Interview with Yuri Andrukhovych

This is not your first time in Chemnitz; you opened the "Leselust" festival during the Capital of Culture year. What is your impression of Chemnitz?

Yuri Andrukhovych: Unfortunately, I had a rather complicated technical task a year ago: it was a musical-literary performance, a kind of concert. I was here with my friends from the band Karbido and they are all perfectionists. They have to prepare everything incredibly diligently. And that meant that I had practically no time for the city. When I'm alone, I have more time, so now I'm experiencing my first touches of this city.


The International Stefan Heym Prize is not the first prize you've been awarded in Germany. Is it still something special for you?

Yes, of course. Every prize means something special, because almost all the prizes I have received in Germany are associated with a particular personality, including the Stefan Heym Prize. It's always a wonderful opportunity for me to get to know this personality more deeply. And I value that very highly.


What do you have in common with Stefan Heym?

I think his speciality is linked to the word "interference". I have to be honest, I never used to hear that word in such a context. So I think that's Stefan Heym's invention - taking this word, which I think is actually negative, and turning it into something positive. I would say that with all modesty, that I am also somewhat involved.


Despite the war, you are working on a new work. Is that right?

That's partly not true, because I have finished this work. I wrote the last sentence on 22 February. But that doesn't mean that this future novel is already finished, it's actually still in progress. I return to the text from time to time and of course there are still small details that I change. Sometimes there is a slightly bigger change to a scene. I'm still thinking about this text all the time and I hope to have my manuscript finished in a few months, say in the middle of the summer.


Would you like to reveal more about the content yet?

My protagonist is a boy between the ages of ten and twelve and he lives in a world that might seem very Eastern European. There is a geographical detail: he can recognise the mountains somewhere in the distance in his town and these mountains are the Carpathian Mountains. That means he is in Eastern Europe, Central Eastern Europe. Of course. It's not necessarily Ukraine. But the time is the same time when I myself was his age. It's about the early 70s, in the context of a dictatorship. There's a partisan war and the boy is waiting for his father. There is a family secret. Neither his mother nor his grandmother tell him what it's all about. Why isn't his father at home? But the background is a strong totalitarianism, an absolutely incomprehensible world, an absurd world. And the protagonist has to find himself somehow.
It's a collection of stories, not a regular novel. There are gaps in the subject matter that I have deliberately left. And now I see that the readers can build the bridges between these parts for themselves and perceive it all as a novel.


How is it possible for you to write in wartime anyway?

When I answer this question, I always think of the Ukrainian farmers who are still working somewhere near the front line, ten or 15 kilometres away, with a tractor or combine harvester in the summer. And in their machines they have special devices that show where the enemy drones are. They do their work without interruption.
I think that the writer also has to do his work, all the more so because I live in a town that is quite far from the front line. I have more peace and quiet than many of my colleagues who live in towns further east or south. When I come to Kharkiv with a reading or to Odessa - as I did a few weeks ago - I can experience the numerous air raids there. I can feel what life is like in this region. How often the aggressor attacks these areas, these cities. And then I am all the more grateful that I have more peace and quiet in my city, in our region, to think and write calmly.


Has the writing process changed for you or your colleagues during the war?

There are quite a few young colleagues who are now in the army. Not necessarily on the front line, but they are still soldiers. Quite a few do press work for their military units. There are also those who have stopped writing altogether for a while and now work more as reporters and bloggers. They have felt the need that these real everyday testimonies are more important at the moment than the next novel. Although more and more poems are being written about this absolutely terrible and at the same time so important time, which is now in its fifth year. There is no prospect of it somehow ending this year or even next. And that's an interesting task for writers, to be in a tunnel where you can't see any light at the end. I think it's a very specific situation and you have to deal with this challenge somehow.


How do you deal with this challenge?

I have accepted it. I have accepted the fact that the years I have left to live could all be taken up by this war. That I won't see the end of the war in my lifetime.


Really?

That's possible. The main thing was to accept it. And I believe that we as a society are now in the phase where we are learning this very intensively - being at war and living a normal life at the same time. This duality or a hybrid condition that probably no nation has experienced historically. This is an absolutely new war, the postmodern war, you could say. 


How did you manage to accept that?

Well, I think you have to look at everything realistically. That's the nature of this aggression. It is uncompromising. Those were the plans at the beginning of the aggression, back in 2014, that we as a country, as a culture, as a language, as everything that is essentially important - that it would all be destroyed and we should simply capitulate. That was the idea. And today, when we are in the fifth year of this story, these plans have not changed. The occupier is so stubborn. He doesn't calculate how many human victims he has, the only possibility is that the occupier is absolutely ruined economically. Then we can see the end of the war. But this ruin cannot happen for a long time yet. And it is important to see this clearly, to decide in favour of reality.


You mentioned that the front line is a long way from your home town of Ivano-Frankivsk. What is the overall situation in your home town?

If we are talking about the circumstances of the war and the first victims, then my city is lucky. So far, two people have died in my city who only died in March this year, in the fifth year of the invasion. It was a father and his daughter who were killed at the same time in a drone attack. The tragedy is even deeper because they went to visit the hospital where the mother had just given birth to her youngest daughter. It was supposed to be a happy visit. This is the most terrible, deepest tragedy that has happened in our city. We have many other losses, but these are our townspeople who died in the army, at the front. There is an avenue in the city centre with large portraits of those who never returned to their city alive.


In a lecture in Kaunas in 2022 - also a European Capital of Culture - you said that leaving Ukraine, emigrating, was out of the question for you. Is that still the case today?

Yes, of course. I see no reason to. If my hometown was Kharkiv, for example, a city that is under constant threat, I think I would stay there too. But I'm not sure about that. Then I could also migrate further west within Ukraine. But I don't see any motivation to go abroad. I understand people best at home, I can tell my own stories best and I am understood best. And I don't want to change that.


In the same lecture, you also described a conversation with a friend about what you would do if Russia attacked. And that your friend suspected that you were both on the blacklist too. Are you afraid of that?

Oh, the days when I was afraid are over. What does fear mean? In my novels, the protagonists are usually the ones who are persecuted. So I create such problems for my protagonists. That has brought me a lot of positive energy. I'm sure that resistance is something that people are supposed to do. Resistance is human.


You've already mentioned it: That Russia also wants to wipe out Ukraine in terms of language and nature. How do the Ukrainians manage not to despair about this?

Not everyone can do it. There are so many people who are really desperate. But still: we see how incapable Russia is of realising this. They want to destroy us, but they don't learn anything about us. They think all the time that we are like the Russians. They don't understand the completely different psychology of the Ukrainians. The perspective for the aggressor is actually very negative. For us too, unfortunately. But his success is totally impossible. 


Despite all the atrocities you describe, your texts do not leave readers feeling powerless in the face of the war in Ukraine. How do you manage that?

It's difficult to describe in words. But of course it's about your own tenacity. That means me and all of us, we have to be like that. This works more socially than as a human community: let's see each other and send each other such signals of solidarity. Every member of this community can do something of their own and can be an example for others. This is an important peculiarity of Ukrainians, that as a society we are all structured rather horizontally, so no power has any high authority among us. We are rather anarchistic by nature and we value our neighbours very highly. And in such situations, these structures are very effective.


Putin has previously threatened that he intends to do the same with other countries as he did with Ukraine. Did politicians fail to see the big picture before Russia's invasion? After all, there was only ever talk of a Ukraine crisis beforehand.

"Ukraine crisis" is absolutely the wrong term. This is Russia's crisis, this is the crisis of a great power that is no longer a great power and that has invented an existential project for itself to become a great power again. And we are, so to speak, the first phase of this return to a great power.
But I think it was a mistake to choose Ukraine first. We proved to be a strong opponent. Nobody knows what the other goals are. One can assume that the Baltic countries are probably the next target. It doesn't necessarily have to be the case that Ukraine has to be destroyed first. It can all happen at the same time. That the Russians will be stuck somewhere in Ukraine, where they are today, but at the same time also start something against Estonia or Latvia. Nobody can rule that out. 


You warned long before the war started that it would come to that. From today's perspective, that reads almost prophetic. What is your view of the future? You've already said that you probably won't live to see a time of peace.

I would like to experience this in my own time and not from the hereafter. See how this peace comes about. I'm not a prophet. I just have a normal writer's ability to build stories. Imagination tells me that it's actually about something global. It's not just about a localised war between Russia and Ukraine. It's about a global battle between democratic and liberal systems and totalitarianisms, fundamentalisms, dictatorships.
I'm sure good will win. My guess is that evil quite often wins tactically and then loses strategically. God is probably a strategist, not a tactician. 
This is not prophecy. It's a bit of imagination and a bit of analysing. And hope, of course.


Stefan Heym wrote in 1942: "To live is to believe in something". What do you believe in?

I strongly believe in the defeat of evil. I believe that no death is an end.