The Texts of Kyiv’s Theater of Playwrights:
Literary-based Acts of War
By John Freedman
THE BACKSTORY
Nobody knew in the second half of February 2022 that any of these texts would ever appear in the world. A whole different set was being written.
Twenty writers working under the banner of the not-quite-yet- existing Theater of Playwrights had scheduled their venue’s grand opening for March 12. Artistic Director Maksym Kurochkin was getting the group’s renovated semi-basement in Kyiv prepared to receive spectators and helping to evaluate a stack of short texts being submitted by his colleagues to be read as part of the theater’s inaugural festivities. It was to be a memorable night, the birth of a promising cultural institution in a city that, despite the paradoxically debilitating, albeit largely successful, Maidan Revolution in 2013/2014, and eight ensuing years of smoldering, deadly war less than 500 miles to the east of Ukraine’s capital, was in the process of experiencing a cultural boom.
The internationally celebrated Kurochkin, along with the equally renowned playwright, screenwriter, and director Natalka Vorozhbyt, had seen a large number of talented, independent-minded, unique and variously accomplished writers converge around them. Each writer, within the framework of this more or less collectively conceived theater, was poised to begin making their individual mark on Ukrainian drama.
These plans were dashed when, at approximately 5 a.m. on 24 February 2022, the Russian army mounted a massive invasion of Ukraine. A long, 40-mile column of Russian tanks headed for Kyiv in the west, while an amphibious assault was mounted on Mariupol in the south, and Russian bombs and rockets pounded targets in Kharkiv and Chernihiv in the north, Dnipro in the center of the country, Odesa in the southwest, and elsewhere. Russian president Vladimir Putin called the invasion a “special military operation,” and the Russian government almost immediately began handing out prison terms to Russians who dared publicly to refer to what was happening as “war.”
My purpose, however, is not to tell the story of Russia’s war against Ukraine. That is done beautifully, in deeply personal vignettes, with wit, insight, horror, emotion, and poetry in the texts collected in this book. My task is to describe how these unique monologues and dialogues came into being, and to provide some information to fill out the picture inside, outside, and around the texts.
Pardon some of the personal viewpoints that follow, but there is no other way for me to tell this story.
I can only begin by noting a message I received from William Wong, a director, actor, and teacher in Hong Kong. William had taken part frequently in the Insulted. Belarus Worldwide Reading Project, a long-running program I was curating to publicize the horrible reality of the courageous, but ultimately unsuccessful, revolution in Minsk, Belarus, in the fall of 2020. No sooner had the Russian invasion of Ukraine begun than William sent me the following query: “Can we do a worldwide reading of a Ukrainian play to support them?”
My first reaction was, “Indeed, can we?!” and I immediately reached out to colleagues who I thought might help. They included Molly Flynn, an American scholar based in London, the English writer and translator John Farndon, and two of the best Ukrainian playwrights alive — Natalka Vorozhbyt and Maksym Kurochkin. Molly sent play translations, emails, and advice; John responded he would help me take on translations immediately; Natalka sent English translations of two of her plays and encouraged me to contact Maksym, because he was the artistic director of a new playwrights’ theater in Kyiv, and he should have access to a large number of brand new texts.
The information about Maksym’s new theater was, indeed, news to me. I immediately reached out to him and explained I was mounting a project that even I, at that moment, did not yet know would end up being called the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings. I naively assumed my 25-year working friendship with Maksym would be more than enough justification for him to send me everything I asked for. But, plead as I might that I needed texts as quickly as possible, Maksym refused to send anything that had been written for the planned March opening. On 7 March, even as the first readings of other texts were already taking shape in Hong Kong, the U.S., Finland, Germany, Slovakia, and elsewhere, he wrote: “I think it would be wrong to give out those short plays. They already belong to another, prewar era . . . I think it would be logical for the theaters of the world to commission from Ukrainian playwrights hastily written plays about the day-to-day situation. [...] I would be happy to lobby this project among the playwrights of the Theater of Playwrights. But this way we will retain control of the discourse. That is important” (Kurochkin).
So there it is, the germination of the book you hold in your hands. Now the plan had to be put into action.
For that I turned to two old friends and colleagues, Philip Arnoult of the Center for International Theatre Development (CITD) in Baltimore, MD, and Noah Birksted-Breen, the founder of Sputnik Theatre in London. Noah answered immediately, writing that he wanted very much to be a part of the project, and that, difficult financial times be damned, he was willing to empty his theater’s coffers in order to commission a play from one writer. Philip, whose organization has been supporting theater in the U.S., Eastern and Central Europe, the Netherlands, and Africa for over four decades, also shot back an instantaneous positive reply. CITD committed to funding the writing of 15 texts, later following up with several more commissions and grants for the Theater of Playwrights.
Maksym determined the size of the grants when I asked if $500 per short text would be sufficient. “$500 is good money for good times,” he replied. “$1000 for a short play, now that would be support.” And so it was — the preliminaries were done and, before long, brand new texts began flowing into my inbox as grant money was traveling the wires from the U.S. and U.K. to Ukraine.
THE CONTEXT
One could say the impulse bringing these texts into existence had been felt by Ukrainians for ages. And by that I mean centuries. There is no proper way to understand Ukrainian writers today without understanding the journey their culture has taken.
The origins of Kyiv, and, therefore, Kyivan Rus, officially go back to the eighth or ninth centuries, depending upon your source and point of view. Quite understandably, Ukraine claims the hallowed grounds of Kyiv on the banks of the mighty Dnipro River as its own. Russia, however, whose name is derived from the ancient civilization of “Rus,” began exerting its own claim on this land as its own spiritual and historical origin around the 16th century. For most of the second millennium, Kyiv found itself in a position of subservience to the Mongolian Golden Horde, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Kingdom of Poland, the Russian empire, and then the Soviet empire.
We can look to 1798 as a turning point for Ukrainian culture in general, and Ukrainian literature in specific. Although ballads, tales, poetry, historical and religious texts had existed in the oral or manuscript traditions for some time, 1798 saw the first- ever publication of a Ukrainian-language poem, Ivan Kotliarevsky’s Eneida, a parody of Virgil’s Aeneid set in the Zaporizhzhia region. That same year also saw the first publication of works, in St. Petersburg, of the famed philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda. Whether he was writing poetry, prose, history, or philosophy, Skovoroda employed a unique mix of Old Church Slavonic, Ukrainian vernacular, Russian, Latin, and Greek. The first published Ukrainian-language novel, Marusia by Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko, followed 36 years later.
By the 1840s a flourishing of national literature was underway, led by the poet Taras Shevchenko, a former serf who was freed in 1838, and whose works, especially the 1845 epistle, “To my Living, Dead, and Still Unborn Countrymen, Both in Ukraine and Beyond,” galvanized in the minds of those countrymen the notion that Ukraine was a separate, self-sufficient nation. Russian authorities arrested Shevchenko two years later and sent him into exile, banning him from writing for a decade, a draconian act that only enhanced his reputation as a national poet, prophet, and martyr.
While fellow Ukrainian Nikolai Gogol chose to write in Russian and focus primarily on comic aspects of Ukrainian and Russian life, Shevchenko powerfully focused his poetic attention “on Ukraine, her experiences, especially her trauma, her subjugation and destruction in the past and especially in the present. In itself, of course, this was a profoundly revolutionary act: his Ukrainian readers, and especially his contemporaries — the first to be exposed to his poetry — were not only aware of this but overwhelmed by it” (Grabowicz).
Words of similar sentiment may someday be written about the texts contained in this collection. And it is important to pause amidst this brief historical discussion to point out the connections between the writers of the Theater of Playwrights and their predecessors. Virtually every one of the works published here takes on, to one degree or another, the trauma, attempted subjugation, and attempted destruction of contemporary Ukraine by Russia. Moreover, every single one of them is intended, if not as a profoundly revolutionary act, then surely as a profound, literary-based act of war.
In A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War, Olena Astaseva writes, “When you hear the sound of a shell flying at your house, at first you feel fear, then hatred. Hatred for whoever did it. For all of Russia, for all its inhabitants without exception.”
In Our Children, Natalia Blok writes about a friend who said he had “been waiting for war a long time, and that Ukraine would win, that Russia had signed its own death warrant, and would fall apart in a few years . . .”
In I Want to Go Home, Oksana Savchenko writes, “The Russians captured the stables and starved the horses. Starved them. One man tried to reach the horses to feed them, but he was killed by the Russian beasts. Killed. Russian whores kill people. Does it make sense to talk about starving horses when Russian Orcs are killing civilians in Ukraine?”
Writing in the New York Times, Jason Farago pointed directly to what I designate as a literary-based act of war: “With Russia actively trying to erase Ukraine’s national identity,” he writes, “this country’s music, literature, movies and monuments are not recreations. They are battlefields.”
These texts are filled not only with a scathing hatred for the geographical neighbor to the east, but also a deep affection for Ukrainians and things Ukrainian. In many of these texts we see an effort to define the national character, to set it in sharp contrast against the Russian ways that have been enforced upon Ukrainians for centuries.
In Call Things by Their Names, Tetiana Kytsenko writes, “But here’s what I think: even if a Russian understands the language, will they really understand Ukrainians? It’s not even a matter of the meaning of the words, but what stands behind them. Take, for example, our leading national virtue — ‘sincerity.’ It’s not just a matter of being ‘frank.’ It is an odd fusion of cordiality and breadth of soul mixed with frank honesty — the ability to call things by their proper names.”
In his short poem “Testament,” Shevchenko wrote:
. . . Bury me then stand,
Break your shackles
And shower your freedom
With the enemy’s evil blood . . .
The only difference I might expect had this poem been written by one of the 20 authors collected here, would be, “Bury the enemy then stand . . .”
There is no timidity in the writers collected here, no sense of trepidation before a powerful geopolitical neighbor that, for the last 500 years or so, has rarely hesitated to suppress and repress the smaller nation on its western border. The Russian aggression of 2022 unleashed a nearly unbounded fury in Ukrainians. Hundreds of years of Ukrainians seeking more or less quietly, unobtrusively, and diplomatically to find common ground with the dominant Russian culture hit the equivalent of a brick wall when the Russian military breached the Ukrainian border. Another way to picture it would be as a long-neglected abscess that burst with explosive force. The response was instant and fierce. Everything Russian became anathema. It didn’t matter who or what it was — whether it was a street named after a Russian artist, a monument honoring a Russian poet (even if his name was Alexander Pushkin), or just some shared cultural reference to a universally known literary work.
Ukrainian frustration about Russian dominance in all things increased constantly after the nation declared independence on 24 August 1991. Scholarly and popular conversations about whether Mikhail Bulgakov, of The Master and Margarita fame, was a Russian or Ukrainian writer were underway a full five years before Maidan began, and nearly 16 years before the Russian invasion. “It’s a cultural cold war with little sign of tensions easing,” wrote an author in The Guardian (Nestruck).
But forget Bulgakov, Gogol or even Anton Chekhov (who wrote several of his most important plays while living in Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula). Arguments about the soup named borscht became heated. Was it a Ukrainian or Russian national dish? New York–based Ukrainian chef Olesia Lew told a BBC reporter, “Yes, Russian people claim it’s their food. But it’s a food they developed through occupation” (Evans).
No longer were the inhabitants of Ukraine willing to define any part of their life and traditions by way of anything Russian. Some Russians and westerners decried what they perceived to be “cancel culture,” as Ukrainians figuratively and actively purged mentions, hints, or allusions to Russian culture in all aspects of life, from the official to the personal. “How can you possibly deny the importance of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky?” these observers asked incredulously. What such viewpoints failed to take into account, however, was that, in essence, Ukrainian society and culture were not attempting to erase or destroy anything; theirs was a much more subtle and more creative act. They wanted, finally, after hundreds of years of seeing their own culture forced into a subservient role, to fill the places of public honor with individuals who spoke like them, thought like them, and shared common values and aspirations.
Vitaliy Chenskiy alludes briefly to this cultural battle in Robinson, where his narrator describes preparing to read his “beloved Dostoevsky” by candlelight, but later adds purposefully not taking his Dostoevsky novel out on the street (“God forbid!”) where patrolmen might check his possessions and have reason to question his loyalties. The “God forbid!” exclamation is a knowing one, a light-hearted wink, an admission of a paradox that has entered his life but does not define it. For Chenskiy, at least, this is an opportunity to inject some humor into his tale, not much more.
Historically, however, the problem was far from funny most of the time.
The influence of Shevchenko encouraged the appearance in the mid-19th century of numerous noteworthy writers, including Mikola Kostomarov, Panteliemon Kulish, and Maria Markovich (pseudonym Marko Vovchok). They stood poised to establish the language and literature of Ukraine as worthy contributors to world culture. The Russian authorities, however, like their subsequent Soviet counterparts, were unwilling to tolerate that. Time and again Ukrainian writers were subjugated to repressions that were intended to keep them as invisible as possible, if not to destroy them outright. Lesia Ukrainka, a poet and playwright now recognized as one of the greatest of all Ukrainian writers, could not publish her first collection of poems within the Russian empire. It had to be printed in 1893 in the city we now know as Lviv, then called Lemberg, in the eastern part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and smuggled across the border.
“In the early 19th century, Russian publishers accepted Ukrainian literature only if it was ethnographic, comedic, or apolitical. (Serious literature had to be in Russian.) Successive laws in 1863 and 1876 led to the effective banning of all works in the Ukrainian language, as well as their near-complete prohibition in public settings. In the 1930s, Stalin executed a whole generation of writers who had been rebuilding Ukrainian literary culture in the decade prior, brutally cutting short the growth of the country’s vibrant avant-garde” (Blacker).
Indeed, Stalin’s brutality toward Ukraine was extreme even for this tyrant. After his policies brought about the Holodomor, an orchestrated famine that killed four to five million Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933, he turned his attention over the next seven years to the sphere of the arts, literally wiping out an entire generation of writers who were on the verge of bringing Ukrainian literature to new heights. In what subsequently became known as the Executed Renaissance, no fewer than 223 Ukrainian writers were imprisoned, exiled, or murdered.
“. . . A painful mark of twentieth century Ukrainian history; its tragic peak [was] the mass execution of nearly three hundred members of the Ukrainian renaissance at Sandarmokh, a mass killing site in Karelia, northwest Russia. Some estimates assert that nearly 30,000 Ukrainian intellectuals were repressed during the Stalinist Yezhovschina, and its impact on literary contributions can be seen in the change in publication trends of that decade. While in 1930, the works of 259 Ukrainian writers were published, by 1938 only 36 of those writers remained — the rest were executed, exiled, had disappeared, or committed suicide” (Perehinets).
One hears in the calls to de-Russianize Ukrainian culture a pained appeal to recover the names of writers, thinkers, artists and musicians whose works have been shuffled aside by history and, more importantly, politics. Why, indeed, should a young Ukrainian girl live on, say, Pushkin Street, while she is denied access to useful knowledge, or even basic information, about hundreds of local, homegrown talents, many of whom might be able to exert life-changing influence on her? For those in the know — and this, significantly, has been lost on virtually everyone outside of Ukraine for hundreds of years — Ukrainian literature has been not only “an autonomous aesthetic system,” but also “an instrument for political struggle mostly devoted to the (re)awakening of a Ukrainian national consciousness and the subsequent regaining of national independence . . .” (Achilli).
The texts comprising this collection, along with other, subsequent works written by these and other contemporary Ukrainian writers, will eventually be seen and evaluated in the context of the contemporary reawakening of Ukrainian national consciousness.
This is made especially true by a handful of statements and one long essay attributed to Russian president Vladimir Putin in the run-up to his invasion of Ukraine. Putin in 2021 amused some, astonished many, and angered many more, when he uncharacteristically assumed the role of a philosopher-head of state, and published a pseudo-scholarly analysis of Ukrainian and Russian history whose purpose, essentially, was to deprive Ukraine of any claims to possessing an indigenous culture separate from Russia’s. In his essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” Putin frequently employed the offensive, long-abandoned reference to Ukraine and Ukrainians as “Little Russia,” or “Malorussians,” declaring that the notion of an independent Ukraine was bogus, and was foisted on the world, historically, by Poland and, more recently, the West. “The idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians started to form and gain ground among the Polish elite and a part of the Malorussian intelligentsia,” Putin wrote.
“Since there was no historical basis — and could not have been any — ” Putin, or a ghost writer, continued, “conclusions were substantiated by all sorts of concoctions, which went as far as to claim that the Ukrainians are the true Slavs and the Russians, the Muscovites, are not. Such ‘hypotheses’ became increasingly used for political purposes as a tool of rivalry between European states” (On the Historical Unity).
Putin expanded upon these thoughts at an extraordinary, protracted press conference in the wee hours of the morning of 24 February 2022, immediately before sending his army into Ukraine. Those of us who heard it detected in it a shrill note of hysteria. Others, like Julia Gonchar, who references Putin’s comments in this collection in A Sense of War, are more sanguine about it, letting their anger explode in response to other topics and incidents. In any case, even as most Ukrainians were still in bed sleeping, and Russian tanks were already rolling through the Belarus countryside toward Kyiv, Putin continued to push his inane theory that Ukraine didn’t exist. The texts in this collection exist to assert precisely the opposite.
THE TEXTS
The texts herein are written in various genres — documentary style, poetry, prose, social media posts, telephone texting, historical tales, memoirs, monologues, and dramatic dialogues. Most were written in March 2022, although two were written in late June, and another was completed in November. All share one thing in common — to one extent or another they are confessional. They are raw, even when, as in the case of Pavlo Arie’s Diary of Survival of a Civilian Urbanite in Conditions of War, their author makes a concerted effort to avoid the mindset and language of panic and anger.
The choice of language is usually Ukrainian. In the years following the Maidan uprising, Ukrainian was embraced enthusiastically and wholeheartedly by most inhabitants of Ukraine, regardless of nationality, and by virtually all people of culture. To speak Ukrainian in Ukraine, Europe, or anywhere else today is to make a statement. It is a badge of pride and honor, an opportunity to declare one’s loyalties. It is an expression of a deep emotional tie to the land of one’s birth. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy began his time in office speaking primarily in Russian, in part because his Ukrainian was noticeably weak. That changed quickly once the war began. Very soon thereafter he would resort to the language of the enemy only when seeking to reach out to, and communicate directly with, the populace of Russia.
Dual-language individuals who, in the past, would surely have switched to Russian out of courtesy, ease, or need depending upon the capabilities of their interlocutor, now might not make that shift. They may seek a third language to share if Ukrainian isn’t accessible to all.
Writers like Kurochkin and Vorozhbyt, who gained international fame as “Russian” or “Russian-language” playwrights, now work exclusively in Ukrainian. Vorozhbyt has famously said time and again that “letters are not to blame” for the crimes that Russia has committed against Ukraine. Yet I hardly know a Ukrainian writer who has not bristled, at least internally, when confronted with the need to express themselves in Russian.
The battle of language and expression is both the theme and the territory of Tetiana Kytsenko’s Call Things by Their Names. Significantly, she identifies her work as a “war-ning,” a cautionary tale about the dangers of language, words, labels, and names. “Of course,” Kytsenko writes, “everyone in Ukraine will understand Russian. But will a Russian understand anything here?”
“By the way,” she concludes, “about names: I’ve noticed one interesting nuance. It’s not so recognizable in everyday life, because I speak both Ukrainian and Russian. But when corresponding in English, I have noticed feeling irritation when foreign colleagues address me not as Tetiana, but rather by using the Russian version. My dear friends, Tatiana is something else entirely. The difference of one letter is enough to contain an entire worldview.”
Of the twenty texts in this collection only four employ Russian in part or whole. But only one of those authors, Vitaliy Chenskiy in Robinson, seems to have made his choice rather casually. In A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War, Parts I and II, Olena Astaseva occasionally addresses Russian-speaking friends directly or indirectly, and her choice, like that of President Zelenskiy after the advent of the war, is most likely dictated by her desire to communicate her pained thoughts to those Russians who refuse to believe there is a war going on, or that the Russian army has engaged in any aggressive or murderous acts.
Ihor Bilyts made a unique linguistic choice in his short piece entitled The Russian Soldier. As if an ironic response to Vorozhbyt’s claim that “letters are not to blame,” he writes the entire piece in Russian words, but spells them using Ukrainian letters. Most likely this is merely a nod to realism since all the characters are Russians in Russia, and they, of course, would speak only Russian. But by using the Ukrainian alphabet to spell the words they speak, Bilyts not only puts distance between the characters, himself, and, presumably, the reader, but he actually, to an extent, “destroys” the Russian he uses. It looks silly, it looks foreign, and it looks helpless dressed in those Ukrainian letters. Such nuances are lost in translation, of course, but it is significant and interesting to know what is taking place on micro-levels.
Finally among the four that employ Russian to certain degrees, there is Olena Hapieieva’s In the Bowels of the Earth, a linguistically, structurally and narratively chaotic piece.
The chaos, naturally, is an authorial choice. In this, one of the longer pieces of the collection, Hapieieva observes a large number of adults, children, family members, and strangers in a basement bomb shelter during an air raid. They are thrown together unnaturally and temporarily, but with significant consequences, at least in the short term. They have no choice but to deal with neighbors sitting or lying foot-to-shoulder with them, people they most likely would not choose to spend time with under normal circumstances. Some of them speak Russian, most speak Ukrainian, while the switching back and forth between languages tends to be jarring and unsettling.
One cannot help but feel suspicions arise when Russian is introduced into the narrative. Again, there is no way to approximate in English the full effect of the linguistic play, and so, as translator, I added a few stage directions to let anyone encountering the text know that it contains shifts in dynamics.
Hapieieva also plays visually with a kind of poetic structure by centering all of the lines on the page. This is no haphazard choice on her part; I have translated other of her works that are written in the same way. It is clearly a part of her aesthetic vision. And, although most of the work is written with the usual character identifications at the beginning of each line, Hapieieva will occasionally drop the identifiers and leave several consecutive lines of free-standing speech, the nameless and faceless voices that also inhabit this cramped, noisy, claustrophobic territory.
In Flowering, Olha Maciupa incorporates two poems into a free-flowing narrative that wanders carefully among memory, dream, history, and biography. There is, hiding behind her resilience, a sense of doom and helplessness. “Trees are blooming,” she writes. “Cherries, apricots, apple trees. Magnolias are blooming and for the first time in my life I can’t enjoy flowering. My time has stopped.”
Other authors, like Andriy Bondarenko in Survivor’s Syndrome, and Anastasiia Kosodii in How to Talk to the Dead, do more than merely hint at poetic structures; they place their texts firmly in a poetic framework.
Bondarenko unleashes a long whiplash assault of words in this, the second-longest of these texts, chasing words and meanings up one side of his consciousness and down the other.
What kind of world
is this? This is a world of
war. And what is war?
It is something that cannot
be. Ever. But it is. How can
that be? It cannot be. We live
in a world that cannot be.
What could not happen has
happened. The unspeakable
has happened, the unreal
has happened.
Are we alive at all,
we who survived?
War begets denial and repudiation at every turn. Life is not life. Reality is not real.
Where are we? Our places
and spaces have been
replaced, spread out,
confused. Train stations
function, but they are no
longer train stations. Cafés
function, but they’re not
cafés. People sit and drink,
but that is no longer
drinking.
Everything in a time of war is a negation of itself. The text begins at “The End” and works and wanders its way back to “The Beginning.” But in neither place (for “all places have been replaced”) will the narrator ever recognize himself again. Never again shall the twain of personality meet.
Bondarenko here is not interested in the pain he may feel, or the insults and humiliations he may have been subjected to. As one would expect in a poetic work, he takes a stance above the fray of the world he observes and seeks to make sense of the irreconcilable paradoxes that have invaded every aspect of his waking and thinking life. Or, as he puts it in reference to deciphering what the future may be like, “We must learn this from / zero, from scratch, from the / emptiness of the day’s / eternal gloom.”
Kosodii’s How to Talk to the Dead is one of just three texts written when the war was no longer new (the others being Kateryna Penkova’s TDP [Temporarilyy Displaced Persons] and Maksym Kurochkin’s Three Attempts to Improve Daily Life). One senses that in the opening segment, a kind of world-weary journalistic observation that blankly describes witnessed atrocities. There is none of the shock and surprise expressed in texts written in the early days of the war, none of the hurt of being misunderstood or misconstrued. These are words written long after the murderous blow of the massacres in Bucha, Irpin, or Mariupol had come and gone from the world’s newscasts. They are words full of a heavy, impenetrable, unwanted knowledge of life. One short paragraph describing a memory brings forth the stunning, unforgettable phrase that a quoted character utters about the dead: “They died so badly. I, at least, will talk to them.”
Inspired by this utterance from a man who has taken to digging up dead, discarded bodies, Kosodii’s narrator slips into a reverie of real or imagined snippets of memory. It doesn’t matter to whom the images belong — the dead or the living — they are still ways of reclaiming lost life. The brief, hard-hitting piece concludes with some stray thoughts about, and strategies for, the future, perhaps landing not far from territory tilled by Bondarenko in Survivor’s Syndrome: “There will be,” Kosodii writes, “such words as have never been.”
How to Talk to the Dead was written specifically for a triumphant evening of readings held 24 June 2022 at the future home of the Theater of Playwrights, a semi-basement hall in the historical Podil neighborhood of Kyiv. Maksym Kurochkin, like most of his countrymen aged 18 to 60, had laid aside his laptop and had taken up the tools of war to defend his native land. He was wounded in early June and sent home to Kyiv for three weeks of rest and recovery.
Literally one night before heading back to active service, he gathered a full house of colleagues and friends to hear writers and performers deliver texts written in the previous days and hours. Kurochkin declined to call this the theater’s opening event, insisting instead that it was merely an opportunity to mark the beginning of the fifth month of war.
Also penned specifically for that late June evening was Penkova’s TDP. Here we sense the numbing effect the war has had on the narrator, someone, most likely, quite similar to Penkova, who helps refugees find temporary places to stay. Tragedy is left far beyond the edge of the page. Nobody wastes time or breath on complaints or tears. A man from the godforsaken hellhole that once was the city of Mariupol only states his son needs to give a DNA sample as they search
for his missing mother. What could possibly have caused a mother in Mariupol to have gone missing? Another needs a first-floor room because he is on crutches. A family of four with three cats and a Chihuahua is simply making a “hasty departure.” The horror of the tragic details behind each of these vignettes is obvious to anyone in the know. Those who know it like Penkova don’t need to spell it out.
Following a reading of several of these texts by the Shipley Players in West Yorkshire, U.K., director Ged Quayle wrote, “That was amazing. That was truly genuinely amazing. Laughs were heard, despite the themes. Tears were shed” (Quayle). The comment about tears needs no justification.
It is the reference to laughter that, perhaps requires some attention, for, indeed, humor is a frequent companion in most of the pieces, no matter how implacable they may be.
Natalka Vorozhbyt, whose dark, hard-hitting film Bad Roads was the Ukrainian nominee for the 2022 Academy Awards, is famed for her sardonic, sometimes challenging humor. That is evident in the three segments of her Three Rendezvous, written expressly for this collection. But don’t expect Vorozhbyt ever to make you laugh without making you cringe at the same time. The first segment shows us a clumsily humorous attempt at online sex between two lovers separated by war, but the ending appears to be anything but funny. The second presents a café-based conversation between two men in Kyiv, one of whom still worries about the behavior of his former wife, who escaped to Munich. The brief final vignette, basically written as a screenplay, leaves a curious Austrian man shaken out of his romantic reveries when he sees the lengths a mysterious Ukrainian woman will go to dishonor a monument to a Russian soldier.
Lena Lagushonkova’s humor in A Topol-M Rocket Fired at a Cat Named Brooch is somewhere to the lighter side of Vorozhbyt’s, but still tends to be several shades of black. “The rats here don’t howl,” she writes, “they’re local.” Or, “A rocket lands in the neighboring yard. It did not land there on purpose, it was shot down. But it’s unpleasant all the same.”
Perhaps the most iconic moment in Lagushonkova’s text is her claim, “I do not want Russian cats to suffer.” No matter what evil fate she might wish upon the invaders, that does not apply to their furry domestic friends.
Animals in general, and cats in specific, are frequent visitors in many of the texts in this collection. You will remember the displaced family in Penkova’s Temporarily Displaced Persons who are transporting three cats and a dog. Animals are, in hellish moments, a connection to warmth, comfort, and affection. I think it is proper, and even necessary, to reveal that Natalia Bratus, a co-translator on 15 of the Ukrainian- language texts published here, arrived in my town as a refugee from Ukraine with her daughter, grandson, a large, inscrutable and magisterial cat named Basia, and a splendid, high-strung German shepherd named Cora. The five of them make a cohesive family unit, and there is something very Ukrainian in that, something I see cropping up in many of the texts here. A large part of Topol-M revolves around a social media discussion involving numerous people in various countries trying to help save a cat that was abandoned by its family in the city of Hostomel in the early days of the war.
Oksana Grytsenko’s The Peed-upon Armored Personnel Carrier strikes me as an example of national humor that could mark her as a descendant of Nikolai Gogol, at least in his early career. Personnel Carrier is virtually a classical, narrative short story. Its details are marvelous and often unexpected. Its characters, though none stand out alone, are portrayed vividly, usually by just a few words or actions, including the one mentioned in the title. There is a loving irony to this tale that suggests if the author wanted to write a wicked satire taking these people and their village down, she could do so easily. But it is love and affection that predominate in the gentle barbs she throws their way. “Putin’s a zero, Zelenskiy’s a hero” indeed!
“I can’t digest this war between Ukraine and Russia,” writes Julia Gonchar in A Sense of War, a terse diary-like piece that slips into dramatic dialogues, memories, and dreams from time to time. She delivers a plethora of minute details — memories of mango and lavender tea that don’t satisfy her as usual; the skulls of long-dead divers; fears of catching toxoplasmosis from cats; on to an actual, historical incident, the receipt of a text message from one of the writers represented in this collection: “. . . playwright Pasha Arie in our Theater of Playwrights group chat: russians (so written in the original — JFr) will attack Kyiv at 03, be at 02 at the shelter.” Each of her observations is capable of painting larger, intricate pictures that may sound benign enough on the surface, but which, when taken together, become a tale of pain that is inextricably intertwined with sex, fear, and terror: “I push Seriozhka away, angry at him for touching my breasts, my genitals. I’m sick, I’m in pain, I want to scream.
I know we may be apart for a long time. Happiness is stolen. […] So war it is! Joy is stolen. It is my Devi Sorrow.”
Pavel Arie, or Pavlo, as he calls himself, gives us the longest, most sustained narrative of all the texts. His Diary of Survival of a Civilian Urbanite in Conditions of War overlaps in form with many of them. Like Lagushonkova, he accompanies his text with photos. Like Astaseva, he specifically mentions the notion of a tale concocted in time of or in conditions of war. The diary form, with actual dates setting segments apart from one another, is used in at least half a dozen texts. Arie, like many, records the shock of those first hours of war.
But Diary of Survival stands apart for its reticence to be swept up in the twin madnesses of war and hatred. Not that they don’t touch the author, they do. But Arie — whom we may equate with his narrator, for he assured me his text is factual — is skeptical of everything military, everything regimental, everything collective. He bristles against the limitations that his government and neighbors would force upon him, and he retreats farther and farther into his own personal world. He readily admits someone may not like what he says, but he stands firm. His purpose is to establish his own personal place in this mess that is war. He doesn’t waste much time apologizing for that.
Planting an Apple Tree by Iryna Harets and My Tara by Liudmyla Tymoshenko both begin from afar before bringing narratives to the topic of war, the former being an almost bucolic tale of gardening, the latter – a meandering mix of history and memory.
The Tara of My Tara refers in name to the O’Hara family estate in Gone with the Wind, but in spirit to the home in which Tymoshenko’s narrator grew up. The direct connection is made in the first paragraph where Tymoshenko’s narrator recalls reading the story of Gerald O’Hara’s funeral in Margaret Mitchell’s novel (in Russian translation). Specifically memorable are Grandma’s words as she tells Scarlett about “the sound of the end.” These words will come back to give meaning to the narrator’s own life experience, which is spread out over several decades in multiple countries. But from there, the story — which is more a biographical narrative than actual short story — moves on to tell the history of the narrator’s life within range of potential nuclear war with a father who served in the Soviet Union’s Strategic Rocket Forces, eating dumplings and cherries with her grandmother in Ukrainian summers, and retelling the tale of a grandfather whose extreme sexual arousal (and, perhaps, a bit too much moonshine) brought about the heart attack that killed him.
Tymoshenko quickly and abruptly pulls together the different lines of the family legends in the decidedly unsentimental final three paragraphs. The sound of Russian bombs ripping through the roof of her childhood home “was the sound of my Tara’s windows being hammered shut with boards and plywood. It was the true sound of the end, for which I was not prepared.”
Harets’s Planting an Apple Tree also begins its journey from afar, but quickly orbits in close to the topic of war. The two topics — gardening and witnessing war — exist side-by-side uneasily in paragraphs that tend to butt up against one another more than flowing from one to the next. The jarring, nauseating, vile realities of war are entirely contrary to everything that goes into and comes out of nurturing a tree that will provide beauty and nutrition.
“Today, again, diarrhea and nausea,” Harets writes. “I just went to vomit. But what about the apple trees? Aha, we must not let the roots dry out.”
I held up the completion of this collection for several months, waiting for the final two texts to come in. One never did. Yevhen Markovskiy had every intention of writing a contribution, insisting several times that he would deliver in a week or ten days. But his particular position in time and space proved to be too big an obstruction. He was trapped in Kherson, a city that the Russians overran and seized in the first week of the war. The Russian-installed administration sought to make an example of the city, kidnapping and disappearing prominent professionals, intellectuals, and cultural figures even as the local population — at least early on — protested openly on the streets. Internet was frequently cut off, telephone lines worked sporadically, and life- sustaining supplies were scarce — in short, the city was thrust into a siege mode. I do not know the nature of Markovskiy’s activities over the first half-year of war, and I did not ask. He responded to my notes irregularly, often promising to send a text soon — “I want to write something, and I will!” I was always more than satisfied to hear he was alive and well.
In the absence of a text from Markovskiy we hoped to put together a text based on posts he was making in a chat group shared among the writers of the Theater of Playwrights, but, for reasons unknown, those posts were deleted before we could begin working with them. As such, we have honored Markovskiy as one of the founding members of ToP with a dedicated page in place of the text he hoped to write.
The final text is the last one I received. Maksym Kurochkin, like Markovskiy, was too fully engaged in war to write for the longest time. Kurochkin spent the first nine months of the war traveling among various hot spots as a member of Ukraine’s volunteer territorial defense unit. For months he would write, “I am almost done!” or “I have just one page left!” or “I will send by this evening, or, at least, during the night!” As fate would have it, Maksym delivered his contribution precisely on the day in mid-November that Ukraine liberated the city of Kherson from the Russian occupation.
Kurochkin’s Three Attempts to Improve Daily Life, like Oksana Grytsenko’s The Peed-upon Armored Personnel Carrier, is essentially a finely honed short story. At the same time it is, like so many other texts collected here, a personal and true confession. Its wistful humor and occasional lyrical moments are tinged with foreboding. Its deeply tragic aspects are understated and brief almost to the point of vanishing altogether. Its underlying currents of hope are colored with disillusionment. As hard as it is to believe under the circumstances, Kurochkin almost entirely erased the person who experienced these events, leaving behind only the laconic, crystal clear observations of a dry-eyed author bearing witness to truth.
LOOSE ENDS
Almost all of the texts contained herein were premiered in readings and staged readings as part of the greater Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings project. As of this writing, 265 days into the war, we have organized 285 performances of 110 texts by 45 writers in 27 countries and 19 languages. I stress the fact that “we” have conducted this project, for it truly was a global effort, involving, primarily, William Wong in Hong Kong; Elli Salo in Finland; Andreas Merz-Raykov and P.J. Escobio in Germany; Dominique Dolmieu and Ian Stephens in France; Raluca Radulescu in Romania; Romana Storkova-Maliti in Slovakia and the Czech Republic; Yevgenia Shermeneva in Latvia; Bryan Brown, Neil McPherson, and Steve Hennessey in the United Kingdom; Alex Borovenskiy in Ukraine; Leslie Baker in Canada; and Robert Matney, Carey Perloff, Mark Seldis, Anya Zicer, Vladimir Rovinsky, Lisa Channer, Igor Golyak, Kate Bredeson, Amy Pinto, and Philip Arnoult in the United States. And that is only a list of individuals who participated multiple times, sometimes in multiple countries.
Dominique Dolmieu introduced me to Nina Kamberos, founder of Laertes Press, the finest, most detailed, and sensitive publisher I have ever encountered. She became a true collaborating partner as we put this edition together. I am deeply indebted to the professional team of editors and proofreaders, Valerie Price and Margaretta Yarborough, who I am certain can find improper needles in haystacks. My hat is humbly off to them. Maxine Mills worked wonders with the graphic design, bringing some of these unorthodox texts to life on the page in ways I never imagined.
Translations for the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings were done by over 40 individuals. The vast majority of English-language translations were done by John Farndon of London, and by me, often with the aid of Natalia Bratus.
Farndon, a well-known writer and translator, the author of over 1,000 books, translated two of the works in this collection (one with the aid of Evgenia Kovryga). I could not possibly have handled the workload of the worldwide project without John’s enthusiasm and tireless work ethic, to say nothing of his talent. I am very happy to represent his work in this collection. I mentioned Natalia Bratus earlier in this introduction, and I would like to add that her stoic character, her readiness to work, and her attention to detail made every moment of work that we shared a real creative joy.
Throughout this anthology I referred to the 2020 decree issued by the Ukrainian government to standardize transliteration of Ukrainian into English (Transliteration). However, I did stray from it when common sense and/or accepted practice interfered. I allowed each writer to choose how their names would be spelled in English, regardless of “rules.” Some are already known in the West under certain spellings, others use pseudonyms that require a loose approach, some didn’t see themselves in the versions that the standardized table produced, others had quirky preferences that fell outside the mainstream (Natalia Vorozhbyt prefers to be identified via the diminutive Natalka). We discussed all the possibilities, and I deferred to each writer’s wishes in all instances.
Some words and concepts that arise or recur throughout the texts require explanation.
Banderites is the term used to describe Ukrainians who followed, or currently revere, the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera (1909–1959). He was a controversial figure, hailed as a hero by many in Ukraine, and labeled a terrorist by the Soviet state. He was executed extrajudicially in Germany, probably by poisoning, and his legacy is still used today in Russia as “proof” that Ukrainians are fascist nationalists at heart.
Ruscist, Ruscists, or Ruscism are forms of a word that arose in connection with several wars involving Russia in recent decades — Chechnya in 1995, Georgia in 2008, and Ukraine beginning in 2014. As can be seen, or heard when pronouncing (rAshist), it is a combination of the words Russia or Russian, and fascist or fascism.
The letter Z is occasionally used in unexpected ways for a specific reason. The Russians chose to use the letter as a symbol in many places, often on their tanks or personnel carriers, ostensibly to identify Ukrainian President Zelenskiy as their primary target. However, many around the world, and certainly in Ukraine, quickly pointed out that the symbol looked like half of a swastika. The irony of an army invading with the expressed purpose of defeating Nazis, while employing a Nazi-like symbol, was lost on few. Ukrainian writers picked up on that, giving us the rather satisfying derogatory combination of “PuZin” (Putin).
As a pejorative reference to Russians, the term Goat or Goats has a long history in Ukraine. Some believe it was because of the long, pointy beards that Russians traditionally wore in the very old days, as opposed to the dashing mustaches that Ukrainians tended to sport. Also met are references to Russians as Orcs, and Russia as Mordor, both drawn from J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy novels.
FSB/KGB are terms referring to Russian agencies of state security. The FSB (Federal Bureau of Security) is contemporary Russia’s successor to the better-known KGB (Committee for State Security).
In the end I rejected a request from Maksym Kurochkin to write all words referring to Putin, Russia in any form (Russia, Mordor, etc.), and Russians in any form (Russians, Ruscists, Goats, Orcs, etc.) with lower-case letters. I felt the emotionally charged device drew too much attention from the substance of the texts, and, frankly, often made them look like they were filled with typos. I hope Maksym and the other writers will accept my apologies for making this decision. My purpose was solely to present their work in the strongest possible form.
At the end of March 2022, I spent an hour talking on Zoom with Natalia Korczakowska, a director who runs the Studio Teatrgaleria in Warsaw. She read several of the texts presented here and was impressed by the fact that all of them imply new ways of directorial interpretation. She saw in them nothing of the old-fashioned narrative drama that we are so accustomed to. In an email, she wrote that the texts “are realistic in a new way. They will inspire new theater forms of expression which we desperately need in our time of constant change.” During our Zoom, she added, “They might lend themselves to street theater.” Korczakowska said that not yet knowing that Anya Zicer would stage many of them outdoors in the woods in June 2022 at the JetLag Festival in upstate New York, or that in September 2022 Bogdan Saratean would place actors on residential streets of Sibiu, Romania, to surprise passersby with unexpected readings of texts about war, fear, anger, and hope. Nor did she yet know about the series of videos, often quite experimental, that were put together by various artists in numerous theaters in Germany from May to July, 2022. Although it had already been completed by the time we talked, she did not yet know the innovative short made by Myro Klochko and Anatolii Tatarenko of Andriy Bondarenko’s Peace and Tranquility (not included in this collection, but available on YouTube). It would be a prize winner at the Kinosaray film festival in Kyiv in July.
Maksym Kurochkin hinted at the different nature, the newness, that these texts would possess when he refused to give me access to anything written before the war began.
Obviously, he knew that texts written before the invasion might run the risk of responding inadequately to Ukraine’s new circumstances. But Kurochkin had more than that in mind. He understood that the utterly extreme circumstances would require writers to seek out new ways through which to express their thoughts, observations, and emotions. That is what he meant when he wrote that he wanted to “retain control of the discourse.” And he emphasized what he meant when he added, “That is important.”
It is also important to remember that all of these texts were written by writers of a theater that, officially, does not even exist yet. That, however, does not indicate an absence of activity. As early as December 2021 there was a collaboration with the Münchner Kammerspiele, while after the beginning of the war numerous venues stepped in to offer support in the spring and summer of 2022. These included the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin, the Royal Court Theatre in London, the Vienna Schauspielhaus in Austria, Teatr Dramatyczny in Warsaw, the film school in Łódź, the Polish Radio Theatre, and several other theaters in Poland and Germany. Still it was largely thanks to Maksym Kurochkin’s insistence, and the generosity of Philip Arnoult’s CITD and Noah Birksted- Breen’s Sputnik Theatre, that these writers came together to pool their talents and professional resources to begin writing a multitude of texts that would begin defining the Theater of Playwrights before it even opened. The reading held on 24 June at the theater’s future space in Kyiv was another step in building the foundation of a theater that was still slowly coming into being. Kurochkin himself declared adamantly that this was not an opening, not a starting point. That would happen, he stated, only after Ukraine had declared victory in the war with Russia.
And yet, the texts of this not-yet-existing theater have already struck a chord all over the world. Some have been read or presented 40 or 50 times. Audiences have attended readings in nine venues in France, 12 in Finland, 19 in Romania, 36 in England, 42 in Germany, and over 65 in the United States.
This book will be published before the Theater of Playwrights has had a chance to open its doors officially.
What that implies is that this book is a sign of promise, of hope, of commitment, and even obligation. If anyone ever wants to know what Ukrainians were thinking, what they were experiencing, what fears and aspirations they harbored when Russia bizarrely chose to invade it in the late winter of 2022, this book holds answers. This book will do these 20 writers proud. When their people and their culture were under attack, when some dared claim they didn’t even exist, they stood proud and laid down in their own words the parameters of a new Ukraine.
— John Freedman
Chania, Crete
November, 2022
Sources
Allesandro Achilli, “Four Decades of Modernist Revolution: Creating a New Subjectivity in Ukrainian Poetry, 1900–1940,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 38, No. 1–2 (2021): 111. https://d3sa9iy9kp2h5k.cloudfront.net/uploads/files/HUS38-1_2-achilli.pdf. Accessed c. 2022.
Uilleam Blacker, “What Ukrainian Literature Has Always Understood about Russia,” The Atlantic (March 10, 2022). https:// www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/03/ukrainian-books-resistance-russia-imperialism/626977 . Accessed 14 November 2022.
Andrew Evans, “Who Really Owns Borscht?” BBC website (October 16, 2019). https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20191014-who-really-owns-borsch. Accessed 14 November 2022.
Jason Farago, “Culture War, with Bombs and Missiles,” The New York Times (July 18, 2022): A1. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/28/arts/design/ukraine-war-art-culture.html. Accessed 14 November 2022.
George G. Grabowicz, “Taras Shevchenko: The Making of the National Poet,” Revue des études slaves LXXXV-3 (2014), 10 and 15. https://journals.openedition.org/res/398?lang=en. Accessed 14 November 2022.
Natalia Korczakowska, email of 26 March 2022.
Maksym Kurochkin (here and later), texts exchanged on Facebook Messenger, March to October 2022.
Kelly Nestruck, “The Battle for Bulgakov’s Nationality,” The Guardian (11 December 2008): https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2008/dec/11/mikhail-bulgakov-ukraine-russia. Accessed 14 November 2022.
“On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” Official Kremlin website, 12 July 2021. The official Kremlin translation into English is posted at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Russians_and_Ukrainians. Both sites accessed 14 November 2022.
Kvitka Perehinets, “Executed Renaissance: The Erasure of Ukrainian Cultural Heritage in the Times of the Soviet Union,” Retrospect Journal. https://retrospectjournal.com/2020/11/22/executed-renaissance-the-erasure-of-ukrainian-cultural-heritage-in-the-times-of-the-soviet-union/. Accessed 14 November 2022.
Ged Quayle, Facebook post 31 July 2022: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10221026949567715&set=a.1124124707605. Accessed 14 November 2022.
Transliteration table: https://unstats.un.org/unsd/geoinfo/ungegn/docs/26th-gegn-docs/WP/WP21_Roma_system_Ukraine%20_engl._.pdf.