Reading Serhiy Zhadan: The Poetical is Personal is Political

Now, how many Russian novels in translation have you read this past year?

- Audre Lorde (“Notes from a Trip to Russia,” 1976)

The line above is the closing sentence of Audre Lorde’s “Notes from a Trip to Russia,” the opening essay in her renowned Sister Outsider. This essay was written during her two-week trip to Russia and Uzbekistan in 1976, before the dissolution of the USSR. I found myself intrigued (as I often am by Lorde’s lyrical intellect) by the encouragement of not only reading translated literature, but literature from Russia.

Currently, I’m finishing up my first year in an MFA in Creative Writing program in which I’ve been given the flexibility of choosing the books I want to read for assignments. To have this flexibility and agency in choosing the books has been a great fortune, as I’ve been able to engage with texts that are not traditionally taught in many collegiate creative writing programs. These texts include poetry collections that are translated from languages of cultures that I have some personal connection with.

One of my nearest and dearest friends is Jess, a Ukrainian Jewish American who I went to high school within Greater Seattle. We both still reside in Greater Seattle, and we live about a 5-minute drive from each other. Her academic career and jobs have focused on international affairs in the post-Soviet sphere. As an Asian person who has been expanding my understanding of what “Asia” is—and as someone who cares to deepen my understanding of my friends’ lives—I developed an interest in learning more about the post-Soviet world.

In late January, as I perused new book releases from small presses, I smiled upon discovering Lost Horse Press, an independent press in Idaho, has run a series of contemporary Ukrainian poetry collections for over three years. A New Orthography by Serhiy Zhadan, the fifth and most recent volume in their Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series, was a finalist for the PEN America’s 2021 Award for Poetry in Translation.

A New Orthography by Serhiy Zhadan, trans. by John Hennessy & Ostap Kin. Lost Horse Press. 2020. 158 pages. $18.

Considering this significant recognition by PEN America, the prominence of Serhiy Zhadan (who is not only a writer, but a political activist) in Eastern Europe, and the powerfully communicated writing in A New Orthography, I wonder why both A New Orthography and Lost Horse Press have not garnered more attention.

When Americans think about the sociopolitical realm of Russia, do they wonder about Ukraine? I’m not knowledgeable about post-Soviet life and Eastern Europe like Jess is. But I like to think I’ve come closer to understanding and being empathetic to the experiences of Ukrainians and Eastern Europeans through reading Serhiy Zhadan’s A New Orthography.

* * *

After the introduction by translators John Hennessy and Ostap Kin, the piece of writing by Serhiy Zhadan that begins A New Orthography is the preface “An American Prayer for Agnostics and Theists.” A personal essay that recounts his experiences as an Eastern European visiting the US in 1996 and 2005, “An American Prayer for Agnostics and Theists” explores the intersections of geopolitics, poetics, and spirituality.

This is a notable excerpt of him exploring those intersections through diction and imagery:

...I could only express my regrets to the late [Vladimir] Mayakovsky who physically couldn’t hear [Bob] Dylan. The great time of unheard poets...unheard and not understood. Excommunicated from church and accused of heresy. Caught in violation of oath and banished outside the city gates. Their testimonies, oh time, probably will sound most convincingly in your favor. Since not only love and courage speak in them but also compassion—what we have been lacking for the last two thousand years. Compassion and nothing more. First of all, compassion. At least. (Zhadan xxix)

I was intrigued that Zhadan implies he wishes that Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Marxist poet who gained renown during the Russian Revolution and early Soviet period, could be exposed to Bob Dylan, an American musician who became world famous with the help of globalization. 

After researching both Mayakovsky and Dylan, I learned that Mayakovsky is a person of Cassock and Ukrainian descent who grew up speaking Georgian, and Dylan is of Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Turkish, and Jewish descent. When Zhadan writes about poets who are “not understood,” I want to investigate how the complex cultural backgrounds of Mayakovsky and Dylan may have informed their art and spiritual life (xxix). Place—regarding the area(s) one is raised in and one’s ancestry—has more influence on a person’s behaviors, art, and spiritual life than most people realize.

Another part of the excerpt that catches my attention is “not only love and courage speak in [the unheard poets] but also compassion—what we have been lacking for the last two thousand years” (Zhadan xxix). He argues that compassion has been lacking in civilizations since the beginning of Christianity, which is rooted in the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, who is widely venerated for embodying compassion. The word ‘compassion’ originates from the Latin word “compati,” which literally translates “to suffer with” in the English language.

I read Zhadan as arguing that poets with complex cultural backgrounds, like Jesus of Nazareth had, are often misunderstood, especially when they act out of love and courage for people who are significantly suffering. In my experiences sitting through hundreds of homilies as an American raised in the Catholic tradition, I often prayed that I would hear preaching that would engage in the convoluted system that Christianity is and has been. Oftentimes, the priests would encourage the congregation to have sympathy for poor people in developing countries, all the while never acknowledging the harm that the Catholic Church has historically enacted in wide stretches of the world. Because of that lack of acknowledgment, I arrived at the beliefs that antiseptic constructions of Christianity and inaccurate depictions of Jesus of Nazareth are perpetuated in many of the churches that exist.

These harmful narratives have been passed down for over two thousand years.

Love and courage in action involves holding accountable the intricate systems that have contributed to significant suffering. I want to pay more attention to people who don’t shy away from complex grappling with the world as they wholeheartedly give light to people on the margins.

I pray that poets who engage with their work in this way will be heard and understood by more people. I echo Zhadan’s profession that “our world does not deserve to be excommunicated from poetry” (xxix).

* * *

All the poems in A New Orthography were written by Serhiy Zhadan after the Russo-Ukrainian War began in February 2014. The poems are narrative poems (which are mostly untitled) that examine a range of daily life experiences such as soccer games, children attending school, romantic love, nature, and faith in Ukraine during the protracted conflict.

One of my favorite (untitled) poems in the collection poses a suggestion for how to process moments of light and moments of dark:

The soil emerges
the way facial features become clear,
fish will arrive in the floodplains of the Dinets river,
a bit of blackness will appear on the horizon,
there will be happiness,
there will be cattails.

… … … … … … … … … …

You have to scream about it.
And so they scream. (Zhadan 15-20, 25-26)

When I see the line “the soil emerges” in juxtaposition with “the way facial features become clear,” I think of the inevitability of life going on after people die because of the war (Zhadan 15-16). Plants and weeds will continue to grow after corpses are buried in the earth, and Zhadan reminds us that “happiness” (19) and “cattails” (20) continue to exist, too.

The next line portrays the presence of fish “in the floodplains of the Dinets river;” it is not specified whether the fish will continue to live or will die in this area of the river after their arrival (Zhadan 17). The appearance of “a bit of blackness...on the horizon” in the subsequent line makes me wonder if these fish will rest as evening comes or if they’ll soon see their deaths; the presence of looming blackness can imply either possibility (Zhadan 18).

Ultimately, the poem ends with the narrator saying that people have to scream about the unavoidable reality of life and death, and a four-word sentence that describes the act of screaming follows.

Screaming doesn’t have a “good” or “bad” connotation in this poem.
Furthermore, the screaming isn’t specified as literal or figurative.
Like how life & death are facts, the need to scream is a fact.

I’m particularly drawn to the final two lines of the poem:

You have to scream about it.
And so they scream.

Screaming is so cathartic.
Screaming is a primal expression of feelings that we often struggle to verbalize.
Sometimes the screaming just happens because it has to.
So the poem ends in a couplet that states the cause and effect.

AAAAAAAAAAAAA HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Another one of my favorite untitled poems in A New Orthography that, like the previous poem described, also illustrates a method for coping with life’s heaviness ends with these two stanzas:

She sits on the beach,
deals with her rage.

And the sea, too—
sits, deals
with the ships sunk within it. (Zhadan 18-23)

The “she” is analogous to the sea in that they both “sit” and “deal,” and her rage is analogous to shipwrecks. In contrast with the screaming of the previous poem, the protagonist in this poem is simply sitting to deal with major emotions. I deeply appreciate this contrast because there are multiple ways to process overwhelm. Screaming or sitting can both be healthy practices for working through our feelings.

Similar to the previous poem, Zhadan ends this poem succinctly and provides minimal specifics. As a result, I feel that the ending appeals to anyone who houses rage, which may have previously been hope that intended to reach a destination, like a ship intended to before it sunk.

In the end, no one is alone in experiencing rage, and this experience is even reflected in seas.

* * *

Serhiy Zhadan has actively participated in various political movements in Ukraine for nearly three decades, since the declaration of independence of Ukraine from the Soviet Union was adopted in 1991. The essay and poems in A New Orthography don’t render the overt political activism experiences that he’s been involved with, but their attunement to the ramifications of war on people’s lives is imperative in demonstrating why the political movements must continue.

Writing is often considered a political act. Whether or not it is true can be debated endlessly.

I do believe the best writers are driven by love, courage, compassion, and righteous rage.

Serhiy Zhadan says “the bravest...will certainly become / poets and prophets” (25-26).