Crooked Runs the World
Translated by Oksana Lutsyshyna
Every day at 9am, my country becomes still. This is the minute we stop no matter where we are, and remember all those who died during this war of russia against Ukraine. Then we unfreeze again and return to our everyday hustle. We keep working round the clock because if you are not in the actual war zone, not at the frontlines, you’d be ashamed to just drop the ball and do nothing. It may seem to some that, at times of war, the society will assume the fetal position and revert to a cocoon state, like a butterfly waiting for a magical transformation. But nothing of the kind has happened in Ukraine. Throughout these three years of war, we are still flapping our wings; perhaps a bit frantically, but quickly and assertively.
For instance, I implemented my most ambitious creative projects in the course of the last two years: a large-scale musical, a poetry festival with sixty events, and several concert programs. Our theatre performances are sold out months in advance. In our cities, many new bookstores, art galleries, and culture venues have sprung up. My publishing house, for instance, published a record number of books and opened six new bookstores, all with cafes in them. We do not forget about the war. It’s impossible. Especially when you are on your way to work and are met by a military funeral procession. This happens almost every day. And you kneel and pay your respects to the fallen warriors who gave their lives for you and your son.
My ten-year-old son is the child of war. As is my mother, and so was my father, who did not survive the first year of the full-scale invasion. But I am not. I remember how, in my soviet childhood, we were constantly told that we, children, didn’t have to experience war thanks to the soviet union having prevailed over the Nazis. We had propaganda lessons, and knew that Americans tested nuclear weapons in Nevada, but we, we were peaceful people, though not without our own nukes, just like in the old russian song “Our war train is standing on the spare tracks.” Only at the end of the 1980s did we start to understand that we were actually russified and sovietized Ukrainians, whom russian occupiers tried to deprive of national identity though torture; that we as people paid for our independence with four million lives during the Holodomor, orchestrated by russia; that our elites and all the educated and property-owning class were killed or taken out to the russian concentration and labor camps; and that today’s intelligentsia are the descendants of those who accidentally survived. We started to understand all this when the prison of nations, the soviet union, began to fall apart like a dilapidated house.
I was a student in the early 1990s. The blinding sun of independence shone on my generation. We dealt with chaos, criminal gangs, and poverty, but, at the same time, we experienced the joy of not being under soviet occupation any longer. That’s when I understood that we all lived in a world the foundation of which was a total lie. Our elders started to cautiously tell us about our forcibly relocated or killed family members, about the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, about the Ukrainian cultural underground. And when the archives were opened, we saw the face of our destroyed culture─the executed literature, music, and theatre. A Ukrainian culture worker had the right to exist under the regime only if they became a KGB agent or an informer. Even after Stalin’s times, and after the return from the camps, our people of culture were not granted the right to manifest their own identity. It is noteworthy that russia would attempt to destroy us as soon as it could reach for us: in the Ukrainian east, after the fall of the Ukrainian People’s Republic in 1918; in the west, in 1939; after the soviet occupation came the Nazi one, and in 1944 the Soviets returned again.
What did the russian soldiers do when they invaded Ukrainian cities in February and March of 2022? The same thing: they killed, tortured, raped, and they did it first to those who did not hide their pro-Ukrainian position. When we saw what bloody and cynical crimes russians had committed in the occupied territories, we were speechless. This is one of the scariest aspects of this war. We still don’t know the whole truth about Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities that are still under occupation. We have endured so much pain and loss throughout these three years of the full-scale invasion that it would be enough for three generations.
I don’t know whether there is anyone in Ukraine right now who did not lose someone close to them. And not only the military lost their lives. Volodymyr Vakulenko, a children’s book writer and one of the authors of my publishing house, was cruelly tortured, shot and killed in Izyum. He was identified only after the exhumation of the bodies of the executed. They were killed and thrown into the ravines and pits. After the de-occupation of his native town of Kapytolivka, where Volodymyr lived with his 16 year old son, his diary was unearthed in the garden by our writer and friend Viktoria Amelina. The next year, Victoria herself was killed during a shelling in Kramatorsk, where she had gone with a delegation of Colombian writers. She took them there because she was involved in documenting the eye-witness accounts of war crimes committed by the russians.
russia invaded my country with tanks and armored vehicles, and my country lives under the terror of constant shelling. Every day, people die under the bombardments in Sumy, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhya, Khiv, Dnipro, Odesa, and Kryvyi Rih. Our big cities and small towns deal with the air raid alarms daily, our children sit in the underground shelters, our adults are clearing rubble to extract the dead and the living from under the ruins, our older citizens are making camouflage nets, our businesses are almost exclusively all-female now, our men are in the army or volunteering, our relatives, friends, and colleagues are at the frontlines, we bury people our age and younger, our women lose their beloved, husbands, sons and daughters, our cities in the east and in the south are being erased from the face of the earth, our infrastructure is attacked to make us live without electricity and heat. They try to take our lives away and tell us, in Trump’s voice, that it was us who attacked russia. Crookedness runs the world.
We can somehow stand up to the aggression and cruelty thrown against us, clench our teeth and fight. But the shameless lies thrown into the information space shut us down and exhaust us. The lies destroy everything and turn the world upside down. In all honesty, we have understood long ago that we have no one to count upon but ourselves. To break the rules, disregard the agreements and ignore the subjectivity of smaller nations has become the new norm of our times. I have no idea whether the world as we know it will prevail in times of such turbulence.
Both the russian and the American president have a very inadequate idea about the character of our country. For some reason, Trump keeps equating our country with Volodymyr Zelensky, but avoids using the word “Ukraine.” But Trump shouldn’t, really. Trump’s idea of Ukraine doesn’t differ much from putin’s idea of it. They imagine that Ukraine has a puppet president, a boy who can be punished for bad behavior. But Ukraine, whose agency these two question, is in reality a country of relentless independence. Urging Ukrainians to run elections in times of war reminds us of a Donetsk or Luhansk “people’s republics,” unacknowledged entities created out of the occupied Ukrainian territories that russia grabbed in 2014. Such elections will not be legitimate, no matter what candidate wins. Therefore, we will not be pushed to do this.
We know that if we don’t hold our country, it will become a concentration camp for all of us who do culture work, with torture chambers all over Ukraine. And if we were to fall, then nothing would hold them from moving ahead, erasing one country after another. Only because our country is not the biggest in size, putin and Trump assume that it might as well be a geopolitical mistake. We all understand that putin does not want peace negotiations, he wants Ukraine’s capitulation.
After WWII, the western world has been persistently building a system of security balances and streamlining moral values and ideals. In some places, it has developed safeguards against tyranny and dictatorship, cared for tolerance, and now everything is being severely destabilized. This happens because the advances of technology are more and more used as instruments of propaganda and reducing people to biomass, persons lacking critical thinking. Simply because thinking can be painful.
And if you are reading this, I am asking you to understand that Ukrainians will sooner die than kneel. We only kneel for our fallen warriors.
Editor’s Note:
Since the advent of the war, it has become customary among some Ukrainians to refuse capitalization when referring to russia. This practice is an act of grammatical rebellion, representing the treacherousness of the occupying forces, whom many Ukrainians feel are unworthy of the proper status a capital letter confers. We might also consider this a magical practice; when people are in mortal danger, they often resort to folklore, to the primal, to incantations and ancient beliefs. Ukrainian war poetry often calls upon the folkloric and primal, calling gods to punish the wrongdoers. Refusing the capital letter is a symbolic "undoing."
Photo by Nastya Telikova
Poet, activist, and publisher Marjana Savka lives in Lviv. She has published twelve books of poetry and children’s literature. As editor-in-chief of Old Lion Publishers, she has brought out the work of Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow, Jorge Luis Borges, Stephen Hawking, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Sofia Andrukhoych. Savka is also a member of the Center for the Study of Young Adult and Children’s Literature. Her own work has been translated into half a dozen languages, including English, Russian, and Latvian. In 2003, she was awarded the Stus Prize for poetry.
Photo by Valentyna Schneider
Oksana Lutsyshyna is a Ukrainian writer, translator, and poet, and author of three novels, a collection of short stories, and five books of poetry, the latest published in English with Arrowsmith (Persephone Blues, 2019). For her latest novel, Ivan and Phoebe, published in English by Deep Vellum Publishing, she was awarded the Lviv City of Literature UNESCO Prize (2020) and the Taras Shevchenko National Award in fiction (2021). She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, and is currently an Associate Professor of Instruction in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches the Ukrainian language and Eastern European literatures in translation.