Lyuba Yakimchuk: "There’s nowhere I feel better than in that space when I am writing."

I think a lot about decolonization

What troubles me the most right now is when our northern neighbor will finally go back home. For me, this is above all about decolonizing Russia. Maybe we won’t live to see it happen—the moment when russia, let’s say, falls apart—because in reality, it’s not enough for just Putin to disappear. They always produce a new putin, or a new stalin, or someone else like that. But there’s a plan for our children, and for the more distant future as well—maybe one of our descendants will live to see the moment when Russia breaks up into small states. They have, what, 120-something nationalities? Nationalities whose languages are nearly destroyed, whose identities are nearly destroyed. They feel the way we once did in the Soviet Union—oppressed, suppressed, and made to feel inferior. 

In fact, I think constantly about what I can do with this in the framework of my profession as a writer, and I think a lot about decolonization. You know, this decolonization—so far, it’s only being talked about from the outside russia. There are scholars who are researching how to decolonize Russia and what needs to be done. And all of them are either from Ukraine or from the USA, of from Kazakhstan—there’s a really great researcher from there. And russians aren’t doing this work—that’s the problem. What they have is this silent so-called opposition that’s left the country and isn’t doing this work. They’re parasitizing on ours. All these TV channels, the so-called “Dozhd,” “Meduza,” are actually deeply imperial. They present themselves as the opposition, but in fact they’re feeding off our grief. They use footage from Ukraine to raise money for their own funding and to promote themselves. That’s also a colonial gaze. That kind of condescending attitude—to use someone else’s grief and to talk over it as if it were their own. So I don’t see—I’m searching—and I don’t see anyone there who could do that kind of work, at least not yet.

 Those of us who came from the East, found new language earlier

I think at the end of 2022, I got a new prescription for glasses—I use either contacts or glasses—and my prescription had changed quite a bit. Everything started to blur, everything went off at an angle: crooked window sills, crooked walls collapsing onto me. And while I was getting used to the new glasses, my optics changed too. It’s kind of the same with perception when war starts. First in eastern Ukraine, then in Kyiv, where I was at the time—basically all over Ukraine, full-scale.

And then the brain adapts. That’s exactly it—the brain adapted to these glasses. I see everything normally now. I forced my brain, I walked around in them, looked, and checked reality. It’s the same now. We’re sitting here, there’s an air raid alert, and our brains have adapted too. We don’t feel that kind of overwhelming stress anymore.

But there’s one thing that people often don’t take into account. Everyone expects that after trauma—any trauma, whether civilian or military—there will be PTSD. Everyone expects post-traumatic stress disorder. But they forget that there can be post-traumatic growth. And for me, after 2014, that’s exactly what happened. I felt that life is short. I felt that it could end at any moment. My parents were fleeing from the Luhansk region, trying to make it all the way to the right bank of the Dnipro—as far as possible, so they wouldn’t be reached. The thought was that they could be reached. And I started to look at my life differently. I began to do more. I started living my life differently. And accordingly, it was the same in literature.

At first, there was deep disappointment—among artists, among writers, among everyone—in 2014, this feeling that literature, culture had supposedly done nothing to stop the war. But come on! Where is literature and culture, and how are we supposed to stop a mad dictator? Of course, that was just an illusion we had. And once that disappointment passed, we started searching for a new language. And those of us who came from the East, I think, found that language earlier, even in literature. We had been searching for it earlier. We understood how massive traumatic events affect a person and how the meaning of words changes. But after 2022, we stopped being alone. Before that, I felt like some crazy, isolated person who kept talking—and no one understood. Not even colleagues understood. Now we’re the isolated ones abroad. We come, we speak, we warn, we say: “It’s going to be like this and that.” We shout, we explain. I come with a tourniquet! I know how to use it—I recently completed my third tactical first aid training. So I come with this tourniquet, I show it to the Poles, for example. Poles who are nearby, close to us, who sympathize with us, seem to understand—and they look at me with those eyes! I say: “Well, in case you need it—rockets and drones reach Poland too. Here, I have one.” And they don’t even know what it is. I explain what it is, how to use it. And then they’re terrified—terrified at the very idea that they might actually have to use it. And yes, it’s easier for a person to build a wall, to shut it out. Because the truth is, it takes a lot of energy to rewire your brain and start preparing for something so horrifying. You have to shift your entire worldview, the whole architecture of the world you’ve built in your head. That’s hard for people to do. It’s hard for people to imagine that everything might be different—and that they’ll have to change something in their lives. That’s why they keep wearing their old glasses—until reality knocks them off their feet.

Today, to talk about the East, it's how we articulate our identity. It’s how we hold on to our land.

I’ve always defined myself as someone from Luhansk—as a woman of Luhansk region and of Donbas more broadly. That’s part of my identity. And now, when I work on various projects—for example, I recently completed a screenplay in March as a co-author—I make a conscious effort to include a regional element. Why? I include Luhansk or Donetsk specifically to keep these occupied territories present in our narrative. So that when we regain them, we can say: here’s what we were doing about them—these are our territories. We never stopped speaking of them in our cultural narrative. And the fact that so many books about the East are appearing now—so many cultural works and films connected to the East—is actually very good. We need to do the same for the Kherson region, for parts of Zaporizhzhia. We need to keep those territories present in our national imagination. Because what do the russians do? First the army comes and destroys everything. Then they seize the scorched earth—because scorched earth is easy to take. And after that, their culture comes in. Their so-called “great russian culture” continues the work of tanks, machine guns, and missiles. It appropriates the land, weaving it into the narrative of their so-called great culture.

And for us to hold on to these places, we have to hold them in our culture—especially when we can’t physically reach them, when we can’t climb the slag heap I played on as a child, or walk through the feather grass steppe. But we can do that in the cinema. We can do it in poetry. We can do it through visual art—through many, many creative forms. And I approach this consciously. In everything I do, I make that choice.

And one more thing—if we go back to the early 20th century, there was a time when Halychyna (Galicia) existed separately from ‘Greater Ukraine.’ That’s what the larger part of Ukraine was called: ‘Greater Ukraine.’ The cultural process was seen as happening there. And those outside of it always looked to it. Today, ‘Greater Ukraine’ is the part that isn’t occupied—the part that cannot directly control some of its territories. And what we’re doing here, in this part of Ukraine, has become the cultural mainstream. Today, it’s the mainstream to write about the East, to paint the East, to create art about it. This is part of who we are. It’s how we articulate our identity. It’s how we hold on to our land.

There’s nowhere I feel better than in that space when I am writing.

Poetry is probably the core of my life. I've identified as a poet since childhood—I've been writing since I was a kid. And already in my teenage years, I called myself a poet; it’s a big part of me. I don’t know of any genre more beautiful than poetry. I can’t think of anything else that compares. But I feel very comfortable with screenwriting too. I’ve noticed that even when I was working under pressure—when I had to write quickly, when I was feeling unwell physically, or there were shellings going on, and I was struggling emotionally—once I enter the text, I forget everything. I shut everything out. I just immerse myself—and there’s nowhere I feel better than in that space, writing. I build a whole world there, the characters start talking, and I just feel good. I realize that even when I’m an old woman, and life might become physically difficult, I’ll still have that refuge—writing—and I’ll be able to hide away in it and forget about everything else.

Also, when I’m doing well, I enjoy working with themes from the 1920s-30s—the Executed Renaissance. I hope to finish a new book soon that focuses on military topics and Mariupol Defenders, and then I want to return to writing a biography of Mykhail Semenko. I recently did research on the conference of revolutionary writers that took place in Kharkiv in 1930—writers came from all over the world—and it was fascinating. When I’m working on something like that, I feel calm and deeply satisfied. I already know how that story ends. It’s a safe distance: you’re immersed in another century, another world. It still speaks to you: there are so many parallels, but at the same time, it’s far away, not quite the same as ours.

I also sometimes write song lyrics. Occasionally, we perform musical-poetic performances. That’s a totally different experience—something wild. I usually enjoy it most when I’m on stage.

Not every nation is capable of making meaningful, transformative art during wartime.

I get the sense that Ukrainian art and literature—our culture overall—often looks even stronger abroad. I think that has a lot to do with the existential threat we live under. Under those conditions, the human brain starts working faster, more effectively. We begin to think, to reevaluate.

We think deeply—about how to change, how to express, what to show. We work better. And there’s something—I don’t want to use the word explosion, because in our context that means something else entirely—but there’s this powerful creative surge. There’s a lot we can present internationally, and often it’s of very high quality. I can speak for Ukrainian poetry—it’s far stronger, more powerful than a lot of the poetry being produced in Europe today. I’m also interested in Japanese poetry—it's unique, shaped by a very different culture—but if we’re talking about contemporary European poetry, I think we’re often more compelling. So yes, war is our tragedy, but it’s also paradoxically our strength: we’ve learned how to survive and how to think and create something new in the midst of crisis. Not every country, not every people, is capable of making meaningful, transformative art during wartime. But we can. And it’s not even the first time—look at the early 20th century, in both visual art and literature. That was a phenomenal renaissance—again, between wars, under threat, at a moment when the very survival of the nation was in question. Now it’s happening again. It’s our peculiar strength—our little secret.

Khvylovy spoke about the term—the romance of vitaism (lat. vita—life)—and I absolutely love it. He said that russian revolutionary and post-revolutionary literature was pessimistic, that classical russian literature overall is pessimistic—they’re always lamenting. But he wrote about Ukrainian literature as vitaistic literature—literature that’s all about life, that celebrates life. And it’s true. Of course, Ukrainian literature has had it all—dramatic, comic. We can think of Kotliarevsky, for example, who wrote about war in a humorous way. Or Shevchenko, who had a more dramatic tone. So we’ve had both of those discourses. But our strength lies in being able to switch between them—this ability to find our way toward something positive, and not just bury ourselves in a death pit, as is often the case elsewhere.

Gardening becomes a way to bring order to the world.

When I see or read tragic news stories, I might suddenly feel cold, for example. My physiological reactions kick in right away. What helps me is the support of my loved ones. But there’s something else—my garden. It’s a strange thing. I never imagined I’d become a gardener. Back in the ’90s, when we were planting potatoes to survive, especially in eastern Ukraine, or sunflowers so we could later beat the seeds out with a rolling pin and sell them for oil—I did all that with my own hands. And I remember being a teenager and thinking: I will never do this again. I want nothing to do with gardening. I’ll do something professional with my life. And then the full-scale invasion came. And what did Lyuba do? I planted roses. Feather grass. An apricot tree. We live in a private house, and every spring, the number of flowers I plant or replant is incredible. I order new ones constantly. In spring, it takes up a huge part of our family budget. But truly, on the days when I feel especially low, I go outside to the garden. I go out and do something. And it grows, as Dovzhenko once wrote. It lives, it develops, it blooms—and that gives me so much strength. And recently I found out this isn’t unique. I know of at least two colleagues who also suddenly started planting gardens. And there’s research on this—from World War I and World War II—that in areas near the front lines, spontaneous gardens would often appear. People planted them. I’ve seen those kinds of photos. And it happened before, too. Community gardens were created from scratch. So gardening becomes a way to bring order to the world. This garden—and horOd, and hOrod, the kind Khvylovy wrote about. Horod is a distinctly Ukrainian word. In russian, the equivalent was always grad. But we have Myrhorod, Vyshhorod, Uzhhorod—these are our words, all from the same root. It’s about an ordered space. And when we bring order to a space—when we gain even a little control over it—even just something small, something you can control, when you have no control over the sky from which everything falls—then it becomes a bit easier to breathe. 

Translated by Anna Petelina