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10 WWW.UNWLA.ORG “НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ЛИПЕНЬ - СЕРПЕНЬ 2019 What We Live For, What We Die For A review by Kristina Lucenko “Where did your journey begin, and where will it end?” Q uestions of beginnings and endings, and all that happens in between, inform Serhiy Zhadan’s recently published What We Live For, What We Die For, a collection of selected poems beautifully translated into English by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps, with a lively foreword by Bob Holman . The fifty poems selected by Tkacz are drawn from collections pub- lished between 2001 to 2015 and create a story map o f unset- tled movement, some times by choice, sometimes by force. Cir- cles and cycles, the old and the new, passing seasons, displace- ment and return, the loss of time and of life, the indwelling resilience of children: these are all explored in narratives tha t resist sta bility, certainty, and soundness. The poems are presented in reverse chro n- ological order, and so , when reading beginning to end we are transported backwards in time but not to some romanticized, simpler past. In fact, the last poem in the col lection, “Th e End of Ukrainian Syl- labotonic Verse” (2001), is about the Budynok Slovo , a housing cooperative in Kharkiv (where Zhadan has lived for most of his life) inhabited by Ukrainian artists and intellectuals in the late 1920s and early 1930s. During this time t he building quickly shifted from a site of creative and intellec- tual discovery to a site of surveillance and impris- onment where residents were arrested, deported, or shot. The building still exists today, an emblem of state - sanctioned violence inflicted on free - thinking Ukrainian artists with lasting repercus- sions for Ukrainian national and cultural develop- ment. When the poet writes that “the shadow of the building creeps up to your feet/ like a great flood,” we understand that for contemporary Ukrainian ar tists, the cast of that shadow is especially heavy and dark. For a Ukrainian poet writing about and within a tradition of Ukrainian poetry, the Budy- nok Slovo recalls a “tortured circle/ you sense each time you return to this place.” But just as great flood s serve as powerful stories of grief and de- struction, they also serve as stories of survival and rebirth and origin. Zhadan’s verse affirms the gen- erative and generational resilience of Ukrainian art and culture, intertwined as it has always be en with poli tics and history. A kind of ebb and flow animates the po- ems — a dance between inertia and propulsion that makes this collection feel nervy and restless and urgent. A desire to remember or be re membered gives way to the recognition that Ukrainia n history is repeatedly marked and weighted by war, by violence. In “Socialism” (2004), a flippant, world - weary voice disa- vows the act of remembering alto- gether: “It’s a bad habit to lug around all kinds of garbage from the past ,/ things you don’t need; at some point you stop / and un- derstand that you can’t carry all that grief and joy.” In a life marred by conflict and displace- ment and loss, what is the point of holding on to anything? This voice — is it cynical? pragmatic? matter - of - fact? — finds its counterpo int in the p oem “The Dark Shattered Wicked Winter” (2015), which pitches remembering as both an oath and a burden almost too great to bear: “I will remember the sky and how high it seemed. / I will remember cities suddenly startled by screams.” Is remember- i ng a choice or a curse, or both? Critical, ironic, skeptical, but always clear - eyed, Zhadan’s poems make room for multiple voices, experiences, and possibilities. The many voices and characters that pop- ulate the poems are highly specific and historically contingent, a ragtag amalgam of the scrappy and the beaten down. In the most recent poems, we meet a tattoo artist named Anton who is killed mysteriously at a barri cade; a social worker named Yuriy who impersonates a Chechen sniper online; a chaplain named Ihor who ha tes hearing confes- sion; a psychologist named Volodya who writes a self - help blog and is arrested for spying; and Sasha, a poet who listens to music thro ugh head- phones while he wanders his burned - out city and believes that “What will survive from the histor y / of the world in which we lived / will be the words and music of a few geniuses / who desperately tried to warn us, / tried to explain, but failed to exp lain anything / or save anyone; these geniuses lie in cemeteries / and out of their ribcages / grow flowers and grass. / Nothing else will remain — / only their
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