Volodymyr KAZANEVSKY: I was glad to share my healthy vodka experience with a country that smokes marijuana

This time The Day plays host to Volodymyr Kazanevsky, a cartoonist of international acclaim who has traveled far and wide. In fact, he could be described as an itinerant cartoonist. How does he do it? Where does he get the money? Below he replies to these and other questions with his usual touch of irony.

AFTER A BRAWL IN THE CANARIES I WAS MOST IMPRESSED BY THE VOLCANO

The Day: How do you artists generally spend your leisure?

V. K.: Like now, sitting back from the desk, relaxing.

The Day: I’ll put it differently. What kind of pastime can Ukraine’s most reputed and successful artist afford?

V. K.: It depends. What do you mean by successful?

The Day: Precisely what everybody does, everywhere in the world: fame and money.

V. K.: Fame? Yes, I’m a successful cartoonist. Money? I don’t measure up. I have to scrape by.

The Day: What about the Ukrainian cartoonists that are just starting out?

V. K.: It’s very tough for them. One has to be a zealot on the verge of lunacy to take up this career. It takes several years to reach a decent professional level, so there are few young cartoonists: Lukyanenko from Kyiv and Loktiev from Zaporizhzhia.

The Day: How did you get the chance to travel so much, to see so much of Mother Earth?

V. K.: A good question. I’ve really traveled far and wide: Hawaii, the Canaries, America, Japan, and Europe. But those were business trips, I mean just business and no pleasure. I received awards from 27 countries and had to travel to receive them in over twenty countries. If a prize is prestigious enough you borrow money and go get it, but the awards committee often pays for your travel.

The Day: Did it ever happen that you would borrow money, make the trip and end up empty- handed?

V. K.: God forbid, no. There were cases when I would receive an invitation and couldn’t make the trip and the prize would vanish.

The Day: Maybe they were offended by your not coming?

V. K.: Something like that. Perhaps they thought so he didn’t come, so what? We’ll keep the prize. That’s typical of our Slavic brothers, the Yugoslavs and Bulgarians. The Poles are more punctilious, maybe because of being neighbors to the Germans. Discipline, you know.

The Day: There is almost a legend about your being close to winning an apartment. Will you tell us?

V. K.: It was in 1990 and I was to receive a very prestigious award. I won a contest of the Iomiuri Shimbun, a newspaper with the world’s biggest print run (over 20 million copies). The Japanese are prosperous people, hold annual cartoonist contests, and the purse reaches $50,000. That time I won the Hidezo Kondo Prize, the USSR was still there, so I was invited to the newspaper’s office in Moscow. They treated me to some sake and interviewed me.

The Day: You mean the Soviet authorities didn’t take away your cash, as they always did, officially robbing chess grand masters and tennis players?

V. K.: No, they didn’t. It was during that transition period. But the Foreign Trade Bank in Moscow paid me the money and then closed all accounts, meaning that none of the customers could get any money later. I bought an apartment with that money.

The Day: It wouldn’t hurt to get that kind of addition to your family budget every year, would it?

V. K.: After that the Japanese lost all interest in me, but I won $8000 in the Canaries.

The Day: You have been around the world. Do you remember anything especially exotic or funny from those experiences? Zadornov used to joke that a Soviet individual should not fly to the United States before learning to live abroad, first in Mongolia, then in Bulgaria and Germany.

V. K.: I followed his advice in a sense. My first trip was to East Berlin, but then I flew to Hawaii, Britain, and Belgium.

The Day: Tell us more about Hawaii. Our poor fellow countrymen (unlike the more prosperous ones) have heard so much about them and seen nothing of them except booklets.

V. K.: Hawaii is an American state, a special one, considering its exotic environment and Polynesian natives, but it has standard American service, highways lit at night, the works, and I was personally impressed by the Canaries. It’s a Spanish territory and less inclined to yield to industrial civilization.

The Day: You mean they have wooden outhouses like we do?

V. K.: Not exactly, but their bazaars are like our street markets. As for the environs — the ocean, beaches, and mountains — I like the Crimea better.