Russian President Vladimir Putin may have inadvertently been the great promoter of literature in the Ukrainian language since 2014. That year is a benchmark for international relations on the European continent and also for reading habits in Ukraine. Because the annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin's war support to the secessionists confronting Kiev in the Donbas "have made the defense of Russian culture very difficult and that has given an additional opportunity to Ukrainian culture", says Inna Búlkina, specialist in Russian philology.
In the company of this scholar, we browse in a bookstore in the center of Kiev (belonging to the E chain, one of the main in the country), where the works of novice authors coexist with those of the already classics of current Ukrainian literature. In this last category, Internat by Serhiy Zhadán (born in 1974) stands out.
Translatable by “El Internado” or “El Orfanato”, that 2017 novel relates the journey (physical and mental) of a provincial teacher who crosses the front line to pick up his nephew from a boarding school. With his direct and poetic prose, Zhadán transforms the war in the Donbas mining and industrial region into a ghostly environment with global value. Zhadán, together with Yuri Andrujóvich (born in 1960) and Andríy Kurkov (who was born in 1961 and writes in Russian) forms the trio of most translated Ukrainian authors abroad, says Oleksandra Koval, the director of the Ukrainian Book Institute (IUL) , an entity founded in 2016 under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture to support national literature. In 2019, Kurkov published Gray Bees , whose protagonist is a beekeeper who wanders through the no man's land around the eastern war front.
Knowing the actual circulation of the publications does not seem an easy task for commercial, financial and fiscal reasons and Koval complains about the publishers' refusal to share information. "The works that exceed 15,000 copies can be considered as a bestseller ", he affirms, explaining that it is "reduced print runs, which are repeated according to sales dynamics". In 2019, three titles reached that category, explains the official: the first was the novel Jaraktérnik (translatable by “El Brujo”), set among Cossacks from the 17th century by Vasili Skliar (born in 1951), a specialist in historical novels known as “ the grandfather of the bestsellers ”. Netflix with its series The Witcher seems to have contributed to the success of the Cossack warlock.
The other two large-scale works cited by Koval are Until the Light Goes Forever by techno-thriller author Max Kidruk (born 1984) and Bouquet of Favorite Flowers by Svetlana Talán (1960), who writes a social novel with courageous and positive female protagonists. Of these three authors appreciated by their compatriots, none appear in the catalog of "new books", published in English by the ILU. On this circumstance, Iryna Baturévych, head of the analytical department of the ILU, explains that the selection of authors was carried out by literary experts, academics, critics and representatives of the main national literary festivals, who decided based on their own ideas of what that interests an international audience.
The contest in the East of Ukraine has been dealt with frequently in recent years and has had a negative influence on literature by promoting bad poets, says Búlkina. According to the critic Evguene Stasinevych, the warlike conflict marks the work The Land of the Lost (2017) by Kateryna Kalytko (1982) and is the backdrop to the prose of Haska Shyyan's Behind Her Back (about the vicissitudes of the couple of Marta and Max after he enlists in the front and she escapes the depression with a trip that culminates with an attack on the French Riviera). As "a black hole that is felt but not seen", the war is also in Happy Falls (2019), by Evgeniya Belorusets, where stories of women who witness their own life and the "great story" are collected. The contest is at the core of Hija , a work by Tamara Horija-Zernya (Tamara Duda), a journalist awarded by the BBC in 2019, who distills her two years as a volunteer and fundraiser for Ukrainian fighters.
The war also influences the dilemmas faced by readers and writers. 33% of readers choose the language in which the book has been written, 12% are indifferent to the language in which it has been written, 28% choose books in Russian and 24% do so in Ukrainian, the latter being higher percentage among younger readers, Baturévych says, citing recent data. For comparison, in 2013 53% of readers preferred Russian, 26% Ukrainian and 21% opted for the language in which the book had been written or did not give importance to the subject, he points out.
Among the most popular works of 2019, in the bookstore we visited in the center of Kiev they mention Barrio D , a set of stories by Artiom Chej (born in 1985) and the collection of essays Si, pero, by Tarás Prochasko (born in 1968). ), a botanist member of Ivano Frankivsk's “Stanislav group”. Furthermore, they cite Irena Karpa (1980) and her novel Good News from the Aral Sea , André Liaba (1987) with the essay work In Search of the Barbarians. Travel through the territories where the Balkans begin and do not end . Somewhat earlier are the collection of essays And again I get into a tank (2016) by Osuna Zabuzhko (1960), and Traces on the Road (2019) by Valeri Ananiev (1993), veteran of the race, blogger and pilgrim to Santiago .
Chernobyl's shadow
In Koval's opinion, a bright future awaits Markiyan Kamysh, author fascinated by the world of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, who has written Scrap (2017) and earlier A Walk in the Area (2015) on the looting of contaminated territory. Kamysh was born in 1988 to the family of a nuclear physicist who worked to settle the aftermath of the accident.
"Vladimir Putin will ever be thanked for what he has done for literature in Ukrainian," says an expert in Russian philology
"E" is one of the main Ukrainian book distribution networks, and the list of the best-selling works in the shop visited at the end of February in Kiev coincides only in part with the chain's state sales list, where they appear self-help works, psychology works on how to prosper in business and also how to write correctly in Ukrainian. In this global list, in fifth position was Feliks Avstria (edited in 2014) by Sofia Andrujóvich, (the daughter of Yuri Andrujóvich), who reconstructed the provincial life of 1900 in an eastern city of the Austro-Hungarian empire (the current Ivano Frankiv, today Ukraine).
"Vladimir Putin will sometimes be thanked for what he has done for literature in Ukrainian," says Búlkina. "Those who previously read in Russian now read in Ukrainian and, technically and economically, it is increasingly difficult to buy books published in Russia, since they have to be ordered, carry out customs procedures and submit them to a special commission that determines whether They do or do not contain anti-Ukrainian propaganda. "Banned in Ukraine is the production of nine editorials from the Russian Federation, which have broadcast works by authors considered hostile by the authorities in Kiev. For the same reason, Ukraine has vetoed several Russian companies from Internet sale.
Warfare alters linguistic identity and restructures markets. Volodymir Rafeenko, a writer from Donetsk (1969) has moved to Kiev and has replaced Russian with Ukrainian as a literary language ( Mondegreen , published in 2019). The Donbas area is rich in science fiction authors, who write in Russian. Given the new obstacles and difficulties for editorial trade between Russia and Ukraine, these writers, in some cases actively involved in the secessionist cause, have been excluded from the Ukrainian market.
Important for the history of literature in Ukraine is a series dedicated to rescuing from publishing the Ukrainian-language publishing production of the 1920s. In the select collection made from 2016 by Yarina Tsimbal, from the Institute of Literature of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, the crime and love novels stand out. "It is a unique period characterized by thematic and expression freedom", Tsimbal affirms that, in Caminos bajo el Sol, he collected journalistic reports from six authors, three of whom perished in the 1930s, retaliated by the Stalinist regime.
In the section of other Ukrainian languages, such as Hungarian, Romanian and Crimean Tatar, the ILU does not seem to have anything to show, since “minority languages, except Russian, are not yet a commercial segment of the market. Ukrainian, "says Baturevych. Translators are scarce and the Hungarian and Romanian literary market in the Transcarpathian and Chernivtsi provinces (the former Bucovina) is supplied from Budapest and Bucharest respectively.
Among the Ukrainian translations, those of Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich (in Russian in the original) are striking. Búlkina describes these translations as “quite a gesture”, which are after 2014 and correspond to works published in the last century or the first decade of this century. Many remember that the Ukrainian versions of Gary Potter's books, by anticipating the Russian versions of the same works, contributed greatly to the Ukrainian's roots in children's literature. "Before, our political system was indifferent to books in Ukrainian and many people thought that our language was not interesting, but now we have many books in our language and that is great," says the store clerk we visited in Kiev, a 25-year-old, who serves in Ukrainian and English, but not in Russian.