War for peace

The words “European sensation” are written on the front cover of this book’s Russian translation. They are accurate: if the British are surprised, so is the rest of Europe. Readers in ‘Great Book-reading Britain’ were genuinely astonished at the fact that the author, a 60-year-old immigrant who had never written anything until now, challenged all literary rules and came up with an ‘unexpected’ stylistic knack.

The literary shock that Marina Lewycka gave Britain last summer with her novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian can easily be compared — with due reservations — to the appearance some time ago of the novel Recreations by the then little-known poet Yuriy Andrukhovych or the later publication of the first book of prose by the poetess Oksana Zabuzhko, Field Research into Ukrainian Sex, which was known only in narrow circles at the time, or to the 2002 publication of the book Cult by Deresh, an author whose physical existence critics doubted for a long time.

The shocked reaction to the book led to award fever: Lewycka was nominated for the Orange Prize (30,000 pounds sterling) as well as the Booker Prize. But the prize committees chose not to change the rules that Lewycka’s book did not meet, and quite predictably the novel came a cropper. Still, a prize was found for her book, which was awarded the Wodehouse Prize for the best humorous book written by a woman. This further complicated the situation around the novel.

One cannot call A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian a humorous novel unless one is under the influence of the unique axiom: a woman can do anything. There is nothing in common between Lewycka and Ilf and Petrov, Chornohuz, or Mednikova. This even arouses a dilettantish suspicion: do the British have a sense of humor at all? But then you recall that the British have Shakespeare whom nobody considers a great comic, although he penned several immortal comedies, using the genre of situation comedy to sweeten the bitter pills of his psychological dramas.

So does the answer lie in the book’s structure? Lewycka wrote a family saga about her parents whose childhoods were marred by the famine of 1933, whose youth was poisoned by repressive Soviet ideology, and whose mature years were blighted by slave work for the Nazi economy. The family’s postwar emigration to Britain was like a low tide that left four fish on the shore gaping open-mouthed at an unknown reality. Into what kind of living beings have these former humans turned during several decades of the frozen existence of immigration? And how can one describe all this to the British reader, who is deprived of such Kafkaesque experiences?

And then, creating a palimpsest, Lewycka lays the pattern of a situation comedy over this picture: “Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blond Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.”

This first paragraph of the novel is a real wonder. A flick of the switch, and here you are: a torrent of light, sounds, and movements. Valentyna, a voluptuous, Rubenesque female, comes to Britain on an invitation from a distant relative. Her only goal is to obtain a residence permit and stay. And now she catches the eye of an old man and successfully ensnares him — “he turned into an 85-year-old teenager tuned in to his own wavelength.”

“Our small family of immigrants, knitted together for a long time by mum’s love and mum’s borsch, was falling apart before my eyes.” The sisters, irreconcilable rivals for their mother’s will, join forces to find documentary evidence of Valentyna’s criminal intentions so that the immigration authorities can deport the fortune hunter. This sparks a full-scale “war for peace,” to quote the Diachenkos. And a la guerre comme a la guerre: even the supposedly right forces resort to the most sinister schemes (“this resembled the Judas kiss in the garden of Gethsemane — the blissful sensation of one’s impunity”).

The plot requires no special control from the author and allows Lewycka to focus, secretly from the reader, on the family ghost hunt announced in the first paragraph. The sister, who narrates the story, is a vivid illustration of the maxim coined by the well-known feminist Clarissa Pincola Estes: “If there is at least one force that nourishes the root of suffering, it is unwillingness to learn further.”

So the narrator finds this root. At first she muses: is it really feminism “that taught me to consider all women sisters, all except for my sister?” Then she watches her father and does not believe her eyes: the old man promptly falls for Valentyna’s tricks, and he shows “what happy eyes a fairy tale has” (Lina Kostenko). And when the skirted crook was neutralized for some time, daddy again “became something gray and inconspicuous — a person without energy” (Valeriy Shevchuk). And which of these things is right: to protect an old man from a marriage scam or to recognize his right to a string of happy sensations in the twilight of his life?

Finally, it becomes clear that “the sin of intolerance is the biggest sin of all,” to quote Shevchuk, the most prominent literary expert on this problem. And, although the daughters successfully send Valentyna back to Ukraine, they are already able to understand this woman, who has also suffered in the accident called “life”: according to Estes’ theory, “if a woman is surrounded in the outside world by hostile or indifferent people, this feeds the inner predator, who gathers strength in her soul and becomes all the more aggressive.”

There is an interesting detail in Lewycka’s novel, which escaped the attention of our Andriy Kurkov, who published a book review in The Guardian: “In my view, the Wodehouse Prize was awarded for caricaturing Ukrainians.” But Valentyna is a Russian, who moved to Ternopil from Russia, which the author emphasizes more than once (“There is an element of cruelty in her character. It is, by the way, a distinguishing feature of all Russians. It is a typical flaw of the Russian character to use violence as a measure of first rather than last resort.”) Therefore, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is not a conflict between different mentalities among Ukrainians but one between different worlds of emigration — not in the Russians’s favor, at that.

Russian publishers tried to smooth this over by translating the dialogues with a comical pidgin З la Vierka Serdiuchka, although it has very little to do with Lewycka (“he always spoke to me in English, putting wrong stresses and distorting words but always observing the rules of grammar”). They attempted to publish this “anti-Russian” novel even in spite of the Russian government’s stiff opposition to recognizing the Holodomor, a leitmotif in Lewycka’s book. Why?

The answer is simple: book publishing is a real business in Russia. Ideology is no longer able to hinder commerce and hush up a real European hit. This business is so powerful that it provides anti-totalitarian protection to high literature, being aware that “art is not only intended for its own sake, it is not only the sign that marks one’s own interpretation. It is also a map for those who follow us” (C. P. Estes).

Against this backdrop it is easy to understand why Marina Lewycka’s novel was not published first in Ukraine.

References:

Maryna LEWYCKA, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (Moscow, Exmo, 2006).

Marina and Sergei DIACHENKO, “Pandem,” Raduga, 2003, Nos. 1, 2.

Clarissa Pincola ESTES, Women Who Run with the Wolves (Kyiv, Sofiya, 2002).

Lina KOSTENKO, Inimitability (Kyiv, Molod, 1980).

Valery SHEVCHUK, “A Stone Echo,” Vitchyzna, 1986, No. 5.

Valery SHEVCHUK, The Eye of an Abyss (Kyiv, Ukrainskyi pysmennyk, 1996).