At the end of the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Ukrainian writer was awarded the Peace Prize. In his acceptance speech, Zhadan turns against politicians and intellectuals who are calling for an unconditional ceasefire.
“You have to speak even in times of war. Especially in times of war,” said Serhiy Zhadan in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche.
Anyone who expects a pacifist speech from Serhij Zhadan does not know Serhij Zhadan. Even when the Ukrainian writer received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, worth 25,000 euros, in Frankfurt am Main this Sunday, he didn’t have any shawm tones with him. That would probably be asking too much for the envoy of a people who have been fighting for their survival since the Russian invasion in February of this year.
Zhadan, the world-class poet, became the chronicler of an escalation that he saw coming early on and that now infuriates him, angry, desperate, but by no means mute. “But you have to speak,” he said in German in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche, “even in times of war. Especially in times of war.”
However, speaking becomes just as difficult as breathing when the war “like the boot of an intruder, a stranger” damages the “anthill of speech” next to one’s own country. Zhadan sees the danger that Ukraine will no longer be able to make itself understood by the world.
Total, uninhibited evil
It sounded as if he were watching certain German debates with the melancholy question, “Do we have to remember our right to exist in this world, or is this right obvious and inviolable?” Some Europeans, both intellectuals and politicians, blamed the Ukrainians for their refusal to surrender. This speaks of a false pacifism, the unethical willingness of the world to “swallow the total, uninhibited evil once more” in favor of personal material advantages.
This sentence, uttered in Germany on the occasion of an award written in 1950 on the ruins of the Second World War unleashed by the Germans, was the clearest possible moral message to the audience before him and to the global public. That is, appeasement with an aggressor only benefits the aggressor. The Ukrainian reality is currently a reality of camps, destroyed cities, bombed schools.
That is why Zhadan recalled the well-known, somewhat old-pacifist sentence that there is no peace without justice. The “supporters of a peace quickly concluded at any price”, on the other hand, dodged this question. They overlook the fact that peace does not come about “when the victim of aggression lays down his arms. The civilian population in Bucha, Hostomel and Irpin had no weapons at all. Which didn’t save people from a terrible death.”
You can’t breathe in war
The prize awarded by the German Book Trade Association has already gone to Hermann Hesse, Theodor Heuss, Nelly Sachs, Max Frisch, Susan Sontag and, most recently, the writer Tsitsi Dangarembga from Zimbabwe – all of them theorists or practitioners of communication. Zhadan stands out from this series insofar as he sees culture as part of the Ukrainian liberation struggle and the invaders as just scum, rubbish, barbarians, criminals: “The Russians are committing genocide against us. They have come to destroy us.”
That’s what it says in his notes from the war, which the Suhrkamp publishing house has just published under the title “Heaven over Kharkiv”. In Frankfurt, Zhadan resorted to melancholic sarcasm and formulated: The “gentle and discreet form of surrender offered to us under the pretext of peace” is simply not the “suitable way to lead a peaceful life and to rebuild our cities”.
In addition to Zhadan’s artistic work, the stock exchange association awards the prize for “the humanitarian attitude with which he turns to people in war and helps them by risking his life”. This is also mentioned in the war notes, and Zhadan’s Frankfurt laudator, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, followed this lead.
The playwright, who came from the former Soviet Volgograd and grew up in Moscow, praised the “seductive energy of Serhij Zhadan’s work”. The awardee is “in the midst of his people”. He writes and speaks “out of their lungs, so to speak. In Zhadan’s poetry, Ukrainian society takes a breath.” In fact, in his acceptance speech, Zhadan diagnosed that one can hardly breathe in war. The “feeling of compressed air” is omnipresent, reality weighs so heavily.
Zhadan loves Ukraine
A symphonist of light is Zhadan, the doctor of literature and German studies, in his novels, especially in the masterpiece from 2010, “The invention of jazz in the Donbass”. One of the many bizarre heroes of Zhadan’s novels, the independent advertising expert Hermann, as he calls himself, a 33-year-old stray and dreamer with a big heart, returns to the place of his childhood from which Zhadan himself comes, in the border region of the meanwhile Russian-occupied Luhansk region.
There is the home valley of “sun, sand and mulberry trees”, “the water and the green, the light-flooded grass, the topsoil and the lakes, the skies and the gas fields”, and suddenly that October, so central to the novel, begins ” with sun and shade, sandstorms and lush withering greens». Zhadan loves Ukraine.
The hero Hermann defends his missing brother’s gas station on a hill against criminal clans, invading farmers, smugglers and smugglers. Realities line up with fantasies, surreal scenes with precise milieu studies. The novel is musical – it is no coincidence that Zhadan, who was born in 1974, sings and plays in a rock band – it is a prankster set against a bitter story, and to that extent it is Ukrainian through and through. In October, the huge country shows itself as it really is: “Bare areas of black earth stretched out on all sides, red pines rose on the horizon. The air was woven of smells and reflections, as if it were not air but flags burning under the sun and fluttering in the October wind.”
The fact that Zhadan writes poems alongside short stories benefits his novels without slipping into the hermetic or clumsily pathetic. This applies all the more to the fictional document of the war in eastern Ukraine, largely forgotten in the West, which began in 2014 with the Russian annexation of Crimea.
Don’t forget the fallen
In the 2017 novel «Internat», Pasha, a busy teacher, wants to go through a besieged border town in the Donbass to get his nephew out of the boarding school. Reading the accounts of a gruesome war with confusing frontlines and collapsing statehood today, one bitter realization comes to mind: Ukraine has been bleeding for almost a decade, and most Western politicians have come to terms with it. As it says in “Internat”: “The sky begins to burn and does not want to go out.”
This historical background feeds Zhadan’s Frankfurt misunderstanding of a world that sometimes finds it difficult to “understand a simple thing”: “We don’t support our army because we want war, but because we absolutely want peace.” You have to state things clearly, and a criminal is a criminal, meanness is meanness and a “frozen conflict” is not peace, not real peace, not peace with security and prospects. In “Himmel über Kharkiv” Zhadan writes: “We have to pass on the most important things to our children: our culture and our weapons.”
If one wanted to bring the formally diverse, multi-layered work of this gifted narrator to a common denominator, the Zhadan before and the Zhadan after the invasion, a sentence from the last pages of the “Invention of Jazz” would be appropriate. There a priest says to the main character Hermann: «Do what you have done. Don’t ignore the living. And don’t forget the dead.” Zhadan closed in the Paulskirche with the hope of being able to find a new language after the war. Then “our dictionaries” would emerge from the names of the fallen.