A Transcript of Trafika Europe Radio's Interview with Serhiy Zhadan
Apofenie’s editor-in-chief Kate Tsurkan interviewed Ukrainian author Serhiy Zhadan for Trafika Europe Radio. They spoke about the opera ‘Vyshyvanyi: The King of Ukraine’, which was staged in Kharkiv at the beginning of October 2021. Zhadan penned the operatic libretto based on the life of Wilhelm von Habsburg, a.k.a. Vasyl Vyshyvanyi, the Austrian archduke who devoted his life to the cause of an independent Ukrainian state. Vyshyvanyi was eventually captured and arrested by the NKVD in 1947. He died in prison in Kyiv a year later.
Zhadan went into detail about the life of the archduke and the importance of his legacy in modern-day Ukraine. This interview was first broadcast on Trafika Europe Radio, Europe’s literary radio station, as part of The Middle Ground series on 10 October 2021 and is available on-demand at any time. The radio broadcast is fully bilingual (English-Ukrainian) with translation provided by Vitaly Chernetsky. It includes a bilingual reading of excerpts from the operatic libretto.
Below is a transcript of the interview in full, reposted with the permission of Trafika Europe’s editorial staff.
1947, Lukyanovska prison
VYSHYVANYI:
What is citizenship? How much do you
Depend on it? I had to live in a city
Through which the nerves of Europe passed.
My family influenced time, it
Adjusted space. We all felt
The course of history. I had a choice, I really could
choose : my citizenship, my occupation,
And my future. But I chose another country
For myself — a country that did not really
Exist, a country that was only dreamed of.
But how they dreamed of it! How they built it
In their reveries and visions. I
Wanted to be one of those who
Dreamed, those who foresaw the turn of history.
Because truly, what is history?
Cyrillic letters of someone else’s alphabet
Seem to be sewn on paper by skilled hands.
Embroidered signs by which our future
Is written. A thread that stretches
Through life like a bloody trail. We stand
In the winds of history — monarchs
Of phantom borders, we call others to follow us, drawing
Death’s attention, freezing in
The cold wind - doomed and sad,
like shooting targets.
TSURKAN
Hello everyone, I’m Kate Tsurkan and today I’m here with Ukrainian author Serhiy Zhadan. We’re going to talk primarily about his opera Vyshyvanyi: The King of Ukraine inspired by the life of Wilhelm von Habsburg. The opera premiers in Kharkiv this October. Serhiy, welcome. I believe that the English-speaking world knows even less about Wilhelm von Habsburg aka Vasyl Vyshyvani than Ukrainians do, so tell us, who was he?
ZHADAN
Wilhelm von Habsburg was a great-nephew of the Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary. As a member of the imperial family he was in the line of succession, but he was so far down that his chances of becoming a ruling Habsburg monarch were fairly slim. This is particularly true when we remember that we’re talking about the beginning of the 20th century, when the Habsburg Empire was coming to its end. Before World War One broke out, a young Wilhelm discovered the Hutsul culture, a Ukrainian ethnographic group in the Carpathians. He traveled through the Ukrainian territories of the Habsburg Empire and fell in love with this culture. He discovered the language, the history, and embraced a version of Ukrainian identity for himself. When World War I broke out he was even leading the Ukrainian detachments within the Austro-Hungarian army. In 1917, the Ukrainian People’s Republic came into being, and the detachments Vasyl Vyshyvanyi had been leading found themselves in the territory of Ukraine. During the fight with the Bolshevik government in Russia, it was said that a group of officers offered him to assume the Ukrainian throne and rule Ukraine as its monarch. Habsburg refused, and unfortunately Ukrainian lost its struggle against Bolshevik Russia, no longer an independent state. In other words, it is a very strange and telling episode of the kind of things that have happened in Ukrainian history.
TSURKAN
How did the idea to write about him come to you? Why did you choose to tell his story in the form of an operatic libretto and not, say, a novel?
ZHADAN
I have a very strong interest in that period of Ukrainian history from 1917-1920 and the fight for Ukrainian independence. As strange as it may seem, many of the ideas that were relevant back then, 100 years ago, have not lost their relevance today. I was interested in Vasyl Vyshyvanyi in particular because he is a very colorful and unique figure that should not be overlooked, and his story is important for the current situation in Ukraine today. I have a friend who is an honorary consul at the Austrian consulate in Kharkiv and it was actually his idea to create an opera about Vasyl Vyshyvanyi. He was hoping that we could produce a new work of art that emphasized the links between Austria and Ukraine. However I think that our work goes beyond the narrow of understanding of Ukrainian-Austrian relations—it is about much broader issues, such as the place of Ukraine within Europe, and how much history tends to repeat itself.
TSURKAN
I read in an interview that you’re far less interested in writing novels these days—why is that?
ZHADAN
Yes, this is true. I feel that working with prose is to force myself into a format that with each iteration becomes less interesting. We live in a very interesting time where, as in other periods before, we see the scale and caliber of literary activities changing, and an adjustment is underway.
TSURKAN
More and more of your work is being translated into English. What have your interactions been like with foreign audiences? In what days do you think their engagement with your work differs from that of your Ukrainian audience?
ZHADAN
Well, first of all I need to emphasize what an unusual experience it has been sitting in isolation for the past year and a half. Before the start of the pandemic, many of my friends and I had a completely different schedule and within it the presence of state borders was not a significant factor. For us it now feels like as if we’ve fallen back into Soviet times, sealed within our borders, but the difference this time around is that people everywhere feel that way, not just us. Online communication cannot fully replace live communication between people, so I would stress that this is a very strange time for artists.
As for your question about the differences in audience reception, you’re correct. There are differences and here we should talk about the specificities of the cultural situation in Ukraine. In Ukraine we now have very complex, dramatic, but also necessary processes taking place in our society. Culture these days is part of politics. It influences the mood in the country in no less a way than the declarations or statements made by certain members of parliament. I hope that this period will wrap up in ten years or so, and we will be in a different country, where perhaps like in the US, poetry is an area of interest for weirdos, in the best sense of the word.
TSURKAN
Back to our friend Vasyl Vyshyvanyi. Why do you think Vyshyvanyi is relatively unknown in Ukraine today, considering he devoted his life to Ukraine, and paid the ultimate price for that: his life?
ZHADAN
I think this is because the political project in which he took part, that is, the attempt to create an independent Ukraine, failed. He is one of the losers of history. Besides, within politics he was a somewhat marginal figure. He was an active military officer, and because of that he was not among the front ranks of major politicians of his time. I would say that a fair number of people do know about him and recently there have been several good books published about him, including a translation of Timothy Snyder’s book The Red Prince into Ukrainian. The people who are interested in Ukraine’s history, especially this period of history, definitely know about him.
VYSHYVANYI:
What was the reason behind my Ukrainian
Choice? A natural desire to stand up
For the most disadvantaged, those
On whose side there were no rights, but on whose
Side there was the truth. Did I really think about
The Ukrainian throne? Why not? In our
Family it was as natural to talk about the crown as
It was in ordinary families to talk about the weather.
Was I ready for such a course of events? I was ready for
Anything. As a child, I heard many voices
warning me about my future.
Sometimes these voices sounded grave. Sometimes
reassuring. In these voices there was a lot of
Bitterness. But they had just as much love.
TSURKAN
Wilhelm was not only an archduke and a military officer but also a poet. What do you think of his poems that he wrote in Ukrainian? I know some critics find his poetry to be somewhat “naive”, overly simplistic, with an obvious rhyme scheme. Would you agree? What is your take on Paul Celan’s famous statement that a poet can only write honestly in their native tongue?
ZHADAN
Every good military officer is a bit of a poet in their soul, so I do not think that writing poetry was something unnatural for Vasyl Vyshyvanyi. I also do not think it is fair to approach his poetry with the criteria of typical literary scholarship because he did not have serious ambitions as a writer. Something else is more important here—the choice of language. We are talking about choosing Ukrainian identity, a choice that was important 100 years ago, and is still very important today. In this broader sense, Vasyl Vyshyvanyi’s choice of language is the determining factor in his poetic work. This is a post-colonial situation that is a bit hard to understand unless you find yourself in a similar context because the choice of identity, which includes language, is always an individual one. The population of Ukraine can possess the same passport, but the society as a whole does not switch to using another language. Individuals choose to switch to another language. So in the case of Vasyl Vyshyvanyi, one can only be surprised and admire his determination and stubbornness in his choice of Ukrainian identity. This was not only unique to him. If we look at the wider circle of prominent figures who were involved in the struggle for Ukrainian independence, the choice of language was a charged and painful one. One of the characters in the opera is Pavlo Skoropadskyi, Vasyl Vyshyvanyi’s rival, and for him, too, the choice of Ukrainian identity was no different.
As for the second part of your question, pertaining to the dictum by Celan, I think that Celan actually negates the statement by his own biography. Even though Paul Celan is one of the greatest voices in German language poetry we understand that if the historical circumstances had been different, it would have been entirely possible for him to become a Russian, Ukrainian, Romanian, or French language poet. It may sound somewhat utopian to us, but 20th century history was so strange and paradoxical—in a negative sense—that it is entirely possible to imagine so many alternatives. I would also like to note that the history of Ukrainian literature at the beginning of the 20th century includes many such cases of authors switching from the language that for many of them was the language they used in everyday life, most often Russian, to Ukrainian. In each of those cases, the Ukrainian language was about acquiring agency. This is something that to some extent has endured to this day. If you choose the Ukrainian language, you choose the agency and existence of this country—you accept it as something that does not require a footnote or any other additional explanations. You accept it as a given. It is important to point out that this is not about nationalism, in this case. It would be very difficult to call Vasyl Vyshyvanyi a Ukrainian nationalist. It’s about personal agency.
TSURKAN
Speaking of Celan, you once wrote that if Celan were alive today that he would be a Ukrainian. Can you explain that? Does the same apply to Vasyl Vyshyvanyi?
ZHADAN
I think I was speaking about this either ironically or in a fantastical sense, because speaking about history in the conditional is a very unproductive approach. On the other hand, one can project certain things on the real facts of what has happened. Since the beginning of Russian aggression in 2014, many people in Ukraine who by their backgrounds are Jewish, Russian or Crimean Tartar switched to communicating in Ukrainian. It’s a personal choice and a matter of principal. We in fact have a number of writers who have switched from writing in Russian to writing in Ukraine Ukrainian. Obviously, this is not a simple process. It is a complex and at times painful process because it requires a certain breaking down and restructuring of creative mechanisms.
Since identity is something very intimate and personal, it needs to be treated very seriously. Coming back to the hypothesis, let’s imagine a person named Paul Antschel is born in Chernivtsi in 1991, so by this time he would be operating within the sphere of two linguistic cultures, that is, Ukrainian and Russian. If we continue using our imagination and say that this person writes verse, we have to acknowledge he exists in the cultural fields operating in the country at that time. He reaches a fork in the rode: either he can make a choice or he can ignore the coexistence, sometimes casual, sometimes habitual and painful, of these two linguistic and cultural spheres. As to what kind of choice he would make, we can’t say. For example, Chernivtsi, the same native city of Paul Celan, gave us the outstanding Jewish Ukrainian poet Moses Fishbein in the second half of the twentieth century. His linguistic choice that impacted his entire personal and creative biography. He left an impressive and powerful literary legacy for himself. So we can say that fantasies about Paul Celan as a Ukrainian language poet are not completely outlandish.
TSURKAN
We know that Vyshyvanyi was bedridden with tuberculosis in Chernivtsi when the Empire fell. All roads lead to Chernivtsi, as I like to say. What do you think of this city and its place in both Ukrainian and greater European cultural history? Is it defined by the beauty it has produced or the terrors it has survived?
ZHADAN
It’s difficult to separate these two things, because the trauma endured by residents of Chernivtsi led to creating things of beauty. To separate Paul Celan’s poetry from his biographical context, especially the history of the Holocaust, would not be productive or wise. We can say the same about Bruno Schulz, a wonderfully talented Jewish author who lived in Drohobych, not far from Chernivtsi, and who became a classic figure of Polish literature. However this pertains not only to Celan and Jewish artists who were living and creating art in the territory of modern-day Ukraine. This also pertains to many authors who wrote in Russian and were therefore considered part of Russian literary tradition. This also pertains to hundreds, even thousands, of Ukrainian writers who were hostages to history.
Returning to your question, I think the city of Chernivtsi today, in a very intelligent and tactful way, is trying to work with its history and memory—with both its trauma and beauty. The fact that in the last decade Celan has become a patron of the city is both very telling and positive. It is always much nicer to discover the history of a city not through dictators but through poets.
1947, Lukyanovska prison
VYSHYVANYI:
What remains is memory, from which the future grows
What remains is our love, which holds up this sky.
I could never give up the words which we spoke with death.
I could never give up on what we all did.
Even though everything looks so hopeless.
But through the thickness of stones, through the cracks
and cobblestones, fresh grass fights through into the air,
The greenery breaks through!
Nobody is able to stop our singing,
Nobody is able to convince us that our hopes are futile.
We will still return to the banks of the rivers from which we departed!
We will still gather in the squares from which we were chased out.
And when night and darkness fall, even then — speak, voices, speak,
Echo through this night.
Stitch the silence like a torn banner. With the threads of pain, intersecting lines.
Echo, do not stay mute.
Combining the past and the future. Overcoming death.
Always overcoming death.
Promotional photos from the official Facebook page for Вишиваний: Король України.