The Ukraine by Artem Chapeye, translated from the Ukrainian, Russian, and Surzhyk by Zenia Tomkins, Seven Stories Press, 2024
‘This next part is my favorite part of traveling’, the narrator of the Artem Chapeye’s opening story ‘Pan Ivan and the Three Bears’ tells his friends as they are invited into a local man’s mountain home to shelter from the cold. Pan Ivan feeds them borsch and hot tea as he regales them with stories about bears—nearly all ending in death, but all endearing in their own way. Chapeye’s beautifully fairy tale-like opening invites us to explore his provocatively-articled short story collection The Ukraine, translated by Zenia Tomkins. Chapeye—a writer, photographer, and now soldier—wrote these stories between 2010 and 2018, blending fiction with autobiography. Snippets of rural and urban life shot through with perceptive encounters with a rich cast of characters, these stories form a love letter to Ukraine and its people.
While some stories are told from other characters’ points of view, the narrator of the majority appears to be Chapeye himself as he travels around Ukraine on a beaten-up motorbike, sometimes accompanied by his wife Oksana. While Ukraine is doubtless the main character, Chapeye himself emerges as the most sympathetic and immediate of storytellers. His ability to see the good in everyone, and his gentle questioning of the people he meets is one of the most endearing aspects of his book. In ‘A Fancy Send-Off,’ Chapeye—who, in the present day, is a soldier fighting against Russia’s invasion—meets Baba Shura, whom he describes as ‘very Soviet’ because of her view that Russia and Ukraine should be ‘together forever’. Rather than argue with her, Chapeye allows her to voice her opinion, before permitting himself only the most agreeable of disagreements: ‘“They’ve supposedly separated already,” I reply, allowing myself to contradict her, which I only do very, very hesitantly.’ He leaves the subject there, instead describing the elderly lady with warmth: ‘Baba Shura never stops smiling, even when she’s talking about something sad, like that fancy send-off of hers. Periodically, she adjusts her scarf. She looks at me kindly. She’s waiting for the rain to pass. She’s worried that she’ll get drenched on her bicycle in the five kilometers she has to ride home.’
This ability to find the best and see the depths in people is also present in the title story, ‘The Ukraine’. Travelling on a local bus, the narrator and his girlfriend observe two drunk young men. Somewhat unexpectedly, one man starts to tell the other about how his infant son is struggling with teething, and how he kisses the baby to console him. The hitherto depressing landscape of the bus is transformed:
The bus was suddenly bathed in love and beauty. All the people who had been sitting silently, swaying with the bus’s motion, lost in their own thoughts and their own problems, ceased to be gray mannequins: inside each of them, behind the mask of weariness, was an entire universe, a gigantic cosmos brimming with internal stars.
These slivers of beauty and optimism recur throughout the collection. In ‘The Gracious Spirit of the Provincial North,’ the narrator and his wife find themselves unable to cross a swollen river. They are helped by locals who send the motorbike across strapped to a tiny boat. In Chapeye’s hands, what could have been an annoyance is instead a magical experience: ‘We drifted slowly across the sleepy river. A noiseless and sunny drizzle sprinkled us. Frogs and mosquitoes sang their melodies. From the stern of the boat, a good man smiled at us.’
The stories are modest and perfectly paced, often ending mid-thought—the vignettes have a cadence that shows rather than tells. This is bolstered by Zenia Tompkin’s translation, which is beautifully accessible and clear without sacrificing the complexities with which the text is fraught. In her brief translator’s note, Tomkins acknowledges that the text has been translated from ‘standard Ukrainian, Russian, Surzhyk (the Russified vernacular form of Ukrainian used widely in the east prior to 2022), and an array of Ukrainian dialects and regiolects.’ This diversity is important to note, she reminds us, as it reflects ‘the Ukraine Russia invaded on February 24, 2022.’ Linguistic interactions, and code switching, are vital to understanding the complexity of people’s lives. Tomkins registers these changes unobtrusively, typically simply noting the change of language in-text—rightly so, since finding an English equivalent would risk parody. Countering any attendant loss in effect on the Anglophone reader, the topic of language is often addressed directly by Chapeye’s interlocuters, and hence even reading in English, we are aware of linguistic tensions and differences. For instance, in ‘Faulty Presuppositions,’ Tomkins relies on calques to reflect the use of language, bringing the topic to the fore:
“And regarding language,” Vitalik continued, glancing in Valerii Valentynovych’s direction, “I adore that new film about that Civil War–era anarchist revolutionary, Nestor Makhno. They addressed the matter of language perfectly, in my opinion. Whatever language someone started talking in, they served in! And that included Surzhyk . . . Like that machine gunner who, according to legend, thought up Makhno’s tachankas, the horse-drawn machine gun carts. Note, he wasn’t a Ukrainian kulemetnyk or a Russian pulemiotchik, but a Surzhyk kulemiotchik—a hybrid of the two.”
Domestic politics and questions of identity inevitably arise as our narrator travels between East and West Ukraine. The linguistic divide, and the attitude to the government in Kyiv is a defining feature of identity throughout the stories—a fact which has gained increased significance since Russia’s invasion in February 2022. But while this is important to Chapeye, he focuses on the effect of these dynamics on the individual and the local, rather than society at large. In East Ukraine, our narrator’s host, Mykola, complains that those from the Western province of Kalychinya call him a ‘Moskal—as if I was Russian’, while in the East they call him a ‘Banderivets’—‘as if I’m some ultra-nationalist Stepan Bandera-loyalist from western Ukraine.’ Driving though the Donbas steppe, in a landscape reminiscent of Serhiy Zhadan’s Voroshilovgrad, Chapeye is relieved to be welcomed just ‘as a person’ and not a ‘Banderite.’ Meanwhile, in ‘Did You Fall Off the Moon, or What?,’ the locals complain about the constant shifts in power: ‘where are we supposed to go, huh? Power is changing hands, but we’re locals, and we’ll stay here like shit on a colander.’
The divide Chapeye shows is not only geographical. Juxtapositions appear between town and country, rich and poor, old and young, and between the real and the imagined Ukraine. In ‘The Apolitical Wunderkind,’ Chapeye describes a 16-year-old girl opening her photography exhibition for a well-heeled crowd at a gallery in Kyiv. Her parents drive her to destinations abroad, covering hundreds of miles, and she publishes a new book after each trip. Her father, described by Chapeye as a man ‘from an ordinary provincial family’ who has not ‘lost touch with his roots,’ suggests that she might gain some valuable experience by photographing people on the street and honing her craft that way—just like Chapeye in fact. Although he rarely passes direct comment, Chapeye cannot help but critique these moneyed people, who are so much the antithesis of the Ukraine he photographs. He notes at the end of the story,
I’m not sure how to end this story, but the following evening, the owner of the gallery calls me. He offers to organize some sort of PR campaign, immediately begins insisting on the indispensability of promoting our culture in any possible way, seamlessly transitions to Ukraine in general and its challenging fate, then starts talking about patriotism and inserts the words “price” and “payment” into the very same sentence.
The version of Ukraine inhabited by the young photographer is set in stark contrast with the countryside, the rural Ukraine that Chapeye appears to be on a mission to document (though the reasons for his journeys, besides curiosity, are never explicitly stated). This clash between two versions of Ukraine is especially clear in ‘One Soul Per Home.’ The story is set in what Chapeye refers to as ‘Shevchenko Land,’ the birthplace of Ukrainian author and artist Taras Shevchenko, and a national tourist attraction. As Chapeye drives towards the village of Shevchenkoe, the road becomes smooth and flawless. Chapeye finds a tourist bus, ‘parked next to the house that symbolizes the one where little Taras spent his barefooted childhood’ but which is likely not Shevchenko’s real house. Meanwhile, further down the hill, along bumpier roads, the real houses of modern-day peasants are to be found. The tourists—we imagine, moneyed and conveyed from the city along the well-maintained roads—do not visit here.
There are no tourists in the neighbouring town of Moryntsi, where the smoothly-asphalted road the tourists’ buses drive along continues. This allows local kids to skateboard, something few of the other roads in Ukraine permit. He notes, ‘maybe it’s only here, on the showpiece roads, that the tarmac is good enough.’ Then he remembers: he has seen good roads at Illinska Church in the village of Suboitv, another tourist site. He recalls that behind that picturesque church lay ‘the wreckage of Ukraine.’ Meanwhile, back in Moryntsi, a drunk young boy buys vodka from the local shop, and pisses on the side of the road.
The quietly heart-breaking title story ‘The Ukraine’ comes, quite perfectly, at the end of the book, distilling the essence of all of the preceding stories. In it, Chapeye explains his intention in deploying the article in ‘The Ukraine’:
…we began to notice and point out to each other situations and instances when it was actually correct to say “the Ukraine”—because there’s Ukraine as such, but there is, in fact, also a the Ukraine—a “voila-Ukraine.” A Ukrainian Dasein. For example, it’s the middle-aged men in peaked caps, with long mustaches and leather jackets over their warm sweaters. It’s the middle-aged women in chunky knit hats. The college girls who, on their way back to the dorm after a weekend at home, step over puddles of oozy mud in their fancy white boots, clutching the handles of checkered plastic tote bags with fingers red from the cold, trying not to chip their long painted nails. It’s the old lady in the ankle-length brown overcoat and cheap white sneakers who’s carting apples on a hand truck. The coiffed aging blonde behind the wheel in a traffic jam in Donetsk who’s calmly smoking out the car window, watching life pass by.
Today, Chapeye is fighting with the Ukrainian army. He wrote the preface to The Ukraine on his mobile phone in March 2022 during breaks between fighting. In it, he describes the effect of the war on his family and friends, and the shock of ordinary life being turned upside down. His own stories find their echo in his collection. With his trademark humility, he registers that his family’s experiences are being repeated over and over throughout Ukraine. Meanwhile, Chapeye is still fighting, to defend a beautiful, complex, imperfect, but very real Ukraine. As he summarises at the end of the final story:
Sincere feelings don’t need megaphones. Love is quiet, barely audible. It’s in the comma and in the reiteration: ‘I love her so, I so love my poor Ukraine.’ Today, I almost let out a sob when I came upon this line. Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko. In defiance of pain, a bit frantically. Tenderly. Acutely. With a fear of loss. In love, the imperative is acceptance.
Sarah Gear is a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter. Her work examines the ways in which politics and publishing intersect, by comparing the commission, translation, and reception of contemporary novels by nationalist and liberal Russian writers. Sarah holds an MA in Translation Studies from the University of Stirling, and a BAHons in French and Russian from the University of Glasgow.
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