When the Revolution’s Over: A Review of Ivan and Phoebe (2023, Deep Vellum)
by Elsa Court
“Wait!” he shouted at Ivan’s back. “Tell me, what’s this independence we got going on now? How am I supposed to live? I don’t know!”
Toward the beginning of Oksana Lutsyshyna’s Ivan and Phoebe, an ex-convict shouts these words at Ivan, the man we will follow for the next few hundred pages. The encounter with the former prisoner, who was locked up in the Soviet Union only to emerge years later into the growing light of independent Ukraine, is unsettling. He’s lost between two worlds, and it is unclear what the future holds for him. It is only after finishing the novel that the reader realizes that Ivan ultimately faces the same fate.
Lutsyshyna’s award-winning novel, translated into English by Nina Murray, tells the story of young Ivan and the first years of his marriage to his wife Maria, who writes poetry and prefers to go by the name Phoebe. In the first part, titled “The Gloaming,” Ivan, his family, and a selection of his friends are introduced. He is about to be married, seemingly against his will. The reasons for this are not immediately clear, nor is the reason why he seems to be living at home in Uzhhorod unhappily.
Through references to Lviv and Kyiv, it becomes clear that Ivan spent much of his student life in pro-independence activist circles and participated in the Granite Revolution in October 1990. The protest movement, during which students set up camp and went on hunger strike with a list of political demands, was the first campaign on what is now the capital’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti. The young protesters are credited with setting the scene for what would become the Orange Revolution of 2004-2005 and the Revolution of Dignity in 2014.
References to his experiences on the Maidan and his student life in Lviv indicate that Ivan sees the best days of his life behind him despite being a young man in his 20s. The choice to call this section after a synonym for dusk is telling – he’s looking into his future, and all he sees before him is darkness. Ivan’s bright, hopeful days are now in his past. “The Gloaming” also provides an introduction to Ivan’s family and shows how his family tree ignores the state borders that have been imposed upon them over the last century. His mother, Margita, is half Hungarian and half Slovak and intersperses her Ukrainian with Hungarian words. Family members live or travel to neighboring Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, and Poland. These countries are more familiar to Ivan’s family than their country’s capital. Lutsyshyna shows the huge distances – not just physical but also psychological – within the country. Political decisions made in Kyiv might as well be made on Mars. Lviv, where her son studied, seems like it’s on the other side of the world.
While for his family, Uzhhorod is the center of a multi-ethnic world, Ivan’s return home is alienating in the sense that he is now again on the political periphery. His experiences of fighting for Ukrainian democracy in Kyiv do not translate so well to what others feel in Uzhhorod. Talking to his soon-to-be wife, they reflect on their different memories of the time that the Granite Revolution was taking place. “I just remember we were all happy because classes were canceled, and the weather was so beautiful,” Phoebe replies. While Ivan’s friends were on hunger strike, her classmates were eating ice cream, she tells him, apologizing that this was just “the way it was for us.”
Ivan feels he has returned from the front line of the revolution, only to find out those on the home front are more concerned with practical matters, like paying bills or planning repairs. Talking to a friend in Uzhhorod, he realizes it is an “effort of will and constant work” to “keep Ukraine inside of him.” The periphery begins to pierce the romantic image of his country that he has created for himself. It doesn’t help that he feels he has to keep his involvement in the Granite Revolution a secret from his mother, the reason for which becomes apparent later in the book.
In the second part of the novel, “The Revolution,” Lutsyshyna masterfully portrays Ivan’s student life in Lviv and his involvement in the activist group. This section is perhaps the most gripping and shows the evolution of the revolution from the perspective of the protest camp and features cameos from real figures of the nationalist movement of the 1990s. Laughter, friendship, and plans for the future dominate his life in Lviv, and Lutsyshyna artfully conveys how the young protesters differed in their views on how to battle the vast Soviet political system best.
Ivan also becomes educated outside of university classrooms. He comes across as naïve but sympathetic, for example, attending a rally but not knowing what to think, feeling “more lost and awkward than part of something important.” Through his friends, he begins to understand how Russia imposed its colonialist version of history on Ukraine, and the more he learns, the more he finds out he does not know. “He had been told nothing, he was never taught anything, anything at all. He had only been taught there was Moscow. And there was snow there.” Lutsyshyna brilliantly conveys Ivan’s profound sense of loss and anger at the fact that he does not know his own country’s history, something that many Ukrainians must have felt as their country broke free from Russia. Though it was not his fault, Ivan clearly mourns the fact that he has lived for his entire life in complete ignorance of his own identity.
This part of the novel expertly demonstrates the psychological aspects of living under authoritarian rule. In his first encounter with a member of the security services, Ivan decides there “was nothing menacing or ominous about him.” The man has a “shapeless, shabby form that could only work in a comedy,” he concludes, almost arrogant in his belief that his ideals are stronger than the system that has ruled over his country for decades. However, he soon comes to understand that it was the anticipation of punishment that tortured people long before anything ever took place.
It is another man, using more subtle psychological warfare, who eventually wears him down. Sashko Petrenko, as the man says he is called, pretends to be a fellow activist but instead becomes a disturbing presence that appears at Ivan’s side day and night. Lutsyshyna and Murray transform the cozy, cobbled streets of Lviv into a maze of alleyways and heavy doors, out of which Petrenko may pop at any moment. Ivan becomes increasingly paranoid, and his relationships in Lviv begin to break down. “Ivan’s laughter was the first thing he lost. Clarity of thought followed.” Lutsyshyna follows Ivan’s slow descent into depression and paranoia in the “bloodless revolution,” which did not require him to sacrifice his body but to which he begins to lose his mind.
The third and final section, “The Choir,” details Ivan’s life upon return to Uzhhrod. While he has escaped Lviv, he is faced with a new disturbing reality – the pressure of expectations that come with being a man in a traditional, patriarchal society. He must find a job, work, provide for his family, and continue to build his home, none of which he seems to have the energy to do. Ivan appears to have completely lost agency over his own life. He finds a job, loses it, finds a new one, and carries out menial errands for his new boss. Is this what he “sat on the granite in Kyiv for?” he asks himself.
What the final part of the book demonstrates, perhaps best, is Ivan’s thoughts and feelings towards women. While he has striven for the independence of his country, he doesn’t see women as independent beings. Their emancipation and equality are not just of little importance to him, but he genuinely does not understand it.
The book features less than a dozen female characters, all of whom fit into the characterizations of being either a wife, mother, or whore. When his university girlfriend, Rose, tries to educate him on how it feels to be treated “as a body alone,” Ivan simply feels insulted by her anger. When the girls of the group are told they cannot join the protest in Kyiv, Rose explodes with rage, realizing that for a hunger strike, the men wouldn’t need the women around to prepare meals, cook, or wash up dishes. Ivan feels upset they have argued, not at the actual content of what she has said. Rose joins the hunger strike anyway.
As his relationship with Rose disintegrates, he disparages “her own stupid independence,” seemingly unaware of the irony that their relationship developed while fighting for the independence of their country. Phoebe’s sense of independence, as well as her literal poetry, is also crushed under Ivan’s presence. It is interesting that he seems to be aware, in general terms, that women like his mother and sister are trapped at home, left to make food, clean, and look after their (often alcoholic) husbands “until they go mad with rage.” But doesn’t realize that his wife has gone mad with such anger and considers her simply stupid. To him, his wife is “first and foremost a mother and had to look after the baby.” The idea that she would have hopes and dreams beyond that seems absurd to him. This trait makes Ivan an increasingly unlikeable character, and his complaints border on grating, particularly in the last third of the book.
There are glimpses of Phoebe’s perspective through monologues that show Lutsyshyna’s background as a poet and Murray’s great skill as a translator. While the story of Ivan is written in the third person, Phoebe’s texts are in the first person. Her anger, frustration, and mental degradation are portrayed in a way that still gives her dignity. The monologues are few and far between, however, and the reader is left hungry for more, if not for an entire novel written from her perspective. Phoebe’s texts show that she had little choice over how her life would turn out. Her family decided that once she had finished her studies, her role was to become a wife to a boy like Ivan, in the way her mother and Ivan’s mother did. And so the cycle continues, even when it is evident that no one is happy in their relationship.
As Ivan develops into a state of numbness, Lutsyshyna shows what can happen to the heroes of a revolution when the revolution itself is declared over. He reminisces about his past and experiences no hope for the future, only nostalgia. He becomes emotional at remembering his childhood friends, some of whom have left Uzhhorod and another of whom has died of alcoholism. With Ivan and Phoebe, Lutsyshyna appears to be asking a question: How many other Ivans are there? How many participants of the Granite, Orange, or EuroMaidan revolutions do we not know the names of, or who survived the protests, only left Maidan and never again spoke about their experiences? Or, when they muster the courage to discuss it, find out that their contemporaries at home were eating ice cream? The book poses the question of how someone like Ivan is supposed to live, stuck between his family, his past, and his place in society.
Elsa Court is a news editor at the Kyiv Independent. She was previously an intern at the Kyiv Post and has a Master’s in Conflict Studies and Human Rights from Utrecht University. Before joining the Kyiv Independent, she worked at the Netherlands Red Cross programme to arrange hosts for Ukrainian refugees and as a freelance writer and editor. Elsa is originally from the UK and is based in the Netherlands.