But a summary of the plot only tells a fraction of the story. The novel, focalized through Ivan’s perspective, is as much about silence, the things Ivan doesn’t notice, as it is about him.
*
Ivan and Phoebe begins and ends with slaughter, opening with a scene of a calf being butchered for the wedding of the titular characters and closing with an image of an injured hog, killed out of something like mercy, its blood splashed over concrete and siphoned into jars, to be cooked with rice.
The animal sacrifice that marks the inaugural moments of the novel goes wrong. Ivan’s father, when moving to cut the slaughtered calf, accidentally slices through Ivan’s arm. Things are not happening the way they are supposed to: Ivan wants to run away, to flee before the wedding ceremony, and would have, if not for the fresh wound in his arm. Instead of running away, Ivan marries Phoebe. During the ceremony, he stands there, as if in a dream, while everyone spins around him. Almost immediately, time loosens its hinges. Without a break, without a time marker or any indication of when we are, the narrative moves back to before Ivan met Phoebe. In the book’s present, Ivan, paranoid that someone is following him, is fleeing Lviv, where he had friends, fellow activists who worked and organized for an independent Ukraine. He returns to his hometown, Uzhhorod, an area not far from Hungary and directly on the border with Slovakia. In Uzhhorod, Ivan’s old life, including his activism, is accessible to him only through his memories. He has left it all behind and instead, begins working in a bank as an IT guy, where he meets Phoebe, the daughter of the bank’s lawyer. Their first encounter is as mundane as it gets. They run into each other when Phoebe comes to use their computers to type up her poems. At first Ivan scoffs at what he thinks is a frivolous pursuit, but when he looks over Phoebe’s shoulder at the computer screen, he is stunned by her words. He begins to fall in love with her, this girl who calls herself Phoebe, naming herself after Phoebus, the god of poetry, though her parents named her Maria. He watches her type up her poetry and save it to a floppy disk. Soon after, the two get engaged.
Right when we have reached an important juncture, here, again, the story folds over itself, and takes us back, further, back before Ivan met Phoebe, before he fled Lviv, to when he was still a student, passionate and hopeful. In Kyiv, we see an Ivan who dreams of revolution as he participates in the student hunger strike that sparked the Revolution on Granite, known also as the First Maidan. In 1990 a group of students gathered on Maidan Square in central Kyiv and proclaimed they would not eat until their demands were met. Their demands included new multiparty elections for the Supreme Council of Ukraine, the government’s return to Ukraine, that all Ukrainians drafted into the army serve their time in Ukraine, the nationalization of all property in Ukraine held by the Soviet government. Though the revolution began with a relatively small group of students, as the days passed, more and more people joined them.
In the days of the revolution, Ivan is surrounded by friends, strangers who become allies in their struggle. His then-girlfriend Rose joins the hunger strike, though he admonishes her for doing so. As a future mother, he tells her, she shouldn’t risk her health, her body. Though Ivan genuinely doesn’t understand her fury at being told this, she comes anyway, carrying a yellow and blue Ukrainian flag, which was banned at the time of the protest.
In the chaos, tension, and occasional joy of the protests, Ivan meets a man who calls himself Shasko. After the protest has ended, Shasko finds Ivan again and begins to follow him. Ivan is sure Shasko is KGB and an awareness begins to settle in. Just because the protest movement was successful, just because Ukraine is now on its way to independence from the Soviet Union, the old ways are not completely gone. The protests have ended and yet Ivan is still followed and taken in for questioning. He calls his mother. She has found a dead dog in the yard. Ivan can only imagine that this is a threat, a warning, from Shasko or someone else upset about his involvement in the Granite Revolution. This is when he flees, this is where the story loops back, back to Phoebe, back to Uzhhorod, back to where it began.
*
What happens in the days after a revolution? In the months when an Empire begins to fall apart?
Though Ivan and Phoebe narrates the days of the hunger strike, it focuses on its aftermath. Ivan’s life almost returns to normal after the protest: he goes to work, he goes home. Shasko follows him, imploring Ivan to introduce him to the other people who were at the Maidan. Ivan is brought in for questioning at the old KGB building even as the Soviet Empire is falling apart around him. He is not tortured; he is let go and decides to move back to Uzhhorod, where he begins his job at the bank. The days on the Maidan turn into distant memories.
The novel moves through time with dazzling fluidity, looping back on itself again and again. During the days leading up to the revolution Ivan has a goal, a dream that gives his life meaning. After, when he returns to Uzhhorod, there is no longer a telos. Ivan loses his sense of purpose, his sense of where his life is going. While the narrative is firmly grounded in the historical events of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the novel’s continuous circling back on itself leaves the narrative unbound from linear time. Just as Ivan returns to his provincial town, where nothing has changed, so the narrative returns to places it has already been, rotating back over itself. Boris Gorys writes that, “The postcommunist subject travels the same route as described by the dominating discourse of Cultural Studies—but it travels this route in the opposite direction: not from the past to the future, but from the future to the past; from the end of history, from existing in posthistorical, postapocalyptic time, back to historical time. Postcommunist life is a life backwards, a movement against the flow of time.” Whereas before, Soviet life pointed always toward a grand telos, with its fall, suddenly, there is a vacuum, an emptiness where there used to be great purpose. Ivan feels this shift acutely, as moment by moment his life moves further from those days of protest, settling instead in the same provincial life his parents led.
Ivan, the prodigal son, returns from his days of protesting to a life of work and drinking. He moves back into the past, as if the protests didn’t happen at all, or happened in another life, another time. Though Ivan’s mind returns often to the protests, the fear and hope, he has no one to talk to about those days in Kyiv. The narrative swoops back, again and again, to those fateful days in Ivan’s life that pushed him out of Kyiv and Lviv, that sent him running back to Uzhhorod and the stagnant daily life that awaited him.
It is in the movement of the narrative voice that we come to understand that time means something different for Ivan. He has, put simply, lost the plot of his own life. Though he returns to the past to try to make sense of things, perhaps to try to remember where he had been going, the only thing his memories reveal to him is that something has been lost.
*
Shut up.
Shut up, you, woman.
Such a little thing, and already a woman.
Free-loader.
Like anybody needs your stupid poems?
Shut up with your poems.
You are dumb.
Before Ivan and Phoebe marry, he destroys the floppy disk of her poems. He silences her, keeping her poetry away from the world, from us, the readers. Earlier in the novel, it is clear that he appreciates her poetry. It is not her artistry that offends him, then, but the pretension of her writing anything at all.
There are two moments in the text when Phoebe’s perspective is heard, through the sudden interjections of her poetic monologues. Unprefaced, they interrupt the rest of the novel and exist outside narrative time. In her first monologue, Phoebe recounts a litany of abuse, presumably from her parents, but never elaborated on in the text or explained. “You don’t even know what a real beating is,” she writes, ironic and biting. Though this poem is the first chance the reader gets to see Phoebe’s perspective, it is not her own voice that we hear. Rather, she writes what people say, or have said to her, telling her to shut up, that no one likes her poetry. Her first monologue is a mirror held up to her parents, to the rest of the novel, showing that there is something not right with the way the world is treating her, and though no one else acknowledges it, she knows it.
Her second monologue, desperate, fast, dashed off, recounts her experience giving birth, the violation of the doctor’s exam, and another man, a medical student, watching. “There is no one to protect me,” she writes. After she gives birth, she suffers from postpartum depression. She disappears from Ivan’s life and from the novel. Ivan has no wish to stay home with her, to hear about what she is thinking or feeling, and he takes the narrative with him when he goes out the door. These monologues hint at all the life that goes unheard in the novel, all of the things that Ivan doesn’t hear or want to pay attention to. Phoebe’s dreams, her desires, what she might want out of life. Rose’s plans, her image of a new, post-Soviet Ukraine. Instead of writing poetry, women cook. They clean. They watch the children. Even Rose, the revolutionary, marries, and moves to a smaller town.
In the heat and haze of Maidan, a new life was possible, Ivan thought. A new life of democracy, free from Soviet control. A new life, where the women should still stay home.
Ivan and Phoebe expertly and subtly shows the ironies and discrepancies of revolutionary rhetoric in the early 1990s. Though Ivan imagines himself the main character, it is Phoebe whose voice cuts through it all. Phoebe, whose perspective throws the rest of the novel into doubt, because suddenly we, as readers, understand there is so much we are not hearing.
The novel begins and ends with slaughter, with a question: what, and who, is sacrificed so someone can have the life they dream of? For revolution, for freedom? In the beginning of the novel, the implication is that Ivan stands in as a kind of double for the sacrifice of the meat, as his arm is sliced and his blood is shed. At the end of the novel, it is again Ivan who is connected to the sacrifice, as he breaks the jars full of the hog’s blood. The novel, through Ivan’s perspective, would have us believe that it is his life that has importance, meaning that he is somehow the sacrificial figure. But behind it all is Phoebe, made to give up poetry, made to stay home, made to be silent.
The title of the novel is unbalanced. One reviewer for National Public Radio writes that “Lutsyshyna should really have called her award-winning fourth novel Ivan,” as we hear almost nothing from Phoebe. However, the title gestures to the silences. Not just of Phoebe, whose voice cuts through the text only twice, but of Rose, of Margita, of all of the women who are pushed to the margins in Ivan’s narration. All of the women who have different desires, motivations, stories that are never heard or acknowledged. Women who are, even for Ivan the revolutionary, only seen as mother figures or people to have sex with. Ivan and Phoebe, then, is a novel of the limbo between the old regime and the new, when time itself gets lost, a novel that doubts its own perspective and dares us to see past its own stories into all the things unsaid, all the things lost in its own narration.
