Interview with Marianna Kiyanovska

conducted and translated by Anna Halberstadt

What languages do you write in and what languages do you translate from?

I write in Ukrainian, always only in Ukrainian, although my grandmother was Polish. I translate from 17 languages, including Polish and Lithuanian, but in most cases my co–translators are native speakers. I have translated from Hebrew in collaboration with Anna Dubinskaya, from Lithuanian in collaboration with Marius Burokas and Vytas Dekshnys, and I translate poetry from English in collaboration with my daughter, Asya Porytko.

Who are your most important influences?

I once joked that a translator is a cannibal, he “eats” the author he translates. Translation for me is “food,” a source of energy. In this sense, translation is more important to me than even reading. There are authors who get energy from communication and performances. For me, the source of strength is, first of all, the act of writing itself, secondly, the act of translation as an act of writing, and thirdly, reading as an act of writing, because I read as if I were writing. Because I am this way, I probably have absolutely no awareness of influence. When I write, each time I start writing a book, I create a language specifically for that book. I have a collection of my crowns of sonnets, several books of free verse, and several books of rhyming poetry. For me, very important poets are [Vasyl] Stus, Euripides, Dante, Rilke, Eliot, Claudel, Celan, [Taras] Shevchenko, [Velimir] Khlebnikov, [Bolesl Les [Adam] Mickiewicz, [Zbigniew] Herbert, [Bohdan–Ihor Antonych] Svidzinsky, Pound, Ilya Kaminsky, Jon Fosse. I know that Euripides and Fosse are not considered poets, but I recognize them precisely as poets. Lately I’ve been re–reading Elena Fanailova, Linor Goralik, Maria Stepanova, [Osip] Mandelstam, Alexei Tsvetkov, [Gennady] Aigi, [Olga] Sedakova, [Grigory] Dashevsky, [Elena] Schwartz, trying to understand whether my perception of poetry in Russian has changed because of the war. But I can’t say that there is any influence, in principle, as such. On the other hand, for me others’ good poetry is a “midwife” for my own, it is some type of maieutics, other people’s poems are “questions” asked of me that extract “knowledge” from me. In other words, cannot write without other people’s poems, they provide me with a source of energy and pose questions to me one after another.

How has this war impacted your life and writing?

The war has changed me more than anyone could imagine. In terms of strength, it can be compared to how the birth of my daughter changed me. One of the women who escaped from Mariupol told me when I was in Berlin that her old mother died of a heart attack, and that was the only reason she and her daughter were able to escape the occupation. They would not have left behind a loved one.

I was lying there, severely disabled after two spinal surgeries, and suddenly realized that I was incredibly lucky: I would not have to decide to commit suicide. For the first time in my life, I really considered suicide, because I would do it for the sake of my daughter’s life. This kind of thought changes your life. I had two clinical deaths before, and I always absolutely knew about myself that for me the most impossible thing in the world was suicide. The war made suicide possible for me, under certain circumstances. After that I changed completely. Because for me, suicide is the most difficult, nearly impossible, desecration of oneself.

The first year after the full–scale invasion, I barely wrote. I was looking for a language for a new book. I only wrote a dozen poems. I wanted to write essays, not poetry. But in 2022, I only wrote a few essays. And only at the end of February 2023, a year after the full–scale invasion, did I write the first texts for a new book of poems. It was published at the end of May 2023 as Lightning Meets Water and Wind. These are poems written as if in an afterlife. They offer eyewitness testimony of the war, but timeless and at the limits of language, from within a myth. As I was writing this book, my husband’s father died in one week, and immediately after that, my brother. When I sent the manuscript to the publisher in Kyiv, several verses from the book came prophetically true. In particular, on the night of April 24, a red aurora appeared in the sky over Ukraine, which I had described in a poem in early March. It was dedicated to Vladimir Vakulenko, who had been tortured to death by the occupiers. I had and still have the feeling that with these poems I came closer to the thinnest layer between reality and non–existence.

How has the Ukrainian’s perception of this war changed?

I always catch myself thinking that there is a certain impossibility of imagining this war, imagining a person in this war. I can’t even really imagine myself now.

Jews understand this, this is a Shoah–like experience. For a person experiencing a catastrophe, the disaster explodes inside. You wash your face, brush your teeth, and it explodes. You walk down the street, and it explodes. I remained in Ukraine until July 2022, and I literally could not breathe from this sense of a catastrophe, from the sobbing inside. The first half of 2022 was sanctified for many by the life–saving illusion that the war would not last long and victory would soon come. There was a lot of grief, but on the whole, almost everyone shared this illusion in one way or another. In May 2022, I wrote on my Facebook page, that the war would probably last until about mid–2025: it could not end any earlier. Now almost everyone understands that this war will last for a long time.

Putin has created, by means of propaganda and normalization of violence, several tens of millions of unscrupulous, irresponsible, brutalized Russians who are ready to commit terrible crimes for money. To feed his family, a Russian must kill, and it is easiest for him to kill the elderly, women, and children. Murderers have always existed. But the horror is that almost all of Russia has made this choice. It is also a disaster that this is exactly how the Russians have raised several generations of children. The Soviet government has created “Soviet man” — homo soveticus — and in Ukraine this Soviet man has always been first and foremost a murderer. The troops of Mikhail Muravyov, who stormed Kyiv in January 1918 with approximately 7 thousand soldiers and officers, killed and tortured over 5 thousand civilians, in addition to over 8 thousand (out of approximately 12,000) military personnel. Then followed the Holodomor and Stalinist repressions, the genocide during the mass deportation of the Crimean Tatars, the abandonment of Jews in Kyev in 1941 by the Soviet authorities (because the enterprises were evacuated, and the people, including even children, were abandoned) . . . And there is no admission of guilt, no lustration, no repentance.

At the start of the war, Ukrainians often called the invaders “orcs,” dehumanizing the enemy. But lately the word “orcs” is hardly used. Ukrainians call the occupiers “Russians,” less often “Rashists.” We suddenly realized that we should not be insulting the orcs in this way. In addition, the occupiers are not “Rashists.” Russia has been taken over by a pre–modern imperialism with elements of Stalinism, Nazism, with learned helplessness cultivated at the national level and with a passive civil society paralyzed by horror — all that put on steroids by the narratives and manipulation techniques invented by postmodernism. This is new. Previously, we saw Russians as “Rashists” and compared them to the Nazis. But this is something else. Even in Ukraine, the attitude towards responsibility (and impunity) has changed. Thanks to the war, we saw how Nazism and Stalinism arose through the destruction of the most active and most creative people; the destruction of the possibility of a legal regime change; the subjugation of the crowd; the “masses” in the Ortega y Gasset sense; but, most importantly, impunity as a synonym of power, and the irresponsibility of the ordinary people. Ukrainians have retained an understanding of the value of a sense of duty, of responsibility: we have not succumbed to the temptation to become hopelessly, helplessly irresponsible, we do not consent to silently watching as women and children are raped. The Maidan protests in 2014 began with the beating of students on the night of December 30, 2013. We did not let ourselves be boiled like a frog over the slow fire of ever–increasing violence (while the Russians did). And now we are gradually developing an awareness of all this. Therefore, responsible behavior is of the same value for us now as human dignity.

What can you say about family archives, relationships with cities that no longer exist, relationships with relatives and friends who are either too far away or fighting on the frontlines?

War exhibits epistemological precariousness and uncertainty. For example, people escaping from the war — especially from places like Hostomel, Mariupol, and the Kharkov region — did not always have time even to grab their most important documents before fleeing, not to mention family archives and valuables. Many were sure that they would return home within a week. No one imagined the speed with which the Russians occupied some cities. In the First and Second World Wars everything happened much more slowly. Almost no one could imagine that the Russians would turn out to be such dishonorable looters, especially the Russian–speaking residents of Ukrainian million–plus cities. People who previously [said they] “knew” that Russia would never attack Ukraine because “we are brothers” have now lost not only this “knowledge,” but also something much greater: the foundation of their own existence.

The war has proven to be not only a mental, psychological strain, not only a cause of terrible emotional trauma and changes, not only a reason for physical displacement, sometimes by thousands of kilometers, but also the newfound awareness of the entire Ukrainian nation that nothing will be the same now. During the First and Second World Wars combined, 44 houses were destroyed in Lviv and approximately 600 houses in Kyiv, including Khreshchatyk Street, blown up by Soviet troops. Today, 68 towns and villages have now been completely wiped off the face of the earth in Ukraine, including several medium–sized cities. Several hundred have been partially wiped off the face of the earth, and meanwhile no one knows still when this war will end.

After two severe spinal surgeries, I first lived in Germany for almost a year, then moved to Poland. I haven’t seen my mother, my daughter and my husband for almost two years, because they stayed in Ukraine. My husband, daughter and I have an agreement to talk without using video, because the war has aged me terribly. I’m 50, but I look 65–70 years old, and I can’t look at myself in the mirror or in photos. We never talk about plans, because this is a painful topic: my husband is preparing for mobilization, my daughter’s boyfriend is preparing for mobilization; my mother has recently undergone heart bypass surgery since my brother died tragically a year ago. In March 2024, three of my close relatives died on the frontlines within days of each other: March 2, March 11, March 27. I now have one cousin who is still fighting at front. I want to emphasize: I’m not complaining. This is what war looks like up close — from the perspective of a person who seems to be relatively safe. But every day, every night, when missiles fly towards Ukraine, everything inside me explodes. At the same time, I try to work on translations 10–12 hours a day to take my mind off thoughts about the war, so I have no time for fear.

What is the most awkward question that you have been asked as a writer during the war?

There are two: about my “plans for the future” and the question “What do you do for our victory?” Because only a soldier in the trenches and a doctor in a field hospital or evacuating the wounded from the battlefield really does anything for victory.

Love and hate during the war.

I’ll start from a little distance. About a year ago, I had a long conversation with a friend, during which the idea arose that empathy and ethics can be explained through the contrast between a nurse and a doctor. The nurse must remain in a field of empathy, so to speak: she must be the first to rush to save a child, even if there are a lot of sick or wounded. The doctor must remain in the conventional field of ethics. Therefore, he will first save the sickest or the most seriously wounded person, if he or she has a chance to survive. The doctor takes it upon himself to determine who does not have this chance. Ethics is much more complex than empathy. Naked empathy in war is too irresponsible. You may hate the enemy, but you will not kill a prisoner of war; you may love your son, but you will let him go into battle. Personally, I hate to hate, I’m scared of being scared, and I love to love, but during a war, in its supposedly peaceful “rear,” empathy can lead to excessive affect, and then you will probably end up paying a price that is always too high.

I have no special education to address this war. I am not a military professional, not a historian, not a political scientist, not a sociologist, not a politician, not a diplomat, not a lawyer. But I have, over many years, cultivated the sensitivity of a witness. I have proven it twice. After the publication of my Babyn Yar, my “voices” asked me how I could relive the Jewish experience, given that I am not Jewish, and how I could write “from within” the Holocaust, given that three generations separate me from it. I have the answer.

An empathetic witness or a witness possessed by passion is a bad witness. In this sense, I have “turned off” empathy in my mind, while allowing my body to be “empathic.” While I was writing I experienced “voices” due to a tumor growing in my brain — I called it “the bullet in my head” — this was well documented by an MRI scan. My body, in an impossible and unimaginable way, made me a witness to the mass murder of Jews at Babyn Yar. Therefore, when I say: “I am Raquel,” those are the words not only of my consciousness but also of my body.

The second time this happened was with my book Lightning Meets Water and Wind. Throughout 2022, I was tormented by the question: how should I write about this war? I’m not in the trenches. I’m not in the hospital. I’m not in Mariupol. I’m not in Bucha. I’m not sitting in a bomb shelter for days on end. There are other people. They are in the trenches, in the hospital, in Mariupol, in Bucha, in the bomb shelter. But, on the other hand, I knew exactly how I should be writing: as a witness. And yet, do I have the right to do this? So, in May 2022, I made an ethical decision: to do much the same thing that I have done when I allowed my body to turn me into a witness to the Holocaust. I allowed my body to process all the love that was available to me and all the hate that was available to me, while my consciousness operated not in an “empathic” but in an “ethical” mode.

On October 3, 2022, I was sitting on a park bench in Berlin and suddenly my cell phone rang. I was informed that I had won the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award. A few minutes later the phone rang a second time. I was informed that my classmate Yuri Lelyavsky had died in the war on September 27. After that, something happened to my spine, and until early May 2023, I was essentially unable to walk. My daughter said: “The war broke your spine.” I had no doubt that that is true. And while I was lying down immobile for about six months, I gradually became a real witness to Russia’s war against Ukraine: my body made me a witness to the fighting, the troop formations in the trenches, the occupation by the Russians of almost a third of our territory, the destruction of our cities. So Lightning Meets Water and Wind is also a book of testimony, that’s exactly how I feel it.

You once told me how you decided to write on Babyn Yar. Could you talk about that?

I never made a conscious decision to start writing that book. Rather, it happened to me like fainting to a pregnant woman. Before that, I had read a lot about the Holocaust in Europe but knew relatively little about the Holocaust in Ukraine. And although I passed right by Babyn Yar whenever I was invited to give an interview on television, I had never been directly on the territory of Babyn Yar. I think it is worth mentioning that I was born and raised in Zhovkva, a town in the Lviv region which has a unique Renaissance synagogue and rich Jewish history. During the Holocaust, about eight thousand Jews from the city and the surrounding area were exterminated in Zhovkva. In my last year before and until about the third grade, we would go and play in the Jewish cemetery, one of the oldest in Europe, which at that time had already been destroyed. Dozens of truckloads of sand were poured onto the destroyed matzevahs (tombstones), and the Soviet government opened a large bazaar on the site of the Jewish cemetery. In those years, that sand was relatively clean and soft, we dug up matzevah sand pretended that they were “treasures” on a “treasure island.” I did not realize until the end of school that we had been playing on graves back then. Understanding this changed my soul. Zhovkva is the hometown of [Sir Hersch] Lauterpacht, a British jurist who worked at the Nuremberg Tribunal. Lauterpacht first introduced the legal concept of “crimes against humanity.” When I was in the 5th grade, our house burned down, we were given temporary housing. It was not until 2017, after the publication of Babyn Yar. Voices, that I learned that this apartment was located in a house built on the site of the destroyed Lauterpacht house. I learned this thanks to Philippe Sands and his book [On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity ] about Lauterpacht and [ Raphael ] Lemkin. So, it was as if Providence had been leading me all my life to my book Babin Yar. Voices, yet at the same time I never intended to write it. It emerged out of nowhere, on its own.

What are you working on right now?

Sorry, I would rather not answer this question. Truckers and sailors are afraid of the “evil eye,” and in this regard, I am even worse than them. I can only say one thing: while I am alive, I try — as a writer — to do as much as possible. I try to think a lot, try new things, experiment, look for answers, so from the outside it sometimes appears that I am merely reading.