The word “war” is even less comprehensible during wartime than in peacetime, when it’s used quite differently. What is happening around me right now—the constant shelling and the warnings I hear—this is what “war” should mean. But this word seems meaningless, because in war reality breaks into parts, islands, pieces.
By contrast, photographs offer Belorusets a way “to give an account, not with words, but with the irrefutable image” which can “speak for itself.”
Since much earlier, the beginning of the 2014 war in Donbass, Yevgenia Belorusets—artist, writer, journalist, curator, and activist—has focused, through both fiction and nonfiction texts, as well as photographs, on the effects of Russia’s aggression in Donbass and other parts of Ukraine, effects on people, animals, and landscapes and built environments.
I’m grateful to Yevgenia Belorusets and poet Eugene Ostashevsky, who translated Belorusets’s story collection Lucky Breaks (New Directions, 2022), for sharing this conversation about literary language choice in relation to political power and aggression, and about photography as another language, an alternative mode of reporting and storytelling.
—Heather Green
You wrote your first and second books, Lucky Breaks and Modern Animal, in Russian. The originals came out with a tiny publisher in Kharkiv, Ukraine. It was in 2017 and 2021, when the Russian attack on Ukraine was as yet surreptitious. Your most recent book, War Diary, charts your life in Kyiv in the first six weeks of the full-scale war. But it’s written originally in German. What were the reasons for the language switch?
The Russian language has little to do with Russia for me. I grew up surrounded by it and learned to love it in Kyiv, in Ukraine. It connects me to my childhood. It prevents me from experiencing my life as some constantly but violently interrupted unfolding of history. The way you formulate your question is itself—if I may say so—questionable. Parties in ideological conflicts connect language to the soil and the state. However, no one should have any claim on the political identity of a language except its speakers.
I started writing in German after February 24, 2022, the beginning of the all-out phase of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. My native languages, Russian and Ukrainian, brought me closer to reality, but I wanted to distance myself from it. I was not yet aware of the opportunities offered by a foreign language when it is so painful to look at reality that a mediator is needed. The German magazine Der Spiegel contacted me on the first day of the war. They asked that I simply describe what was happening around me, how the city was changing. As I wrote I realized that working with the German language—the process of carefully interacting with it and of getting to know it—allowed me to express more clearly what I was thinking. It was as if the languages close to me were silent: I could hardly say anything in them.
In other words, because wartime reality is so—as we say nowadays—traumatic, it is easier to see it through the prism of a language you learned not in early childhood but as a young adult?
It’s not about seeing new reality, it’s about saying something about it. The reality of war is incapacitating on two levels. It strips my past life and personal history of any worth, but it also erases my country’s complex experience of collective living. No language can be mobilized against the tremendous violence offered by war against a culture and its ways of speaking, when acts of terrorism, mass murder and nonstop crime become a part of everyday life. No particular language—neither one that is foreign or native—can by itself show us how to keep our voices, and how to speak.
But in my case, the German language became a kind of bridge, a way to find the words to describe the reality around me. Because it made me realize, in a direct, tangible way, how difficult it is to find the right word. Also, German always reminded me of the Yiddish expressions I heard from my grandmother when I was very little. It seemed to echo the forms I knew in my earliest childhood. But this is more of a fantasy of recognition than the reality of working with a language learned later in life.
After I moved to Germany, a friend from New York who came from Odesa as a child said to me: “I don’t know how you can stand being surrounded by that ugly language!” When I pressed her on it, she talked about the sound of German. But she really was thinking about the Holocaust—as was another friend, who attributed my difficulties with learning German to intergenerational trauma from the Siege of Leningrad, fortified by Soviet movies. For me, the idea that any language can’t express the full range of human relations and emotions is false, and the same goes for the idea that the phonetics or grammar of any language can be inherently ugly or oppressive. Most Germans would associate German with tenderness, and rightfully so. And I find it interesting and lovely that you associate German with Yiddish. But can we talk about Russian, the language of your first books? Can I ask you about the feeling of revulsion now often provoked by the Russian language in Ukraine, even among native Russian speakers, because of the Russian invasion?
You caught the thoughts I am thinking now, as I wander the streets of Kyiv. Тhey feel vaguely forbidden in the shadow of this war and are difficult to write down as a result. I often develop in my mind the thoughts of people who have exchanged only a few words with me. As if I overheard someone else’s monologue. I may start arguing with it or else I may succumb to it. Recently, a Ukrainian voice cut into the flow of my generally Russian-speaking thoughts. It was cursing the Russian language, accusing it of crimes, of cruelty, of atrocities, and bewailing its threat to the Ukrainian language.
The other day, I fell into a conversation with a young woman in a Kyiv café. She told me that the crucial thing now is to protect the Ukrainian language, which is in danger. I objected that the Ukrainian language is flourishing like never before. My objection gave her pause and she agreed with me. But immediately she added that she sensed the Ukrainian language to be under threat and this is why she decided to switch from Russian to Ukrainian in her everyday life. I told her: maybe it’s easier for us to think that it is the language that is under threat. It is easier to live with this kind of threat than with the daily reports of people being killed in their apartments and houses. People are being killed every day. Most people are being killed in those regions of Ukraine where the home language tends to be Russian. The girl covered her face with her hands and began to cry. I put my arms around her.
You mean that, since it is impossible to emotionally deal with the violence performed by the invading Russians, reaction to it is projected onto the Russian language instead?
When I listen to myself think, I hear the complaint against language. Perhaps it comes from some collective political conviction that language can be associated with a passport and a country—that language has a “homeland,” and this “homeland” has clear political boundaries. It means that Russian was not “native” to Ukraine, but a guest, as it were. A horrifying guest, who showed his true nature the moment Russia started the war. And now, after “the mask has been torn off,” all that remains is to turn one’s back to the language and expel it. It is as if a language can leave one place for another. But, in fact, it has nowhere to go. That Russian that was in Ukraine—the way of speaking that surrounded me since childhood—is a unique local language. If it disappears, nothing like it will emerge anywhere else.
But now, when the pain is so strong, it’s very hard to talk about it. I keep meaning to write an article about the language issue, but I can’t get myself to start.
This war puts you in a particularly difficult situation as a writer. Before the full-scale invasion, although you wrote in Russian, you rejected the possibility of publishing in Russia. But it was hard to publish and even harder to disseminate your Russian-language fiction in Ukraine. Now it will no doubt be even harder, if not outright impossible. Many Russophone Ukrainian writers and poets are switching to Ukrainian, because they associate the Russian language with the occupiers. What kind of language choices do you see in your own future? Russian? German? Ukrainian?
The very word “Russophone” feels objectionable to me. I always considered my Russian as actually a Ukrainian language, a language of Ukraine. The war implicates its name but not its identity, because the word we use to refer to this language happens to coincide with the name of the country that attacked us. Instead, the war should provoke us to ask ourselves: does our local linguistic culture have any value? And where do the borders of a language run? I don’t think that these questions have clear and certain answers. We have dialects in Ukraine that appear to combine Russian and Ukrainian expressions. They are widespread, especially in the countryside. We also have lots of families where partners speak different languages with one another. Our literary culture includes figures like Gogol and Babel who wrote in a Russian that is not the Russian of Russia, and Skovoroda, whose language is mixed. Where are we to draw the borders? Through our families, through our conversations, through our heritage? Our practices are ambivalent. That gray zone of ambivalence can be easily captured by an ideological dogmatism that stigmatizes one or another kind of linguistic activity. But dogmatism cannot deal with the actual complexity of our culture. It cannot sufficiently compensate for its erasure of lived, individual, human experience.
Ukraine’s own unique Russian-language culture is being annihilated by Russia first and foremost, because the invaders are destroying the territory where this language and culture predominate. At the same time, one common reaction to Russian aggression has been the rejection of Ukraine’s own, second-most-widely spoken language, as “the language of the invader.” Indeed, Russian propaganda constantly acts to appropriate the Russian language spoken in Ukraine in order to claim ownership over its speakers. The response of Ukrainian anti-propaganda has been to reject this language as “foreign.” But it’s actually one of our languages. Here is a chance for all of us Ukrainians to realize that the culture of our country belongs only to us. None of it belongs to the Russians. What’s more, our culture is in our power. It is up to us whether we will treat what we have with care or whether we will bowdlerize and destroy it.
Russian-speaking Ukrainian culture is a blank spot on our cultural map. It has not yet been labeled, described, or legitimized through acceptance, interest, and study. Rather, in reaction to the Russian invasion, we prefer to disguise it, to make it either invisible or inconsequential. We would rather it had never existed. Today I would like to keep writing in Russian, addressing my Ukrainian reader. That means, for me, continuing to explore Ukraine’s linguistic culture, including the Ukrainian-speaking part of it. This is how I can best report on what I hear outside and inside me.
I have always heard Ukrainian in my Russian, without ever separating one language from the other. My Russian speaking could only become itself because the Ukrainian was there, illuminating its possibilities and somehow shaping it. No matter which of my languages I choose to write in, I will always feel that I am missing the others. But publication is the last thing on my mind right now.
As a New Yorker, I am also a speaker of local Russian, but while Ukrainian Russian is spoken by Ukrainian-Russian bilinguals, our Russian is spoken by English-Russian bilinguals. Both of these ways of speaking Russian are quite different from monolingual Russian, a variant that is dominant in Russia but not anywhere else. I certainly have no sense whatsoever that my Russian has any political relation to the Russian Federation, which is not even a nation-state but the warmed-up leftovers of a feudal land empire.
As far as the wartime animus against the speaking of Russian in Ukraine is concerned, I see three long-term reasons for it. The most important one is that the war is awakening the centuries-old trauma of linguistic discrimination by the Russian state against the Ukrainian language. For centuries, the Russians have impeded the use of Ukrainian as a language of education and culture. But the current reversal recoils against Russian-speaking Ukrainians, rather than against Russians. In English we speak of cutting off your nose to spite your face, but this is cutting off your nose to spite somebody else’s face.
The second reason is the successful appropriation of Russian high culture by the Russian state. Not just Russian nineteenth-century writers but even the dissidents and underground artists of the twentieth century got posthumously kidnapped by the Russian state and made into agents of Russian soft power abroad, where they drown out Ukrainian and other voices. My guess is that declaring Ukraine a multilingual nation, and thereby laying claim to literature composed within present Ukrainian borders in any language, would be an effective antidote. In addition to literature in Ukrainian, Ukraine would thus acquire a lot of literature in Yiddish; it would get a bit of a claim on Paul Celan and Zbigniew Herbert and maybe even a sliver of Joseph Conrad. Most importantly and satisfyingly, Ukraine would thereby repossess not just Gogol, but about a third of Russian literature, wresting a soft-power resource from Russia and making it work for Ukrainian interests. I have known Russian poets who originally came from Ukraine and were influenced by Ukrainian-language literature—I mean Dragomoshchenko, who grew up in Vinnytsia but moved to Leningrad as an adult, or Parshchikov, who grew up in Kyiv but moved to Moscow as an adult. I am sure that they, like you, would say that their Russian was formed by Ukrainian. Or take Russian Futurism, a very consequential movement in Russian experimental poetry, which was founded and run mainly by people from Ukraine: Burliuk, Kruchenykh, Livshits, Gnedov. How can David Burliuk be a Ukrainian painter but a Russian poet? Why not rebrand all of their writing as Ukrainian literature but in Russian? Why let Russia make cultural capital out of it?
The third long-term reason for the current desire to do away with Ukrainian multilingualism is the fact that Ukraine was subject to the Soviet educational system, which preserved German Romantic linguistic ideology. The native-language criterion for national identity made sense in the nineteenth century, before the rise of modern media, when the speakers of language X were also the natural consumers of print media in language X, and thereby their thinking was informed by the ideologies of the print media in that language. But now it’s not novels and poems but television and video that are the true manufacturers of national identity, with the result that people who consume Russian state-controlled media are “Russian,” and people who don’t, aren’t. Language by itself has nothing to do with it.
I realize that I am speaking as a New Yorker. I am projecting the linguistic ideology that is proper to New York outside the borders of New York. After all, New York had its own Ukrainian poetry, its own Russian poetry, its own Yiddish poetry, and they are just as properly New York as English-language poetry. So I think. If New York is left in the sole company of English, it is no longer New York but rather . . . I don’t know what. There is no longer such a thing as a monolingual city. Maybe there are monolingual villages somewhere . . . like in some Russian heartland, if Russia has a heartland. But Russia is not a good example to follow for language policy.
I am especially pleased to hear that, for you, the Russian you speak also has no political or identity relationship with the Russian Federation. The desire to demarcate the political borders of a language must mainly arise from the military aggression and the renewed, shocking barbarism of the invaders and their state.
In order for Ukraine to acknowledge its own Russian-language tradition, it needs to resist the temptation of simplicity, when language choice differentiates between “us” and “them.” Such accusatory and stigmatizing reductionism mainly recoils against ourselves—against people whose lives are bound with Ukraine. Language is the ground of the pleasure that comes from naming, defining and formulating something precisely. Stigmatization of a particular language tars with guilt all the ways of speaking it, depriving speakers of comfort and tranquility within the bounds of their speech. Thus, Ukrainians whose main language is Russian suddenly found themselves stained with guilt. I object to this. Especially now, when the Russian language has become the language of aggression—the speech of soldiers who invaded Mariupol and Bucha—we must, on the contrary, double our empathy with those Ukrainians who speak it. We must not associate the victims with the perpetrators. The perpetrators are criminals, who came from another country and a totally different political culture.
But is it not true that many refugees from those eastern areas—the areas that have been the main focus of the Russian invasion—are voluntarily switching to Ukrainian as their main language? In the aftermath of the assault, they too have begun accepting the link between the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian political identity, and—by corollary—between the Russian language and the Russian political identity. Or at least they have started looking at their Russian as an indicator of an imperfectly Ukrainian political identity. Am I being too reductive?
You’re right but I see nothing wrong in voluntary language change. Many Ukrainians switched their language even before the war; others stuck to bilingualism or else went back and forth. What I oppose is our looking at our own linguistic culture as something alien and “imperfectly Ukrainian,” as you put it. To reject the Ukrainian variety of Russian: this is not to be pro-Ukrainian. Rather, it is to reject a part of your own self because you want to have as little as possible in common with the aggressor. You want to show yourself and the whole world that you are separate and autonomous. But it’s done on the basis of a purely formal assumption that Russian is the language of Russia. Ukraine is at risk of developing a hierarchy of cultures, which will evaluate a person’s views and allegiances only on the basis of a language chosen to express them. Shibboleths will prevent us from building the democratic and free society for which Ukraine has been fighting for so long.
Shibboleths are a long-standing method of political manipulation in Ukraine, threatening the integrity of the country. Election campaigns of the past—at the time of the presidents Yushchenko, Yanukovych, and Poroshenko—played on language rights, appealing to the fears of insufficient representation among different regions and language groups. But the Revolution of 2014, when people from all parts of the country gathered to protest at the Maidan Square in Kyiv, demonstrated that the putative division of Ukraine into East and West was a mirage built by our politicians and fed by rumors and propaganda. When push came to shove, all the regions of Ukraine embraced the ideals of free and fair elections and of human rights and human dignity. During Maidan we all saw that our cultural differences enriched our shared space rather than divided it.
I am writing from Kyiv after nearly a year of open war has passed. I see here a united society that exhibits immense tolerance and magnanimity. All the variants of languages which exist in Ukraine can be heard on the streets of my city, and people make great efforts to support each other. Nothing shows as eloquently as this how determined Ukrainians are to create an inclusive society. And I hope that our current determination will survive into the postwar future.
Let me ask you about multilingualism from a different angle. As an American poet who was not born in the US and who lives in Europe, I am very aware that the global language of English enjoys far more social power and prestige than all other languages. All other languages are local, even Spanish, when compared to English. Writers from non-English-speaking countries often get used to the idea that they will be read primarily by foreign readers in translation. Some have started making allowances for it, i.e., writing with the translator and the foreign reader in mind. Do you think of readers and, if so, are they Ukrainian, or German speakers, or English speakers? Or are they Martians? Or are they you?
There was a point when I made friends with a ghost reader, an imaginary reader. I wrote my first book imagining that I was addressing miners from Donbass, whom I met during my trips to mining towns near the front. I was also thinking of miners from similar towns in western Ukraine, near the Polish border. They fascinated me, and I thought of my book as the answer to our interrupted conversations and nascent friendships. Then it turned out to be very difficult to distribute the book in towns bordering the fighting.
In general, I find it hard to ensure the distribution of my texts, I easily fail on this front. Modern Animal, my second book, primarily addresses the reader who can share my experience of a totalitarian discourse that exists somewhere at the level of forgotten memories. It is a discourse that builds strict hierarchies: it separates animal and human, man and woman. But totalitarian discourse is not universal. It comes from my childhood: it has an origin, a history; it undergoes metamorphosis, and another language is not an obstacle for it. It will gladly master any language in order to keep dividing, defining, building power relations and ensuring strict subordination. By the way, I think that such totalitarian discourse also informs the relationship between the Ukrainian and Russian languages. During the Soviet period, it was the Ukrainian language that was oppressed, there was an aura around it of “provinciality” and “weakness.” Now the discourse happily does the same with Russian. I have always wondered about its mechanisms. Once you examine totalitarian discourse, it loses some of its power. At least, that’s what I like to think.
Have you been asked to translate your books into Ukrainian? If so, would you translate them yourself or would you work with someone else or would you reject the possibility?
My War Diary has been translated into Ukrainian from the German. I don’t have the wherewithal right now to be the translator of my own text, but the task of editing the translation is still ahead of me. And I wish it weren’t. Probably because I have always found translation to be difficult, and would much more readily translate other authors than myself. Like you. I translated you.
Yes, I can’t stand translating myself either. But let me ask you yet something else. You first met with international recognition as a photographer. In fact, all your books are multilingual also in that their text is always accompanied by photographs. Or, to be more precise, each of your books consists of a series of literary narratives and one or more series of photographic narratives. The photographs do not illustrate the text. In Lucky Breaks the photographic and the verbal narratives are connected only by places and themes, whereas in War Diary the text sometimes talks about how you got this or that picture. But even in War Diary, the pictures are not subservient to the words. How would you describe the unusual relationship between words and pictures in your books? It’s not what we usually mean by the difference between showing and telling. Do you think of yourself as working in different languages even within the borders of a single book? Is a book for you a kind of translingual polyphony, or maybe even Gesamtkunstwerk, which the reader “gets” only when all of the artistic languages are considered individually as well as in their relation to each other?
Your question already contains a rather profound response to my practice. At some point, while working on Modern Animal or Lucky Breaks, I began to look at a photograph as an element of the book’s larger syntax. A picture became a road sign that interrupted the text and undermined its self-confidence. Each photograph could, of course, also be read narratively, and it did not even seem to require translation. I used to hope that a photograph could speak for itself—in defiance of the text, in spite of it, because what happens in a documentary shot can be commented on, but cannot be explained. The aspect of randomness present in any shot arouses suspicion, especially if the picture breathes harmony and makes the eye move along its forms and light and dark spots. Suspicion arises from the falsity of the arrangement that results in a still, a “portrait.” Our gaze is harmoniously directed in the right direction; we are complicitly inscribed into the composition of the living and the dead, of objects and people intertwined in a single whole image.
But the invasion converted me. I became a believer in photography's ability to record time and space as they “really” are. For the first time I felt that I really needed the services of photography and its contact with reality, because every hour was taking away my life, plunging it more and more into the alien field of war. Photography offered the chance to contrast the big story of society with the small story of a street, a house, a stone, a passerby. By registering a reality that was inescapable, photography sought to prove that some other reality was possible, that there was hope. My reaction is probably somewhat paradoxical . . .
I try to be honest and look for words to talk about photography. Photography is yet another language, as you say, but it is a language that constantly violates the boundaries of the text, a language that сan be—and often is—the least submissive to the will of the speaker and therefore so very necessary.
