“My first childhood memory is Russian tanks on Bratislava streets”

Pavol Rankov is a writer, essayist, winner of many prizes, including the European Literary Prize and Angelus, and a teacher at Comenius University in Bratislava. He debuted in literature in 1995 with a collection of short stories, Over the Distance of Time. Then We and They/They and We and Close Up saw the light of day. In 2008 Rankov published his first and very successful novel, It Happened on September the First (or Whenever), which is still “grabbing” literary awards.

According to Mykola Riabchuk, the book owes this popularity to a Central European subject matter. The novel’s events begin on September 1, 1938, a year before the war, and the characters – three youths: a Czech, a Hungarian, and a Jew – go through such ordeals as World War Two, occupation, and two totalitarian regimes. Riabchuk says this novel is a “wide profile of Europe’s dramatic life.” Hopefully, Ukrainian publishers will also show interest in this book and make it accessible to our readers.

Meanwhile, the year 2011 saw Rankov’s novella Mothers which tells the history of a woman who gave birth to a child in the GULAG. Rankov himself read out an extract from this text at a “Month of Literary Readings” meeting. Incidentally, thanks to this festival, the author visited Lviv for the first time. In a Den interview, the Slovak writer said more about his novel, the skeleton and muscles of a literary text, and also shared his opinion about Central Europe and the feeling of danger on the part of Russia.”

I would like to begin our conversation with your novel It Happened on September the First (or Whenever). Levice, where the novel’s plot begins, is a town where your father was born. Did you visit it in childhood and what does it mean to you?

“Levice is a small town in southern Slovakia, and, as far as its ethnic structure is concerned, it has changed greatly in the past 50 years. Before World War Two, it was mostly populated by Hungarians, but after the war the town was reunited with Czechoslovakia, and Slovaks constituted the majority of the population. My father, who had been born and raised in that town in the 1920s-1930s, recalled that Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, and Jews got on with each other. When I was writing the novel, I asked him to tell me his memories of the town. I liked some episodes very much, so I asked him: ‘Did the guy you are talking about come from a Slovak or a Hungarian family?’ Father said it was impossible to give an answer because you could not say exactly whether the family was Slovak or Hungarian. At the time, Levice was a very pleasing and quiet town – we would call it multicultural now. This word was not used then, but this was the way people lived.”

Have you been there?

“I wrote this novel on the basis of my father’s reminiscences. I first visited this town to have a meeting with readers. They said they recalled the episodes I described in the book but did not at all remember me and did not know which school I had gone to and where I had lived. When I said I was in Levice for the first time, they got hurt and said it was not the way to do things. But, in my view, a fiction novel does not need to be true to life.”

When receiving the Angelus prize, you said that, although the book’s stories were fictional, they still contained some biographic points connected with your father and a friend of his. To what extent is this book biographical?

“Let’s imagine a human body. The skeleton is fiction and the muscles, joints, and viscera are reality. To be able to live, this creature needs to have both the former and the latter.”

The town Levice, which you describe, is a treasury of the history and culture of many ethnicities, a borderline area. To what extent is this town symbolic in the Central European context?

“In fact, the entire Slovakia-Hungary frontier is mixed. It is typical south. This town is symbolic in that the ever-changing border used to pass through it so many times. I don’t know if this also applies to the current situation in Ukraine, but a border is always unstable and changeable. Another symbolic moment is that when people live close to each other, they are more tolerant, but when they live separately, they hate more.”

I agree that frontier is a very pressing problem for Central and Eastern Europe, including Ukraine. This topos has had a very complicated history and is always in transformation. What do you think are the main challenges to Central Europe?

“I always doubt that the idea of Central Europe is named correctly – not only because the word ‘central’ means the center of something, while this place has always been an outlying area. The part of the world we call Central Europe has always been sort of a corridor where the interests of Germany and Russia met. The local countries are too small to oppose the two latter. Whenever I say I like Lviv, I also mean that I like its sleepy and quiet atmosphere. The quietness results from the fact that this city is not central – this is why it can be so calm and creative.”

So what about challenges to Central Europe?

“I think the challenge is the need to find a central place for itself and live quietly in spite of German and Russian influences. I will tell you a story about something else, but it is a typical Central European situation. The Czech Republic does not use the euro, while we do, and Czechs asked me very many times what we would do if the Eurozone broke up because of Greece. I would answer spontaneously but in a typical Central European manner: ‘It’s not of our concern. Berlin will solve this.’ Slovakia has no plans of its own.”

In The Tragedy of Central Europe, Milan Kundera says: “In Central Europe, the eastern border of the West, everyone has always been particularly sensitive to the dangers of Russian might.” Do you feel this danger now?

“When my mother read the book Mothers [on the GULAG. – Ed.], the first thing she said was: ‘If the Russians come back, they are sure to imprison you.’ In other words, it is not a historical experience but the experience of my mother, which means that she is sure that the Russians will surely ‘come back.’ One more story: ice hockey is a national sport in our country; we do not play very well, but when there are some international hockey competitions, we watch them closely. My daughters used to ask me why, although Slovakia did not play hockey well, I watched this game and even supported the Russians. My answer was: the Russians are generally disliked in any case, so I’d like to be the only one in this country, who supports them. But I understood two years ago that those who are glad to see the Russians conceding a goal are right. The current situation in Russia is that even if its hockey players win, this will also be support for Putin’s regime. Putin is what I don’t like and what hampers Russia. I am surprised that an ex-KGB man can have friendly relations with an Orthodox Church patriarch. I can’t understand this.”

You must have heard about the situation in Mukacheve. These events are taking place a few dozen kilometers from Slovakia. Is there any reaction in Slovakia? Is there a feeling of a nearby conflict?

“Yes. The first reaction was a sharp increase of the number of army and police units on the border. Another reaction was the opinion that this was what Putin wanted – he is waiting for a domestic conflict to erupt. But, maybe, this situation is good in a sense that Ukraine is aware now that any nationalism – Russian or Ukrainian – is dangerous.”

You write very much in your books about World War Two and the postwar years. The current events are often compared to World War Two events. Do you also see any semblance?

“In my country, the situation in Ukraine is compared to the Soviet occupation in 1968.”

You must have been very little at the time. Do you remember those events?

“Actually, this is my first childhood memory. It is about Soviet tanks on Bratislava’s streets. I finish the book This Happened on September the First with the reminiscence of Soviet tanks rumbling down the streets of Slovakia. I was four then. I was a little boy who liked playing gun-wielding soldiers. So, I was immensely glad to see tanks. I could not understand why mum, who was holding me in her arms, was crying to see them.”

Speaking of culture as a whole, what effect do you think war may have, how can war change an individual?

“If you, an ordinary person, resign yourself to the fact that somebody is being killed nearby or that you have to kill somebody, this will destroy you for all your lifetime. This, unfortunately, creates a difficult situation, when people have to shoulder the burden of this experience. The point is that patriotic inspiration and awareness of every individual are different things.”