“War is our destiny”: An Interview with Yaryna Chornohuz

Yaryna Chornohuz is a poet and combat medic currently defending Ukraine against the russian invasion. Long before Chornohuz joined the military, she was a fierce defender of the Ukrainian language and culture. Previously, she was part of the campaign to pass the law "On Ensuring the Functioning of the Ukrainian Language as the State Language''. She also participated in MovaMarafon (‘Language Marathon’), a program offering support to Russian-speaking Ukrainians who want to make the switch to speaking Ukrainian. In 2020, Folio released How the Military Circle Bends (UKR: Як вигинається воєнне коло) a collection of Chornohuz’s poetry. Occasionally, she posts new verses on social media alongside updates from the frontlines.

Yaryna Chornohuz spoke with Justina Dobush about reading and writing during wartime, the intensity of emotions felt by soldiers and civilians alike, how to not become like the enemy, and more.

Let’s begin simply with books. Are you reading anything right now? Or do you have some particular hopes regarding our literature now?

Until recently there was a partial intellectual discourse in Ukrainian society that said, let's stop suffering collectively, let's not study the literature of suffering, because for how long should we really keep crying, there is too much depression and gloom in our literature. There was a very superficial attitude to our literature, but now, when we read, for example, the same Pluzhnik, Khvylovy or Kotsbynsky, everything on the contrary becomes clearer and more obvious. That is, the rhyme "blood / love" [Editor’s note: krov/lyubov in UKR.]  is no longer banal. It is true, because all those writers who are part of our canon and whom we were once skeptical of, as something old and burnt with gunpowder, experienced and felt all this long before us. And here, for example, I will tell you my own story of reading literature in the war.

It was probably around three weeks before the start of the invasion: we were constantly moving from one place to another, changing villages, we had no shower for two weeks...our comfort conditions were absolutely minimal, and there was also constant stress, reports of shelling... Now all the details are mixed up in my head. However, I then had a very strong need from everything I read in my life, particularly the Ukrainian writers of the 1920s ... And so, in a village in Donetsk region, in the library of an abandoned school, I was very lucky to find and take almost all the books they had from these writers. That is, those were books by Teliga, Olzhych, an anthology of the writers of the Executed Renaissance, and some other books on history and French classics translated by Lukasz and now, I read Guy de Maupassant and Flaubert in the woodland belts. And you know, it was so funny: there was something located on the first floor and that was evidently going to be our guys’ check-point position. So, I went in there and said, "Let me into the library on the second floor." They looked at me in disbelief but let me in there anyway. Shortly after that, I ran out of there with a good pile of books and began to throw them into a car loaded with all sorts of things while the guys, still in disbelief, continued watching me.

What exactly were you looking for in these books?

First I'll give you some context. On my eight-month pre-invasion rotation, I took many different books with me, but unfortunately they all were left under occupation because it so happened that I could not pick any of them up in time. And all I read, given the interruptions with the Internet, is what I  would find in these village cultural centers, libraries, and other places in the villages we were passing through along the way. To be honest, from the very beginning I was looking for two specific authors, whom I eventually found in the above-mentioned library. So, I really needed Yevhen Pluzhnyk and Olena Teliga  and as soon as I found both of them, I felt much better. And it seems to me that if anyone who survived these last months of the war in Ukraine now picks up and reads Pluzhnik's poetry, he will immediately see many poetic passages of what has happened and is happening to us now. For example, this is a famous line from one of his poems:

I met a bullet in the woods.
Exactly where I sowed rye!
Why the hell
I’ve lived through so much!

The old woman came and shouted ...
A small hole between the ribs ...
Well, of course – beauty and strength!
A funeral march!

My worldview is very much in line with his now. And when I write, I feel close to his desire to fight, which is at the same time full of so much pain that is sometimes very difficult to avoid, and this concept of strength and helplessness, and how they interact in his works.

As for Teliga, apparently, everything is clear, because she is a woman's voice and, more importantly, she is a woman who fights. Although, to my surprise, I saw that she was not as feminist as those of our girls who have now gone to war. Because she still has a number of poems in which she says that here, men, this is your business, we will give you a sword, go fight, and we will give you tenderness, and although you also want, but I'll wait, because this is not our business–something like that. However, outside of such lines, her voice is very close to mine.

Here also, I mentioned an excerpt that shows at the same time how avant-garde and modern Pluzhnik is:

You don't need newspaper phrases.
–Pain is constant pain.
Silently growing somewhere a new Taras
Among the bloody fields.

As simple and strong as these lines are, I think that they should be promoted and reminded of in social media posts. In the past, I often published poets whom I would recall, because it's all very painful, but as a soldier, it doesn't seem very appropriate to me, and I try to restrain it. But still Pluzhnik is especially lacking now and I would like to see him mentioned more in all of this here.

I will jump to the topic of popular culture and social networks. Recently, an acquaintance of mine wrote on Facebook that he would not look at any memes until Mariupol was liberated. And for me it was a little strange, because memes are not all about smiles, especially since now they often convey serious things. So I want to ask, how do you feel about the meme culture of war? How in general do the military now perceive in what way and with what intonations civilians joke, talk about war and, in principle, allow themselves to engage with humor?

Neither the psyche of civilians nor the military can endure constant stress, catharsis or suffering, so all these memes and this culture of laughter are definitely needed and I have a clearly positive attitude towards them. In general, the military likes to watch all sorts of things on Tiktok - it entertains them and relaxes them. Everyone has their own right to a personal attitude to this. Personally speaking, memes do not offend me and I believe that they should continue to exist. Because humor is a category of aesthetics, as well as something that helps us experience reality with something tragic. Therefore, it has every right to exist.

In addition to humor, we have a lot of optimism in Ukrainian society. In some instances, our optimism becomes somewhat excessive. It can sometimes ruin an awareness and understanding of the reality of our tragedy, and an understanding of what is happening on the front line and of the fact that everything is not really so beautiful and heroic. Do you think there is a need to speak publicly about the limits of optimism we can have during wartime and the limits of what is acceptable in positive thinking? And can optimism really be harmful in some cases?

Optimism is certainly needed these days, but it doesn’t hurt to talk about its limits. Now all of Ukraine is experiencing what members of the military have felt for the past eight years, since the beginning of the war, and civilians who previously knew nothing about the war can find some common ground with our servicemen and women. The soldier who returns to civilian life after eight months on rotation and the average civilian are two different people, so it was previously very difficult for them to understand each other. This newfound understanding not only allows them to maintain common ground but a sense of shared optimism. During the first weeks of the invasion, when I read a lot of positive posts and comments that we will win, I was, on the one hand, very happy that people have such faith in the military and thought overall that was a really good thing. On the other hand, I saw what was happening around me and I thought: Why are you all so optimistic? You know, the way all these events are experienced by the military is completely different. It's hard to be optimistic when you have a tank column attacking you, but you still keep doing what you have to do. After such experiences, your optimism clearly begins with the understanding that you need to be calmer about everything happening around you.

It is best to listen to those who talk about the need for awareness, sober thinking, miscalculation, and understanding technical details. Because in war it is really very important to understand the technical details and maintain a very strict adherence to them in everyday life. For example, if you do not understand what is the basic set of things you need to survive in the woodland belts, in wild circumstances, for navigating a hostile space, if you do not attach them to yourself, you will not have things to keep warm, then your chances on efficiency and survival are significantly reduced. That is, practical thinking is needed.

Also, some people now say that you need to be purely rationalist. I don't know. Even though I'm a soldier, I can't be a rationalist in all this, because emotions can actually give us strength, too. And they must exist, if only that they allow us to survive the pain and become stronger.

It goes without saying that we also have hatred for the enemy. It is quite justified, natural, and even necessary in our situation, but I often note that in some people this hatred becomes more destructive, begins to deplete them internally, leads to conflicts with loved ones or others and makes them generally less capable. So I want to ask: how do you work through your hatred? How do you keep it within the limits of what is acceptable and necessary for the effective performance of your duties?

I felt this hatred which many people now have today when my comrade and love Krasny died in 2020. It was very difficult for me to overcome. Then, after I became a soldier and started to go on rotation, the enemy became something so simple and banal, just a target, an enemy. After my comrades and I saw what they, in typical ‘rashist’ fashion, were carrying on them–that is, a stolen video camera, some household items, clothes, a bag of toys–I realized that they were just miserable people. They are all just pathetic people who have spent their whole lives in poverty, and I personally have not so much hatred for them as I do contempt.

However, this hatred still awakens in me when I read the news about dead civilians. I felt this hatred when I had to pull a nine-year-old child out of a basement with shrapnel in his chest while the russians were still launching Grad missiles in our direction. Hatred comes and goes, but most of the time it is just contempt. How do I work with that?

I believe that hatred should not make you look like your enemy in the first place. Our enemy is poor in spirit, their way of life and morals, so when you start to hate him, worry too much about him and his actions, you involuntarily become somewhat like him. Here’s a fantastical scenario which will never be our reality—because first we would have to liberate Ukraine—but let’s imagine that after victory we would conditionally liberate Crimea and Kuban. I would not allow myself to shoot any adult civilian russian or child and would not allow those around me to do so either. Similarly, if a russian woman from their army had been taken prisoner in our unit, I would not allow anyone to rape her. I would not allow us to become like them—this is very important. And this is the most important thing to understand about the enemy and our hatred for them, because revenge is a dish that is served cold. Therefore, it is necessary to be as cold as possible, to keep your own actions as far away from the atrocities of the enemy as possible, in order to be able to demoralize him and at the same time be able to save yourself. I am very proud of our Ukrainian servicemen, who conduct interrogations of captured russians while keeping a balanced cold and calm tone, even when talking to them about these terrible crimes. As a result, it is worth it, because that is how they will benefit both in terms of information at the international level and simply for ourselves, in fact.

And yet, the strangest thing for me about Russians now is that they seem to hate and despise us so fiercely, do not consider us full-fledged people at all, and yet they loot our things, take them home, give them to their own wives and children. For some reason, it always seemed to me that if you hate someone that much, then you should hate their things and not even imagine stealing their panties.

Here it is necessary to understand in the military such a thing as taking a trophy. For many of them, the same underwear and many other things are probably trophies. And if they steal any of our toys or clothes for their relatives, it is no longer about putin, but about themselves and their lives. About how much they are imbued with this phenomenon of Skabeeva and faking experts, so superficial and basal, which is so deeply rooted that for them, that even things like clothes become a trophy. It is common in the military – including our own – to take military trophies when engaging in combat with the enemy, like submachine guns or chevrons, but definitely nothing like civilian clothes. That's why it's about their lives. Military trophies themselves are a normal thing for any war. It is possible that all their tanks and BMPs were clogged with clothes, because they thought that their command would take care of them, that is, that they would go to a Ukrainian town or village, rob it, take away their belongings and then rotate them immediately. Well, it kind of didn't work out that way and as a result they didn't manage to take all these refrigerators, washing machines and toys back.

In your opinion, can we hope that the russians will one day understand what they did to us and repent, like the Germans did after the Second World War, and even pay us reparations? Because it seems that they are more likely to make themselves out to be innocent victims of the putin regime as long as they can rather than plead guilty and apologize to us.

The fact is that their information space is completely cleared of dissent. Only this Skabayeva is promoted and tolerated there among all sorts of obscurantism with the letter Z and show business that agrees with everything that putin does. There is a chance that their political elite will change: after all, it happens once a century, then for a few years someone more democratic comes along, then he is either killed, or he himself goes away and is immediately replaced. That is, we can count on the maximum that, perhaps, for some time under the pressure of sanctions and all this, they will change the political elite, giving us the opportunity to breathe, pull up forces and regroup. But I think it will simply continue again later on. As people who have studied the in-depth history of Ukraine at the university, you and I understand that this massacre is not the first or even the second, and that all this will be repeated again and again. Just before the invasion, I began writing a text entitled "Accept the Military Circle", where I say the following: All of us, in fact, must accept that for us and our country, war is our destiny, resistance is our destiny, we will never have peace, and we will never have anything else. In this situation, certain groups of Ukrainian society have no special right to relax, namely, political elites and the military. Because the people who will join them after this war will have to stay constantly vigilant. We can no longer hope that it will end soon or that only peace and tranquility remain. Instead, we must accept that we will always be at war. Some realized it later, some earlier, but it was thanks to a number of people who realized from 2014 until the winter of 2022 that war was our destiny that we managed to repel the rashist blitzkrieg this spring. In the future, if even more people understand this, we may have our own iron dome, like Israel, because, as Churchill once said, if you want peace, prepare for war.

My brother and I actually were talking on the 24th and realized that we’ ve actually been ready for this moment since childhood, because the war with Russia is like our samsara wheel. And when you know our history, you accept it, then somehow you don't even feel sorry for yourself, because you just understand that this is what happened, but it doesn't mean that you are more unlikely than others or that the world is especially unfair to you, or that God has somewhere inadvertently messed with your fate. Instead, you begin to learn to live in the conditions you were dealt, be happy, rejoice, remain human, remain strong, continue to develop your culture, love your country and your life, and generally treat it less tragically or catastrophically, that is, with a sense of defeat or despair. After all, while still studying internationally, I remembered forever how we were dictated by a very cynical definition: peace is the absence of war.

It's hard to believe all this in the era of comfort and consumerism, when you are surrounded by shopping malls, a bunch of online stores, all kinds of entertainment, blogs and social networks. Under such conditions, you simply cannot believe that the Third World War is possible today or tomorrow but what is happening in our country now is the Third World War, in which there are tank battles, in its purest form for more than two months. I can only guess how shocking it is for Europeans who have long created super multimedia museums about the Second World War and for whom all these things are distant history, although what is happening here in our country is not history, but a consequence of the fact that the russians have already raised two generations of people who are constantly looking everywhere for fascist-nazis And this, by the way, is also about the ethics of dealing with their enemy: the russians hated their enemies so much that they eventually became them, but they can not realize it.

And returning briefly to the topic of optimism: when I was still studying at university, our teacher of literary creativity, Serhiy Ivanyuk, told us during his lectures about the matrix of perception of war and self-creation on the basis of iconic literary works of three peoples–the Germans, Ukrainians and Russians. He showed, in his opinion, the three mental traits of each nation, which follow purely from their written works. I am usually skeptical of such things, but it was quite accurate and his observation was accurate. So, from our literature, he took Kulish's People's Malakhiy, Goethe's Faust from Germany, and Bulkagov's Master and Margarita from Russia, and showed how each of these works looks at and fights evil. In the Germans we see the concept of Faust, the scientist who forced Mephistopheles to serve his purposes, that is, was able to saddle evil, defeat it, comprehend and, based on the path taken with evil, create a new world. On the other hand, the Russians have a completely diametrically opposed Woland, whom nothing can defeat, and in fact, their intelligentsia in Master and Margarita eventually remains powerless before that evil and that is why it will never be at peace. This calm, democratic, not small part of russia, which is forced to watch all this, remains powerless before that evil with which we are now fighting directly. As for the People's Malakhiy, Ukrainians have this habit of waiting for the good news. We are constantly left feeling exposed and weak in the fight against evil, because we are waiting for news of victory and for something new to come. It's like the People's Malachiy said that it was all over: God is dead, a new government has come that will create a paradise for everyone. And everyone quickly believed in it, forgetting what happened before, and it all started again. This news guarantees everything to restart from the very beginning and it is fair to say it is exactly what puts us to sleep. In my opinion, our enemy knows very well that we have a habit of falling asleep, that we like to believe quickly, as if we have made a hyper-effort and peace has come forever. In fact, we desperately need such a memory of the crimes against us and the history of our people as, say, the Jewish people do.

And to confirm this, we have a vivid example of how blindly we hope that suddenly, perhaps even tonight, putin will die and peace will come to earth. But let's move on, because I want to talk about your poetry. You wrote on your Facebook page that after seeing the deaths of many of your comrades in the first days of the invasion, you don't know if you will ever be able to write poetry again. How are you doing now? 

I have just managed to write two texts that I do not know when I will share, because in general there is this feeling as if nothing can convey your pain, nothing can convey what you experienced. This paralysis is present in me, but I think I just have to be patient, because time helps and most importantly, I understand that neither I nor others have the right to remain silent for a long time. Since voice and language are what have always saved us and Ukraine, without it there is no way. It is our primary strength, and the same weapon comes later. And keeping your voice is very important. What will change in me after that and how, I do not know yet and accordingly am not ready to answer it.

By the way, I am particularly impressed these days by how Ukrainians have the courage to find the necessary words to speak to the whole world about the atrocities committed by Russian soldiers against civilians, above all about these terrible rapes, which are no longer just statistics, but actual stories told by victims and eyewitnesses. To be honest, I didn't expect anyone to be able to talk about rape right away, because this topic is still painful for many, and they often prefer to keep quiet about it or blame the victim for what happened to them. So, despite the fact that we used to call our language a nightingale-like, and we thought for a long time that our language is not amenable to certain things or suitable for some topics, that it is very gentle, because it is really true that we have not only the word ‘enemies’ in our language but also the word ‘enemies’ with a poetically diminutive suffix [Editor’s note: ne tilʹky vorohy, a y vorizhenʹky in UKR]. Now it suddenly turns out that our language is able to say what it once seemed impossible to describe with words and that in principle, at first glance, you do not know whether it is possible to weave into a sentence, weave into the sentence structure, preserving all syntax, and speak aloud.

In general, I tend to believe that language is a living organism that finds its own way, just like water, to pass into the smallest cracks of grief and find ways to express itself. The Ukrainian language itself has long been ready for the things we are experiencing now: everything in it is ready to help us navigate our current emotions. I am especially pleased that, for example, in public discourse even earlier, before February 24, when I wrote in my posts "Occupying Army", that I went on a contract to fight the occupiers and so on, it felt that my audience was skeptical of the word "occupiers". That is, some of our fellow citizens were generally skeptical of any emotionally colored military words, and it was the word "occupiers", not to mention "rashists", "russian scumbags" or something like that. Now everyone is calmly using these terms and it is not strange to anyone, but again it is sad that so much blood had to be shed for these words to be perceived as a reality of life and not as an exaggeration of some crazy emotional girl who suddenly and as if for no reason signed a contract with the military. That's nice, and so the Ukrainian language has been ready for a long time and I especially like the fact that with the help of military discourse, it took from the russian language the best that it has–that is, the russian curse words. Because, as all these teachers of Ukrainian language and literature rightly say, this brutal vocabulary of swear words is foreign to our language, but now, it has been able to use these russian curses to its advantage. And thus it equates itself a little with the enemy in a positive sense, because excessive politeness is also superfluous with them.

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, there has been a separate talk in our public discourse that russians should not be called anything other than russians. Some say that the term 'rashist' should be abandoned, because it is the russians, the russian army, and they should not be called by any other words, so that everyone remembers and understands that this is a specific nation that existed before February 24 which not everyone understood was so clinically ill. In your opinion, do we need to worry now about how to correctly refer to this nation of non-humans?

On the one hand, no matter what you call shit, it won't stop being shit. That is, whether you use the terms russians, rashists or orcs it won't really change much. Their deeds and "feats" are so  self-revealing that they can be given any name, and as a result, each of these names will become a negative word precisely because of the association with said deeds. On the other hand, it might help if we are more snobbish about this distinction. This became clear to me after I read Pavel Kazarin's book The Wild West of Eastern Europe, where he talks exactly about the distinction between empire and Russia. So he says that the empire that putin created took its basis from Russia - for example, its language, but in fact, in essence, it opposes it. In other words, the empire defeated Russia as much as the telnyashka defeated the kosovorotka, the latter of which became banal, uninteresting and something old for them, while the telnyashka remains the symbol of the rashist, who may be of some eastern ethnicity and not Slavic appearance, such as Buryats. Yet they are still for the “russian world” which has convinced them that there are some imaginary Nazi-fascists, not to mention America, that has really had nothing to do with them for a long time. Nonetheless they believe that they all need to be destroyed and they can find this enemy in almost anyone. This is a typical rashist, and russians, if we talk about abstractions, are some people who can be far from politics and all that, but just speak russian and live quietly in their cities. However, we must understand that in their clean information space, as a result, you can not distinguish a rashist from a russian, because how? I believe that everyone, depending on their vision, has the right to call them russians, rashists or just as they want, because the main thing here is the facts that now speak for themselves, leaving no other alternative. And even the fact that now in the civilized world many people are ashamed to call themselves a russian is very significant. And the term "rashism", by the way, has already immigrated abroad, I've seen it even in memes on Twitter. And no matter what, many people around the world today understand what is at the heart of this ideology and that Orwell would cry if he saw modern Russia.

---

Interviewed by Justina Dobush
Translated from the Ukrainian by Dmytro Kyyan and Kate Tsurkan

If you want to help the Ukrainian army, please consider donating to Come Back Alive.