Of those who read the book when it was first published in 2017, who could have imagined that the war would still be going on in 2021? That Pasha’s journey would not belong strictly to the realm of the poet and his muses? It is even harder to read the book today if one pays attention to the news: the so-called frozen conflict between Ukraine and Russia heated up in the spring of 2021, and pundits were debating whether Russia would launch a full-scale invasion. In the meantime, Ukrainian soldiers are dying, with some families losing more than one son or daughter to defending the country. Innocent civilians are caught in the crossfire, too, and those lucky enough to escape with their lives still face the challenge of life as a refugee or internally displaced person—not knowing when, or even if, they can return home.
A poet, novelist, essayist, translator, radio broadcaster, and veritable rockstar, Serhiy Zhadan has remarked that his oeuvre can be divided into two parts: what was created prior to the Russo-Ukrainian war, and what has been produced since its outbreak. He has made numerous trips to the frontline cities, and his charitable foundation provides invaluable humanitarian aid to the people still living there.
It is all too easy for Ukrainians in other regions of the country to forget about the war when the fighting is isolated to the Luhansk and Donetsk regions. It is all too easy to forget, that is, until death comes knocking in the form of a lost family member, friend, lover, or classmate, and the grieving loved ones and soldiers are standing around a coffin in an otherwise calm city center. Such scenes remind us that the war is never too far off; in the end, it will spare no one. Both Zhadan’s poetry and prose about the war emphasize the importance—the necessity, even—of the collective “us” in Ukrainian society. He compels Ukrainians to understand—whether they have loved ones fighting or not, whether they live with the sounds of artillery fire in the frontline cities or enjoy a coffee with friends in Lviv’s cozy Rynok Square or not—that the war does affect everyone on a deeply personal level. The very future of the country is at stake:
Let’s start with what’s most difficult—with singing
and quenching the fires emerging from the night.
Let’s start by whispering the names,
let’s weave together the vocabulary of death.
To stand and talk about the night.
Stand and listen to the voices
of shepherds in the fog
incanting over every single lost soul.
In 2020, Lost Horse Press released A New Orthography, a book of Zhadan’s selected wartime work translated by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin, as part of their contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. (At the time of writing this, the book has also been shortlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.) Read together with The Orphanage, this collection offers English readers a better understanding of the Russo-Ukrainian war and the delicate intricacies of modern Ukrainian reality. In both his poetry and prose, Zhadan refuses to speak the language of a propagandist: above all, he is interested in how the war has transformed the lives of everyday people—that is, the most innocent and vulnerable in Ukrainian society. It is worth noting, in that respect, that most of the characters he introduces us to are not soldiers. For example, Pasha, the main hero of The Orphanage, is a teacher, and many of the people he encounters on his journey in the occupied territory are regular civilians just like him. The poems included in A New Orthography are no different: while soldiers are mentioned, so are priests, grave diggers, lost loves . . . This is what makes Zhadan’s prose and poetry so meaningful and, in a sense, timely: he lends his voice to the living and the dead, to the souls trapped by the machinations of imperial death drives. Most importantly, he listens to them:
They buried their son last winter.
Strange weather for winter—rain, thunder.
They buried him quietly—everybody’s busy.
Who did he fight for? I asked. We don’t know, they say.
He fought for someone, they say, but who—who knows?
Will it change for anything, they say, what’s the point now?
I would have asked him myself, but now—there’s no need.
And he wouldn’t reply—he was buried without his head.
It’s the third year of the war; they’re repairing the bridges.
I know so many things about you, but who’d listen?
I know, for example, the song you used to sing.
I know your sister. I always had a thing for her.
I know what you were afraid of, and why, even.
Who you met that winter, what you told him.
The sky gleams, full of ashes, every night now.
You always played for a neighboring school
But who did you fight for?
To come here every year, to weed dry grass.
To dig the earth every year—heavy, lifeless.
To see the calm after tragedy every year.
To insist you didn’t shoot at us, at your people.
The birds disappear behind waves of rain.
To ask forgiveness for your sins.
But what do I know about your sins?
To beg the rain to finally stop.
It’s easier for birds, who know nothing of salvation, the soul.
How did so many Ukrainians get consumed by Russia’s infernal war machine? How was it possible for some Ukrainians to abandon their country and suddenly fight for the Russian-backed, so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (Russia’s name for the proto-state in the occupied territory)? This all ties into the greater question of Ukrainian national identity, a difficult topic that Zhadan explores without damning judgment. In several scenes in The Orphanage, Pasha is confronted by the question of what it means to be Ukrainian, an otherwise ordinary question that soon takes on a pressing, existential dimension. He is a teacher of Ukrainian who never uses the language outside the classroom; he doesn’t watch the news on TV (something he repeats to numerous people who incredulously ask why he didn’t retrieve his nephew from the orphanage sooner, as if this excused his inaction); and he is firm in his lack of support for any politicians, parties, or ideologies. Like many Ukrainians, he simply kept his head down and lived a normal, quiet life. He was neither involved in nor interested in politics—he was just trying to survive. This apolitical behavior explains much of the chaos that followed the outbreak of the war: one’s neighbor or classmate could suddenly, without any sense or reason, become an enemy.
The novel presents three generations of Pasha’s family: Pasha’s father, who seemingly sits in front of the television all day; then Pasha; and, later on, his nephew Sasha. As television is an important propaganda tool in Russia’s war against Ukraine, it is unsurprising that Zhadan devotes several passages to it: after all, the novel begins with the decontextualized image of a “blood-drenched man . . . crying out . . . in front of the screen, to no avail—the sound’s been off since last night. Now you can’t get to him, no matter how loud you yell.” We don’t know if the broadcast comes from Ukrainian or Russian television—in this region of the country, one can only guess. Following Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the experiences of these three generations are deeply intertwined, yet they also exist in conflict with one another.
The uneasy social fabric resulting from this tension was ripe for exploitation. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought an end to any semblance of stability and the so-called “brotherhood” of Slavic nations, a myth that the Russian media continues to propagate to this day, despite the unfortunate fate of countless Ukrainians during the Soviet era. (One need only think of the Holodomor, a manufactured famine in 1932–1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians, especially in the east of the country, and the Executed Renaissance, a generation of writers who were repressed and executed as enemies of the people under Stalin’s regime in the 1920s and ’30s.) The 2014 annexation of the Crimean peninsula and the current conflict in Donbas also belie the existence of any such brotherhood. Pasha’s father’s generation, to a certain extent, still exists mentally in the Soviet era and does not fully understand the strange new world that they inhabit. Pasha’s generation, on the other hand, is a lost generation: they came of age in the aftermath of the previous generations’ mistakes, but they do the best they can to survive. So, the question remains: Can Sasha and his generation be saved?
To rescue his nephew, Pasha crosses into the occupied territory with the help of a taxi driver known as the Chameleon, who, for a few bucks, transports people and coffins alike through military checkpoints. But he can only take Pasha to the train station: after that, Pasha’s on his own. At the train station, Pasha finds many women and children huddled together, hugging their belongings close to their chests, on the verge of delirium. With them are many dogs seeking shelter, an otherwise normal thing at a train station in prewar times: now, however, one dog clings to Pasha when it becomes frightened by the sounds of artillery fire, only to trail after a tank with Russian soldiers who throw him a half-eaten chocolate bar. Animals only understand survival—they know nothing about the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic. A group of people at the train station is paying a man to help them cross safely into the territory still under the protection of the Ukrainian army, and Pasha joins them after the man promises to take him to the orphanage along the way. Unfortunately, the guide cuts out once they find themselves under fire. The group then turns to Pasha for help, as he is the only able-bodied young man among them, but his indecisiveness forces them to eventually split up. When an old man in the group begins to have heart palpitations, Pasha takes him and several others in search of some medicine and temporary shelter. Much of the novel follows this structure, in which there is one uneasy alliance after another, with Pasha relying on strangers to find his nephew and get out of the occupied territory alive. The backroads and abandoned neighborhoods through which Pasha and the others travel in order to avoid the fighting become a kind of liminal space with the potential to encounter both good and evil.
Eventually, Pasha makes it to the orphanage, where the teachers have fled and only the director and the gym teacher remain to look after the children. Sasha is understandably angry that his uncle took so long to come for him, but he quickly comes to his senses, understanding that he must act wisely if he wants to survive. Orphans have long occupied a significant place in literature, especially in nineteenth-century fiction. Without strict family ties, orphans must make their own way in the world. Their journey rivals any hero’s, for the ties they forge along the way emphasize the importance of family and a sense of community. In many ways, Zhadan’s orphanage resembles Ukraine in the years following its independence. The country has been caught between empires, leaving it with a fractured sense of identity. If these generations come together, managing to forge a coherent national identity, Ukraine’s dark past can only lead to a brighter future.
One of the novel’s most poignant scenes takes place in the kitchen at the orphanage, when the director, Nina, the gym teacher, Valera, and Pasha ruminate on this national predicament. “Obviously they’re gonna try and pin it all on us, on the people who stuck around,” Valera says. “Yeah, that’s how it’ll play out for sure. But no way in hell are they gonna pin anything on me! Not gonna happen! I don’t have anything to do with this! And they don’t either!” he continues, referring to the children. He laments that these children were born in the wrong generation, without any good memories to sustain them in harder times. But Nina grew up in the Soviet Union as well, and in defiance of Valera’s nostalgia for better times, insists that she only remembers the hungry feeling in her stomach. Even though Valera and Pasha say that they, as ordinary people, have nothing to do with the war, she reminds them that they never voted or took an active interest in civil society. “You should have made up your minds and picked a side a long time ago,” she tells them. “You’re so used to hiding. So used to staying out of things, letting someone else decide everything for you. Nobody’s going to decide for you, nobody’s going to take care of things. Not this time. Because you saw what was going on, you knew. But you kept silent, you didn’t say anything. Nobody’s going to judge you for that, obviously, but don’t count on your descendants’ appreciation.”
Unlike many of the people they met along the way, Pasha and Sasha find their way back home. As they near their home, Sasha finds a small puppy, half-alive and trembling in the cold street. His uncle tries to convince him to leave it, but Sasha knows that the small animal will die if he does not take it with him. And so, the novel ends on a positive note: the younger generation, despite living through tumultuous times, will not be weighed down by the guilt of the previous generation’s sins. If they can be saved, as The Orphanage suggests, they will be capable of great achievements that benefit the whole country.
