. Ernst was thinking, 'Something bad is going to happen, something real bad is definitely going to happen. For now, nobody can really tell--they all think that the worst is behind us and that the storm has passed. But that's not true at all.' Ernst was very famlliar with the feeling, with the sense of impending danger. It was coming, all right, and there was no0 way to avoid it. They'd have to run this gauntlet one way or another. There would be no way to sped the process up of avoid it altogether. All you could do was look the ominous beast in the eye and wait. Its terrible snout would sniff you for a while, then it'd just walk away, leaving fear an stench behind. Ernst almost immediately had a flashback to when he once felt the rotten breath of brewing trouble. He recalled that trapped feeling that filled his lungs, he recalled that seep-seated fear that encroaches upon new territory like swollen rivers in March. . . . "

Often, reading this novel is like stepping through thin ice and falling into a dream. But the sense of time and place is solid, and the current of hope and compassion carried me along. Highly recommended.… (mais)

[The Orphanage : A Novel] by [[Serhiy Zhadan]] (Ukraine, 2017, English translation 2021

March, Wartime, Kharkiv, Ukraine. Pasha is a relatively young high school teacher of Ukrainian. He shares an apartment with his father. His sister asks that Pasha to make a three day trek to pick up her son from the orphanage there (where she put him as she has a drug problem) Pasha is a good guy and leaves to get the kid.

Did I say this is in wartime? Pasha’s journey is not easy and he faces many challenges but he does make it to the orphanage and collects his 17-year nephew, (who he doesn’t really know, so they will get to know each other) and heads back with just enough juice in his cell phone for one phone call.
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This is a unusual book, and I think it requires flexibility from the reader. While reading this I thought of other books…other kinds of books i.e. ]post-apocalypse, madcap, epic …. I began to dog-ear page corners (gasp!)

Pasha’s journey reveals the absurdity and messiness of war, and yet, in some way the story is part bildungsroman, and or a hero’s journey. Wild and non-stop, but what a splendid, moving, crazy read.… (mais)

War in Ukraine (not the present one) a school teacher (who teaches Ukranian) goes to the city to collect his nephew who is at an orphanage. Beautifully written about a dark dank rotting subject: not just war, but urban war. It’s scary, gross, upsetting, but the first person monologue aspect of the book is very good, the disoriented way that memories of one’s life the sum of the parts gurgle up while going through all these other things. It all hits a sort of horrible apex and then the narrator switches suddenly to the young boy. The brief glimps into his perspective is sweet and lovely. Very sad, especially given the present state of Ukraine, but very moving too.… (mais)