My Identity is Multilingual: Svetlana Lavochkina

Svetlana Lavochkina is a Ukrainian novelist, poet and translator. Her work has been widely published in the US and Europe. Her novella, Dam Duchess, was chosen runner up for the Paris Literary Prize. Her critically acclaimed debut novel Zap was shortlisted for Tiber and Jones Pageturner Prize, London. Having left Ukraine in 1999, she settled in Germany with her family. Uday Adhikari of The Gorkha Times had a talk with Ms Lavochkina. The same has been presented herewith. 

You were born in Ukraine while it was a part of the erstwhile USSR. Later it became a separate country. What was your childhood like? It was a politically unstable time? Did the situation affect your family too?

I grew up in Zaporozhye, a failed industrial giant in the south-east of Ukraine. If anything, life was rather stable. My mother was a piano teacher, my father an engineer and a semi-professional photographer. We had a small cosy two-bedroom apartment in a block of flats. As compared to European or American standards, we were as poor as church mice, but, since we didn’t know what else life had to offer elsewhere, we considered our situation plausible and never wished for more. Once in a couple of years, we would go to Crimea to visit our relatives at the Black Sea. Those short sojourns were the highlights of my childhood.

I had always hated community activities connected with Soviet politics; they were mandatory, however, as was the unquestioning acquiescence in everything said on TV. Probably, it was this, and, of course, the quiet yet menacing background of anti-Semitism that marred my childhood and adolescence.

Your mother tongue is Ukrainian. You left your country quite early. You live in Germany and write in English. It seems you have had a very interesting journey through languages. How is it possible to live in German and do creative work in English?

Well, to put it right, my mother tongue is Russian. I was born in Eastern Ukraine;  it is a largely Russian-speaking region. Ukrainian, however, had always been a weighty presence since my childhood, but in the USSR there was a policy of delicate and not very delicate suppressing of all the languages other than  the Russian, so that the population of the republics knew who “the Big Brother” was. Learning Ukrainian was not exactly discouraged, but there was an official law that enabled parents to “free” their children from learning it at schools, which was used very gladly “to unburden the children”. Yet, the blessing was that my own parents wisely considered language knowledge a boon and, unlike others, didn’t “unburden” me, so I was exposed to Ukrainian and its immense complexity, flexibility and sonorous beauty; at school, I had a strict yet an inspiring teacher. Also, my nanny was from a Ukrainian village and spoke Surzhik, a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian. Then, at school, English came to conquer me forever. I think foreign tongues are a way of travelling without leaving the confines of your country, or even your own house. This was very practical while living behind the Iron Curtain. 

I had always wanted to travel, to try living somewhere else – not only out of curiosity, but equally out of political and economic necessity. I would have loved to go, say, to America, but the intricate logistics would have involved active and interested relatives there who would have guaranteed the émigrés’ sojourn and promise of financial support – this was not the case with my American relatives, and I can understand that. As a Jew, I could have gone to Israel, but its hot, harsh climate and permanent gunpowder-barrel political situation were somewhat off-putting. So it became Germany – it gave a residence permit to Jewish refugees from the ex-USSR. Within me, there has always been a clear watershed between the functions of each of the languages. Russian is the language of the subconscious – anger, swearing, strong emotions, jokes – the substrate. German has become the language of everyday life for me. I love it; yet, I have never envisaged writing in it actively – that would have involved the exertion that would have drained me. And English has always been the language of art, literature, home of beauty. Writing in English is assuming a different personality, a freer, cheekier, more reckless, being in a guise of someone else. Recently, by sheer chance, I started translating my own work into Ukrainian, which I just passively knew and admired – and it’s another discovery, very enriching and energizing. Currently, I’m translating my verse novel into Ukrainian.

I left Ukraine at 26: it’s up to you to judge whether it’s early or not. In my view, at 26, a person is already formed, if not career-wise, then, at least, personality-wise. All the “filling” of the character-cake is there. All the rest is icing.

Your new book, a novel in verse, reminds me of Bikram Seth’s verse novel The Golden Gate. In Russia, there is a long tradition of writing a story in verse. Pushkin is a fine example. How did you decide to write such a novel in verse in spite of having a slim chance of being commercially successful in the market?

Whenever I start a new project, I’m guided by inner voices that command what I have to do. I always know what’s next, and the right shape of the next piece, structure, form, genre – are predestined. It’s easy – I just “follow orders”. Wherever they come from, whether from an inner urge, or from outer space, is not important. I’m always sent “messengers” – people who guard my way, muses, if you wish. With Carbon, the verse novel you have mentioned, I felt it was time to tell the world about the city of my alma mater, Donetsk, that is now in the throes of war, in a way no one had done it before. Short poems and fiction had been written about it, good movies were made as well, yet all of that in Ukrainian or Russian. Yet, I knew I was to do an all-encompassing panorama of the world of Eastern Ukraine, with all its beauty, squalor, contradictions, suffering and glory – and the task was mine, only I had the full set of necessary instruments: writer’s English and the indigenous, insider knowledge and understanding of Eastern Ukraine. I knew that it would have to be a verse novel – I’d say, not even Pushkin-style, rather, in the vein of Iliad and Odyssey, a thoroughfare already travelled by Derek Walcott in his Omeros. 

So, when writing, I don’t even worry: whoever will read my book? If a book is meant to be, it will find its publisher and readers even if written in gobbledegook, on water or inside one’s bowels. 

It seems your first love is poetry. Even when you came to fiction, you were constantly haunted by poetry and your latest novel in verse indicates the same obsession for poetry. How did you start writing? Was there any inspiration at an early age?

As early as in Class 2, at 8 years of age, I took a lined exercise-book and imagined I was writing a novel in English. At that time, I was just mastering the basic vocabulary and grammar. But it was only a quarter of a century later that I indeed wrote my first short story, encouraged by my mentor, a renowned Scottish storyteller David Campbell, whose seminar I attended at a teachers’ conference. I was so self-conscious, so timid – the desire to write in English burned in me, yet I didn’t know whether I had the talent. My mentor’s praise and the prompt subsequent publication of that story fuelled me and gave me confidence.

You will not believe it but I disliked poetry for a long time – it was like a perfume too strong, nearly poisonous in its electrifying distilled nakedness of the language, I read it out of educational necessity rather than out of love. I preferred fiction, it was duly diluted and much more palatable.

It was not before I had turned 30 that the dam of my defence suddenly burst, and mistrust turned into love. I found myself translating contemporary Ukrainian poets into English for international anthologies. When I started writing (at 32, comparatively late), it was short fiction only, for years. Then a novel and a novella. I kept telling myself and everyone else, “I am not a poet, I will never write a line of poetry in my whole life.” Yet, proverbially, here I am, with a verse novel hot off the press.

You are living in Germany where hatred for Jews started long back and was timely fuelled by Hitler. You mentioned above that the part of Ukraine you lived in was very suffocating for the Jews, and it was anti-Semitism that led you to leave your birthplace. It sounds contradictory and requires some analysis. Will you explain more for clarity?

What happened in Germany during the time of the Third Reich is a dark place in world history, this is undeniable. Anti-Semitism has accompanied Jews as long as they have existed, and it is up to people to draw lessons from history. Germany has long been a democratic European country with a strong emphasis on human rights. The country has learned its lessons, and the government, education and culture have done their best to repent for the crimes their predecessors committed, be it actively or through connivance. The Second World War and the Holocaust are big on the school curriculum, and humanitarian values are imparted sincerely and diligently to the younger generations. In the educated democratic circles in Germany, anti-Semitism is a no go. In literature, being a Jewish writer is even a bonus, one gets extra attention. 

In Ukraine and Russia, anti-Semitism has never been addressed honestly and directly, and it’s still ubiquitous, even in educated circles. I was appalled to learn that even in a Kiev hospital, in 2020, a friend’s sick mother was told about her disease (by a doctor!), “Well, diabetes is something only Jews get, it’s a Jewish condition.” “Jews have usurped power in government” is still a frequent adage in social media, and I read anti-Semitic comments to posts related to Jewish life. When I asked a literary friend the other day if he would like to be featured in a new anthology of Ukrainian Jewish writers to be published in the US, he declined, saying he is afraid to be pointed a finger at and put at disadvantage by his colleagues, should they know about it. A recently deceased outstanding Jewish-Ukrainian poet Moisei Fishbein was scantily published in his lifetime, denied literary awards, belittled, and it was only upon his death that he belatedly got some attention. Of course, intelligent, “normal” people from all walks of life condemn anti-Semitism in Ukraine and Russia. Now there is a vast net of synagogues, Jewish museums and cultural centres, people can practice Judaism unhindered, yet, it’s still a far cry from what the state of things should be like in a democratic European country. 

You said your first language was Russian, and you lived a fair amount of your life speaking it in Ukraine. In our part of the world, Russian writers like Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Chekhov are quite popular. You read them originally in Russian. Have the giants of Russian literature left an impression on your writing endeavor? Please share the books and writers that have fascinated or impressed you.

My literary godfather is Nikolai Gogol, and I am, of course, in awe of all the Russian writers you mentioned before. These maestros are best to rediscover in mature age: although Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev are on the school curriculum, the very young readers are unable to grasp all the subtleties of those geniuses.

The best ever, the most humbling compliment that has been made to my writing is having been compared to Mikhail Bulgakov and Vladimir Nabokov. This was what one of the reviewers wrote about the German edition of my novel, Zap, called Pushkins Erben – “Pushkin’s Heirs” in German. I think yes, these giants have subconsciously influenced me, although I rather think I learned the craft of writing from Anglophone literature. Yet, the seam side of my soul is indeed Slavic – and my function as I see it, is connecting the Western-European and Eastern-European world in literature in a way, dressing an eastern mind in western clothes, so to say. I’m one of the modest literary labourers with just this assignment. 

The books that have shaped my world and soul view are The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, Ada by Nabokov, J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Waves by Virginia Woolf. Speaking of poetry, Osip Mandelshtam, Marina Tsvetayeva, Ted Hughes, Wallace Stevens, Derek Walcott – and, deeply, Rumi.

You left Ukraine when you were 26, saw the disintegration of USSR and its impact on the life of people in a disintegrated state like Ukraine. How was your and your family’s experience of the event, then and afterward?

This was a really topsy-turvy, toppled time. On the one hand, we felt absolute freedom to say what we wanted or thought but this was a hungry freedom. Traditional values were twisted or reversed. Professions like teacher, doctor, librarian, engineer were despised, these people were paid peanuts and ridiculed as outsiders. The new god was “business” and the most precious talent was that of fast, actually, always dishonest money-making – trading, swindling, opening up fake companies, racket and fraud – many such “businessmen” were murdered during those wild 1990-ies in those battles for power and capital – a snake devouring its tail. I must admit that in my early youth, I was not immune to this reversal of values either, and it took me many years to return to “normality”.

My family was plunged into extreme poverty in spite of my mother being a piano teacher and my father an engineer. I think my parents never fully recovered from this disintegration. My mother had never wanted to emigrate and did so out of contingent necessity, but, first and foremost, out her mother’s duty, to be close to me and her future grandchildren (this is what Jewish mothers are traditionally famous for, sacrificing EVERYTHING for the sake of their children). She loved her job, her circle of colleagues and friends, and forsaking her accustomed social environment, getting settled in Germany, starting from scratch, learning a new language at the age of over fifty was a big, big challenge. My father was not averse to the new experience of emigration but it wasn’t easy for him, either. Yet, looking at the still afflicted Ukraine 20 years after we left it, I think it was a right choice for my parents to go to Germany, however they miss their past.

How do you feel seeing a Ukrainian writer’s book being translated into the Ukrainian language? Is it being part of multiculturalism or universalism or losing the linguistic identity of a writer?

This is my personal route in literature, returning to Ukraine after a long journey. The start of the translation of my own work into Ukrainian was, on the surface, quite accidental. An Australian-Chilean colleague, Juan Garrido, reached out to me, asking to translate some of his poems into Ukrainian, and I demurred at first. I had never worked with Ukrainian as a literary language. But he persuaded me, and it miraculously worked. So I thought, if I can do it for him, why not for my own work as well? What I do in Ukrainian is said to be innovative, and this fills me with delight, so my courier service from Ukraine to the West has boomeranged, the return ticket, so to say.

My identity is multilingual, so, if anything, it’s acquiring a polyphonic voice, and it is no way a loss but a gain.