From Manning the Barricades to Sleeping with Women

Yesterday's tragic events in Ukrainian skies bring the world's attention again to the border of Russia and Ukraine.

It has been a tough year. Initial student demonstrations on Maidan Square, renamed EuroMaidan because of the protestors' orientation toward European ideals of free speech, democracy and accountability for elected officials, led to bloody repercussions in Kiev, the Russian takeover of Crimea, and separatist movements in Luhansk and Donetsk. Ukraine hasn't been in the news this much since ... well, probably ever.

More will emerge about the shooting of Malaysian Airlines flight 17 (which already has its own Wikipedia page). Investigations will be conducted, opinions aired, perhaps international courts convened. And eventually a memorial will be erected in the midst of those Ukrainian wheat fields.

I have for some time been planning to write about my former student, Andriy Lyubka, a poet and writer whose time on the barricades in December and January did not prevent him receiving his M.A. degree in East European Studies from Warsaw University last week. Andriy's most recent book, Sleeping with Women, chronicles the life of a young writer who travels all over Central and Eastern Europe (i.e. the author!). I haven't read it yet. (My Ukrainian would be "limping" [as the Russian expression goes], except that I've never actually studied the language. When I "read" something in Ukrainian, I first google translate it and then reconstruct what the meaning might actually be by looking at the original text and drawing on my knowledge of Russian and semi-knowledge of Polish.)

Sleeping with Women (far right) joins new fiction and translated classics
(including Kafka's Metamorphosis) in chronicling life in Europe and beyond.

I performed this feat recently on an article Andriy published in The Kiev Times (see here if you read Ukrainian) in which he wrote about the meaning of Maidan for Ukrainian citizens. With a newly elected president in place and a continuing civil war in the East, Ukraine still needs to negotiate its relationships with Russia and Ukraine, and I fear it will be a prolonged exercise.

This interview Andriy gave was easier for me -- because it's in Russian -- and I was fascinated by his conclusions: "Ukraine's goal, in metaphysical terms, is the dissolution of Russia," and to begin to interact with Russia as a country rather than an empire. Later he clarifies: or maybe the goal is "saving Russia from a tyrant"? He also makes a few important comments about Russo-Ukrainian relations. For example, that when Ukrainians hear that Russians put Ukraine second after the U.S. in "nations we dislike the most," it fosters growing anti-Russian feelings. Or that his own generation, which looks toward Europe, is increasingly distant from the "homo sovieticus" generation of Ukrainians left over from the Soviet period.

Where does this leave me, the Russian specialist? For one thing, my sense that Russia has embarked on a new anti-American phase kept me home this summer. And I certainly have re-oriented much of my interest, at least in contemporary events, toward Ukraine and Poland.

But I was also reminded of this post which I wrote in May of 2013, long before anyone could have anticipated the Russian and Ukrainian struggles of recent months. Despite my son's prescient observation that generally speaking Poles dislike Russians considerably more than they dislike the Germans, the undergraduates I taught in Warsaw felt empathy for the Soviet soldiers memorialized in the famous "Four Sleeping Soldiers" monument. Individual soldiers did not always have a choice as to how they behaved during WWII, and my students thought that the Soviet non-intervention in the destruction of Warsaw was a tragedy, not a deliberate offense.

What happened yesterday in Ukraine was, it seems, a deliberate act of violence, and the fact that the victims were so very random, so very innocent of any involvement, is a devastating consequence of today's world of international air travel. Will this catastrophe bring common sense back to Eastern Ukraine? Will the tyrant back off and allow the citizens of Ukraine -- east and west -- to forge their own path in future? And how will future generations remember Eastern Ukraine and the events that have taken place there in 2014? In his Kiev Times piece Andriy argued that "the year 2014 will no doubt become a caesura, a line dividing the country's life between 'before' and 'after.'" To the world's horror, 2014 has become even more tragic in Ukraine after yesterday. When will it end?

Andriy is probably right that contemporary Ukrainian (and Russian) writers need to follow Milan Kundera's example from The Unbearable Lightness of Being and wait to memorialize the events of EuroMaidan until considerable time has passed. It is too soon to understand the meaning of those early demonstrations, of the way they went wrong, of the loss of Crimea and the tragedies in Eastern Ukraine. In the meantime, I wish that more Russians and Ukrainians could enjoy the summer months and a little frivolity (the frivolity implied in Sleeping with Women). Not likely this year.