Words of the Living and the Dead
Image: Meridian Czernowitz via Facebook
For many years I preferred to communicate with the dead. I descended into the literary archives of Paris, hoping for my authors to speak to me from dusty old manuscripts: to seek out the traces of Mallarmé’s fingertips on his calling card or embody Rosny’s deepest anxieties in letters written impeccably on lineless paper. In those moments my authors came alive, and I admired them for all their moments of brilliance and maddening contradictions. There was even a time when I claimed that Zola was the only man I had ever truly loved.
Yet the more time I spent with my authors, the harder it was to step back into the real world. Everything felt incredibly dull: colors were dimmed and sounds were muted. I was easily disappointed by other people’s failures, even more so in my own. This is not to suggest that my authors had lived without sin. I understood them as products of their time which made it easy to forgive them. Although writers are filled with words of wisdom, they are not meant to be spiritual leaders or whatever one needs to fill the void. Zola had a mistress, fathered two children with her, and was by all accounts a difficult person to be around. Yet he had taken an incredibly brave stand defending Dreyfus, a stand which forced him to flee France for his safety and likely cost him his life.
My authors were flawed people but they seemed tuned into the rapidly changing world around them, unlike these days, when it felt like everyone was intent on becoming the master of their own small universe.
Academia allowed me unprecedented access to this world and for that I was thankful. I understood on an acute level that I would have had a much more difficult time flying to Paris and descending into the depths of the BnF without a letter of support from my department. Yet as the years passed, I couldn’t understand how academia commanded my full attention without guaranteeing anything in return. The market was overflooded. Did that many Americans want to be doctors of philosophy, or did they simply do it for the health insurance? Would I really sacrifice five to six years of my life only to land some adjunct position in the wastes of the heartland of America, living off ramen noodles and a prayer that someday, eventually, things would work out in my favor? Why did I have to be thankful for what felt like a betrayal of my time and my greatest passion in life? More importantly, why did my cohort seem so much more open to the empty promises of academia? There was something going on that I didn’t fully grasp yet.
Perhaps the most disorienting moment of my graduate studies came at a dinner party attended by faculty and students alike. Although the exact nature of the conversation escapes my memory, I recall how one professor told me that academics were better at writing than writers themselves. In such settings I had previously shrugged off the inevitable turn in conversations in which either a professor or student—really, it could be either—proclaimed “You’ve never read X book? What kind of literary scholar are you?” This was something entirely new, and another reminder of how stifling everything felt. My first inclination was to call it contempt for writers, as the joke that one writes a dissertation to be read by 2-3 people before collecting dust on the shelf was commonplace, but I know this is a word fueled by emotions and not logic. It was something else, perhaps an attempt to distance academia from the world of literature, to elevate it above all else, which made no sense in a country that had never truly celebrated intellectual thinking.
I needed to escape. Although New York—where my literary journey began—had been good to me, it could no longer give me what I needed. People from all over the world dreamed of making it big in New York. Meanwhile, I saw myself becoming some embittered alcoholic who-knows-where with delusions of grandeur if I stayed. New York promised me nothing but ruin. It was necessary to renounce New York and all its creature comforts, because true freedom comes through blindly embracing the unknown.
At first, I thought I should go to Paris. Yet it was too closely tied to my previous life. I had to abandon the city, too, if only temporarily.
By a twist of fate, I decided to volunteer to teach English in Chernivtsi one summer, the birthplace of Celan. Chernivtsi residents are proud of their city’s cultural history and eager to share its stories, like how Kobylianska Street (known as the Herrengasse in the Austro-Hungarian Empire) was swept clean each morning with bouquets of roses. Yet the former outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had seen better days. The tremors of history were still subsiding: in 1941, the Romanian Army, in alliance with the Axis powers, retook Chernivtsi from the Soviets. Under the military regime of Ion Antonescu, a Jewish ghetto was established and tens of thousands of the city’s Jews were sent to camps in Transnistria (although Traian Popovici, the Romanian mayor of Chernivtsi, heroically saved 20,000 of Bukovyna’s Jews from deportation). Less than half of the Jewish population survived the Second World War, and many of the survivors emigrated to Israel. The Soviets took over Chernivtsi in 1944, but they would go on to strip the city of much of its historical memory through forced resettlements and propaganda campaigns—as they did throughout the greater lands of the Soviet Union—presenting an obscured vision of the city that was decidedly more grey in colour.
Coming to Chernivtsi was a chance decision that would completely change the course of my life. During my first visit there, I befriended a Ukrainian writer, although I didn’t know that at first. She was just a kind and open person, filled with an intellectual hunger I had never encountered before. During our first meeting we walked through the whole city to pass the time before my train to Lviv. “You are a writer!” she exclaimed. “So why aren’t you writing?” Her words stayed with me for the entire journey by train. When I returned to the States, I felt compelled to realize a lifelong dream and launched my own literary journal, interviewing and publishing many Ukrainian writers in translation. I knew that it was the first step I needed to take in order to serve a higher literary power.
That is to say, Chernivtsi brought me back to the world of the living. Although I had no familial ties to Ukraine, my arrival felt like a triumphant return. When I left, the sadness threatened to swallow me whole. I kept returning until eventually, Chernivtsi became my home. I met many other writers, not only Ukrainians but Czechs, Polish, Romanians, Hungarians… but Ukrainian literature was something special. A golden age of Ukrainian literature was coming into being, a realization that brought tears of joy when I later stood in front of the “Slovo” House in Kharkiv, where an entire generation of Ukrainian authors were killed or imprisoned during Stalin’s Great Terror. The wheels of history were turning and Ukrainian writers had their own hand in writing it—some of them even went to fight in the East, defending the country against Russian forces. Although the fighting is confined to the Donbas, the war looms over the entire country, psychically tormenting everyone in unique ways. Living in Ukraine, one is always uncertain what the next day will bring, but there are constant reminders in people’s actions and words that everything will turn out okay.
These days I spend a lot of time with living writers, trying to spread their words far and wide. I haven’t forgotten my long-dead French writers, though—if anything, I have learned to appreciate them even more. Someday I will return to Paris and lay flowers at their graves to thank them. Rather than study them from a stuffy windowless basement office infested with mice and cockroaches, taking breaks to eat an overpriced salad, I went out into the world to emulate them.
Kate Tsurkan is a writer, editor, and translator. She is the co-founder of Apofenie Magazine. Her previous work has been published in Los Angeles Review of Books, The Calvert Journal, Asymptote and Literary Hub.