Serhiy Zhadan

Capitalism yay!
"Idea! We sell everything we own and spend the money on smuggling 2 boxes of vodka from Russia!"
"And then what?"
"We sell them and use the cash to smuggle 4 boxes!"
"And then what?"
"We sell them and use the cash to smuggle 8 boxes!"
"And then what?"
"We get REALLY DRUNK!"

Let's have a black celebration to celebrate the fact that we've seen the back of another black day

Charkiv, newly minted Ukraine, 1993. A bunch of kinda-sorta-friends, if more out of boredom and necessity than show more actual friendship, 19 and without any sort of goal. Old enough to remember that they've lived in the Soviet Union, young enough to have no firm clue of what that's supposed to really mean. They drink. They try to make a quick buck in order to finance their drinking, and fail. Hilariously.

He doesn't open up, he's read too much Engels and can't process information in a normal way anymore, neo-communists are a screwed-up zen cult unto themselves; first there's no way in and then you can't get out

But the story, and everything they've been handed, suggests that they need a quest, a goal, a greater purpose. So they find one, arm themselves with all the pathos and alcohol they can find, and set off through a society of brand new nationalists, nostalgic old socialists, drug dealers and disillusioned cops just looking to beat someone up. It's all very Guy Ritchie, really. Except funnier, and sadder.

There are no emergency brakes on this train

Zhadan - either the author or the narrator, possibly both, I'm not sure - takes you on a hell of a darkly comic ride, drunk and stoned and insomniac in a way that would make a young Denis Johnson weep blood, hallucinating between moments of bleary clarity. He turns on the radio and hears a DJ telling the story of the titular band, a story where absolutely every single fact is 100% wrong, forced to fit into an old narrative that no longer has any guiding principle. He finds, or thinks he finds, a bunch of old pamphlets directed at schoolchildren, telling them how to build bombs in the name of glorious revolution. He passes monuments dedicated to those who died for The Cause. He drinks.

"...because to hell with it all; to hell with cash, to hell with the command economy, to hell with investors, to hell with the govenment" - he's starting to work up steam now - "to hell with the state, to hell with multinational corporations, to hell with corporate mergers, to hell with spheres of influence, to hell with the eastward expansion of the market."
"To hell with world peace," Vasia mumbles.
"Absolutely."

2014. Books are burning in Charkiv. Serhiy Zhadan has been beaten up by Russian nationalists after refusing to kiss a flag. And so it goes.

Let's play master and servant. show less

Voroshilovgrad, an hallucinatory novel by Ukrainian Serhij Zhadan novelist and poet Serhij Zhadan, was written several years before the Russian invasion of the country. And yet, the book is rife with a feeling of the precariousness of the Ukrainian state in the post-Soviet era. Our protagonist Herman has a steady if somewhat shady job in a large city. But he gets a call from an old friend that his brother has suddenly disappeared, presumably to Amersterdam, urging Herman to come out to his show more home town and "take care of business" in his brother's absence. The "business" turns out to be a small but profitable gas station on the outskirts of the town, located on Ukraine's eastern steppes, now known as Luhansk but formerly known, during the Soviet Era, as Voroshilovgrad. The station is under seige from mysterious forces who want to force Herman to sell it, perhaps (although exact reasons remain obscure) because there is natural gas to be found in the area. There is barely a character in the story who is not mysterious and rough around the edges. Stories of the past are always blurred by secrets and mythology. The representatives from the federal government who make periodic appearances are more likely to be gangsters than legitimate government officials. Or else they're both. Travels across the empty stretches of this country are always hazardous. The people Herman runs into could be from anywhere, and the sights that pass before his eyes, especially at sundown and after dark, swirl into hallucinations and dreams.

Gradually, though, Herman begins to find a sense of purpose as he gains a sense of comradeship with the old friends he reconnects with, and through the stories they tell him. What he'd thought would be a quick in and out to "take care of business" before returning to his old life becomes a commitment to this off-kilter community. At one point, an old soccer team, on which Herman had been a young player on a team of old veterans, reassembles for a rowdy game against a local rival. Later, Herman comes upon the graves of some of these teammates in the local cemetery. Had he been playing soccer with ghosts? It is central to the essence of the novel that this question is never taken up again. Herman seems to simply shrug the discovery off as irrelevant.

The writing is often laced with multiple metaphors that don't quite work. A metal rod brought down on the hood of a car makes a sound like to tolling of Easter Bells. Spider webs described as floating in the air, as if anchoring a metal fence to the ground. The come, at times, so fast and furious that eventually I could only decide that the effect was purposeful, as if telling us that no impressions can be trusted. Although the metaphors can also be precise: "He was giving me an angry, prickly look, but it was somehow detached from his personality, as though he was wearing anger-tinted contact lenses."

The overall theme of the book to me seemed clearly to be the struggles of these far flung areas of Ukraine to make sense of their post-Soviet existence, already several decades in the past but still casting a difficult shadow over everything. It's obviously no coincidence that the book's title harkens back to the town's Soviet name. And then there is this seeming (from our current remove and perspective) foreshadowing of events to come:

"It was obvious what Ernst was thinking. Ernst was thinking, 'Something bad is going to happen, something real bad is definitely going to happen. For now, nobody can really tell--they all think that the worst is behind us and that the storm has passed. But that's not true at all.' Ernst was very famlliar with the feeling, with the sense of impending danger. It was coming, all right, and there was no0 way to avoid it. They'd have to run this gauntlet one way or another. There would be no way to sped the process up of avoid it altogether. All you could do was look the ominous beast in the eye and wait. Its terrible snout would sniff you for a while, then it'd just walk away, leaving fear an stench behind. Ernst almost immediately had a flashback to when he once felt the rotten breath of brewing trouble. He recalled that trapped feeling that filled his lungs, he recalled that seep-seated fear that encroaches upon new territory like swollen rivers in March. . . . "

Often, reading this novel is like stepping through thin ice and falling into a dream. But the sense of time and place is solid, and the current of hope and compassion carried me along. Highly recommended. show less

I think I checked this novel's publication date five times during the week I spent reading it. Published in 2017 -- long before the current Russian invasion and war. Reflective of some contemporaneous skirmishes but darker and I'd argue prophetic.

This is a difficult book to read. The details are sharp and vivid. The rendering of war claws at you. But it is worth reading to see one Ukrainian's take.

Pasha is a teacher who must travel through the military checkpoints of a rapidly exacerbating show more war to reach an orphanage and retrieve his nephew. Pasha's town was once a typical one; his career was once a rewarding one; his family was once a normal one. Now there's a war that worsens by the day and a journey through the hellscape of modern warfare. show less

Published in 2017 by Ukrainian author Serhiy Zhadan, this book reflects the impact of the war in Ukraine on the civilian population. Pasha is a thirty-five-year-old teacher of Ukrainian language. When violence intrudes into his classroom, he realizes that his nephew is stranded in a care facility in occupied territory, and he embarks on a perilous journey to bring him home. Pasha declares he is apolitical and does not keep track of the news, so he was unaware of the magnitude of the danger. show more He was trying to live a “normal” life but with the arrival of the war at close quarters, he must act.

Pasha finds a taxi driver who transports people and items across military checkpoints and gets a ride to the train station. Pasha must tread carefully, deciding whom to trust, as he navigates one crisis after the next, forming precarious alliances with strangers. He decides to take lesser traveled paths to avoid the brunt of the fighting, where he encounters both cruel and kind people. This is a powerful book about the upheaval caused by war, conveying omnipresent fear and not knowing whom to trust. This is an important book, especially for those of us not in Ukraine to get an idea of what has transpired (and is still occurring).

4.5 show less