Life on the Exhale: Victoria Amelina
Justice
Victoria’s Book of Poetry, Published by Borderland Publishing House
The last inhale was Canada, a good job in the IT industry, studying creative writing in the US, literary residencies in the West, vacations with her family in Egypt, the safety of her son Andriy in Poland. Vika crosses the Polish-Ukrainian border on February 26, 2022. In the evening she reaches Lviv, where her mother, a history teacher, lives. As soon as the Kyiv region is liberated, she moves east. On the train to Kyiv, she meets three women writers, as well as activists from the Revolution of Dignity, human rights fighters, and journalists Larisa Denysenko, Svetlana Povalayeva and Olena Stiazhkina. They are united by a commonality of fate, a Ukrainian sisterhood awakened by the Maidan and maturing in resistance to the "Russkiy mir." Its mystery is captured by Vika in a poem written a month before her death. Even then, on the train to Kyiv, they had all the air in their lungs, aware that all that remained was to exhale: ...testify on the exhale... go on the exhale to our own. Still in early April, Vika enrolls in war crimes documentation training and soon joins the Truth Hounds team, a Ukrainian civic organization tracking down the truth about violations of international law. She becomes a field documentarian, right on the front line, right after the crimes are committed. She lives life at full exhale.
This is how I met her. In wartime, all it takes is one meeting, just a few days of acquaintance, a conversation stretching long into the night, for a cordial bond to form, to see the other in all its brightness. She had a clarity and the kind of subtlety that on the surface seems to indicate fragility, but is in fact a symptom of indomitable strength and courage. There was a shadow of tragic stigma across her silent face. She was one of those who knows. Her stay at the Kharkiv Writers' House "Slovo" (Word) was no ordinary literary residence for her. In the 1930s, the Stalinist regime martyred more than eighty percent of its residents. For Vika, it was not just history, but the realization that her generation was joining another link in the chain of poets of the "Executed Renaissance." "Stay in Krasnogruda!" I said to her. My incantations were weak.
We both knew that I was throwing them to the wind. Sleepless, tireless in action, hospitable to the wronged, sharply angry in the face of evil, boundless in friendship, Vika was created for work in the garden of the soul. She learned the various names of love, but the war called her to the service of love bearing that one name she often uttered in conversation: justice. Initiated by Lviv-educated Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht, who introduced the concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity to the profession of international law, continuing the tradition of expanding the understanding and enforcement of justice in the face of modern forms of violence was most important to Vika.
There is a photo of Vika: in the background you can see the flag and symbols of Ukraine, she is standing on the border of the Donetsk region, upright, wearing a blue coat, with bright yellow hair flowing freely over her shoulders and chest. In my imagination, I put a scale and a sword in her hands. I see her as a priestess of the goddess Nemesis, preserving the oldest affinity with Aphrodite, dating back to the origins of Greek spirituality, erased over time by a culture seeking expression for revenge and envy. Standing for giving people exactly what was due to them, she remained amorous and watched over, ready to reach for the sword at any moment, the just balance of good and happiness.
Vika took in full lungs of air / full sails of blood / full stretchers of love. She believed that the air would be renewed, that there would still come a time when it would be possible to carefully take a breath of life. She was not destined to live to see that moment. She lived on the exhale, until the end.
carry
shoot
speak
Future
Tuesday, June 27, 2023. Bad news from Ukraine: a Russian rocket hit an RIA Pizza in Kramatorsk, full of people. Subsequent reports say thirteen people have died, including four children. Among the many injured is Victoria Amelina.
Vika should have been in France by now, on a year-long writing residency, where she intended to finish her book War and Justice. At the "Arsenal of Books" festival in Kyiv, she meets writers and journalists from Colombia. Among them is Sergio Jamarillo, former High Commissioner for Peace
in Colombia. This and other experiences of war from that region of the world allow them to accept without illusions the truth about the criminality of Putin's regime. Moved by their solidarity action "¡Aguanta Ucrania!" (Hold on, Ukraine!), targeting the lies of Russian propaganda spread throughout Latin America, Vika decides to show them more of the reality of war than the festival can offer. On Monday at dawn they leave for Kramatorsk, located 40 kilometers from the front line in Donbas. On the way, they pull up to a house from which the Russians took, tortured and shot Volodymyr Vakulenko, a writer, children's book author and father of a disabled son. Vika miraculously found the diary he had buried in the garden, which, along with the poems and her introduction, became one of the most harrowing testimonies of the war. They also visit a Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of Kharkiv.
Before the festival, her Facebook posts had come from the Kherson region, already inundated by a hydroelectric power plant dam broken by bombing. She reached Kherson to write down the testimony of the wife of murdered conductor Yuri Kerpatenko. In early June, she posted a Truth Hounds report on Russian war crimes in Kachovka on social media.
From the beginning, I did not give credence to the randomness of the tragedy in Krematorsk. The missile whose shrapnel hit Vika was a high-precision-directed Iskander ballistic missile, thermonuclear, with a range of more than a thousand kilometers, and an accuracy radius of 10 to 30 meters.
Waiting always carries a seed of hope, but the incoming news from friends in the following days clearly tried to prepare us for the worst. A miracle did not happen, and an operation in a hospital in Dnipro did not bring Vika back to life. July 1. Half the life of the one born on January 1. On the same day, two years earlier, a bill by Ukrainian parliamentarians restored the town in Donbas to
its former name of New York. In a few months, Vika boards a bus with a Lviv-New York sign to bring guests to a literary festival she is organizing. If she had survived, if she had been given the chance to live to peremoha (victory), it is not out of the question that she would have tied the second part of her life to this other New York, which, more than an overseas megalopolis, embodied the future for her.
Colombian writer Hector Abad Faciolince described the last moment of Vika's life when she was conscious: "I was sitting on the terrace of the restaurant across from her. Since alcohol was prohibited there, Victoria ordered a non-alcoholic beer. Sergio Jaramillo filled my glass with ice and something that resembled apple juice. ‘It looks like whiskey,’ she said and smiled. At that moment Iskander fell on us, hell fell from the sky. Victoria now has a home in heaven. Not in the
Christian or Muslim sense. In that immaterial heaven, the heaven of the mind, the very human heaven we call memory."
—
Vika was convinced that the future was hostage to justice. Meanwhile, the ongoing regimes and following tragedies kept Ukrainians from discovering and dealing with the truth. For too long, people were distracted from acting on what they knew. In Krasnogruda, Vika told me that the first words of Czesław Miłosz’s she remembered came from his Nobel speech: "In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot." She believed that in a room teeming with ghosts of the past, the light must be turned on. And that means confronting the covering up of history, naming and punishing the guilty, restoring dignity to the victims, working on a culture of remembering, wisely, in the spirit of Nemesis -- a goddess implacably immune to self-love. Smiling slightly, she recalled an advertisement she had seen in Kharkiv's Freedom Square: "Live in the center of the future." The developer's slogan, in Vika's imagination, evoked the shifting new center of her struggle - the future - from the despair of past wrongs. She saw the real peremoha of Ukraine not only in the protection of territory, but also, and perhaps most importantly, in the de-occupation of the future.
For the exhale-living, the question about majbutnie became essential: ...I started to see a little / "tomorrow", then - nothing, dark, she noted in her poem Word in the Dictionary [Future], dated April 14, 2022. She asks about the future, do you see it? And she answers "I see it," but, in order not to seem as gullible as "Ukrainian Suspilne Radio" to the friend with whom she walks in Kyiv,
she adds:
I'm not sure if the russians
won't hit us with iskanders now right away.
Home
In my mind’s eye I see a 15-year-old girl invited to a TV studio in Moscow. She is the winner of a Russian literature contest for young people from the former Soviet republics. She feels like a star, until a journalist throws her a question about how the Russian-speaking residents of Lviv are persecuted. She then realizes why she was really invited to the studio, and why this investment by the crumbling empire in her Russian-language school and the Russian TV seen in her home, in
internationalist youth rallies, in an amateur theater named after Pushkin, in trips to Moscow. Decades later, in an essay called “Expanding the Boundaries of Home: A Story for Us All,” Vika wrote, "They probably invested more in us than they did in the education of children in rural Russia: those who were already conquered did not need to be tempted with summer camps and excursions to the Red Square." This was an essay prepared for a seminar in Krasnogruda organized by Borderland Foundation together with the International Writing Program from University of Iowa. And Vika immediately added: "Hopefully I will have turned out to be one of the Russian Federation's worst investments."
This interview was one of the turning points of Victoria Amelina's life. Its center would begin to shift from Moscow to Kyiv. Instead of Russia's fabricated lie, an awakened awareness of who one is and a new sense of belonging. The choice of truth becomes a choice of identity. She must have realized early on that boundlessness is a virtue of imagination and sincere interpersonal relationships, but appropriated by the empire, it becomes a tool of conquest and enslavement. Soon she began to feel how difficult it is for residents of Western nation-states, advocating a world of open borders, to understand the emancipation Ukrainian woman, for whom the border with Russia becomes a survival need. The words of the Scorpions song Wind of Change sung at the time of the demolition of the Berlin Wall: The world is closing in / and did you ever think / that we could be so close, like brothers, words she knew by heart, have taken on a completely different meaning since the annexation of Crimea. Now she is much closer to Hannah Arendt, who writes in The Human Condition that what made the Greeks defend the inviolability of borders was not "respect for private property as we understand it, but the conviction that without owning a home, man could not participate in the affairs of the world, because he did not really have his own place in it."
From the spirit of Arendt's words was born the excellent musical formation of Serhiy Zhadan, Oleh Kadanov and Euhen Turchinov's "Mannerheim Line," both a metaphor for defending one's principles, and a viable line of defense against partitionist Russia, just as it was for the Finns in the 1930s. When, at Vika's invitation, they came with a concert to a festival taking place near the very front line in the Donbas, there was no more room for metaphors; poetry became reality. In turn, reality itself sought support for itself in the Ukrainian language and identity, without which the line was losing its raison d'etre. Hence the real, far from metaphorical, importance of poetry for Ukrainians. Vika came from a family with the trauma of the Holodomor and a Russification complex, and as a result, she did not inherit the Ukrainian language from her grandparents. She
had to do great inner work to free herself from the feeling of "being out of place" in her own country.
For a person thrown out of the nest of the "Russkiy mir," for an expatriate and writer in various languages, for the Ukrainian patriot and nomadic lifestyle activist, the question of home became fundamental. "This is it," she said after watching in Sejny an animated film created in Borderland by children from Ukraine and Poland. It was titled Peace, combining two meanings of the Polish word pokój (room and peace) and bringing out the interdependence of having an intimate space for living, rooted in one's own home, with releasing the need for peaceful coexistence with others. Vika is from the generation who had to reclaim their home for themselves in Ukraine, and to take up the struggle to save it, with their lives at stake. She also felt at home wherever, as a Ukrainian, she was shown help and understanding: in Prague, where she found herself just after the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in Poland, in Europe, in the United States. But solidarity with Ukraine alone was still not enough for her. The second sentence out of her mouth, after expressing her gratitude, was a question about what was happening on the Polish-Belarusian or US-Mexican borders. She felt a community of fate with migrants from every part of the world.
Home for Vika was the "homework" to be done, i.e. to start repairing the world from oneself, reviving a space of trust in one's own country, building a civil society that can claim justice, while also taking responsibility for the fate of the weakest, for the rights of minorities, and for fighting exclusion. The social activism and critical patriotism of the generation of Ukrainians, of which Vika became a leader, was combined with pronouncing out loud the truth. Living on the exhale brought with it the need to shout one's own name, to enforce the right to be oneself and to be at home, suppressed for many years: ...silence creates cracks so deep that it is hardly possible to feel at home, she wrote.
The December 2013 Maidan was a turning point for Vika to find a home in Ukraine. To go to the streets of Kyiv, we had to take the risk of trusting each other, she wrote in that essay from Krasnogruda. She expresses the most important lesson learned from the Revolution of Dignity in words that echo the universal form of establishing community: Home is not a magical, perfect place, but a place where, if you are being beaten, you can be sure that your neighbors will show up to take a stand for you. The experience of civic solidarity in Vika's homeland is followed by graffiti with the word "HOME," with the inside of the letter "O" filled with a map of Ukraine. "I'm impressed by it," she confides in an interview with Natalia Kornienko.
New York
On November 7, 2021, two New York City marathons were held for the first time in the world: first, the traditional one, for the fiftieth time, through the streets and bridges of the American metropolis; the other almost at the very front line in a small town in Donbas, where there was a war the world did not want to hear about. The first marathon ran without pacemakers, which meant that the competitors were more on their own, thus providing more excitement for observers. For the second, there was a lack of peacemakers, which the world, cowering like a hare, chose not to bring into the zone of the growing threat of armed conflict. It was accompanied by the slogan "The marathon that no one wants to run," and participation consisted of running any distance anywhere on Earth in the spirit of protest against Russia's aggression against Ukraine, and against the war turning into a marathon. More than thirty-five thousand people joined the run in the Ukrainian city of New York, more than in the city overseas, in addition to a small handful of participants on the spot. This is how Ukrainians tried to draw the world's attention to the crimes of Moscow's regime, to which the West was still selling arms at the time. For Victoria Amelina, something else mattered in the whole affair: the town itself and its inhabitants. Just a month earlier, she had organized the first New York Literary Festival there.
In Krasnogruda, Vika wanted to talk mostly about New York. She told me about a town in the hills, between Avdiivka and Bahmut, in the very eye of the cyclone of this war. Divided by Ukrainian and Russian languages, a sense of belonging either to Ukraine or to the Donetsk separatists and Russia, constantly under fire since 2014, depopulated more with each year of war. One of the most important issues for Vika after February 24 was to help resettle families from New York whose lives had become endangered.
Vika got to know New York thanks to her husband's family, who came from there. He brought her to the paradise of his childhood for the first time in 2005. She told me about a maiden from the big city who seemed to have come to this remote, small place and, not knowing how or when, left her heart here. That night in Krasnogruda we let our imagination run wild by designing the creation of a "small center of the world" in New York. It was very appealing to us to juxtapose the big with the small and rescale these values in favor of the small. This is needed not only in the
Donbas, not only in Ukraine, but also by the residents of modern megalopolises, where loss and alienation are often hidden behind the big numbers. Vika was convinced that the literary festival was the catalyst for a long-term program, that it should be followed by year-round action, and organic work with the local community. She was keen to recruit Russian-speaking residents, a large number of whom had not yet found a home in Ukraine. She knew that not only Russian propaganda but also the Ukrainian state's omissions were to blame for this. She attached great importance to working with the youngest generation, with teachers, with leaders of civil society. This is evident in the very way she organized the festival: literary and artistic events were preceded by a "Teacher's Day" for educators from the Donetsk region, during which guests, including Olena Stiazhkina and Serhiy Zhadan, gave lectures on history or discussions around poetry; children had their own creative space where they could take part in workshops and read books; an essay contest was announced for young people; a local New Yorker was created (www.newyorker.city), a portal run to this day by three residents of the town Kristina Shevchenko, Valeria Panasenko and Nadia Hordiyuk; local musicians, poets and a children's dance troupe performed together with Ukrainian celebrities; behind everything was social involvement, including Victoria Amelina's own funds, volunteers, NGOs.
From Vika's stories and photographs, including those she posted on Facebook, I try to imagine the town of New York. The central axis runs along Garden Street. Along it, red brick houses with reddish tile roofs and blue shutters. Not coincidentally, these two colors will become the visual symbol of the New York Literary Festival. The brick factory was built by Germans, settling here in the late nineteenth century. Before that, the settlement was homesteaded by Cossacks and merchants from the Balkans, seeking refuge after the fall of the Zaporozhian Sich. Where on the borderlands of the Ukrainian steppe the name of Novy York came from remains a mystery to historians, as it was marked on the map as early as 1846, long before the arrival of settlers from Germany. A local legend tells of a dignitary in love who, bringing his beloved from the West, wanted to build for her here a city of bright future, another New Amsterdam. One has to be careful with legends, as they like to resurface, enticingly influencing the fate of people who seem to have nothing to do with their source, hidden deep in the past.
Although there were Lutherans among the German settlers, the town's community was overwhelmingly Mennonite. More important to them than tax exemptions was the privilege of exemption from military service, since their religion forbade them to take up arms. On the other hand, the asceticism of their spiritual culture, mandating, among other things, the renunciation of technological advances, was no obstacle to the industrialization of the settlement, which was rapidly growing rich. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the steppe chutor had developed into a town of nearly eight thousand people, with a factory, an iron railroad, a bookstore, an electric grid, a mill, and high schools for girls and boys. It is from this period that the splendor of the former Gardenstrasse, but also the park with its fountains, the elaborate and richly ornamented architecture of the industrial buildings, originates. Reviewing the photographs, I read the story of the tragic fate of the Mennonites during the Stalinist regime. One of the brothers running the bookstore refused to burn religious books and was executed by the Bolsheviks. Others were deported to Siberia, near Amursk. For Vika, the rebirth of Ukraine also meant the restoration of the memory of neighbors, of others who were given hell by the communist "paradise country" here. Vika and I stop at a photograph of the cultural center "Ukrainian New York" located in the building of the famous Auron Thiesen cooperative store from 1910. It was only a few years ago that a plaque was placed on it detailing its history in Ukrainian and German. While preparing the festival program, Vika asked Serhiy Zhadan to read his translations from German of Bertold Brecht's poems to the people of New York, accompanied by the famous jazz double bassist Mark Tokar, soon to be an officer in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Everything she did resonated strongly with the ethos of borderland people close to me, with the revival of "connective tissue" and the creation of a culture of memory in communities experiencing the tearing down of bridges. She had an excellent feel for the borderland, not only as a hotbed of conflict, but also as a space for communing with the Other, the first from which to begin reviving the world.
New York is a strategically important place on the Donbas front line, the site of a defensive fortification on Ukraine's Mannerheim Line. There is constant fighting here, as a result of which its material form is inexorably disappearing from the face of the earth. Russian bombs have annihilated its economic potential. Many people have died, and whoever could, left. Earlier, after the historical turmoil of the Bolshevik Revolution and World War II, the town came back to life again and again. There is no doubt that it will also recover from these wounds, the deepest in its history to date, although it will certainly be a long and difficult process. There is, however, another dimension to this place's presence on the map of Ukraine and the world. Through Victoria Amelina, New York has become a symbol of the de-occupation of the future. It is not military or economic issues that will prove decisive for its real realization, although neither Vika nor her allies have ever questioned their importance. But instead of hard factories of geopolitics, with no regard for life, the environment, or the needs of the people, the people of New York must join the civilizational ecosystems comprising the small centers of the world. They are the ones that will have the power to change reality, caring for the spiritual and physical health of their residents, practicing good neighborliness with other people and nature, countering the monopolistic power of the big center with the solidarity of many smaller but equal, bringing out universal values from the potential of genius loci, providing justice for victims through the cultivation of collective memory and human rights activism, crushing the dictates of authoritarianism through social responsibility for development,and investing in education and civil society at least as much as in sports and road building. The New York of the future, to which Victoria Amelina gave her life, will be reborn with the power of David leaving a defeated Goliath on the battlefield. And then justice will return to the world, giving everyone his due, and man will find a home for the happiness that will bring him not wealth, not power, but goodness.
Although physically New York has almost disappeared from the face of the earth, spiritually it is still alive. No one thinks of returning to the Stalinist name Novhorodske, given to the town in 1951. Vika's friends, including writers Kateryna Mikhalitsyna and Olya Rusina, continue her work. The youth essay contest continues, and each year its winners participate in NYCamp, an excellent summer school prepared at a high level. They help each other find new places to live, to pursue creative passions. They post on social media that instead of organizing poetry readings, they are collecting for a “very poetic SUV and other poetic things” for the army. In spite of the war, they are sticking together. They continue to inhabit New York, attaching it to Italo Calvino's spiritual space of invisible cities and inscribing in his annals the words with which they summed up one of their meetings: “Home is the people.”
Return
Life on the exhale is like knocking on the door, it carries an echo, wakes up the dormant. People to whom this life is written, like Victoria Amelina, transcend what others of us usually can, and what in Ukrainian is expressed by the word mohty. In truth, Vika, seeking justice, a home and a future, bore witness to the path to victory, in Ukraine's destiny fulfilling itself through pere-mohty, doing more than our strength and imaginations would allow. On the exhale, the song turns into a scream. I can still hear it. It keeps coming back and shouting out the world turning the dead words "never again" in its mouth. It keeps trying to shout out the conformism of new forms of appeasement, that is, old as the world's ways of bending the knee to tyranny, in the ever-so-illusory hope that the flare of evil of the cowardly will get at least a second chance, and in the meantime maybe somehow spread to the bones of the front-line victims.
Into the spring blue field
out comes a woman in a black dress
to scream the names of the sisters
like a bird into an empty sky
A woman screaming the names of her sisters, sowing the field with pain, she finds her name in poesis, in doing with words. As a poet, Victoria Amelina was born during the Great War. Before that she wrote novels, children's books. In a conversation with Natalia Kornienko, she will leave a trace of her own understanding of being a poet in a liminal situation: "Poems began to appear when I wanted to say something, but was unable to write a prose text or even a banal Facebook post. I have long been convinced that writing fiction is not so much a special ability as a special incapacity, an inability to express myself directly as other people do. When I lost the ability to express myself in prose, it was time for poetry. Only she can explain it all: it's not really poetry, it's just a bullet that hit my tongue. From the fragments of the language poetry is arranged... All the words have changed their meaning. That's why in the few poems I've written since the invasion began, there are no metaphors, no contrivances, no attempts to make an impression. Instead, there is immediacy, bare meanings, snippets of information. I call it 'The obvious things written in a column of verse during the war.'" She elaborates the rest in the poem No poetry:
bits of tongue
resemble poetry
but it's not her
and it's not her either
she is in Kharkiv
as a volunteer
In our house in Krasnogruda there is such a custom that whoever visits the house for the first time rings a bell suspended under a frog carved in metal at the entrance. We believe that this sound carries a promise to return. Vika rang the bell. And the next evening in Sejny's "Old Yeshiva," during the Café Europa meeting, she read The Story of Return, ending the poem with the words:
And what did you take with you?
I just took this story
on the return
I have now brought to light
She is growing
Photo by Aneta Stabinska
Krzysztof Czyżewski is a practitioner of ideas, writer, philosopher, culture animator, theatre director, editor and translator. President of the Borderland Foundation, director of the Centre “Borderland of Arts, Cultures and Nations” in Sejny, Poland, initiator of the International Center for Dialog in Krasnogruda at the Polish-Lithuanian border. Teacher and lecturer, and a visiting professor at the University of Bologna and Rutgers University. Among his books of poetry and essays published in English are: The Path of the Borderland, Trust & Identity: A Handbook of Dialogue, Miłosz – Dialog – Borderland, A Small Center of the World, Firewords: Tiny Poems, Toward Xenopoli, Visions from the Borderland, and Practicing Utopia.