“If you bring young and talented people together, they will garner attention”

You could write a gripping book about the specialty publishing house Smoloskyp (The Torch). Established by Ukrainian students in France in the late 1950s and later transferred to the US in the early 1960s, the company focused on dissident and human rights literature, the works of Ukrainian writers banned in the Soviet Union, and Ukrainian samvydav (samizdat). Smoloskyp published works by Les Kurbas, Mykola Khvylovy (the five-volume edition is the most complete collection of works by this writer from the 1920s), Olena Teliha, Mykola Davydovych, Viacheslav Chornovil, Lina Kostenko, Atena Pashko, and Oles Honchar; political writing and literary research by Hryhorii Kostiuk and Yurii Shevelov (Sherekh); the samvydav journals Ukrainskyi visnyk and Kafedra , documents of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, an English-language collection of testimonies presented at the International Sakharov Hearings, and many others.

The stories of how poetry, prose, and political writings were smuggled out of the USSR could be the basis of a great thriller. For example, the brilliant Ukrainian artist Opanas Zalyvakha hid slides of his paintings in Ukrainian dolls and sent them as a gift to Osyp Zinkevych, the founder of Smoloskyp.

Today Smoloskyp Publishers, which is based in Kyiv and Baltimore, houses Ukraine’s (if not the world’s) largest museum of Ukrainian samvydav and a bookstore, where you can buy books issued by leading Ukrainian publishers. In recent years Smoloskyp has published works in the Executed Renaissance series, four volumes of Dmytro Chyzhevsky’s philosophical works, the political writings of Oleh Olzhych, Ivan Bahriany, and Ivan Dziuba, memoirs by Oleksandr Barvinsky and the members of the resistance movements during the Second World War and the 1960s, a series of lectures by distinguished Ukrainian and foreign professors, such as Ola Hnatiuk, Pavlo Markovsky, Leonid Ushkalov, Dmitry Gorbachev, Jose Luis Ramirez, among others, and the correspondence of Viacheslav Lypynsky.

The Day recently interviewed Rostyslav SEMKIV, the director of Smoloskyp Publishers.

“We are not just publishing books. We are also creating and expanding the milieu of young creative Ukrainians.”

What can you tell us about the writers’ seminars in Irpin?

“The Irpin seminars are the culminating point of our annual activity. Every year the Irpin House of Creativity of the Union of Ukrainian Writers annually gathers between 50 and 60 young political scientists, historians, sociologists, philologists, culturologists, and poets and prose writers from various regions of the country. First, there are roundtable debates on political science topics, then sociology and history, and, finally, fiction. In between the annual seminars trips are organized. For example, in 2006 Smoloskyp sent 10 young writers to the Non-Fiction Festival in Moscow and held a series of literary readings in Sevastopil last November.

“In other words, we are trying to broaden the geography of our activity, because new contacts often result in interesting projects, like Video-Poetry — poems read against the backdrop of video footage, a kind of postmodern version of a poetry recital. This movement is gaining in popularity, and video-poetry festivals are held in Europe, the US, and Russia. In 2007 there was only one group doing this in Ukraine — Sumy — where young people made films adapted to their poetry. Today there are groups in Lviv, Luhansk, Nizhyn, and Zaporizhia. Young poets often come up with interesting ideas, such as screening a video-poetry trailer before a film in a movie theater.”

Smoloskyp also holds the Young Wine Competition.

“Young Wine is a poetry recitation competition. Before announcing three winners, we hold preliminary rounds throughout the year. This year they were held in Zhytomyr, Ostroh, Kamianets-Podilsky (together with representatives from Khmelnytsky and Chernivtsi), Zaporizhia, Sevastopil, Kharkiv, and Donetsk. Seventeen people were short-listed for the finals. The goal of this competition is not only to present new poetry but also to highlight the way they are recited. That is also interesting.

“This kind of event is creating or expanding the informal literary youth milieu through which so many people have passed.”

It is often said that modern Ukrainian literature is now at the “sifting stage.” What is your opinion of this literary youth environment?

“Naturally, modern Ukrainian literature is far from perfect. The problem is not just authors but also, first and foremost, the fact that our publishing houses are still rather weak. For example, they are not able to motivate writers, by which I mean not just offering them decent advances but also the opportunity to attend book festivals. The second problem is readership, and the third problem is that there are very few bookstores left in Ukraine. Literature may be considered developed when a reader comes into a bookstore at least once a week and feels like buying something to read.

“As for the literary youth environment, it is interesting in and of itself. It is very important to know that the Kharkiv-based poet Oleh Kotsariev and the Zhytomyr poet Bohdan Horobchuk can stay awake somewhere until 3 a.m., discussing problems of early 20th-century Ukrainian art.

“In general, we hold this competition because we are convinced that young people are creative and clever, and if you bring them together, they will garner attention.”

Which young poets and prose writers would you single out?

“First of all, Sashko Ushkalov from Kharkiv. At first he only wrote poetry, but recently he produced the novel BZhD (The Safety of Viability). I would say this is the work of an adventure-seeking youth, but it shows indications of being good prose. What is good prose? It is when I come across problems (psychological, philosophical, and social) that also worry me. In other words, it is not trivial literature which, naturally, is also needed. I wish we had a literature on which one could reflect.

“It is important that we already have people from the younger generation, such as Serhii Zhadan or Taras Prokhasko, who have been wring and transforming for quite a long time — not just Oksana Zabuzhko, Yurii Andrukhovych, or Yurii Vynnychuk. The latter seem to be blackmailing readers in a way: ‘Just wait for our novels for this many years because you have nobody else to read. And now, they do have somebody to read!

“I grew up on the works of Vynnychuk and Andrukhovych, so I was not happy when Andrukhovych fell silent in 1996, and his next novel appeared only in 2003. It is not a big problem for him that he lost one reader, but he still lost him. The same goes for Vynnychuk’s Malva Landa , a book that readers had to wait for, if I am not mistaken, from 1992 to 2001. Andrukhovych and Vynnychuk belong to an existentially complex and crucial generation that was destined to psychologically survive the 1980s, enter the 1990s, and become commercially successful in the 2000s. Meanwhile, young writers, who are calling themselves the ‘two-thousanders,’ are growing up in tune with the entire literature.”

Archival and memoiristic literature used to be the preserve of narrow specialists. Do you think there is a growing demand for it now and, if so, why?

“Our readers are definitely opting for memoirs, but in Russian, for the simple reason that there are too few such books in Ukrainian. I think this is a promising niche. Over time, Ukrainian- language memoirs will be richer in terms of genre, and Ukrainians will be reading autobiographies, biographies, and reminiscences.

“Ukrainian literature is developing and becoming richer. I think the main thing is that the number of readers is on the rise. While a thousand copies were considered a good print run a few years ago, today it is a bare minimum. All you have to do is visit the Lviv Publishers’ Forum to see that the numbers of publishers and, hence, readers are increasing year by year. Recently there was an ‘away forum’ in Kyiv, which holds two annual book exhibits of its own. New publishing forums have also emerged in Kharkiv, Kherson, Odesa, and other cities. There is a demand for Ukrainian books. Publishers are already experiencing a shortage of authors. But we are also short of bookstores.”

Lately, there has been a sharp drop in the number of bookstores.

“Yes, because the vast majority of bookstores have failed to adapt to the new conditions once they entered the free market. At the same time, super— and hyper-markets now have sections that sell, first of all, Ukrainian-language literature, including books published by Ye and us. This is a good thing because earlier there were only bookstores where, at best, three-quarters of the stock was Russian-language products and one-quarter was Ukrainian-language. But it would be good if there were modern bookstores not only in regional centers (there could be several stores of this kind there, including specialized ones) but also on the raion level. I very much hope that the current positive dynamics will produce results in time.

“One way or another, books are a powerful source of information and formation. A cultured nation is one that reads. No matter what you say, Americans are great consumers of literature, and it is a very diverse literature. The same in Europe.”

The Day does a lot to encourage reading , My Ten Books being one of the newspaper’s most popular columns. Can you name 10 books that you can’t live without?

“Ten books are too few for a professional philologist. Some books have always been indispensable for many cultures, and it is unthinkable to live without them. First of all, these are the Bible, the Shakespearean tragedies (in one volume), Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes, Ulysses by James Joyce, and, from our literature, Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar . This is the foundation on which a person can form his or her idea of elitist and popular literature. My personal favorites are authors who understand the painful problems of our time, about life and death, erotica, literature, the onslaught of machines: the Italian Umberto Eco, the Czech Milan Kundera, the Russian Viktor Pelevin, and the American William Gibson. There’s one more: my favorite Victorian Jerome K. Jerome, because his book is good, funny, and instructive.”