How did we build our houses?
When you’re standing under winter skies,
and the heavens turn and sail away,
you know you’ve got to live somewhere you aren’t afraid to die.
It’s not terribly wrong to start a dispatch on prose with poetry because in Zhadan, the two overlap. Let that last poetry line, in Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk’s translation, hang over the remainder of this text like a life sentence.
A poet, fiction writer, translator, essayist, rock star, and legend, Serhiy Viktorovych Zhadan was born in 1974 in Starobilsk, but later moved to Kharkiv and made the capital of Ukrainian modernism his spiritual home. Zhadan wrote a dissertation on the Ukrainian Futurist poet Mykhail Semenko and became an honorary doctor of the Karazin University (the one bombed by the Russians in spring 2022).
In Post-Chornobyl Library, Ukrainian literary scholar Tamara Hundorova describes Zhadan as ‘a punk who does not want to grow up’, and at the same time, ‘a revolutionary of the “homeless” and “alcoholic” generation of the 1990s’. The punk bit of this description still rings true as it relates to Zhadan’s profile as a frontman of ska punk bands Zhadan i Sobaky (Zhadan and The Dogs) and Liniia Manerheima.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, Zhadan has also been a tireless volunteer and activist. Some of his most important concerts were played in the Kharkiv metro stations and underground shelters during the bombardments of the city. During the most dangerous for Kharkiv first months of the full-scale invasion, Zhadan stayed there and continued helping the army and civilians:
Why have my friends and I stayed? Because we have a lot of work to do. We had this work to do before February 2022, too, and it hasn’t gone anywhere. We knew that when the occupiers came we wouldn’t be able to hide out in basements, that we would have work to do instead. Second, and probably more important, we love this city too much to abandon it when it’s going through tough times. So we decided to stay put in the neighborhoods we’re used to, where we’ve always felt calm and confident.
(Read the piece here: Beyond Metaphor: Inside the First Month of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine. Serhiy Zhadan Records the Emergence of a New Reality in Kharkiv. Translated by Reilly Costigan‑Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler, May 17, 2023 ).
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