This is part of a continuing story of how visiting Ukraine changed my thoughts about writing and novels—see here for the previous installment.
Happy New Year, dear readers! I hope everyone survived the holidays OK and is feeling some pleasant sense of renewal about 2024 and the impending year of the Wood Dragon, which will apparently be marked by “competence” and some association with middle-aged women.
My 2024 resolution is to write at least one sentence every night about something that moved me that day. I’m three years into this attractive 5-year diary (shout-out to designer Tamara Shopsin), but when I look back, there are a lot of blank days, and also many days where all it says are completed tasks, which turns out not to be what one cares about later.
Lately I have been regretting that I don’t have a diary from my 2019 visit to Kyiv. (It feels weird to write about this without mentioning that Kyiv was recently hit by the biggest aerial bombardment since the beginning of the war.) But I did find some photos on my phone, and looking at them has helped me to recover the specific feeling of arriving in Kyiv for the first time, and how different it felt from abstractly knowing about its existence. That’s the point of departure for today’s post.
First, a quick and related detour to a reader question from the fall. David Parke writes: “My daughter starts classes next week for her freshman year as a likely English/classics major. Any advice for her?” The advice I feel the most confident about telling students is, whenever possible, try to study abroad—ideally, somewhere where the language is different, and also ideally not just over the summer. I almost didn’t do it, when I was in college; I remember thinking, “I worked so hard to get here and it’s only 4 years, isn’t it wasteful to spend part of it at a random program in Moscow.” But now I can tell you that school programs make it exponentially easier to just up and live somewhere else than it will be later in life. And living abroad in a non-vacation context is like the most efficient shortcut to critical thinking, because you get to see your culture as a culture, and not just as Reality. Just from the kind of boring small talk that you wouldn’t learn anything from at home, you start to question all kinds of invariable-seeming institutions and ideas. What is breakfast? Do eggs belong in the refrigerator? Who lives in a house? What is it normal or rude to offer to pay money for?
I was about to say that travel might be particularly helpful for students in the humanities—but actually I think it’s helpful for everyone. A while ago, a Columbia student dropped by my office hours and described how reading The Idiot had motivated her to go to Hungary and study math pedagogy(!)—which was apparently a revelatory experience, because the emphasis there was on helping students find their own way through a proof or problem (rather than on imparting the “correct” way); before going to Hungary, this student had thought of herself as bad at some particular kind of math, and now, that math was what she was going to study in grad school.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a breakfast meeting I had in Lviv last October with Tetyana Teren of PEN Ukraine, whom I had first met in Kyiv in 2019. We were catching up on how things had changed since the war. She had been doing a lot of international outreach, and had noticed a difference in effectiveness between going to the EU/ US herself, to give presentations, versus physically bringing international visitors to Ukraine. On one trip outside Ukraine, Tetyana had talked about a basement where hundreds of Ukrainians had been imprisoned for weeks. She showed them a picture of the basement, and she could see that the audience felt sorry… but a few minutes later they had gone back to thinking whatever they had been thinking about before.
On another occasion, Tetyana was able to physically bring an Italian group to see the actual basement—and some people in the group cried. Without physically bringing people there, it felt impossible to explain. Such experiences had caused Tetyana to doubt the power of literature, since language can feel so powerless to convey the reality of war; she quoted a line from a talk by the poet Halyna Kruk: “I wish that poetry could really kill.”
This is such a clear memory for me, and I’ve thought about it so much since then: Tetyana’s voice, hushed and regretful, saying “I wish that poetry could kill,” over a breakfast table at the Grand Cafe Leopolis. There were Ukrainian flags everywhere, and our breakfast had just appeared on beautiful multi-tiered cake stands, and the whole thing felt like a dream, in part because I’m not a morning person so I always feel asleep at breakfast.
I couldn’t help comparing that meeting to the last time I had seen Tetyana, at a PEN meeting at the United Nations in 2022. As I remember, we were standing by a buffet table—breakfast, again—and, at the sound of an airplane, Tetyana glanced toward the window with sort of a stunned expression, and for a moment I felt like I could see the scene from her perspective—how astounding that all these muffins and things still existed, how different this reality was from that one, and how inconceivable and wrong that a person could exit that one, and leave it behind. And I felt, too, that I was in the other reality, the more frivolous one, and it made me feel bad about myself, and thus somehow avoidant and resistant—and soon I also went back to what I had been thinking about before.
This is actually the subject of Halyna Kruk’s talk (“I wish that poetry could really kill”):
The war forms an abyss between those who have experienced it and those who stay at a distance. With each day I find it harder to explain to outsiders how the war feels to us here from the inside. Our very intention to explain dwindles. Our language loses clarity. Poetry is not for us anymore. When your husband is fighting at the war, your relatives suffer horrible occupation in the Kherson region and your other relatives live under constant shelling in the Kharkiv region while you must consider air-raid alerts because a missile can hit and kill you, it’s hardly possible to [remain above it all]. In such a case, poetry takes on peculiar forms of either spontaneous prayers, sparing testimony, lament or even a curse upon the enemy. These are not the forms of poetry the modern European culture is used to. They are ritualistic and functional, way too primeval in their emotion, way too subjective, pathetic, and intolerant.
This is something I’ve been thinking about since Lviv—how the most exciting part of the book festival was hearing poets like Halyna work through how the meaning and process of writing has changed in the past year. Even though this talk (from June 2022, early in the war) is an expression of despair, it also feels, to me, like a rallying cry. I was especially moved by the phrase “subjective, pathetic, and intolerant”—because I have noticed these same qualities when I have tried to write essays from a radical or critical perspective—essays related, in one way or another, to trauma. (Is this what “radical” writing comes down to—the attempt to disrupt, by naming it, the cycle of trauma?)
The jargon (“trauma”—sigh) the feeling of being mired in “grievances,” of failing to “rise above” in an evenhanded and humane way—it all feels like a trap. I think that’s one way the “status quo” (which RUNS ON WARS, literally and economically) defends itself: when you try to criticize it, you keep slipping into “bad writing.” Being in Lviv made me feel excited about all the smart writers who are working to find ways around that—which feels related to the perspectival shift that you get from going to a new place.
After the paywall, I’m going to talk more about the shift I experienced on my first trip to Kyiv (with photos), and about how the war, while generating communication gaps, is also pushing resilient writers to bridge those gaps.
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