Serhiy Zhadan, a Ukrainian troubadour on a war mission

Cataloging Serhiy Zhadan (Starobilsk, Soviet Union, 48 years old) is as difficult as finding him.

Writer, poet, musician or activist?

Zhadan is all this and more, a celebrity in his country, Ukraine.

Arranging a meeting with him is almost impossible, as evidenced by the various unsuccessful attempts by this newspaper in recent months to interview him.

Zhadan does not stop, from one place to another, always on the road, like a troubadour, offering his art in exchange for money and help for the Ukrainian Army.

He is a patriot, but also an internationally recognized storyteller, as evidenced by

(Galaxia Gutenberg), his first novel translated into Spanish and in bookstores in Spain since November.

Zhadan has been touring Germany with his rock band, Zhadan i Sobaky (Zhadan and the dogs) since the end of that month.

The German cultural world has exalted him as a European literary figure, also as a standard-bearer for the defense of Ukraine against the Russian occupation.

In October she received the German Booksellers' Peace Prize, in June she was awarded the Hannah Arendt for Political Thought, an award given by the German Greens foundation.

Between February and April, when Kharkov, his city, was besieged by Russian troops, Zhadan wrote a kind of diary from his apartment every day.

His texts, posted on Facebook, were shared by thousands of people as a sign of hope: if the artist continued at the foot of the canyon, resistance was possible.

Zhadan is a product of the chaos that arose with the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. A reference in his youth of an urban and post-industrial culture, his patriotism has double value for his followers because he is from the "hard East", from Kharkiv and the province from Lugansk, in Donbas, where he was born.

His activism against Russian influence in Ukraine has not stopped since 2014, when the Maidan revolution took place that overthrew President Viktor Yanukovich.

In those weeks of revolt, in which he mobilized in Kharkov, the writer suffered a beating by supporters of Yanukovych and had to be hospitalized in Warsaw.

In July he gave a concert in kyiv – which EL PAÍS attended to try to interview him – in tribute to a deceased commander of Pravy Sektor, an extreme right-wing nationalist organization.

Zhadan assured that he would always support them because he has fought against Russian attempts to seize control of Ukraine.

Bands like Pravy Sektor

They hate the Ukrainian president, Volodimir Zelensky, because until the invasion that began in February, he tried to be conciliatory with Russia.

Of the same opinion was Zhadan, who even wrote a song asking Zelensky to leave for Russia.

In an interview he gave in 2019 to

(Internet cultural magazine specialized in Eastern Europe)

the author explained why he was a patriot and not a nationalist: “I have known the Ukrainian nationalist movement since the eighties.

I have many friends in the nationalist movement, but the ideas of nationalism do not correspond to my vision of Ukraine.

Ukraine is much more complex, it is less a question of whites and blacks”.

The Orphanage

, written in 2017, is a kind of adaptation of the

to what is known as the "grey zone" of the war in Donbas, a territory that is not under the control of either of the two armies, the Ukrainian and the pro-Russian separatist.

It is the zero line of the fighting and where people show what wood they are made of.

Another prominent name in Ukrainian letters, Andrei Kurkov, also dedicated a novel to the gray area of ​​Donbas,

.

Both authors demonstrate in them knowing the different identities of Donbas and the human adaptation to violence.

In the case of

The difference is that Zhadan seems to foresee that the population of Donbas would end up assuming that the aggressor and the person who has ruined their lives comes from beyond its borders, from Russia.

The protagonist, Pasha, is a schoolteacher who has never wanted to side with one of the two souls of the region, the Ukrainian and the Russian, until the war started by the pro-Russian separatists pushes him to side with the Ukrainian side. .

One of the most important dialogues in

It takes place between Pasha and a Ukrainian soldier who entrusts him with a treasure: the fossil of a fern millions of years old.

In a bombed-out city, whose name is not specified, but which, due to the proximity of Mariupol, can be deduced that it is in the province of Donetsk, the soldier extracts from his backpack a rock that Pasha first identifies as a piece of Coal.

But the soldier takes out his combat knife, stained with dried blood, carefully scrapes and petrified lines appear.

The teacher agrees to keep it safe, from the museum that the soldier extracted it, only ashes remain.

The soldier confesses that the situation will get worse and he goes back to sleep leaning on the seat of a riddled bus.

The orphanage

it is a fiction in which each page is built on snippets of reality that its author has observed.

Anyone who has been in Ukraine's war zones long enough will get a chill from many of the situations Zhadan describes.

The sunflower crops that could not be harvested due to the proximity of the front, some fields marked, as if they were scars, by the tracks of the tanks and the craters of the mortars;

the looting of shops in cities from which hundreds of thousands have fled in a matter of days;

the soldiers who speak loudly because the detonations have left them half deaf;

the wounded soldier who wants to get away from the doctors because the pain he feels is unbearable;

and the vulnerability of those left in the gray area, wandering around as if they had lost consciousness.

“Beyond the deserted school;

the razed newsstand;

the bullet-riddled obelisk,” Zhadan writes in the novel.

“Shards of iron, burned bricks, bloodstained clothing.

Except for some soldiers who are stationed next to the kiosk, smoking and talking, indifferent to everything, you hardly see passers-by in the streets.

An old woman drags a sledge loaded with cardboard across the wet asphalt: it is not known whether to light a stove or to mend a window”.

Zhadan's orphanage

was written with the war in Donbas as the setting;

five years later, it is a mirror in which millions of Ukrainians can see themselves reflected.

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