Yurii ANDRUKHOVYCH: Time is one of my favorite characters

It is hard to find a person that would be equally influential both in public life and literature. However, it is the case with Yurii Andrukhovych. His signature under an appeal is a priori proof that the protest is important: this is how it was in Kuchma’s times, and it continues to be like this today. However, our conversation dealt mainly with art, because politicians fade away but things created by Andrukhovych and his talented fellow writers will remain. Andrukhovych provided answers to several questions as he visited Kyiv with his new literary-concert program, Cinnamon, as well as his previous album Samohon he created jointly with the Polish band Karbido.

How did Cinnamon appear?

“I was making a selection of texts that had something to do with Drohobych and Bruno Schultz, as it was supposed to be performed at the festival to commemorate him. So I selected the verses that had something in common with the retro of the post-war period, the world of Galician towns inhabited by crazy outsiders, at whom everyone was poking their fingers. I explained this to the musicians, they chose the texts – everyone chose several verses. Then we came together and gave our first performance in Drohobych in 2008.”

It is not the first time you make a project with a rock band, but it seems that you work particularly well with Karbido.

“Since the very beginning it has always been somewhat accidental. We met at a literary festival in Wroclaw, whose director invited them to accompany all the poetic performances. They did not pay attention to the words, the thing was about reinforcing the atmosphere. But he proposed me to come a day earlier and try to put together several pieces with them. The result was good, and the audience liked it. We decided to continue our cooperation. I sent them a selection of my works and they composed the music. In 2006 we recorded Samohon. At first I was interested in simply making a CD. But they eventually got dragged into the process and everything went beyond a single project. We started to give concerts. When we were working on Cinnamon, the task was more ambitious, as they undertook as sort of interpretation of my poems. The verses I offered for Cinnamon were written much earlier as a part of the collection Exotic Birds and Plants of the late 1980s. But nothing would have come out of this if not for the Polish translation being published in 2007. Then it became possible. It’s extremely important for them to understand the text, live through it and compose something for it.”

Did they “get” you?

“It seems that they understand me quite well as a poet, they treat my texts with maximum seriousness. When we were recording the album and my vocal track, they periodically performed the directing functions, formulated everything the way they wanted. They are extremely versatile as artists, all of them are working on several projects at a time. I was lucky to have gotten on so well with them.”

Should a poet be a rock star?

“(Laughing) I have great doubts about this. I think that a poet should not do this. A frontman, a singer in the traditional rock’n’roll, is also a poet whose works are performed. But he is present a priori in music, he does not move to literature, as in our case. However, we in fact do not give rock concerts, those are literary readings performed in a slightly different format. Therefore the audience, although it perceives us well, is still somewhat embarrassed, because it does not even understand how to behave: there’s too little rock’n’roll for a rock concert, yet it’s too loud and energetic for a literary soiree. Thus, we are now in the process of creating a peculiar style, I don’t know how we will call it, Cinnamon is actually not that bad. Of course, I can hardly aspire to be a rock star, but I don’t want to be one anyway. I am mainly interested in new form of presenting texts.”

Why has the form become so important for you?

“I like their music so much that I join the process of its composition. Instead of reciting, I start singing the parts, and melismas appear. On the other hand, here we have the factor of each concert’s uniqueness. And this makes a great and exciting adventure to which I like to belong.”

How do you assess the state of the contemporary Ukrainian literature?

“I think that within the past several years, no breakthough has happened. Several years ago we saw a flush, a peak of the new wave: some young authors made themselves known. Zhadan prepared the antology Decameron, which is a small summary of the literary decade. It comprises the works of ten authors that have made their debut as prose writers in the past decade. He asked me to write a couple of words for the cover, so I have read it. When you get this kind of a cross-section, you tend to think, ‘It’s superb, every text is up to the level, it’s cool, it matches the standard.’ I think that the crisis has had its effect here, it paralyzed many publishers. On the one hand, ideally, this process should not depend on publishers. Of course, there should be places where one can bring their new novel, but this does not mean that one ought to stop writing until the crisis is over. Literature is surprising in this way. Maybe some colossal works are being finished right now.”

Do we still have this Stanislav phenomenon [a literary scene which developed around the town of Ivano-Frankivsk, formerly Stanyslaviv. – Ed.]?

“There used to be something like this. I would say, this is a topic for the historians studying modern literature. It already has its place in history: the middle and late 1990s.”

Why are you so categorical about this?

“Because I can tell you about the way it existed, as I was part of it. For the most part, it was about getting together, reading the same books, sharing your new texts with each other and presenting yourself as a part of a single phenomenon. I was somewhat advancing, as I started earlier, the rest were simply younger than me. New authors seemed to come from the street: they came, and nobody knew them for that moment, they brought their texts and everyone got surprised: awesome! But the definition of the ‘Stanislav phenomenon’ remained actual and useful for a while, until the people became single names. Long ago it became clear that calling Taras Prokhasko a representative of the Stanislav phenomenon would sound ridiculous. Because there is Taras Prokhasko, and that’s it, as well as Yurii Izdryk, Volodymyr Yeshkilev, Halyna Petrosaniak and those of local scale. I think they all have become personalities in their own right and this label, ‘Stanislav phenomenon,’ can easily be left to history.”

Let’s speak about some of your foreign affairs. The French translation of the novel 12 Obruchiv (Twelve Hoops) has recently been published. How was it received?

“Very well. I regularly receive copies of reviews from the publishers. Hardly anyone paid attention to Moskoviada, because it was published two or three years earlier. It is simply that the publishing house has recently entered a stronger group of publishers, which pays greater attention to promotion and cooperates actively with the mass media. So, I think that this reaction has not been caused by the objective nature of what I had written, but by the promotion techniques applied by the publishers. I have even started to get income from selling books and receiving invitations from the France to give performances, which is a new thing for me. Incidentally, it is difficult to perform in front of the French audience, as they don’t like the authors who perform with translators, so one should have a good command of French.”

Are any other translations underway?

“At the moment I am working with a German translator on arguably the most difficult text, Perverzii. The work is advancing very slowly. My German is good enough to work in succession, i.e., she completes several chapters, sends them to me, and I authorize them. But I have found out that I want to change many things, as this text is out of date for me in many moments. We have resolved to do so. When I am dissatisfied, I offer some changes. This might be one of those interesting cases when the translation will differ from the original.”

Speaking about Germany, it is apparently a lucky country for you: your works are translated there on a regular basis, you give numerous performances. Why is it so?

“Again, everything depends on the publishers. Suhrkamp is one of the most serious companies which built a loyal audience: on the one hand, it publishes intellectual books, on the other hand – exciting fiction, and everything is on a very high level there. They are working for the German-speaking readers over the world, and it is one of the steadfast burgher traditions to follow literary events and buy books. Today they are complaining that the people do not read as much as they used to in the 1950s-1960s. But it cannot be compared to our situation. There is another factor: I am also known as a political commentator, running columns in German press about Ukraine. So this part of the world is indeed favorable for me, and I always accept invitations from there.”

Speaking about trips, please, tell us: at what stage is your guidebook of urban essays?

“Some 20 cities are left, out of 111. I want to strain myself, so as to publish it in December. I’m going to set off for another storm this summer, then I will make time for the book to stay untouched, edit it thoroughly, rewrite once more, then it will become possible to publish it.”

Are you planning any big prose work at the moment?

“I am. But I won’t utter a word about this.”

Have you started to work on it?

“No, I haven’t. I do not do everything simultaneously.”

To what extent does a litterateur have to be an entrepreneur?

“As far as I understand, many fellow writers think that I am extremely enterprising. I don’t think I am. I might have found an optimum version for myself. I meet the offers, I have already mentioned this. One may call the eagerness to perform before the audience as a new kind of technology or PR. PR has been placed into an exclusively negative context, it is perceived as a self-promotion. In fact it simply means contacts, public relations. For an author his literary evening is PR. And he promotes himself, why not? He reads his own works, presenting them in this way. In this sense I am enterprising. But for me, again, this is rather a desire to change and be mobile, to run off as frequently as possible, go somewhere, because when I stay somewhere without any changes, I fall into a crisis. I need this kind of things quite badly.”

Once you were called a Post-Modernist. Now, when Post-Modernism is in the past, would you explain what is this?

“This term has functioned within the framework of a concrete system of coordinates of specifically French and francophone philosophical-aesthetical school. Unfortunately, when it started to be used as a cliche in different circles, everything was profaned. Therefore one can only make jokes about the word Post-Modernism. It appeared as a joke, as a notion, but the question remains open for me, whether this phenomenon ever took place. I remember, during a literary discussion that took place in Berlin, when the moderator asked whether Post-Modernism is still alive, the reply was, ‘It has always been dead.’ Besides, it is a tradition to speak critically of this notion. It is already improper to characterize it positively. Therefore I cannot say whether it is over, because it was never really here. But at some period of time a part of the milieu believed that it existed and tried to define its attributes, like usage of quotations and collages. But there have always been quotations and collages. Everyone is quoting somebody in more or less significant literary works.”

Let’s put it in a more neutral tone, what is actuality in art?

“It is not simply something that keeps pace with tendencies. It creates them. When in a successful context some new artistic quality appears, for example, a new literary quality in the context of Ukrainian or European literatures.”

“At least for me, it is a thing with many aspects. Fashion is a lower level. There is simply a personality that enters the stage and the hall is full of his admirers. They pay attention, for example, to see if he’s wearing his favorite sneakers. Everything starts on this particular level and in the end new tendencies are created. The moment is also a fitting way to see it, probably because the spirit of time with its regular breaks, because we don’t have a single time line or common time stream. Everything is totally broken, I am afraid even that it is chaotic.”

What is the moment?

“Taking a concrete subject as prose writing, Decameron is an example of this, we see a return to normal narration, telling stories that feature this nakedness, frankness in terms of physiology, some subcultural issues. That is why the genre of short story has revived. For the most part it includes the stories of the modern city.”

How shall we call it?

“Some term that ends with -ism, what else could be used to name it? Probably, somebody will invent some term soon.”

Are we coming back to social, rigid literature?

“Absolutely.”

Will you react to this in some way?

“Let’s meet after the book about the cities is published, because I don’t want to retell this now. Rather I will react with the help of my text.”

You have said in an interview that time is a fictitious category. Why?

“This is also close to a joke. In fact, time is one of my favorite characters. I write fiction, and time is also a fictitious category in this sense. But time for me is also an important system of coordinates. The only thing is that I want to deform it in my creative work. I don’t agree that it is linear and wholesome. I feel it and I want it not to appear linear in my works, rather like a twists, circles, and loops.”

The Petersburg avant-garde prose writer of the 1920s-1930s Kostantin Vaginov describes a situation in one of his novels where a writer finds himself eventually inside the text he created. In your opinion, is an artist able to control reality?

“The thing is not about control. Funny things happen. At the beginning of Cinnamon we perform the work Wolf Messing. While touring Ukraine, we stopped in a cafe in Mykolaiv or Kirovohrad oblast, ordered coffee, and suddenly heard the announcement of the series Wolf Messing on TV. We started laughing: that was the sign. Most importantly, it was not the first time. Next day we were sitting in another place, in Dnipropetrovsk, and were making a very substantial review of our progress. We had a nervous and complicated conversation. We faced the problem of how to do the lighting for all four concerts. We made an agreement that every song should be separated with a blackout. When we came to this agreement, the light went off. That was a blackout. Waiters came, bringing candles. So, it is not the same as with Vaginov’s novel, but it happens so. If an author is worthy as an artist, he can call demons with his creative endeavors. This happens beyond his consciousness.”