Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T11:52:24.576Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Synchronous War Novel: Ordeal of the Unarmed Person in Serhiy Zhadan's Internat

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 August 2019

Tanya Zaharchenko
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In Serhiy Zhadan's recent novel Internat (2017), the protagonist epitomizes the quintessential east Ukrainian under scrutiny today, while his journey depicts working through trauma. His transformation portrays the ultimate shedding of melancholy when, in response to violence, the past is replaced by the present. I elicit some of the key symbols and features of this process, which I call triggered mourning, and attend to the role of real-time menace in initiating it. This article draws connections not only between the story's plot arc and the ongoing war, but also between Ukraine's past and present from the perspective of trauma theory. The four sections of the article (on the transformation, the void, the defect, and the antidote) propose and expand upon the notion that Internat is a synchronous war novel—a narrative that emerges parallel to, and closely entwined with, unfolding warfare—and examine its significance for scholarship on Ukraine, for Slavic studies, and beyond. Trauma studies in the context of literature are central to this analysis, with postcolonial studies providing some helpful illustrative parallels.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 78 , Issue 2 , Summer 2019 , pp. 410 - 429
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

The author is grateful to the peer reviewers, who kindly took the time from their own workloads to offer valuable comments on the earlier versions of this article, as well as to Slavic Review's Harriet Murav and Dmitry Tartakovsky for their input and expertise.

References

1. Zhadan, Serhiy, Internat (Chernivtsi, 2017), 228Google Scholar. Throughout the article, translations from this source are my own. At the time of writing, English world rights for the novel had been sold to Yale University Press, with the title expected to be translated as The Orphanage.

2. Often referred to as Russia’s hybrid warfare, or conflict in the east of Ukraine. My choice of term here reflects the full-fledged violent military engagement in progress—also as described in Internat.

3. “Osnovnі zasady і shliakhy formuvannia spіl΄noї іdentychnostі hromadian Ukraїny,” Tsentr Razumkova, April 12, 2017, at http://razumkov.org.ua/novyny/vidbuvsia-kruhlyi-stil-osnovni-zasady-i-shliakhy-formuvannia-spilnoi-identychnosti-hromadian-ukrainy-povni-rezultaty-doslidzhennia (accessed April 17, 2019).

4. Oleg Polishchuk, “Etnotsid naoborot. Kak Putin prevratil Ukrainu v mononatsional΄noe gosudarstvo,” Dsnews, April 14, 2017, at http://www.dsnews.ua/politics/etnotsid-naoborot-kak-putin-prevratil-ukrainu-v-mononatsionalnoe-14042017220000 (accessed April 17, 2019).

5. Gareth Evans, “War, Peace and National Identity,” keynote address, Melbourne Festival of Ideas, Sidney, June 15, 2011. See also Brown, Michael E., Ethnic Conflict and International Security (Princeton, 1993)Google Scholar, incl. chapter by Barry R. Posen, “The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict,” 103–24.

6. President Petro Poroshenko declared in 2013 that the Maidan uprising served as “the birth of a nation.” For similar thoughts, see Paul Goble, “The Birth of a Nation,” The Interpreter, February 26, 2015, at www.interpretermag.com/the-birth-of-a-nation (accessed April 17, 2019); Aleksandr Kirsh, “Tak rozhdaetsia Ukraina,” Obozrevatel΄, July 1, 2016, at https://www.obozrevatel.com/blogs/80724-tak-rozhdaetsya-ukraina.htm (accessed April 17, 2019), among many others.

7. Stocks, Claire, “Trauma Theory and the Singular Self: Rethinking Extreme Experiences in the Light of Cross Cultural Identity,” Textual Practice 21, no. 1 (February 2007): 86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Craps, Stef, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (New York, 2013), 33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. For a detailed overview, see Tanya Zaharchenko, “Frontiers of Identity,” in Where Currents Meet: Frontiers in Post-Soviet Fiction of Kharkiv, Ukraine (Budapest, 2016), 39–77.

10. Hundorova, Tamara, Tranzytna kul΄tura. Symptomy postkolonial΄noï travmy (Kyiv, 2013), 12Google Scholar. In this article, translations from this source are my own.

11. Rory Finnin, “Ukrainians: Expect-the-Unexpected Nation,” CRASSH (blog), December 20, 2013, at www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/blog/post/ukrainians-expect-the-unexpected-nation (accessed April 17, 2019).

12. Fearon, James D. and Laitin, David D., “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 1 (February 2003): 88CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a more recent inquiry specific to Ukraine, see Onuch, Olga, Hale, Henry E., and Sasse, Gwendolyn, eds., “Identity Politics in Times of Crisis: Ukraine as a Critical Case,” Post-Soviet Affairs 34, no. 2–3 (2018)Google Scholar. For problematization of the concept of ethnic diversity in general, see Chandra, Kanchan and Boulet, Cilanne, “A Baseline Model of Change in an Activated Ethnic Demography,” in Chandra, Kanchan, ed., Constructivist Theories of Ethnic Politics (New York, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. The title translates roughly as Boarding school, or Orphanage, referring to live-in educational institutions for troubled or abandoned children.

14. Marci Shore, “The Bard of Eastern Ukraine, Where Things are Falling Apart,” The New Yorker, November 28, 2016, at www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-bard-of-eastern-ukraine-where-things-are-falling-apart (accessed April 17, 2019); Sally McGrane, “The Abuse of Ukraine’s Best-Known Poet,” The New Yorker, March 8, 2014, at www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-abuse-of-ukraines-best-known-poet (accessed April 17, 2019).

15. Serhiy Zhadan, “Narodytysia na Skhodi,” interview by Inkyiv, inshyi Kyiv, June 8, 2017, at http://inkyiv.com.ua/2017/06/naroditisya-na-skhodi (accessed April 17, 2019).

16. Zhadan, Internat, 17.

17. We never learn explicitly what happened to Pasha’s hand, but we may assume it is a birth defect, given that he also suffers from inexplicable seizures. At the end of the book Pasha’s nephew calls him a serdechnyk—someone with heart problems (327).

18. Zhadan, Internat, 327.

19. Zhadan, Serhiy, Voroshylovhrad (Kharkiv, 2010), 9Google Scholar. Available in English as Voroshilovgrad, trans. Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Wheeler (Dallas, 2016).

20. Zhadan, Internat, 181.

21. In short, this simplistic but enduring approach assigns homogeneously pro-Russian traits to the east of Ukraine, presenting it as diseased and incompatible with the rest of the country. Over the years, this notion has formed the basis of a protracted dispute in Ukrainian studies. The mirror reflection of such sweeping generalizations portrays Ukraine’s western regions as unvaryingly (ultra)nationalist.

22. Holbrook, Carolyn, Anzac: The Unauthorised Biography (Sydney, 2014), 159Google Scholar.

23. Zhadan, Internat, 14.

24. Ibid., 254.

25. Ibid., 141.

26. Quote from Abraham, Nicholas and Torok, Maria, “Introjection—Incorporation: Mourning or Melancholia,” in Lebovici, Serge and Widlocher, Daniel, eds., Psychoanalysis in France (New York, 1980), 8Google Scholar.

27. Zaharchenko, Where Currents Meet, 181.

28. Goldberg, Amos, “Trauma, Narrative, and Two Forms of Death,” Literature and Medicine 25, no. 1 (2006): 137CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29. Hartman, Geoffrey H., “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies,” New Literary History 26, no. 3 (1995): 537CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30. Zhadan, Internat, 228.

31. The age parallel is hardly a coincidence. For Pasha and Sasha alike, formative years of early teenagehood coincide with major geopolitical events: imperial collapse and war, respectively. As such, uncle and nephew represent two pivotal generations in Ukraine. In the course of the novel, as they navigate warfare, they ultimately mend their relationship.

32. Launch of the Norwegian translation of Anarchy in the UKR in Oslo on March 20, 2017. Recall, too, a passage from Anarchy itself: “In that bitter and sensitive time, when everything inside of you gets ripped apart and reattached, something similar was happening around us as well, and we had to watch.” Zhadan, Serhiy, Anarchy in the UKR (Kharkiv, 2011), 111Google Scholar. My translation.

33. Jacques Derrida, foreword to Abraham, Nicholas and Torok, Maria, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy (Minneapolis, 1986), xviGoogle Scholar.

34. See LaCapra, Dominick, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, 1996)Google Scholar.

35. LaCapra, Dominick, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 4 (July 1999): 712CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the same page, however, the author cautions: “Losses occur in any life or society, but it is still important not to specify them prematurely or conflate them with absences.”

36. Lipovetsky, Mark and Etkind, Alexander, “The Salamander’s Return: The Soviet Catastrophe and the Post-Soviet Novel,” Russian Studies in Literature 46, no. 4 (September 2010): 6–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37. Morrison, Toni, Beloved (New York, 1987)Google Scholar. As a brief reminder, this is a story of a former slave woman, Sethe, who had slaughtered one of her young children in an attempt to protect them from the horrors of slavery. As the dead baby, known as Beloved, haunts the family, Sethe’s surviving daughter, Denver, grows mute. In the end, however, she succeeds in breaking through the pained walls of silence. Given her emblematic ordeal, Denver may well be one of literature’s unapparent lead characters.

38. Luckhurst, Roger, The Trauma Question (London, 2008), 96Google Scholar.

39. Zhadan, Internat, 258.

40. Serhiy Zhadan, “Ia znaiu velycheznu kіl΄kіst΄ patrіotіv Ukraїny, iakі rozmovliaiut΄ rosіĭs΄koiu movoiu,” interview by Sergei Vasil΄ev, Apostrof, April 29, 2017, at https://apostrophe.ua/ua/article/society/culture/2017-04-29/sergey-jadan-ya-znayu-ogromnoe-kolichestvo-patriotov-ukrainyi-kotoryie-govoryat-na-russkom-yazyike/11764 (accessed April 19, 2019).

41. Zhadan, Internat, 276.

42. In what may be a classic case of unreliable narrators, uncle and nephew testify to each other’s illness without any apparent awareness of their own analogous condition. Even the descriptions are eerily similar. Pasha: “Niby nad malym davno vzhe stoїt΄ znak smertі.” Sasha: “Vdoma my vsі zvykly … do toho, shcho ves΄ chas des΄ poruch ye ioho khvoroba.”

43. Forter, Greg, “Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form,” Narrative 15, no. 3 (October 2007): 260CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44. Zhadan, Internat, 125–26.

45. An archetypal observation is that “unlike human beings who either dupe others or are duped, dogs will give an honest bark at the truth.” Morritt, Robert D., Echoes from the Greek Bronze Age: An Anthology of Greek Thought in the Classical Age (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2010), 95Google Scholar.

46. Luckhurst, Trauma, 80. See also Goarzin, Anne, “Articulating Trauma,” Études irlandaises 36, no. 1 (June 2011): 11–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47. Fassin, Didier and Rechtman, Richard, The Empire of Trauma: An Enquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, trans. Gomme, Rachel (Princeton, 2009), 281Google Scholar.

48. Gunning, Dave, “Dissociation, Spirit Possession, and the Languages of Trauma in Some Recent African British Novels,” Research in African Literatures 46, no. 4 (2015): 121CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49. Luckhurst, Trauma, 65.

50. Hartman, “On Traumatic Knowledge,” 547.

51. Hundorova, Tranzytna kul΄tura, 12.

52. Andryczyk, Mark, The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction (Toronto, 2012), 67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53. Hundorova, Tranzytna kul΄tura, 170.

54. Zhadan, Internat, 182.

55. Zhadan, Internat, 330. It is worth recalling that, after a gradually deteriorating relationship, Marina leaves in part due to Pasha’s apparent passivity in the face of impending war. As part of this passivity, however, he refuses to flee their home region for safety. When she wants them to “drop everything and go,” he stays.

56. Ibid., 178.

57. Ibid., 330.

58. Ibid., 325.

59. Olena Stepova, “Samoe strashnoe na voine, eto—voina,” UA Modna, August 21, 2014, at www.uamodna.com/articles/samoe-strashnoe-na-voyne-to-voyna (accessed April 19, 2019).

60. Zhadan, Internat, 277.

61. Zhadan, Voroshylovhrad, 434. A novel full of apparitions, Voroshylovhrad literally begins with this key word: “Telephones exist for breaking all kinds of bad news.”

62. Zhadan, Internat, 308.

63. Luckhurst, Trauma, 95.

64. Nicholas Abraham, Maria Torok, and Nicholas Rand, “A Poetics of Psychoanalysis: ‘The Lost Object—Me,’” SubStance 13, no. 2 (January 1984): 17.

65. Schwab, Gabriele, “Writing Against Memory and Forgetting,” Literature and Medicine 25, no. 1 (2006): 96CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

66. Zhadan, Internat, 226. The sweeping notion of Soviet nostalgia, incidentally, does not always appear to differentiate between such age-related sentiments and regime-oriented beliefs. When asked for his take on this, Zhadan draws a firm line between warm reminiscences of youth and actual affection for a fallen country. In his case, for instance, the late Soviet period coincided with “the time in my life when my father was young and healthy,” and it would be erroneous to confuse related emotions with missing a political regime. Public interview with audience, Oslo, Norway, March 20, 2017.

67. The USSR relied on its educational establishments to shape, maintain, and laud its own image. Its multifarious national mythology, as articulated through extensive youth organizations and a well-developed lore of leaders and heroes, formed a crucial part of the school curriculum. When Pasha grew up and became a teacher, the curriculum was not just vaguely different from his years as a student; it had been overhauled. He enters the official system of education and becomes its representative without having fully processed the collapse of the things it had embodied. This may well be among the factors contributing to his general disorientation.

68. Balaev, Michelle, “Trends in Literary Trauma Theory,” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 41, no. 2 (June 2008): 158Google Scholar. Several varyingly traumatic events came together in Ukraine’s recent history alone: the Soviet experience, the collapse of the USSR, and the ongoing war. At different points in this article, as in the text of Internat, all of them come into play. The last of the three—warfare—today affects persons across the country and abroad, including those either living or presently fighting in the warzone and their families. The Soviet experience, with its vast corpus of grief, likely touched every family at different times. The collapse of the USSR may have had more shock potential for those geographically closer to the Russian border, which they saw transformed from an internal to an external geopolitical boundary—such as Pasha and his “first catastrophe” of losing the country he thought he knew. As we have seen, however, this did not render him nationless for life.

69. Zhadan, interview, “Narodytysia na Skhodi.” For powerful cinematic ruminations on taking sides during a conflict, see acclaimed drama Before the Rain, directed by Milcho Manchevski. Skopje, Macedonia: Vardar Film, 1994. Research focusing on synchronous war films—or poetry—would make an intriguing topic in its own right.

70. Adapted from Zaharchenko, Tanya, “While the Ox Is Still Alive: Memory and Emptiness in Serhiy Zhadan’s Voroshylovhrad,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 55, no. 1–2 (2013): 45–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71. In typical Zhadan fashion, the author is never explicit about what happens to the school and its inhabitants. We cannot even be entirely sure about the identity of the perpetrators, despite the earlier confrontation with the locals by the water well. Our woeful assumptions are fueled by one last harrowing image: a teacher’s solitary coat, hung like a crucifix and peppered with bullet holes.

72. Burrows, Victoria, “The Heterotopic Spaces of Postcolonial Trauma in Michael Ondaatje’s ‘Anil’s Ghost,’” Studies in the Novel 40, no. 1–2 (2008): 163Google Scholar.

73. Pavlyshyn, Marko, “Literary History as Provocation of National Identity, National Identity as Provocation of Literary History: The Case of Ukraine,” Thesis Eleven 136, no. 1 (October 2016): 86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74. Zhadan, Internat, 304–5.

75. For an important poem that challenges the stereotypical delineation between Donbas workers and the rest of Ukraine, see “Abrykosy Donbasu” by Lyuba Yakimchuk, who grew up near Luhansk. Its opening stanza evokes the colors of the country’s flag: “With eyes sea blue // And hair flaxen yellow // Faded a little // It’s not a flag // But my father // Standing in a pit” [u shakhti—in a coal mine]. At the Eine Brücke aus Papier event in Kharkiv in October 2017, Yakimchuk prefaced her performance of this poem by introducing it as an anguished response to the Two Ukraines sentiments. Yakimchuk, Lyuba, “Apricots of the Donbas,” trans. Lavochkina, Svetlana with Naydan, Michael M., in Andryczyk, Mark, ed., The White Chalk of Days: The Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology (Boston, 2017), 322Google Scholar.

76. Zhadan, interview, “Ia znaiu velycheznu kіl΄kіst΄ patrіotіv Ukraїny.”

77. Zhadan, interview, “Narodytysia na Skhodi.”

78. Stocks, “Trauma Theory,” 86.

79. Zhadan, Serhiy, Mesopotamiia (Kharkiv, 2014), 79Google Scholar. My translation. Now available in English from Yale University Press, 2018.

80. Oleksandr Boĭchenko, “Korotka doroha dodomu,” Gazeta.ua, August 31, 2017, at https://gazeta.ua/articles/opinions-journal/_korotka-doroga-dodomu/789215 (accessed April 19, 2019). For thoughts on the media’s portrayal of the warzone’s residents as retrograde, see Andrіĭ Portnov, “Donbas—iakym vіn ie?,” Nash vybir, July 27, 2016, at http://naszwybir.pl/35411-2 (accessed April 19, 2019).

81. “One of the main problems of contemporary Ukrainian literature is that the country’s regions remain under-expressed; writers talk mostly about Kyiv or Galicia. . . . I plan to continue working with eastern Ukraine,” “Sergei Zhadan: ‘Ukrainskoĭ literature nuzhny novye geroi,’” interview by Konstantin Skorkin, Vostochnyĭ variant, April 7, 2011, at http://v-variant.com.ua/articles/24859-sergej-zhadan-ukrainskoj-literature-nuzhny-novye.html (accessed April 19, 2019).