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  • PEN Atlas Q&A: Vigdis Hjorth

    Interview by Theodora Danek

     

    Vigdis Hjorth is a prolific, prize-winning Norwegian writer. A House in Norway (Norvik Press 2017, translated by Charlotte Barslund), which won a PEN Translates award, is the first of her novels to be translated into English. A political fiction as well as a take on the Künstlerroman, it tells the story of Alma, a textile artist with strong left-wing ideals, who rents out an apartment in her house to a Polish family. Over the course of the novel, Alma’s ideas about herself and others are challenged by the realities of cohabiting with someone she only ever refers to as ‘the Pole’.

    When I met Vigdis, she had a coffee cup in one hand, and a copy of Wittgenstein in the other. This provided the starting point for our conversation about the political in fiction.

    Your novel A House in Norway does two things: it is abstract because it is clearly very concerned with ideas, but you’ve also said that it’s very concrete, that it’s about something that you experienced yourself.

    When I embark on a new novel I take my starting point from something that bothers me or something that burns me. If I thought that the question, the problem, the dilemma only concerned me, then I wouldn’t write about it. But if it burns in me I guess it burns in a lot of others as well. I can write concrete stories but the questions I ask apply to many people.

    The protagonist Alma in A House in Norway could be a symbol for many of us: so content with her ideals that she thinks having ideals is enough. Alma doesn’t even see that there’s a contradiction between the tapestry she’s making, depicting her socialist ideals, and the fact that she has no compassion for and no interest in her neighbours.

    This is very interesting to me because there are some who would defend Alma. They’d say, We can’t help everybody and we cannot help those who can’t help themselves. Some may say that we cannot help everybody, and I agree with that. But we must try! I always think of this poem by Bertold Brecht:

    A Bed for the Night

    I hear that in New York
    At the corner of 26th Street and Broadway
    A man stands every evening during the winter months
    And gets beds for the homeless there
    By appealing to passers-by.

    It won’t change the world
    It won’t improve relations among men
    It will not shorten the age of exploitation
    But a few men have a bed for the night
    For a night the wind is kept from them
    The snow meant for them falls on the roadway.

    Don’t put down the book on reading this, man.

    A few people have a bed for the night
    For a night the wind is kept from them
    The snow meant for them falls on the roadway
    But it won’t change the world
    It won’t improve relations among men
    It will not shorten the age of exploitation.

    He says in a simple manner – which is Brecht’s way – that we have to work on two fronts. We have to do something about the structures, and we also have to help the individual. It’s a fantastic poem that shows us how we can make it work.

    Would you say that your work is political?

    Yes I would. My last novel, Arv og miljø is the most political, and has caused a big debate in Norway. In it, I tried to mirror one of Marina Abramovic’s first performances. Abramovic is supposed to stand still for six hours. On the table in front of her are a lot of things: a rose, a feather a gun. The public can do whatever they want with those objects. In the beginning the public is very discreet. Then they take the feather. But suddenly one breaks the intimacy border and touches her. They get caught up and rile each other up. They take her clothes off. In the end it develops in a very bad way. One takes the gun, takes it to her head. They are so provoked by the fact that she doesn’t move. Then, when after six hours she does move, they retreat.

    When talking about this performance, Abramovic said, ‘They couldn’t stand me because of what they had done to me.’ That’s also why the family can’t stand the main character in Arv og miljø.

    So people don’t want to see the suffering they’ve caused?

    Yes, and also because to see the suffering would remind them of their own humiliating history. But for some reason, when talking about this new book, Norwegian reviewers and the reading public only care about the personal story.

    Do you think there’s something peculiarly Norwegian about this focus on the personal? After Knausgård, is everyone just interested in the personal story?

    Yes I think so. It is very Norwegian. Also, I think that most people in Norway are so well off that they don’t bother about politics. The political questions in Norway are about minor things. We don’t talk about foreign politics at all. We only talk about community-level issues. We don’t talk about conflicts, structures, capitalism. We do of course have critical voices. But they are not concerned with literature. The literary field is aesthetical and personal.

    A House in Norway  (translated by Charlotte Barslund) is out now with Norvik Press.

    Vigdis recited Brecht’s poem in a Norwegian translation. The English translation is by  George Rapp.

  • PEN Atlas Q&A: Dorthe Nors

    Interview by Theodora Danek

    A term that has often been mentioned in connection to your work is ‘women’s fiction’. What do you think of the term? 

    I don’t like it at all. At all! I mean, they’re writers, and writers are writers, it’s not gender-based. Sometimes when you’re a female writer you get the impression that you’re not considered to be a true writer. A real writer is, of course, a man who is a bit older than fifty. That’s a real writer. This is of course something that women struggle with and we should continue to fight against. Because I’m not a female writer, I’m not a women’s writer, I write about their existence and women have an existence on an equal basis to men. Therefore, we should not be labelled by gender.

    Your protagonist is often described as ‘an older woman’, but she’s just over forty – not actually that old!

    She’s not even halfway into her life, because maybe she will be 90 or 100. We get older and older, so she’s just in the first half of her life. She’s a middle-aged woman. But in a man’s world, she is of course past her prime.

    How has your writing books about a middle-aged woman been received?

    I mean, I’m nominated for the Man Booker, which is pretty good, but apart from that I try not to read too many reviews. Most of the ones I’ve seen are extremely positive and they get the voice, they get the theme. They understand that it is about being paralysed in an existential way, and also that the book is trying to investigate the relationship between urbanism and rural life, and between the landscape and urban, modern life.

    It’s interesting that it’s been perceived through a women’s lens. I guess it’s another example of how women writers are always seen as women, and men are seen as writing about the human existence in general.

    Exactly. And I do think that I write about existential structures that are completely equal to those of a woman, but I choose to write with a female protagonist. I once discussed this with another writer, who is also a woman, who said that there is a tendency for women to have male protagonists in order to escape that, being labelled. And that’s just too sad. We’re full blown existences. We’re real human beings. I kind of insist on writing with a woman in front.

    This is very much a novel about town versus countryside. It seems to me that there’s a lot of guilt wrapped up in your character’s approach to this issue.

    Sonja is one of a generation in Denmark, and probably all over Europe and the US, that has been very urbanised, almost self-deported from the rural areas that we grew up in. In order to have status we had to urbanise ourselves. When you do that, it means that you let go of some values and some rooting and some essence of yourself that you can’t return to. It’s the whole problem of loving a place, feeling connected to a place, and then being disconnected from and unable to return to that place. And that goes for the family members that you leave behind – for the friends, the landscape – you become an estranged human being, which leads to a certain kind of solitude and loneliness.

    So that loneliness exists because we’re all uprooted?

    We’re disconnected and uprooted. And Sonja lives in a city where she has no family; cousins, sister, parents, all those people who make us feel grounded and connected live somewhere else. This is pretty normal for urbanites – that they’ve left family behind.

    After reading your novel, I read several articles about touch deprivation, because Sonja’s only way to have a human connection that includes touch is to get a massage. That is such a striking way to encapsulate what modern loneliness is all about: that you can’t even get anyone else to touch you apart from by paying for it.

    This is also a very urban thing; you’re supposed to use the relationships you have for something. You’re not just in a relationship because you like somebody, you’re in a relationship because you need something from the other person. Another aspect of the urban relationship is that you know you can be ditched. You can be fired from any kind of relationship that you’re in, and then drift on to the next one. Which makes it very frail all the time; you always have to deliver something for the relationship. In comparison, if you look at the relationships people have in traditionalist societies, I mean in villages or small communities, they don’t necessarily have to deliver anything because people are stuck with each other anyway in that environment, and that makes it less lonely. You’re less on trial every day.

    It sounds like the urban relationship is like a marketplace.

    It is. It is cost benefit: what can I get from this? And if you don’t get what you want from this relationship, you can just choose another relationship. You can cast out that friendship. I remember having a conversation with a woman in Copenhagen once where I actually complained about that side of urban life, that relationships weren’t that deep and they would often end at a certain point. She said, that’s the beauty of it because nothing’s fixed. If you don’t like to be caught up in something and rooted down, that is the place you’re supposed to live.

    But you left Copenhagen!

    I did. I lived there for several years, but then I had this international breakthrough and spent a lot of time abroad. And I thought, I’m going to get the hell out of here. When I lived in Copenhagen, I missed the landscape so incredibly; I missed being somewhere open, so I took myself out of there.

    I was very amused to read that Sonja, your protagonist, is a translator, and your book is, in a sense, a send-up of the literary establishment. Does it mirror experiences that you’ve had?

    Definitely. Some publishers are so commercial that they treat books like bricks. Others are very thorough, very good. I’ve been very lucky, but if you go to very big commercial houses, they treat some books as if they were… milk.

  • The right/write to roam

     

    My father’s mother was a Hausa-Fulani woman. The Hausas, the historically nomadic nation tribe of equestrian-based cultures, raised livestock to graze across planes in the northern part of Nigeria. Much of the ancient history of that region is documented because Islam came to the region in the seventh century and brought the technology of pen and ink. By the fifteenth century, we were using a modified Arabic script called ‘Ajami’ to record the Hausa language. With it, we took down the constellations and noted the passing of time in calendars. The Hausa kingdom was prosperous and grew exponentially under the legendary war queen Amina, and when the Fulani nation tribe invaded the Hausa states in 1804, so similar were their cultures that their lords learned the Hausa language and intermarried. Overwhelmed by British military power, the last Vizier of the Sokoto Caliphate (the seat of scholarly and political power) surrendered in 1903 and, shortly after, the ‘Boko’ script was imposed by British and French colonial forces.

    ‘Boko’ is a Latin alphabet that was used to write down the Hausa Language, which, as you can imagine, the Hausa-Fulani scholars distrusted, favouring their own. ‘Haram’, in Islam refers to that which is forbidden and ill-willed. The term has been politicised and colonised by the war on terror narrative to mean ‘Western education is bad’. But given the historical context, ‘Boko Haram’ – the term popularly used for fundamentalist Islamic extremists operating in Nigeria right now – in its earliest conception culturally meant ‘This foreign script is wrong’, ‘This symbol of colonisation is bad’, ‘Why the hell are we using these weird squiggly lines anyway? Oh right, they’ll kill us if we don’t,’ and, above all, ‘Our culture is good enough for us’.

    In my book #Afterhours, I re-write my childhood by narratively, culturally and historically translating/transposing poems by British and Irish poets. One such poem is ‘Shooting Script’ by Seamus Heaney. Here, Heaney describes the Irish script being eroded by water, symbolic, I believe, of British military power:

    And just when it looks as if it is all over –
    Tracking shots of a long wave up a strand
    That breaks towards the point of a stick writing and writing
    Words in the old script in the running sand.

    I saw in this the erosion of ‘Ajami’ with ‘Boko’ and, for history is locked in language, the erasure of aspects of my ancient culture. Much happened after direct British rule left Nigeria. The Christian and English-educated Nigerians who had grown wealthy under the colonial capitalist powers came north and permeated various facets of the historically Islamic life and culture. They bought up huge swathes of land, which severely disrupted nomadic cattle herders and drove them to destitution and poverty. Out of work, angry at the new culture that ostracised and brutalised them, these young men were (and still are) drawn to ‘Boko Haram’ who promise security, wealth, community and brotherhood. Violence erupted in the late seventies and, in this context, my Christian mother met my Muslim father and they fell in love.

    Of the five-hundred languages in Nigeria, my father grew up speaking two, Hausa and Edo, and my mother grew up speaking Isoko. English, imposed in schools across Nigeria, became the official language and, wishing to create an environment that would best equip us for the future, English was the only language spoken in our household. It isn’t my father’s tongue, my mother’s tongue, or my mother tongue, yet it is all I speak and write in. Of the Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa main nation-tribes in Nigeria, by my father I am a Hausa man. I like to think that the nomadic literary tradition, which ceased with ‘Boko’ and English and is coded in my blood, became unlocked when we left Nigeria in 1996, when we became international nomads, or immigrants.

    #Afterhours covers this period, from 1984 to 2002, from when I was born to when I turned eighteen and settled in London. Those years, in which I lived and learned in Nigeria, Ireland and England, fostered querulous and often contradicting voices, yet much of my creative output grows where they intersect. I belong to all three worlds, or none of them. Dublin, where I spent the least amount of time, is where I started truly grappling with art. The love and enthusiasm I have for literature was sowed in me by an Irish basketball coach who loved John Keats as much as he did a crossover; the tasks he set us, the journeys of introspection and interrogation needed to fully engage with poetry, invited me to criss-cross my own internal borders.

    Much of the world has changed since 1984. Britain has been systematically shutting down its international embassies or making needle-eyes of visa granting processes. The wealth in ‘The Commonwealth’ is all but myth. Climate change (which creates opportunities for ‘Boko Haram’ in the form of disenfranchised young) is adding great numbers to the global migration crisis. There are sixty-five million displaced people presently, numbers not seen since the Second World War, and all this is set against the rise in far right nationalism here in the West, whose child is Britain’s exit from the European Union, whose child is racial profiling and attacks on people of colour in the streets of London.

    Those sixty-five million who have crossed borders to survive, as my parents had to, will have children, border-crossing-offspring who will consider themselves citizens of the world, as I do. Last year, when the British Prime Minister said, ‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere’, the implication was that we who are multi-placed will never be British, or British enough. The implication is ‘nativism or else…’. To choose nativism is to deny my Hausa-hood and my inner Irishman, to flatten the tumult of my rich mixing to a single English plain plane. The choice means a crisis of identity and sanity. It is not a choice for me. I am ‘or else’, and I have to be.

    One way to consider #Afterhours as a text is as an exploration of how possible it is to contain multitudes, to be one and many. In translating and transposing the poems, I hope to demonstrate how transient and borderless cultures can be when built on understanding. Just as the Fulani married the Hausa, and my mother married my father, the book marries contemporary British history with Nigeria’s, and I thank my Irish teacher for the space to understand. I spent twelve months as the National Poetry Library’s Poet in Residence, flipping through their archives looking for poems I could reset. To write was to carry myself and roam through British history and culture, but to read was to roam even further.

    Books are borderless as breath, and the last poem in #Afterhours engages that ‘right’ to roam. In it, I talk about a project I founded called The Midnight Run, where I gather strangers to migrate through a city from dusk to dawn. I invite local artists to run interactive workshops on anything from poetry writing, to interpretive dance, to basketball. I create a safe space for anonymity; for them to be whoever they wish. Relating to this, I reset a poem by Andrew Motion called ‘Aftermath’; it is about journeying into the countryside. My version is about travelling through the city and looking for space. It begins:

    I feel like an exiled child going walkabout by night
    for the first time, packing everything I can imagine
    I’ll need: spare socks, rain coat, assorted fruit, map
    of central London, notebooks, pencils and a torch.

  • The Revolution over Dinner

    In the autumn of 2013, I sat out at an open-air café for dinner in Gaziantep, or Antep as the locals call it, an industrial city in southern Turkey. Joining me was a friend, a Syrian revolutionary turned refugee who had fled his home in Damascus and who now toiled at odd jobs around the city. His wife was meant to join us but she had called and they’d had an argument and it seemed it would just be the two of us. “I was unfaithful to her and she’s never forgiven me,” he told me. He then explained that the infidelity was not with another woman, but with the revolution: its ideals, its excitement, all that he had sacrificed for it, too much, abandoning the emotional core of his marriage for what ultimately became a lost cause.

    The pain of that lost cause ran particularly acute on this evening. President Obama had recently elected not to enforce his “redline” when Syrian President Bashar al-Asad launched a sarin gas attack in Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus. Military aid from the west would not be coming. The conversation turned, as it often did, to the current state of the revolution (the term of choice if you sympathized with the rebels) or the civil war (the term of choice if you sympathized with the regime). As we pondered our menus, my friend began to talk about the merits of western intervention on behalf of the rebel Free Syrian Army. He explained that cities like Aleppo, Homs, Idlib, were all still contested, the Free Syrian Army continued to hold significant swaths of land, western military support could turn the tide despite gains by the Islamic State and Iranian and Russia interventions on behalf of the regime. Or so the argument was made to me as our first course arrived.

    As someone who had spent his twenties in uniform fighting in the Middle East, I doubted the efficacy of such an intervention but often didn’t voice my misgivings too aggressively. It wasn’t my war and I understood the emotional complexities of having a war—or wars—that you can call your own. I felt that my job in such moments was to listen. We discussed other topics, of course: the difficulty of finding reliable work, the manner in which the Turks often exploited refugee labor, and the moral conundrum of whether to return to Syria or leave the border and start a new life in one of the few European countries resettling Syrians. But the conversation eventually returned to the revolution. By the end of the meal, as we were sipping our tea and a pack of cigarettes had emerged, the discussion had grown somber, infused with regret. “I wish we’d never gone out into the streets,” my friend told me. “I’ve destroyed my home.”

    Can you feel both pride and regret for an experience as defining as a revolution, or even a war? This emotional conflict—which I often witnessed among those who had participated in Syria’s revolution—mirrored the emotional conflict I felt about fighting in my own wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When I think of the best days of my life, many of them are days that I was in combat. When I think of the worst days of my life, they are the exact same days. How do we reckon with this type of an experience and how does it echo into other parts of our lives? It is a question that I have long grappled with and one I could see many of my Syrian friends grappling with as well.

    The stories that I enjoy reading don’t provide solutions, but rather carefully frame such questions. When he accepted the Nobel Prize in 1950 William Faulkner said in his speech, “[it is] the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about …” A failed revolution is rife with such conflict and it is the subject I endeavored to write about. The complexities of the Syrian revolution—the shifting alliances and shifting frontlines—are overwhelmingly complex to all except the closest observers and even then the essential truths of the conflict often aren’t found in tracking these particulars. Fiction allows us to delve into emotional terrain that grants us a deeper understanding of such events.

    When I am reading a really excellent novel, I feel something as I turn the pages. That is what good art does: it transfers emotion. Whatever the writer felt as they crafted their story is passed onto the reader. That emotional transference is an inherently optimistic act, it is a belief in empathy, that our shared humanity means any one person can feel and understand the challenges faced by any other. When creating a story, what I am often searching for is emotional equivalency. What is it like to participate in a failed revolution, or a failed war? What is it like to still believe in a cause that has already ravaged your life?

    All through that dinner, my friend was exchanging distracted text messages with his wife. A marriage, like a revolution, is an adventure of the heart and his relationship was in trouble. Marriage is a letting go of two separate worlds in order to create a single shared one. When a marriage dissolves, a couple is forced to reimagine that world, to start again. The novel I wrote tried to tell the story of the war in Syria, a failed revolution, through the lens of an intimate, universal emotional arc: a failed marriage. The book is an exploration of grief—the death of a child, the destruction of a cause, the individual’s search to assuage loss. Having spent nearly three years covering the Syrian Civil War, I have watched that conflict’s spiral into darkness and witnessed the central choice of any failed revolution, any failed relationship: whether to accept what’s ruined and begin anew, or to keep faith with an increasingly hopeless cause.

    After the waiter had set down the check and we’d paid, I was about to ask my friend if he wanted to share a cab. Then at the door, his wife arrived. Although she had chosen not to join us at dinner, she had come now. It was the slightest gesture, but it was not lost on either of us. She had come so that my friend wouldn’t have to find his way home alone.

    Elliot Ackerman’s new novel Dark at Crossing, set on the Turkish/Syria border, is published by Daunt Books in April 2017. Find out more.

    Photo credit (c) Muhsin Akgün

  • PEN Atlas presents: Svetlana Alexievich in conversation with James Meek

    This event was one of Svetlana Alexievich’s few UK public appearances in 2016. She discussed her new book Second-hand Time, translated by Bela Shayevich (Fitzcarraldo Editions, May 2016), and the new edition of Chernobyl Prayer, translated by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait (Penguin Classics, April 2016), to mark the 30th anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

    Themes of memory, trust, family secrets and of course the disintegration of the Soviet Union emerged over the course of a fascinating discussion between Svetlana Alexievich and James Meek, interpreted beautifully by Masha Karp.

    Listen to the audio recording

    https://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=261948265

  • PEN Atlas Q&A: Ihor Pavlyuk and Steve Komarnyckyj

    Ihor, what was the inspiration for the poems in A Flight Over the Black Sea? What inspires your writing in general?

    IP: A pure nostalgia for Ukraine when I was roaming in other countries of the world or soaring in aircraft over the Black Sea and over the oceans. I love the skies, it’s in my blood, and I love the sea. There is a wider social meaning encoded in the title of this book that could refer to spiritual flights over Ukraine, which underwent two Maidans. The Black Sea has become a symbol of geopolitical events that are significant both for Ukraine and for the world. Love in general inspires me, along with the cosmos and love of one’s homeland in all its dimensions, from my native Volyn to the planet Earth.

    Steve, how did you come to translate A Flight Over the Black Sea?

    SK: I was introduced to Ihor’s work by a colleague, Dmytro Drozdovsky, from Ukraine. I was immediately captivated by the pagan spirit of the poetry, by the fact that Ihor had created a world, based on Ukraine admittedly but a Ukraine which had been transmuted into myth, an open space of the imagination roamed by wolves, and anarchists, and the pagan gods of Ukraine.

    Ihor, does your writing speak to a broader Ukrainian literary tradition? If so, how?

    IP: Yes. I draw the material for my creativity from the prima, fresh impressions of colours, smells, sounds, touches and the songs and tales of my early childhood until I was about five years old. I lived with my grandparents and great-grandparents then. My great-grandmother, Hanna, told stories marvellously and sang folk songs, ancient and deep as artesian wells. Then, when music was born in my soul, I began to describe it in words and that’s what poetry is for me – it’s music, written in words… I learned how to create the content and form of text and the text of my life from the great poets of Ukraine and the world – they taught me how to live and how to write. It is impossible to be a greater poet than, let us say Byron or Virgil, or our Ukrainian philosopher Hrihorii Skovoroda and poet Taras Shevchenko … but it’s possible to continue their traditions and become a significant poet of one’s own time. I try to tread this difficult but felicitous path.

    A Flight Over the Black Sea has been translated into several languages. What is gained by translating poetry?

    SK: Poetry is the voice which speaks from the soul of every person, from the heart of every person. It is an affirmation of our common humanity. When we read a poem which touches us, we realise that someone else, another person, often far away, has been in love, has been afraid, has been hurt, has been injured, and experienced the same sensations that we have. Or we are shown a world in a new light, and our own world is reinvented. So poetry affirms our common humanity. It affirms the power of the imagination to reinvent the world. It is an incantation against barbarism, against sectarianism and against everything that would divide humanity. This is precisely why it’s so feared by tyrants and authoritarian regimes.

    Ihor, how do you see your writing developing in response to the war in East Ukraine?

    IP: In war, when you are in the trenches, you will not really write a great novel. There the human heart needs prayers and songs. I am glad therefore that some of my poems have become songs that are sung in the war zone. The renowned Ukrainian director Serhii Arkhypchuk took a selection of my verses to read to those on the front line. My son-in-law is a Ukrainian army officer. I myself have signed up as a volunteer… I feel personally the huge, apocalyptic scope of this conflict. A war is being waged now in the soul of each individual and every country, a war which I am also involved in. Therefore I have started writing about this theme in my verse novel Palomnyk and other works.

    Steve, if you were stuck on a desert island, what one book (in translation!) would you take with you?

    SK: I would take A Song Out of Darkness, which is the translations of Tarashevchenko by Vera Rich. Vera Rich was an English literary translator who devoted her life to translating Ukrainian and Belarussian poetry into English. She is one of the most professional and one of the most passionate translators that you could wish to meet, and her translations approach the ideal of being a transparent membrane through which you glimpse the original. She was so closely in tune with Tarashevchenko that she wished to be interred near his grave, and her wish was granted. I think that shows the degree of commitment that she brought to her literary translation, and she’s a person to be admired and emulated, and should be more widely known.

    And finally! Ihor, if you were stuck on a desert island, what one book would you take with you?

    IP: I know my favourite books by heart, so I would take a packet of blank paper and a pencil – so as to write a new book in the solitude and contemplation of a desert island, a book that would ennoble and save humanity from… humanity…

    Steve Komarnyckyj is a poet and translator who was born in Yorkshire in 1963 but maintains strong links with his ancestral Ukraine. His literary translations and poems have appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review, The North, and Modern Poetry in Translation. His book of translations from the Ukrainian poet Pavlo Tychyna, The Raspberry’s Eyelash (Poetry Salzburg, 2011), was described as a ‘revelation’ by Sean Street. His translation of Vasyl Shkliar’s novel Raven was published in April 2013. He runs Kalyna Language Press with his partner Susie and three domestic cats.

    This interview is also available as a video on our YouTube channel, together with clips of Ihor and Steve reading extracts from the book.

    Read a previous PEN Atlas piece by Steve Komarnyckyj about free speech and the Euromaidan movement.

    Find out more about A Flight Over the Black Sea on the World Bookshelf.

  • PEN Atlas Q&A: Margaret Mazzantini

    Interview with Tasja Dorkofikis, PEN Atlas editor.

    Many of your books touch upon current conflicts, their aftermath and the tragedy they cause to individuals. How do you see the role of literature?

    Literature is increasingly alone. We live in an excessively extrovert period, everyone wants to say something before they’ve even thought about what to say. Writing is damaged, words lose their meaning. We speak too loudly and too quickly, we scream on television, we write on our iPhones. To deprive words of their dimension and depth is to become dehumanised, because we are the words we utter. It’s words that make us human. For me as a writer, introspection is the only way to protect human beings. Our society needs to find its way back to introspection.

    In his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Calvino said that literature must be ambitious, must set itself vast objectives. That’s what I think too. For me, literature is a revolutionary force, it requires courage and risk-taking, it must have the ability to thrust you out of your comfort zone, take you on a dangerous journey, a journey into the unknown, and then bring you back to the centre of yourself. The purpose of literature is to make us more human. Today more than ever.

    In Twice Born you deal with the post-Yugoslav conflict and the siege of Sarajevo; in Morning Sea it is the current refugee crisis and Libya in the 1960s and 1970s.  How do you choose your subjects? Is the fact that all these dramas happen on the doorstep of Europe significant?

    I always find it hard to talk about how my work comes into being. Even now, I don’t know how it functions. For me, writing is like trusting in a creative engine that’s travelling towards an unknown destination. I never look for a meaning first. I never know why I’ve decided to write a particular book. If I did, I wouldn’t write it. I write to talk about what I don’t know, which only writing reveals to me. Every time it’s as if I was trying to stop a landslide. The first mental image is always the recurring one of a landslide, a hole. I go through an apprenticeship, a long inner preparation. A kind of spiritual retreat before battle commences. I withdraw from the world in order to try and restore something of the world. What I want before anything else is to free myself of my own ego. I never write in front of a mirror, I write leaning out of an open window. At this window, I see everything that goes on. The story of the siege of Sarajevo is emblematic, a terrible war that took place in the heart of Europe just a few years ago and seems to have already been forgotten. Very few people know the painful story of the Italians of Libya. I felt the need to go back to these roots of pain that unite the peoples of Europe. They are things that young people today know nothing about. In this sense, literature can have a political role.

    Morning Sea is also an exploration of Italy’s colonial past and the ‘festering wounds and collective guilt’ carried by the whole nation. Why did you decide to look at this period in Italian history?

    I’m not an essayist, I’m just a writer of novels. The novel is the Trojan horse in which I hide my warriors: the subjects that mean a lot to me, the things which make me indignant, which I can’t swallow, which weigh on my conscience.

    I feel I’m being given the opportunity, in a very small way, to stitch up the wound, to ease the pain by simply not leaving it alone. To put people in contact with themselves, with the damaged, most bereft part of themselves. In this excessively extrovert era, we aren’t really in contact with the pain of the world, we are an expression of its sickness. A writer is like a detective who lingers at the scene of the crime when the floodlights have been turned off. He looks for traces of a past that may just possibly point to the future. Since the end of the Cold War, which froze the world into two opposing poles, the great rift of our time has come to the surface: on one side, the rich West, on the other, the South of the world. Through the human stories of my characters I’ve unearthed the hidden story of Italian colonialism, which was about poor people deported and flung out into the desert, but also about a cruel and ruthless policy.

    You look at these events through the damaged lives of two women and their families: Angelina, Italian, born in Tripoli and expelled from Libya following Gaddafi’s coup, and Jamila, Bedouin, escaping the Libyan unrest with her son across the Mediterranean. Why did you decide to link these two women in your novel?

    A writer is a person who lives in an unbalanced way, between her need to withdraw, her own inner tension, and the great conflicts convulsing the world. Like a seismologist, she captures the tremors of the time in which she lives. My starting point was those distressing images of boats and people fleeing wars and famine, which we see every day on our television sets. An abyss of pain which seems as if it will never end.

    True charity, as we know, isn’t throwing the dog a bone. It’s becoming that hungry dog. We Italians know what that means, we’ve also been hungry dogs. We mustn’t forget it.  There are stories of emigration that everyone knows about, like the Italians who went to America, but nobody remembers the ‘Tripolini’, the Italians who were born and brought up in Libya, and were expelled by Gaddafi after his coup in 1970. I felt the need to unearth this story, the story of these ‘interrupted lives’. Because that same sea which today is overrun by people fleeing Africa, just a few decades ago was crossed by Italians with the same desperation in their eyes. The history of man is the history of his hunger. Man moves through hunger. The hunger of the poor. The greedy hunger of the powerful.

    Your book is also a serious reflection on the refugee crisis on the borders of Europe. And tragically, even though your book was published in Italy a few years ago, the terrible refugee crisis has deepened since then and people die every day trying to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. How do you think Europeans should address this problem?

    Europe is wondering how to stop this migration, how to ‘sort out’ these people. It’s a ‘technical’ problem. Now everyone is afraid of this ‘black sea’. We should probably have thought about it before. Angelina in my book says: no nation that has colonised another nation is innocent.

    For us Italians, it’s personal. These people reach our coasts, or die in our sea. Italy is surrounded by sea. The people of Lampedusa have been heroic over the past few years. They’ve had a huge burden to bear. But the world shouldn’t need isolated heroes, just greater sharing of the responsibility.

    The Mediterranean is a door that must remain open. A bridge. I thought of that hanging bridge, of a silent dialogue between a woman of the desert fleeing war who boards a boat to get to Italy and an Italian woman born in Tripoli who looks at the sea and keeps searching for the meaning of her interrupted story, but also the moral responsibility of her country.

    I thought of a boy collecting the flotsam from shipwrecks on the beach of Lampedusa. A wonderful place, where the sea turtles lay their eggs, a place where death arrives every day. The boy collects this flotsam and pins it to a big panel. It’s as if he’s trying to restore memory, to stop a shipwreck. He may become an artist, but he doesn’t know it yet.

    The countries of Africa were colonised and exploited. We know what an enormous mistake the war in Iraq was, when the Arab spring came we all hoped things would change. But what emerged was the black flower of Isis. Those condemned to death wear the same orange jumpsuits as the prisoners in Guantanamo. Now we live in fear of beheadings on the internet, terrorist attacks, the Islamisation of the world. And many of us start to think it was better before… when there were local dictators who kept their populations subjugated. The vague idea of exporting democracy has failed in countries organised on tribal lines that are hard to fathom. The results are there for all to see, the civilian population is increasingly isolated, at the mercy of ragtag armies of madmen, which somehow attract the young. The phenomenon of infiltrators, of foreign fighters, is appalling. Now everyone is afraid – of these poor people arriving on ramshackle boats… of our dark-skinned neighbour who goes to the mosque. And we all know that whoever controls fear controls the world…

    Through Angelina you look at the issue of immigration and the feelings of alienation that it often brings. You were born in Ireland, lived in various countries and then settled in Italy. Have you experienced these feelings yourself?

    I felt a great deal of empathy with Angelina, a brusque, withdrawn woman with an interrupted life behind her. A woman who every Monday has a day’s silence like Gandhi and writes notes to communicate with the world. On one of these notes that she leaves to her son, she writes: break down the wall of feelings. That’s what I try to do every time I write, I try to break down that wall.

    I come from an eccentric family that wandered all over. I’ve always felt rather out of place everywhere, I’ve had to find a place within myself. An artist is always an illegal immigrant, a person who makes himself and other people uncomfortable, who finds it hard to acclimatise himself to the surface of things. Far from everything, he still remains in contact with his ‘ancestors’, with a distant spirit.

    Imagery and landscape play a huge part in Morning Sea. The sun is unsparing and the sea both uniting and dividing.  Are landscapes as powerful in your other novels?

    I write through images… for me, the activity that’s closest to writing is dreaming. In dreams, without the control of the ego, our inner images are able to emerge. Jung said we need to go back to the beauty in our hearts, and the heart doesn’t reason through ideas, but through images…

    The sea is an inner landscape that recurs constantly in my dreams and in my books. The sea is a psychic, mysterious, evocative place. A living barrier, like a blank page. It’s calm but it hides storms. The sea is amniotic, it’s the blue blood of the earth.

    This novel has been translated by Ann Gagliardi and your books have been translated into many languages. How do you work with her and with your other translators?

    A writer is her writing, the words she chooses, the rhythm with which she puts them together. When a writer finds her language, she finds the book. Language is the inner voice, the psyche of a book. You have to find the ‘music’. To restore this music in another language is very hard. That’s why I think translators have a very tough profession; they don’t just translate, they rewrite. They have to allow themselves to be ‘inhabited’, to reach an empathy with the subconscious level of the subject matter. I’ve been lucky, Anne Gagliardi did a really extraordinary job. Morning Sea is a very lyrical book, and translating poetry is particularly tricky.

    Who are your literary influences?

    Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Morante, Duras, Woolf, Böll… and today, Auster, Kureishi, Grossman, Oates… I could go on. Mishima says: life is short, but I want to live forever. That’s the possibility that true writers give themselves and their readers.

    Are there any young Italian writers whom you would like to recommend to readers and publishers abroad?

    I’ve heard that in America only six per cent of books are by foreign authors, and that includes Dante! And yet we have many well-known writers. Two names stand out: Roberto Saviano, a social and political writer, and Elena Ferrante, who’s more private and mysterious.

    Howard Curtis has translated more than ninety books from Italian, French and Spanish, mostly contemporary fiction.

    About the Editor

    Tasja Dorkofikis is editor of PEN Atlas and a freelance editor and publicist. She has previously worked as a publicity director at Random House and Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor for Portobello Books.

  • PEN Atlas Q&A: Jenny Erpenbeck

    Interview with Tasja Dorkofikis, PEN Atlas editor.

    Your books are steeped in history and historical events. In The Visitation, the main protagonist is a house, and you deal with the way its inhabitants are influenced by historical events. The main character in The End of Days cannot escape history either. Why is history so important to you and your fiction?

    It was not my original idea to write about history when I started to write – but while working on my first stories, which were based on my family history, it became more and more clear to me that no private world exists beyond the so-called ‘big history’. There are so many stories in my family about fleeing, leaving things behind, separation of family members during the war – so there has always been a strong sense of the importance of politics in my family, a sense of what’s behind the small things in a single person’s life. You can see every family as a kind of kaleidoscope of mankind and, especially if you happen to be a writer, it’s like a treasure that nourishes you: gathered around the coffee table you will find all the different perspectives you need to understand things a bit more deeply. And of course all the changes I myself experienced after the fall of the wall were also very important for me to feel – not only to know, but to feel – what it means to be all of a sudden cut off from your origins.

    How much research goes into your books? And how do you select which events you will use in your books?

    It’s fascinating for me to find out how the life I’m writing about really felt. Not only when or where something took place, but what jokes were told, the smell of a building, the sound of someone’s laughter and so on. If I find a 70-year-old mosquito between the pages of a document, it’s also part of the research. I love to sit in archives, I love to talk to people, I love to read books, fiction and non-fiction – in order to find something I hadn’t been looking for. Research is an adventure and a gift – I consider it my privilege to have a profession that allows me to take the time to find those treasures and to pass them to the reader. Sometimes you might find things that are different from what you expected, but it’s always worth facing them and making something out of them rather than inventing something that fits your ideas better. In the end the choice of which factual material you put in the text depends on the heart of your thoughts. The research must work with the original concept to create the story you want to tell – and the story of course will be affected by the research.

    The End of Days follows a family history in Eastern Europe before the First World War through the life of one woman. You are inventive with time and fate and your main character experiences many possible lives and outcomes. At the beginning the mother finds out ‘a day on which a life comes to an end is still far from being the end of days’. You imagine that your main character is saved and does not die as an eight-month-old baby and she grows up to experience various horrors of European 20th
    -century history. Despite cheating fate, your character avoids death only for a short while.  Do you wonder whether in this case the early death would have been a preferable fate? And how do you choose this moment of possible change in a character’s life?

    It’s not all about tragedy – it’s also about giving a new life to the main character in every chapter of the book and about the importance of different influences in different phases of her life, about decisions she makes herself and about how she manages to get through the hard times when decisions are made for her. It is especially during these hard times that you have to face the question of how to retain your integrity and your senses. Often it’s sorrow that enriches our lives. I think in everybody’s life you can find those big changes, paths chosen as well as avoided or missed – passages for which the death in my book is only a synonym. Sometimes it depends on the place where you live, sometimes it has to do with the relationships you have, your family, your love, your professional development, your engagement in politics. But even in one single day you’re not just one: I’m doing my work, I’m a mother, a woman, a friend, a customer, a passenger on a train… There are so many layers in every single moment.

    Mapping out these possible lives and biographies must have been very complicated. How did you choose this structure? Did you decide at the very beginning that you would give your character five possible options?

    When I started to think about writing the book I wrote some 10 or 12 beginnings. But then I decided to try the version with the five possible deaths and lives and I of course had to be clear about the basic settings – things like time, place and circumstances. At that point I also had to think about the reasons for every death: like illness, love, politics, accident or just old age. But everything else happening within the chapters I explored only while writing. And the more the book grew the more complex it became – so it was like going back again to add some detail in one of the former lives, so that the connection between them became closer. I like the idea that one could read the book more as a circular than as a straight narrative.

    There are many hidden events and secrets in your book.  A violently anti-Semitic attack is never openly admitted in the family. The main character’s son in one of the versions of her life ‘carries around with him a vast dark land: all the stories his mother never told him or that she hid from him; perhaps he even carries with him those stories his mother never knew or heard of’. Do you think that being open about the past helps the healing process?

    Keeping secrets might be a way to balance something for a short while, but one always has to be aware that it’s also a way to use power. Keeping a secret makes an object out of someone who should and might be a partner.

    The End of Days has no conventional plot and no obvious hero or heroine. Your main character remains nameless throughout most of the book. Why do you often choose to write about nameless characters?

    To me there seems to be a certain element of fashion in choosing a character’s name in a work of fiction – I don’t like that.  A name itself doesn’t say very much: it’s a bit like a mask. In many cases it tells much more about the taste of the writer than about the character who is given the name. What I liked about the namelessness of my main character in the book is that she instead gets titles like: daughter, lover, wife, comrade, mother, grandmother and so on. That shows much better than a name that a human being is growing, or in motion, or in change, and this interests me much more than a name.

    Do you see yourself as a German writer or even as an East German writer? Does the past division into West and East Germany still mean something in German literature?

    Since no one can change his or her past I’ll always stay someone who grew up and has been formed by a foreign country – even when my passport is and has always been a German one. For the next generations it’ll be different. As a writer I see myself as one among many others sitting at their desks somewhere in the world – not just in Europe.

    What are your literary influences?

    There are of course many German speaking authors among my favourites like Büchner, Kafka, Stifter, E.T.A. Hoffmann – but also a whole bunch of translated authors like Majakowski, Gabriel García Márquez, Edgar Lee Masters, Proust or the ancient Ovid.

    Your books have been translated into many languages. Susan Bernofsky is your English translator. How do you work with her and with other translators?

    Susan Bernofsky is the translator of all of my books into English – so we have known each other for many, many years now: travelling together, giving workshops and readings, visiting each other every year at least once and, of course, sending many emails back and forth. I have always had the feeling of a deep understanding between us not only in terms of the content of a story but also concerning the rhythm of the language, the sound of the words, the ‘speed’ or ‘slow motion’ in a sentence or passage, the hidden humour, the kind of vocabulary both of us love – and, last but not least, the thinking.

    Described as ‘one of the finest, most exciting authors alive’ by Michel Faber, Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. She has worked on opera and musical productions and her fiction has been translated worldwide. She is the author of The Old Child & The Book of Words, The Visitation and The End of Days, for which she and translator Susan Bernofsky received the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

    About the editor
    Tasja Dorkofikis is editor of PEN Atlas and a freelance editor and publicist. She has previously worked as a publicity director at Random House and Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor for Portobello Books.

    Jenny Erpenbeck announced as the winner of the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize via Booktrust.

    Read more about The End of Days and buy it through our book partner Foyles on the World Bookshelf.

  • PEN Atlas Q&A: Peter Stamm

    Interview with Tasja Dorkofikis, PEN Atlas editor.
    Translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire.

    All Days Are Night describes a woman, who is a television host, recuperating after a car crash which killed her husband and left her face disfigured beyond recognition. Seeing yourself and being seen by others, the body and identity are major subjects of this novel. Why did you choose the subject of image and self-image? Do you think that women often end up existing through the image others have of them?

    I think we all do. Our self-image is crucially influenced by how others react to us, perceive us and reflect us back to ourselves. We’re social animals, after all. But I’ve noticed at readings from the book that women think more about the subject, are more interested in it. Men present themselves in a more naïve way, in fact they usually even fall for their presentations of themselves. I can’t really say why I chose the subject for my book. I think all writers have their subjects that pursue them for their whole lives. I had a project on the same subject ten years ago, but a very different story. That novel never came about, sadly, but the subject refused to go away.

    You describe the difficulties of relationships at the early-to-middle stage of one’s life in your other books, notably in the novel Seven Years. Why are you interested in couples during this vulnerable period? Do you think that Gillian and Matthias’s relationship would have lasted and survived to old age? 

    I’d have to write a new book to know that. But I wouldn’t rate their chances too highly. In other words: I’d want them to split up with decency because the relationship clearly isn’t working. In my writing, I’m interested in crises because it’s easier to recognise people in crises. But I think there are crises at every age. My first books were more about young people looking for relationships. Now that I’ve reached middle age I’m writing books about middle-aged people. And when I get old I might write about the problems of aging and death. Or I might just stick to gardening.

    Hubert, the second main character in this novel, is a painter, whose most successful series of paintings showed naked women performing the most mundane tasks of everyday life. The relationship between the artist and his subject is essential here. Would you compare it to the relationship the writer has with his/her characters?

    For the book, I had my portrait done by a painter friend, to find out what it feels like to be a model. And I also once tried writing with a model, but that didn’t really work. There are some parallels between my writing and painting and I have as many friends who are painters as writer-friends. But there are also big differences. My image of my characters isn’t primarily visual. I slip inside their minds and try to feel the way they do. The painter’s position, by contrast, seems to me to be a purely external one.

    Your books mostly deal with everyday life and small everyday events. Why are you interested in describing the ordinary rather than the dramatic side of life?

    I’m going to go back to painting again now. No painter who takes himself seriously would ever think of painting Miss Universe. What they do is paint the people around them: their wives, their children, their landlady. Even landscape painters don’t paint the world’s most amazing landscapes but often those they find outside their front door. It’s not primarily a question of content; it’s more about how the picture is painted. If you choose extreme subjects there’s a risk that they take on too much weight. And when it comes to people, I think they’re easier to recognise in everyday life. We’re all similar in extreme situations. But we’re most ourselves in everyday life, in the little things. In the moments when nobody’s looking.

    When writing ‘Sweet Dreams’, one of the stories in We Are Flying, you told your editor: ‘I’m writing a story about a woman who buys a corkscrew.’ How do you choose which moment to focus on in your stories, and which detail of everyday life is important to you and your characters?

    I go through life with my eyes open and suddenly a situation leaps out at me and I know I want to make a story out of it. The corkscrew wasn’t what I was interested in for the story, of course. I saw a young couple on a bus and I was touched by how they acted together. They came across a little like an old couple, very serious, as if they were playing at being grown up. It made me think of the time when I was their age and setting up a home for the first time and buying things and thought I’d found the woman I’d be with for the rest of my life.

    Three of your books are short story collections and you are known as the master of this genre. Why are you attracted to the short story form? Is this form popular in Swiss literature?

    No, unfortunately the short story is no longer very popular in German-language literature. I’ve often compared them to chamber music, which I also like very much. You only have a few voices but you do hear every note. And because they’re short, you can achieve a level of perfection that’s almost impossible in novels. I’ve written a few short stories that are like pictures, in which plot plays barely any role and the atmosphere takes centre stage. And you can try things out in short stories that would become tiring very quickly in a novel. For example, I wrote a story in the second person and one with very fast changes of perspective, sometimes in the same sentence. I’ve been meaning for a long time to go more towards ‘prose poetry’ and write even shorter pieces.

    Who are your literary influences?

    Actually, every book a writer reads is a literary influence. Sometimes books you don’t like influence you more because you realise from them what you don’t want to do. And because bad books are easier to see through than good ones. The first writers who had a positive influence on me were Henrik Ibsen and Edgar Allan Poe, who I read at a very early age. Later came Ernest Hemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, also Albert Camus, Cesare Pavese and Anton Chekhov. I like Robert Walser, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Heinrich von Kleist a great deal, and in poetry Joseph von Eichendorff. And many, many more.

    You have published nine books in Switzerland in German and they were all translated into English by Michael Hoffman. How do you work with him and with your other translators?

    Michael asks very few questions. I think he simply understands my books and has found an English voice for them. I like him a lot and when we meet we talk about all sorts of things – just not much about the translations. Other translators ask me more questions. I think it’s a question of temperament. I’ve now started making a list for the translators to go with every book, for example the origin of the quotes or any mistakes that have been corrected since the first edition.

    Are there any other young Swiss writers you would like to recommend to readers and publishers abroad?

    It’s kind of you to call me a ‘young Swiss writer’ – I’m 52 now. I’m afraid I have to admit I read less than I’d like to. And it doesn’t matter to me where a writer comes from, so I don’t tend to prefer Swiss authors. Tim Krohn is a good friend of mine but I don’t think he’s been translated into English. Markus Werner is a wonderful writer but not quite young any more; he turned 70 last year. He’s translated by Michael Hoffman too. And Klaus Merz, whose 70th birthday is this year, is another great writer.

    Katy Derbyshire translates contemporary German writers including Inka Parei, Clemens Meyer, Helene Hegemann and Simon Urban.

    About the editor

    Tasja Dorkofikis is editor of PEN Atlas and a freelance editor and publicist. She has previously worked as a publicity director at Random House and Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor for Portobello Books.

  • The Red Terror and Maximilian Voloshin

    Maximilian Voloshin was for many decades seen as a rather minor poet. During the last twenty years, however, his reputation has been steadily growing. And the Russian annexation of the Crimea, a region with which Voloshin is closely identified, has made his poetry seem startlingly relevant to the present day. Voloshin’s concern with questions of Russia’s historical destiny, together with his own political ambivalence, makes his poetry appealing to liberals and to Russian nationalists alike. Some elements of this appeal, such as the faith he often professes in Russia’s purification through suffering, can seem facile, but we should not allow this to obscure his real greatness, both as a poet and as a defender of freedom.

    Part of Voloshin’s appeal lies in his steadfast refusal to accept any ideology as absolute truth. One of the slogans most often repeated by Putinites today is ‘Whoever is not with us is against us’. Such thinking was anathema to Voloshin. A famous poem titled ‘Civil War’ ends:

    And from the ranks of both armies
    I hear one and the same voice:
    ‘He who is not with us is against us.
    You must take sides. Justice is ours.’

    And I stand alone in the midst of them,
    amidst the roar of fire and smoke,
    and pray with all my strength for those
    who fight on this side, and on that side.

    Born in Kiev, Voloshin spent much of his childhood in the Crimea.  In the early 1900s he moved between Paris, Moscow and St Petersburg, but from 1907 he again spent much of his time in the Crimea, finally settling there in 1916. For over a decade his large house in Koktebel, where he both wrote and painted, was a refuge for writers and artists of all political and artistic persuasions. Among his hundreds of guests were Maxim Gorky, Nikolay Gumilyov, Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva. In 1924 the house became a ‘House of Creativity’ for Soviet writers, the first of the many such closed-access hotels that became a central part of the Soviet cultural world.

    Voloshin published five books of poems. The last, Poems on the Terror (1923), was published only in Berlin, but these and other post-1917 poems circulated widely in hand-typed copies, loved by both the Reds and the anti-Bolshevik Whites, within and outside Russia’s borders.  The poems are uneven, but there is much that is incisive and moving.

    Nadezhda Teffi’s Memories (an account of her last journey across Russia, before emigrating) includes this portrait of Voloshin in Odessa in 1919: ‘Wherever I went, I would glimpse his picturesque silhouette: dense, square beard, tight curls crowned with a round beret, a light cloak, knickerbockers and gaiters. Reciting his poems, he was doing the rounds of government institutions and people with the right connections. There was more to this than was at first apparent. The poems served as keys. To help those who were in trouble Voloshin needed to pass through certain doors – and his poems opened these doors. He’d walk into some office and, while people were still wondering whether or not to announce his presence to their superiors, he would begin to recite. His meditations on the False Dmitry  and other Russian tragedies were dense and powerful; lines evoking the fateful burden of history alternated with flights of prophecy. An ecstatic crowd of young typists would gather around him, ooh-ing and ah-ing; in blissful horror they would let out little nasal squeals. Next you would hear the clatter of typewriter keys – Voloshin had begun to dictate some of his longer poems. Someone in a position of authority would poke his head around the door, his curiosity piqued, and then lead the poet into his office. The dense, even hum of bardic declamation would then start up again, audible even through the closed door.’

    After an account of Voloshin saving a woman poet from execution, Teffi ends: ‘In Novorossiisk, in Yekaterinodar, in Rostov-on-Don I would again encounter the light cloak, the gaiters and the round beret crowning the tight curls. On each occasion I heard sonorous verse being declaimed to the accompaniment of little squeals from women with flushed, excited faces. Wherever he went, Voloshin was using the hum – or boom – of his verse to rescue someone whose life was endangered.’

    During the Red Terror following the evacuation of the White Army from the Crimea, Voloshin showed still greater courage. His belief in the power of his words – what Marianna Landa, in her article ‘Symbolism and Revolution: on Contradictions in Voloshin’s Poems on Russia and Terror in the Crimea (1917–1920s)’ (SEEJ, Summer 2014), refers to as ‘his Dostoevskian faith in the divine spark in the soul of the abominable criminal, and his Symbolist belief in the magic of the poetic word’ – seems to have been unshakeable; his personal appeals to Red and White officials and commanders, on behalf of individuals, and his verse-prayers addressed to God, on behalf of his country, have much in common. Voloshin believed he could affect the course of events – and sometimes he did. That he escaped arrest and execution is astonishing.

     

    Terror

    The working day started at night.
    Denunciations, papers, certificates.
    Death sentences signed in a hurry.
    Yawning, drinking of wine.

    Vodka, all day, for the soldiers.
    Come evening, by candlelight,
    time to read out lists, herd
    men and women into a dark yard,

    remove shoes, clothes, underwear,
    tie the stuff in bundles, pile
    it up in carts, take the carts away,
    share out rings and watches.

    Nightfall, men and women forced
    barefoot, naked, over ice-covered stones,
    into waste ground outside town,
    in wind from the north east.

    Rifle-butted to the edge of a gully.
    The lantern light wavering.
    Machine-gunned for half a minute;
    finished off with bayonets.

    Into a pit, some not quite dead.
    A covering of soil, in a hurry.
    And, with a broad-flowing Russian song –
    back into town, back home.

    At dawn wives; mothers; dogs
    made their way to the same gullies;
    dug the ground; fought over bones;
    kissed the flesh they held dear.

    (26 April 1921, Simferopol)
    tr. Robert Chandler