"To break out of this kingdom of crooked mirrors": An Interview with Igor Pomerantsev

Igor Pomerantsev (born 1948, Saratov, USSR) has been living in political exile since 1978. He writes in Russian and has authored a dozen books of poetry, prose and essays published in Russia and Ukraine. Translations of his work have appeared in magazines in the UK, USA, Germany, Austria, Hungary and elsewhere. His radio plays have been performed in both Russian and English. Igor began his broadcast career in the Russian Service of the BBC in London, but later moved to the Russian Service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Funded by the US Congress, RFE/RL broadcasts in 28 languages to countries where freedom of the press is limited or non-existent. Igor now lives in Prague.


You emigrated from the USSR in August of 1978. In 1993, you asked the Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrešić how she found out she was an “enemy of the people”. Let me ask you the same question. 

‘An enemy of the people’ – this is too strong. Our times were the times of selective repressions, not collective, as it used to be under Stalin. There were certain rules of the game and you knew when you were breaking them. Reading ‘forbidden literature' fell under some articles of the criminal code and so, I wouldn't say that my detention and interrogations took me by complete surprise. I was not called an enemy of the people, that's way too archaic. They called me a dissident. 

A dissident is a 'renegade' and no sane person would call himself a dissident. It's like calling yourself a renegade – this word has only a negative connotation. During interrogation, they say that you are a renegade, a dissident and you naturally answer, “I am the same citizen as you. Why am I a dissident? I'm hearing this from you for the first time.”  We know that a dissident, for the KGB, always had a negative connotation. Nevertheless, that idea would be repeatedly imposed on me during interrogation. 

I was interrogated for possession of so-called 'forbidden literature'. By the way, they would always mention other dissidents. I remember the major who interrogated me said, “We don't want to say that you are insane like Leonid Plyushch and Natalya Gorbanevskaya.” Leonid Plyushch is a Ukrainian mathematician and dissident. He was kept in a psychiatric hospital. Natalia Gorbanevskaya is a Moscow poet who protested on Red Square against the occupation and invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. She was also kept in a psychiatric hospital. In other words, they had some kind of tactics of their own when telling you  “we don't say that you're a neurotic or a psychopath like Plyushch or Gorbanevskaya.” I must say that later, I got acquainted with both Leonid Plyushch and Natalya Gorbanevskaya. They are two people of great temperament and increased sensitivity. I am rather a sluggish person in comparison to them. 

Anyway, this very dissidence was declared and announced to me. As a result, my relations with the KGB, to put it mildly, wouldn’t go on nicely. Having gone through those interrogations, I realized how grim, terrifying and menacing that organization was for people, including my loved ones. I could easily see others in my place – being held as suspects, arrested, sentenced to various terms. And afterwards, I began to sign letters in defense of dissidents, which was an obvious self-denunciation by the KGB’s standards. There were about twelve people like me in Ukraine at that time which would sign letters demanding to put an end to political persecutions. Signing a collective letter is a completely individual act. It means that in a country with forty million people, you are in a group of one dozen people who by the fact of signing such a letter basically sign up to become a so-called dissident.

Censorship?
Self censorship?
I never allowed myself to cry on air.
Or burst into sobs. Why?
Aren’t tears as natural as laughter?
Yet you laughed your head off.
Though never once wept. What does it mean?
What sort of a culture is it that does not allow you to weep out loud?
Is it really shameful? But why?
I must do it! I have to!

In your essay “My Home” you write, “Without any pathos but not without pride, I can name the kind of people I've belonged to for more than thirty years. My people are displaced persons, political emigrants, refugees, the stray dogs of Europe. I'm a patriot." Has anything changed since then?

The problem of refugees was perhaps the most important problem of the twentieth century. That was the century of refugees and displaced persons, primarily due to repressions and totalitarian ideologies. In the twentieth century, the concept of the house had changed and I think that we owe this to dictatorial regimes – first of all, to the communist, national socialist, international socialist dictatorships. Concentration camps appeared in Germany and thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people were deprived of their homes and sent to camps, which turned into death camps. 

And those German concentration camps became a new form of housing. At the same time, a gigantic new housing complex appeared in the Soviet Union. It was called the Gulag. Even when the era of collective repressions was over in Khrushchev's times, those who returned from the camps could hardly find a residence permit, housing. During the times of Stalin's Gulag and along with its camps, a strange 'housing genre' appeared and it was called communal apartments. People were shoved into a three-room apartment that could be divided between three families. 

What I'm talking about is the appearance of a different housing concept. And even that wasn't enough. It was during World War II when people were simply loaded onto train wagons and sent either to Siberia, or, as the Germans did, to forced labor in Germany and Austria. Those were huge movements of people and if we look at this history of the twentieth century, we'll see the displacements of entire nations. After the war, the concept of “displaced persons” appeared and it was used to call people who were left homeless, who were forced laborers, primarily in Germany, who didn't want to return home to the Soviet Union. They were afraid and their fears were justified. We are talking about millions of people. 

And in this twentieth century, when it seemed that after the war, during relatively well-fed years, refugees would cease to be one of the main problems, Jewish immigration from the Soviet Union began and the return of ethnic Germans from the Soviet Union to Germany. In other words, I look at this age as the times of nomads, European Bedouins who were looking for refuge. And I also became an immigrant in 1978. It was considered a great sin from the point of view of the state authorities – a betrayal of the Motherland that was a 'communist paradise', according to ideology. 

It is not the only thing. Take for example the outstanding Russian poet Anna Akhmatova who several times spoke contemptuously about emigration that we called “white emigration”. She wrote with pride and pathos [in her “Requiem”], 

“I was then there 
With whole my nation 
There, where my nation, alas! was.” 

Her fate turned out that way, her son was repressed, she would pass in the outer waiting line of the prison visitors. That's the way she saw it – as a certain duty, and that's why she reacted pathetically, and her poems are bombastic too. She was with her nation. 

And I thought what could be my answer to this question? The whole flood of refugees, political emigrants, just emigrants, displaced persons! I am with them, they are my people! That's why I said and wrote that I may not have a homeland but I definitely have compatriots. And the number of my compatriots is becoming larger – I am talking about a gigantic flow of refugees from authoritarian countries, from countries where military operations are taking place, where the authorities are destroying entire tribes, entire nations. And for me, it was a personal trauma when at the end of the twentieth century, Tutsis were exterminated in Rwanda, about a million Tutsis were exterminated within a month. These are also my compatriots.

What didn’t go into the program about Venice?
The canals’ underarms,
their rotten teeth,
their gastritis and colitis,
crumbly mustard papers,
bedsores.
What else?
Haven’t asked yet
how they arrest people here.
The streets are poky, the squares cheapskate.
A city without cars.
No room to maneuver a black maria
disguised as a meat delivery van.
Maybe they take you away in a gondola
to the accompaniment of a canzona?
A good way to go:
Sa-a-a-nta Lucia, Santa Lu-u-u-cia.

You've been living a life of writing poetry and prose, several decades in journalism working on the radio – one of a kind journey through genres. How to avoid getting into a routine?

I’ve always loved books. I grew up in a house with hundreds of them. Reading was like air for me. It was not just an oxygen pillow, but an oxygen down jacket in the suffocating atmosphere of the Soviet Union. And of course, I lived with those books and moreover, I also thought over words, meanings. I somehow realized that among the many writers whom I had loved in my youth – not in my childhood when I would avidly read, especially adventure books – that I loved their first and the second book but the third was no longer so interesting. First of all, the discovery of a writer is already a great event in itself. Then, you look for some nuances, details, you wander around 'the back streets' of his books. However, I noticed that genre fatigue was inherent in writers.

And I thought what can I do about it? After all, I'd been writing already. How to avoid this genre fatigue? The elbows have already been worn out and even the genre clothes themselves, i.e. stories, novels and poetry. You feel comfortable in this and that repetition but you no longer discover the world. Moreover, I even asked this question. 

I was lucky to go to Provence, where I interviewed Lawrence Durrell, who wrote such wonderful works as “The Black Book” and “Alexandria Quartet”. Then, the time of genre and stylistic weariness came and he began to repeat himself. So, I asked him indirectly how to really avoid these repetitions and mentioned the names of other writers like Heinrich Böll or Friedrich Dürrenmatt, for example or English expatriate writers whose works I loved. He said there was nothing else he could do and he would toil away like that to very end. 

Every so often I would come back to this issue because I don’t want to die as an empty and tired writer immersed in endless repetitions. I began to think about who had managed to avoid repetitions. Who really did it? There is Graham Greene, for example. He obviously succeeded. You can read his novels to the end but the point is there is no longer any discovery of the world in them. And I thought of Elias Canetti, the Nobel laureate in literature. I wondered why I am always interested in reading his works. The reason is that he worked in different genres. He wrote just one novel “Auto-da-Fé”. And then, he wrote “Crowds and Power”, a literary study dealing with issues of crowds and the power of rulers. He also wrote diaries, plays and poetry. It may seem sort of an unflattering comparison but it’s like hares dodging. 

And here I am – a dodging hare. I don't want to burden the reader with repetitions because when my text is not a discovery for me, it means it is not going to be a discovery for the reader either. Therefore, I have always tried to find different genre territories. Here is the prose, and once you see that you succeed at writing genre stories, you need to run. And off you go, into poetry and after that, into essay writing. And essays are such a muscular genre. It makes any artist think. It is not that you should come just with an artistic text but rather with some strong intellectual issue, with some thought! 

There is also drama. I’ve been working on radio for over forty years and have written several radio plays. You know they say crazy people hear voices. But I am just that normal crazy type because I work on the radio and I heard voices. And when the war in Ukraine began with the Russian invasion, I made several films. That is to say, the acoustic world and the radio world was not enough for me. I made those several films because I hadn’t worked with eyes, and cinema makes you work with vision, with optics and not with words. The cinema makes you work with the characters. I indulged myself a lot as a lyric poet and I have a sense of sin for writing lyric poetry, I love character radio. That’s why my documentaries are the character films – one is about radio and the others about the war in Ukraine, more precisely, about the bloody front of Eastern Ukraine. 

This century and the last decade in particular have imposed a hybrid war on us. Speaking in the language of literature, it is a genre-diverse war that includes conventional and information wars, fakes, a fifth column, and so on. Looking back at what I’ve been doing and I'm not talking about quality – maybe, I did everything badly but I did it as best I could – it seems that it has been some kind of anticipation of this hybrid situation. I’ve been searching for a variety of genres. You can call it a premonition of hybrid war. The variety of genres I've worked in is my hybrid response. The definition isn’t beautiful, well – neutral, but this is my response to a completely new situation: to answer like a person who writes, like a person of acoustics, a person of optics. This is also such a new state of a person, of people who are usually called creative. To be honest, I envy my Ukrainian colleagues who also find time to sing and perform on the stage with some rock groups. But unfortunately, this is way too much for me.

I’ll whisper them in your ear –
closer, closer still –
my radio secrets.
I know how to give voice to age, to dying
(though not death! The experience of death is not broadcastable!).
I also know how love howls
(I interviewed a dingo in the zoo).
Listen to the spices, herbs,
condiments I use in my radio kitchen.
Can you hear? Those are recordings of a man
made forty years apart.
Isn’t it obvious now
how to convey ageing?
And dying?
An old man is lying in the heat in the garden,
Beset by insects.
They are scavengers.
Who else should see a dying man down under the earth?
Add flamenco heel clicks to the buzz
and you get a dance on a coffin.
Why flamenco?
Because it’s –
all about love and death.
But don’t tell anyone!

In your program “Above the Barriers”, we hear the voices of many people and some of them have already left us for good. What are these voices and what is the radio language, this Ars Acustica?

Radio can be an art form. Indeed, I am not the first person who works with radio as an art form and as a genre. There is an international community of radio aesthetes and it's called “Ars Acustica”. They create acoustic dramas which, by the way, can be heard in many other countries because the main thing in them is not semantics, not words, not the meaning of words, but the meaning of sounds. In other words, I am not completely alone in my perception of radio as 'ars acustica', an art form. If you work with something for a long time and you have some artistic ambitions, you begin to perceive the material as your opportunity to learn about the world and yourself, an opportunity to understand life. 

The more I worked on the radio, the more I realized that it’s not just an art form but a different fabric that testifies to and speaks a lot about life. I have little by little accumulated a very large archive and I think now, after forty years of my work on the radio, that the majority of the voices that sounded in my programs are the voices of the dead. I once looked at the archive in my office closet, before the digital era, and thought, what a grave – hundreds of voices, probably thousands of voices! Two hundred belong to the departed, and their number is growing and growing because time is fleeting. So, I looked at my archive, this giant crypt, a cemetery and I realized that I could revive these people. 

There was such a philosopher, [Nikolai] Fyodorov, in the nineteenth century. They used to talk about him being almost crazy. He was Leo Tolstoy's friend. Fyodorov is the author of the so-called "Common Cause" concept and at the heart of his philosophy is the desire to physically revive the dead! He believed that was the moral duty of humankind. He suggested we should start that work in museums and cemeteries. By the way, this madman is very close to me. I am the successor of his strange work and in an absolutely real sense of it because when you broadcast, you send sound signals including human voices on the air and they eventually go out into space and, according to the laws of physics, they decrease but they never disappear. And I realized that I could give people eternity, eternal life! Being a small official, a small radio host, I would save humanity! And I need to have voices at hand for that. So, I completely stopped recording my own radio monologues, as I was better off to start sharing. I record people because I want to give them immortality and I think I succeed in doing it. (laughs) I announced that goal and people are eager to be recorded by me and they know that they are in good hands. They know that my arms are much safer than the muscular arms of a gravedigger.

Found a colleague’s voice in the archive.
The recording is from forty years back.
The voice is rich, fearless.
Not a voice, but “a whole life ahead”.
I asked the secretary for his number,
made a transatlantic call, said who I was,
told him I was doing a program about vocal material,
how it crumples, frays, decays.
Asked could he answer some questions.
Something rasped in the receiver.
“Speak louder”, I yelled.
Louder rasping.
“Wha-a-at? What qu-est-ions?”
“About the voice! How it crumples, breaks,
gives up the ghost.”
“Gives up – the ghost?”
“Louder!”
“What?”
It sounded like water was boiling, bubbling in the receiver.
Then it broke off.
Then a silence.
That kind.
Dead. 

Once you said there is no innovation in creativity but there is traditionalism and epigonism. Could you please clarify?

The concept of the intellectual novel was invented by Thomas Mann. It was not enough for him to be just an artist. “The Magic Mountain” and “Doctor Faustus” are intellectual novels. He introduced intellectual conversation into fiction prose. And literature has been making the writer think intensively since then. Although writers are artists, if they want to be modern, they have to be intellectuals. So, I think about what I'm working with. Literature became literature when it was called literature. 

Take “Solomon’s Song of Songs” that we consider poetry but for contemporaries it was the sacred scripture. There is a culture that called it (and not only) literature. I may say banal things but I'm talking about the Greeks, the Greek culture, the Greek subconscious, the Greek understanding. Aristotle's “Ars Poetica” is fundamental. Since then, literature has known that it is literature, it sees itself in the mirror, compares itself. 

I worked for a short period of time in a patenting firm in Kyiv and if an inventor came with some idea, I knew that absolutely nothing new could be invented as I had huge volumes with patents behind my shoulders. I looked for what he came up with in the chemistry or the cold metal processing sections. You search, find, make a copy, compare his invention with another invention in that field. Of course, there can be primitivists in a culture, in a mature culture. By the way, there are no primitivists in literature because language has a deep property, large biography and usage in different contexts; and there may still be primitivists in painting but we love them only because they contain the classical understanding of art. Without the classics, primitivists would remain like those cuisines in gastronomy that are good but very primitive, simple. 

Literature has been literature since the Greeks said what is literature. I think that people working in literature should understand that this word ‘genre’ is etymologically related to genetics: genre, genes – origin! When the futurists together with [Vladimir] Mayakovsky say it is necessary to throw [Alexander] Pushkin off the ship of history, this is all a tautology because pagan gods were thrown from the ships. It’s a game! Mayakovsky says, 

“But could you 
Play 
Right to the finish 
A nocturne on a drainpipe flute?”

This echoes with Shakespear’s “Hamlet”, doesn’t it? 

Hamlet: “Will you play upon this pipe?” 
Guildenstern: “My lord, I cannot.”  

All these are such dialogues within literature. That is to say, Mayakovsky who suggests Pushkin gets thrown off enters into a dialogue with Shakespeare. 

Therefore, since the Greeks called it literature, we, writers, have been working in certain genres, within certain frameworks. And here, I offer to think about a different scale of values: there are epigones on one side who grab everything, use it and don’t give anything in return and there are traditionalists – they also grab, they also follow some traditions but they are grateful and they still add something to the genre. And what I think is a dialectic, a literary paradigm. Perhaps, this particular thought of mine is conditional but what is not conditional. After all, the starry sky was also divided into constellations – this is a conditional star map of the sky. 

Oh to do an interview with blood.
To hear her voice.
“To move soundlessly” is an oxymoron.
Everything that moves makes a sound.
The voice of blood… Is it a rustle? A whisper?
A sonorous transfusion?
Or a faint groan,
that reminds one of fading vowels?
This will take painstaking work
with phonographs and cardiographs.
“Tell me, please, Mrs Blood,
do you think you are the carrier
of a person’s rhythmic memory?”
I want to hear your voice,
blood! 

Can we talk about palimpsest – acoustic, language and cultural palimpsest as the “crosscutting way of life” according to you? What is it for you?

The writer seeks the crosscutting way of life, the thread that he lives along. Science works with the rational and it explains and finds certain existing laws. It's like a contour map. There are lines in physics, mathematics, and there are written formulas. Science is rational cognition of the world and the artist cognizes the world associatively, what can be called – through images. 

The things I’m saying are simple and I’m not at all original in doing so, but it makes sense to repeat them from time to time. For example, in literary textbooks, a metaphor is defined as a meaning transfer. All these literary terms have a very deep metaphysical meaning. And the meaning of a metaphor, for example, is that a writer or a poet, by way of using it, overcomes the chaos of life. If we can compare things, we no longer live in nonsense. Consider it a poetic understanding of the world. 

Grammar is also a very complex phenomenon. For example, in both Ukrainian and Russian languages ​​there is no “pluskvamperfekt” or the pluperfect tense and this how I explain all sorts of historical failures. Russia is always in some segment of the past. Russia lives in the past all the time. And why is it so? There is no grammatical form like “pluskvamperfekt”. So, I am looking for such grammatical forms that would help us to overcome the sense of meaninglessness of life. And one of my favorite images is the palimpsest image. 

There is a simple dictionary definition that describes it primarily in connection with written texts on papyrus or parchment, for example. The material used to be saved and the new texts were written over the old ones. In the visual arts, one layer was painted over with another, covered with another, and so on. 

I was lucky to grow up in a city that's called Chernivtsi, known as Czernowitz in German. It represented exactly that kind of cultural, linguistic palimpsest – that is, once it was the Ottoman Empire and part of the Balkan world; then, the Austro-Hungarian and after that, the Romanian kingdom and then also, it was part of the Soviet empire. All of that was a superposition of one layer onto another, such a linguistic and cultural palimpsest. 

I lived in the times of the Soviet layer. The city's past was being painted over in the crudest way. And yet, thanks to its architecture, I felt I was living in several cultures at once and of course, thanks to the people around me, I constantly heard not only Ukrainian and Russian, but dialects of Ukrainian and also Yiddish, Polish and Hungarian. That was the background for me. Therefore, the Soviet layer of the palimpsest could still be pierced if you wanted to, if you were capable of hearing, seeing and experiencing. 

Thanks to Chernivtsi, I understood the meaning of palimpsest. The thing is that I just understood it with my eyes and ears. I would go to the market with my mother in the fifties and I remember hearing the way Jewish ladies used to bargain with Hutsul women in an extraordinary dialect that was a mixture of Yiddish, German, Ukrainian and a peculiar Rusyn dialect. All of that was a discovery. Therefore, from my childhood, I felt the palimpsest but I didn't understand the meaning of it. 

It was later and already on the radio when I heard the way some voices interrelate with others, it is called “actuality”, when your interlocutor speaks English and you leave his English voice but cover it with the Russian voice. And somehow I thought that the palimpsest is not just a cultural phenomenon but it’s rather a crosscutting image, kind of a key metaphor. I thought they are the grammatical palimpsests. All that interrelates with each other. And I understood a lot about love, about jealousy when lovers feel the touch of an opponent. Skin is also our palimpsest of touches. Therefore, palimpsest for me is not only a cultural phenomenon, but rather it is a cosmic phenomenon.

I was editing together the pauses between the strikes of a bell
(the ceremony of the Feast of the Shroud).
Several pauses in a row.
Something like a lump in the throat.
A snowy plain opened up.
I thought of Japanese verse.
They have a different way for crickets to chirrup,
rivers to roar, autumn to rustle, winter to be silent.
I should go to Japan with a recorder.
And what if I really did find there a closed cosmos
With an unheard of sound? 

I would like to ask you about one of your very caustic comments when referencing certain authors of the seventies some of whom you even called “talented but stupid”, having added they’d rather bathe in “self-indulgence” and care for no intellectual tension whatsoever.  Can you add anything to this discourse today?

Alexander Pushkin's poetic drama “Mozart and Salieri” from his four short plays know as “The Little Tragedies” questions the dual capacity of genius and villainy. What presents a problem for me is rather a different opposition: if talents are compatible? The thing is that talent often devours the mind. Egocentrism is the natural state of a poet and artist. They are self-centered. I don't condemn the lack of intellectual power among creatively gifted people, although I think that a modern poet, especially a prose writer, cannot allow themselves to be stupid. Nevertheless, you can see some of them do allow it. 

The twentieth century is the age of polarization and - this is absolutely obvious - the triumph of evil. Most European writers, being caught between the swastika or the hammer and sickle, chose sides. Most of them didn’t understand that it was possible to make a different choice, possible to withdraw, not to accept this polarization - but it requires an intellectual effort. I think it is a great weakness for a writer to allow himself to make generalizations. 

Sometimes, I want to say that the proportion of good and evil doesn’t change very much. I don’t see much progress, and this very proportion of talent and intelligence is the strength for me, and it manifests itself in conflicts. During the massacres in the Balkans, the great Austrian writer Peter Handke, a really wonderful writer, began to support absolute evil and you shrug your shoulders but then also, you remember how great European writers in the thirties and forties supported Moscow or Berlin. All this is such an undying immortal tradition of confrontation between mental talent and stupidity, between talent and lack of common sense. It is a self-indulgence, love for paradoxes. In plain situations, you should act plain clear – there are no dialectics in evil! 

A still from the documentary film “Amputation” (2017), available to watch on YouTube

In the context of the war Russia unleashed against Ukraine in 2014, your cycle of poems "Amputa" an also the documentary "Amputation" (2017) shot together with Lydia Starodubtseva about seriously wounded Ukrainian soldiers who had undergone amputation of limbs is a very powerful poetic statement of not only this decade but of many years to follow. Could we talk about this?

There is a human, natural reaction to events. Take a war, for example. There is an aggressor in any war. It was not Poland that attacked Germany in September 1939 but it was Germany that attacked Poland. By the way, Poland was not an angelic country at all. It was a country with a military junta in power and a giant concentration camp for ethnic and political dissidents. But in September of 1939, we no longer talk about the viciousness of the Polish military regime. Poland became a victim of German aggression. 

So, what is the human reaction? Ukraine is a victim on the part of Russia, the eastern neighbor. And we are not talking now about the defects and weaknesses of Ukrainian democracy. This country became a victim. This is a human reaction. There is also a writer's reaction and of course, I wondered what types of writer's reactions I possessed. 

And I began to think about war poetry and the way how radically it changed in the twentieth century because prior to the First World War, the theme of war was mainly represented from "The Iliad" to works by the heroic style poets like the French poet Charles Péguy and not just him but also, a group of English poets who wrote about the colonial wars, the "Lake School". Those were the elevated works. The literary feat was accomplished by the English poets of the First World War almost all of whom died. They brought radical changes in the attitude towards war – a massacre, and that was already a different vocabulary: trenches, lice, pus, urine, gaping lacerations, death that you describe. This is the literary feat of the English poets. 

When this war began, I thought about them first and then I thought about the Russian-Soviet war-poets whom I love very much. They wrote wonderful poems, very cruel, naturalistic poems.

 “I seem a magnet put to test,
attracting every shell that flies.
But once again death whizzes past –
a blast,
and my lieutenant dies . . .” 

(from “Before the Attack” by Semyon Gudzenko)

You know it's such a strong skin-sensitive feeling, vital, absolutely honest.

“It's cold. The sky is spreading out
Above the rumbling railroad, tired
Of moving east with endless crowds
Who lost their homes to bombs and fire.” 

(from “The Forties” by David Samoylov)

Or this famous Soviet-Russian song by Mikhail Isakovsky, for example: 

“His home was burned down by foe,  
They murdered all his kin and wife.  
Where now the soldier has to go? 
And what is left in his hard life?”

It is written about a soldier who returns home and sees his house burnt to ashes.

“[…] And bitter 
Tears came out. And on his chest,  
Like one of them, did slightly glitter 
The medal for taking Budapest.”

This song was banned at the beginning. That is, I have in stock of my emotional memory these poems of the Russian-Soviet war-poets. They are cruel poems, real and the enemy is always obvious in them. After those quoted lines “But once again death whizzes past”, there goes how they sit and pick out the clotted blood from under the nails. And it is clear that this is German blood. This is the enemy.

“Then
we swilled cold vodka scooped from pails
and scraped the blood of other men,
unruffled, from beneath our nails.”

And I thought what should I write, if I wanted to? This is the normal reaction of a poet. I believe that contemporary poets should work with contemporary issues and with contemporary language, situations and dramas. And so, I recalled these poems of Russian-Soviet poets and I chose the best lines for the epigraphs and wrote my own poems about this drama – about Ilovaisk, about these cauldrons of violence, of the Ukrainians who had perished. 

The drama of this cycle "Amputa” consists, on the one hand, of my love for the Russian-Soviet poems in which the enemy is German and on the other hand – my love for Ukraine as the bloody eastern side, the eastern body of Ukraine covered in blood when everything changed and when the enemy put on different army shoulder straps, and what used to be Russian became something similar to German in World War II. This cycle of poems “Amputa” and a film based on them is really about how evil changes its shoulder straps, army caps and facial expressions, how it begins to speak in another language but nevertheless – it remains evil. 

The cycle has its own drama and this drama is intrapoetic. The poet should react to this situation verbally, in a genre form, stylistically and literary. It is really necessary to set the tasks as literary. And as for all those publicists and what they do, there is a place for their publicistic work on Facebook.

In early autumn
I always repeat my programme about cigars.
I imagine people listening to it in the early evening
at the dacha, in the garden.
Somebody’s got a bonfire going,
and my voice mingles with the smoke, dogs barking, children squealing.
Dogs especially like me.
Not me so much, as the wisps of jazz
hanging after
the last cigar. 

Being asked about Igor Pomerantsev in 2020, it's hard to restrain from saying we talk about a person who represents that unique cultural dividing line on one side of which is Ukraine and on the other, Russia. How would you comment on this?

This is a moving line, a moving border. It has changed over the course of my life. In general, ethnic and national self-identification shows itself in a critical situation. It could be a football match when you sit and support your team. But another, not so lightweight critical situation is war. Of course, the war shows us who we are. 

I thought a lot about my literary youth in Chernivtsi, about this Soviet layer of palimpsest – miserable, propagandistic; how much it disfigured children, adolescents and young men – with different heroes, different ethics, different understandings of life and a person's place in it. All these are profound things and as a whole system and an imposed culture, they can disfigure, distort your worldview. 

Take for example a classic Bukovinian writer Olha Kobylianska. There is a main street named after her in Chernivtsi (Panska or Herrengasse under the Austrians). And what was the image of Olha Kobylianska that they taught us at school? That she was kind of a defender of the peasantry (laughs), such a humanist. And that's how you grow up in the city with Olha Kobylianska street. When you are around twenty or thirty years old, you learn that she was a feminist, a Nietzschean, a symbolist! This is a completely different image! And what they did instead – they imposed on you a daub-like picture as those non-official movie posters we had in our times, loosely painted by local movie-theater artists. They were good at painting Fernandel, thanks to the elongated face or Louis de Funes – thanks to the nose or ears. They could do that really well! That was the world of certain and completely distorted concepts, including literary ones. 

I lived in a city where the best contemporary German poets and Austrian poets grew up between the wars. One of them is Paul Celan, who is considered to be the best post-war European poet. All that was sealed off from us. We could know Salinger but what belonged to us was not given. And even when they gave it, like Olha Kobylianska, everything was distorted, disfigured. What a kingdom of broken, crooked mirrors! You know, now I love rooms with laughing mirrors and I even made a film in which I walk between the mirrors and look for the God of sound, the God of radio. 

The writer deals with the refraction of reality. Those writers who live in countries with dictatorships, they look for the truth, but if you live in freedom, you are engaged in the refraction of language. I love refraction. Nevertheless, when I recall the kingdom of crooked mirrors, I understand that millions of people stayed in this kingdom – because in order to overcome all this, you need a very strong personal motivation. It requires you to understand words, understand yourself, understand verbs, pronouns, adjectives. If a person has such qualities, he will be able to break out of this kingdom of crooked mirrors.

Interviewed by Dmytro Kyyan
Poems of Igor Pomerantsev translated from the Russian by Frank Williams