Oksana Lutsyshyna wears many hats. She’s an award-winning novelist whose third novel, Ivan and Phoebe, has won Ukraine’s largest national prizes for literature. She’s an accomplished poet who’s released collections of work like Persephone Blues. She’s a translator of Ukrainian literature, a scholar of modern literature, and a celebrated faculty member in UT Austin’s Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies. And she’s our second-ever guest for the Extra Credit podcast.
Last fall Lutsyshyna and I met to discuss Ivan and Phoebe, recently released in a stunning English translation by Nina Murray. By pure chance, we recorded this podcast on the anniversary of the Revolution on Granite, a little-known Ukrainian protest movement in 1990 that plays a significant role in the novel and continues to reverberate through Ukrainian history and politics. Listen for more discussion of the revolution and its legacy — plus detective stories, Treasure Island, and living as exiles from time. A (lightly edited) sample of our conversation to get you started:
Kaulie Watson: So we're talking through all of these sides of your work. You’re a fiction writer, you're a poet, you're a translator, and of course, as a member of the department here at UT, you're a scholar and an instructor. Can you tell me about your scholarly work? What questions are animating you there? What are you interested in? What are you working on?
Oksana Lutsyshyna: Well, I have two areas. One of them is the 1920s and 1930s, and it's basically modernity and how it shows in literature. When I say modernity, I don't necessarily mean just modernization, but more like the neurotic response to modernization. So I used to work on just Bruno Schultz and Walter Benjamin — Bruno Schultz is a Polish author and Walter Benjamin is a celebrated philosopher of German Jewish origin. And I like both of them in terms of their ideas, but now I'm kind of throwing more authors into that project. And I was actually looking at how the appearance of film affected writing. Because 1920s, that's still silent film, but it's already showing in writing. What does it do? And, yeah, I like that a lot.
Then my second project is more like postcolonial writing or decolonial writing, if we decide to use that terminology, from Ukraine, usually the end of the Soviet Union. That's basically the writers of my generation and a little older and how in their texts they're exposing this colonial past. How are they getting rid of this colonial past? How are they exposing our national traumas as a result of that and gendered colonialism and stuff like that?
Which is, of course, something comes up in your own creative work. So it seems like there's a real through line between those two sides.
Oh, yes, yes. I would say so. If Schultz and Benjamin taught me to think in constellations and sort of this very interesting nonlinear thing, then I would say that Oksana Zabushko and other writers, from them when I just started writing seriously I guess I learned some of those things and some of these themes and just seeing how they deal with these themes.
Talking about colonization and decolonization maybe loops us back to this ongoing conflict in Ukraine, this ongoing war. And thinking about Ivan and Phoebe now out in translation in the U.S. and therefore much more available to American readers — When I was reading through reviews of the novel in English about the English translation, they were celebrating not only its storytelling and its literary value but also putting it forward as a way for American readers to learn more about the history of Ukraine, to learn more about the Revolution on Granite but also this struggle for independence generally. I don't know how that sounds to you as a writer — you maybe didn't set out to write a history — but what does it mean to have readers coming to this novel with those questions in their minds? Is there something that you hope American readers are taking away from the story, historical or otherwise?
I think we need more novels and we need definitely more novels translated because when nowadays people approach us sometimes, I'm at a loss because I'm not sure how to cram all this huge history of 300 years into one paragraph or something. So, I don't have any illusions. I realize that my book is looking at just one tiny element of it. I guess my hope is that they will get interested enough to read more about us.
Otherwise, yeah, I guess it's astonishing how true history gets lost if we are talking about the situation of colonial oppression, totalitarianism, and also cultural imperialism that's been going on. So for example, if people knew the word Soviet Union, they automatically equated it with Russia. And the idea of Russia is equated also with some recognizable things from popular culture, like Dr. Zhivago and the Snow Castle, or, I don't know, Matryoshka dolls. So all of these other nations, they kind of existed behind that. That was the real Iron Curtain, these intransparent histories. So I'm hoping that if Americans read a little bit more of us then they will be more open to read even more eventually.
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