War comes to Ukraine’s ‘rock-star poet’
LINDA KINSTLER
HOW FIRE DESCENDS
New and selected poems
SERHIY ZHADAN
Translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps 136pp. Yale University Press. Paperback, £12.99 (US $18).
SKY ABOVE KHARKIV
Dispatches from the Ukrainian front
SERHIY ZHADAN
Translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler 208pp. Yale University Press. £14.99 (US $26).
"WRITING CONTRADICTS DEATH." With these words Serhiy Zhadan, a renowned Ukrainian poet, novelist, musician and activist, begins the introduction to Sky Above Kharkiv: Dispatches from the Ukrainian front, a compilation of his Facebook posts between February 24 and June J24, 2022. "We cling to the writing process as an illusory chance to pin down and preserve the outline of reality, flee the energy field of extinction, and try to trick oblivion."
Yet about a week into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Zhadan, the author of seven novels and twelve poetry collections to date, found himself unable to read and write. His home town, Kharkiv, was under attack and he was spending his days distributing supplies to whoever needed them: markers for children sleeping underground in metro stations, insulin for a local hospital, bulletproof vests for his friends at the front. Under these conditions, he felt, “molding reality into literature, searching for images and similes, using blood and gore as literary material, seems ethically dubious and completely inappropriate”. He could only bring himself to write down what he saw unfolding before him, and as a result both his prose and the poetry in his collection How Fire Descends: New and selected poems took a markedly realist turn:
Deep in the earth the soldiers
are making the warm ground fertile.
Eye of the night sky, eye of winter.
Someone returns to the city, rebuilds their home.
Inside Ukraine Zhadan is known for his literary work and for the music he produces with his band, Zhadan and the Dogs. For the past two decades his prose, poetry and lyrics have faithfully chronicled the Ukrainian experience. As a student he participated in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, and he later helped to organize the Euromaidan movement in Kharkiv, the city that continues to inspire much of his literary world and where he continues to live. Widely decorated for his fiction and poetry both within Ukraine and abroad, where he has been dubbed Ukraine’s “rock star poet”, Zhadan is also known for his patriotic political commentary. In 2022 the Polish Academy of Sciences nominated him for the Nobel prize in literature.
For several years before the full-scale invasion Zhadan had been keeping a Facebook diary where he posted news about his band, shared his views on current events and publicized upcoming book s
