“I see politics through a literary and poetic lens”: An Interview with Vladislav Davidzon
Born in Uzbekistan and raised in the United States, the Paris-based literary critic, editor, and journalist Vladislav Davidzon has emerged as one of the leading voices on Ukraine in the western world. Shortly after the triumph of the Maidan Revolution, the self-identified Judeo-Banderite and his wife, the film producer Regina Maryanovska-Davidzon, founded The Odessa Review, an English-language journal dedicated to promoting Ukrainian content abroad. In 2021, his book From Odessa With Love: Political And Literary Essays In Post-Soviet Ukraine, a collection of previously published and new essays from 2012-2021 was published. Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, he has actively been reporting from the region. Davidzon spoke to Kate Tsurkan by spoke by phone after he’d returned to Odesa from the frontlines in Donetsk…
You recently burned your Russian passport outside of the Russian Embassy in Paris. Can you tell us why you did this? And why was Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the former president of Estonia, there with you?
I did it for multiple reasons. On a purely symbolic level, everyone with a conscience these days wants to show they have nothing to do with the actions of the Russian Federation. I no longer think of myself as part of the Russian diaspora nor do I want anything to do with Russia until Putin is dead and everything he built has been cleansed from this world. Secondly, I wanted to pledge my allegiance to the Ukrainian political nation. Whether I end up getting a Ukrainian passport or not–I stand with them. I want every Ukrainian to know this and also to show what the responsibility of every Russian citizen during this war is. Considering that I grew up in the United States, I have more opportunities than many Russian citizens living in Russia, which gave me all the more reason to burn the passport. There is also a kind of educational value in it, meaning that I wasn't the one who burned the passport – Putin did. Because of him the Russian passport is now a useless piece of paper.
As for Toomas Hendrik Ilves, I knew he’d be down with the aesthetics of the act. Look, I like him a lot. We were having dinner with my dear friend Claire Berlinski the night before so I invited him along. Both Ilves and I were part of diasporas growing up in the Tri State Area of the United States. I respect that he went back to his country later on to work and lead. He was one of the most vocal anti-Kremlin politicians in the entire European Union. Looking back, he wasn’t wrong–he was just well ahead of the curve.
Much of your journalistic work is tied to politics. You have spoken for example with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and Belarusian dissident leader Svetlana Tsikhanouskaya, but the foundation of your education as I understand is in literature. Do you feel torn between disciplines?
I have been obsessed with literature from a very early age and I will admit that I do see politics through a literary and poetic lens. Literature is indeed my first love and the rigorous study of it at University in New York City and while I was in graduate school formed the foundation of my sensibility and approach. It has also shaped me as a writer and observer of politics. Even when I am writing about something that is not necessarily very aesthetic in nature, I do as much as I can to make it literary in scope and reference. So much of what we read on the internet is really badly written, so polishing one's prose is a necessary reaction to that, I feel. I certainly view Eastern European politics and its personalities and processes as being part of a tremendous Shakespearian historical saga playing out in our own time. Zelensky and Tsikhanouskaya are characters in an intense world historical play (at least for me), and when I interview them or I spend time with them, on a certain level I am more interested in their interior life and what they represent in terms of their generational cohort or as psychological or cultural types than I am in their policies or politics.
I would admit that I used to feel torn between the disciplines when I was very young and I wanted to do everything all at once. And hard and fast! If you are interested in art and current events and literature and history as I was as a student, making one's way into journalism is the obvious choice on a certain level. That feeling of trying to do several things at once never really goes away and I imagine that is true of lots of people with several passions. As one gets older the constraints on one's time do wind up making all kinds of decisions for you. The possibilities of what one can get done in ever diminishing blocks of time do diminish what one attempts to do and how one allocates one's time… We have to try to cram more and more into less and less. That is a natural answer to the question of getting older, but when one attempts to do several things at once or to have two or three careers concurrently as I have done, there is of course going to be a strain. We all know that deep down inside, every journalist desires to be a novelist and every political cartoonist wants to be a world renowned fine artist. The classical typologies of the arts are no longer fashionable in our demotic times, but even as the minor arts are very important, some individuals can (and should) try to break out of the minor subsidiary arts into the higher ones. Even Norman Rockwell wanted to quit painting Kitsch Americana and to become a serious abstractionist!
In any case, being good at several things–the curse of the generalist–is that it is going to be harder to become a master in any one given realm, but I would like to think that I have made a pretty good go at it!
You often post photos of your journals, which have been featured in museum exhibitions in Odesa. Do you create them with an audience in mind?
My drawings, collages and notebooks are a daily practice for me and it is something that I do every day, spending several hours a day on them. It is something that I do every day first and foremost for myself and it is a sustained practice that has served me very well as the notebooks help me organize information. They are also an archive to memorialize various parts of my life. I studied art when I was very young. A part of me - the part that makes me depressed if I do not daily craft things with my hands- always pulled me to leave journalism and the life of the mind in order to retire to a hut in the Japanese mountains or in the Italian countryside and dedicate myself to creating something physically beautiful. Until the end of my days. I am too much interested and invested in worldly events however, and so I cannot quite allow myself to follow through with that fantasy. Still, that fantasy lives within me and it is generative.
The notebooks allow me to mediate and they serve as an outlet for my graphomania and intense desire to shape information and images into something that will withstand time. It is a zen like daily practice in which I have engaged for the last twenty years and it gives me tremendous aesthetic, spiritual and psychological pleasure and emotional resources to jot down what I do everyday, whom I see, how it makes me feel, etc. It is a form of channeling and processing reality, one that I suppose many people engage with in a more detached form now as they curate their lives over social media. Scrapbooking has been democratized and many of us are daily providing several intelligence agencies worth of personal information about ourselves in real time for the entire world to see.
I have been blessed on the other hand with having had a very interesting life, one full of adventure and friendship and travel and aesthetics. I have cataloged my life and over the years the notebooks have become progressively more ornate and labor intensive. They more and more began to resemble overstuffed illuminated Medieval manuscripts. It was a natural progression, I never thought about it, and at a certain point some of the more interesting pages I began to use to illustrate my articles and essays in magazines that have cover art in them. It was only in 2018 that I first had a couple of museum exhibitions of them. Several more are in the works now.
So to answer the question about the audience: to be honest, I never used to think about their public reception- and in fact I never showed them publicly to anyone outside of a few friends and family members before my early 30s. It was something that I had always done for myself. It gave me joy to do it and that is why I did it. Not a single drawing or page of my notebooks ever appeared on social media or on my instagram account until very recently. Sometimes I create a page knowing it will be shared with the world, other times I am just writing down what I was doing for myself. Some of the pages are utilitarian and others were created with a specific usage or audience or aesthetic in mind. It has been truly surprising and gratifying how much people like them however.
Your love for Ukraine is genuine, and it is evident that Odesa in particular holds a special place in your heart. In your opinion, how does it stand apart from other Ukrainian cities?
Odesa is very special because of its combination of history, architecture, people, climate and energy. It has historically been a center of cultural life and of freedom to experiment. It was a metropolis to which people could move–flee if needed–in order to find whatever it was that they needed to find. Wether it was to escape from slavery (if one was a serf), religion (if one was being oppressed by whatever clerics), poverty (if one was poor) or backwardness (if one was living in whatever rural backwater) the city offered generations of people the opportunity to remake themselves.
That is what makes the city special and the fascination that it continues to engender from outsiders, I do think continues to speak for the sort of city that it is.
What makes her different from other Ukrainian cities? She is world class! Luhansk and Chernivtsi and Donetsk are not cities that have the same pull on the international imagination… Venice is similarly a city in which all sorts of people will wind up visiting to take part in a festival or world class cultural event. That is not the case with Uman or Chernihiv, but it is the case with Odesa. In my book characters such as Michel Onfray, Bernard Henri-Levy, Svetlana Alexeivich and Petr Pavlensky all wash up on the shores of Odesa and get into adventures of one sort or another. One can not possibly imagine the same happening in Dnipro.
She–and I will refer to her as a she because I have had a love affair with her, and she also gave me my Queen, my wife Regina–is a city of tremendous resilience and of a storied historical legacy and patrimony that has been retained even as it has continued to change and churn demographically. That has always been the case, for the entire duration of the history of the city. What really makes her special is that she is a regnant beauty that could have been a hub of world business that instead, because of the events of the last hundred years, did not quite live up to its potential. So she is a melancholy beauty who has seen better days. She has not given up on herself and she has internal resources and strength and a fighting spirit. But her beautiful streets are shabby and her cultural intelligentsia lives in beautiful beat up apartments with lovely old books and furniture that has not been changed in many years. And despite the fact that her best times were in the 19th century, unlike similar storied cosmopolitan gateways which live off their glamorous past–Trieste or Alexandria or Beirut come to mind–Odesa does very much have a future.
What has it been like covering the invasion on the ground from Odesa?
It’s becoming more and more clear now that the Russians will not be able to take Odesa. They’re fighting badly: they’re having a hard time getting past Mykolaiv, and now part of their naval fleet is at the bottom of the Black Sea, so I do believe that the theatrical aspect of the war in Odesa is over, at least for now. It has been fascinating to watch Odesan society change in real time. I’ve been here for the past two weeks and noticed a considerable difference in how people think and talk. While getting a haircut earlier today, I was listening to young Russian-speaking Ukrainians discussing joining the army, referring to the Russians as “Orcs”, and so on. Most Odesans have become even more patriotic because they’re full of rage at what’s happening in their country. It’s been an eye-opener. This cannot be called a city of vatniki anymore, and that’s a good thing. There have been waves of journalists here. Sometimes a lot, sometimes nobody except me and a couple of guys from the Daily Mail. It’s gone back and forth since the start of the invasion. I’m glad the city is more or less out of the front headlines - though missile strikes are still happening...
By the way, I have some friends who are trying to get UNESCO status for the city center. Not sure how that’ll stop the Russians from trying to blow it up, but it’s nonetheless another positive aspect to come out of the past two months.
Your book From Odessa With Love: Political And Literary Essays In Post-Soviet Ukraine covers Ukraine’s place in the emerging geopolitical landscape of the region not only from a political but cultural perspective. In hindsight, might one look back at it and see that this invasion was, unfortunately, inevitable?
The book is a collection of essays from 2013-2021, and like any book written during those years, it will in hindsight be read as the slow crescendo of a culminating conflict. It is obvious while reading the book what is going to happen and it gives you a lot of the context for what is happening now. Everything was always going to end as it did because Putin wasn’t going to allow the situation to conclude without some sort of violent denouement. He’s really obsessed with Ukraine in an unhealthy way–why? Well, it’s hard to speculate why, but it seems that Ukraine represents something for him that goes against his worldview. He’s a tedious, boring, homo-sovieticus conformist. He’s the representative of the average Soviet man with all his vices, weaknesses and psychological imperfections.
You have another book coming out on the question of Jewish identity in Ukraine. If we consider the efforts of organizations that restore Jewish cemeteries in the west of Ukraine, or festivals like Meridian Czernowitz which celebrate the city’s Jewish cultural history, would you say that Ukraine is increasingly reconnecting with this part of its history?
I would say that Ukraine is connecting with its Jewish present. It’s a thriving multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious liberal democracy. Whatever problems it has, Ukraine is a liberal country–it is a democracy. You know, Jews are heuristic for being the Other, the talented minority; for living with a political nation as both insiders and outsiders. And Ukraine is a political nation defined by difference. With that in mind, you have two very clear opposing worldviews on how to define difference in the post-Soviet space: you have Ukraine, which is sometimes a bit chaotic yet nonetheless liberal, open minded and tolerant, where people live together in spite of their differences and give each other space. Then you have an authoritarian worldview, that is, Russia, where difference is effaced. Russia today is akin to a postmodern version of fascism–communist revanchism minus the brotherhood of man.
Ukraine and the Jews are very important: the history of the Second World War and the resolution of memory politics associated with it is the key to this entire conflict. It is the ideological cornerstone that Putin has built in order to cement a nation of 150 million people who otherwise have very little in common and need some sort of pan-imperial ideology to bring them together. That ideology is a death cult and represents a kind of sick nostalgia for the past: a festering, wounded, nostalgic view of the past that has nothing to do with reality or the future. The history of the Second World War, that is, the crimes committed by the Nazis against the Jewish people, the great universal crime, was committed on the territory of Ukraine and those crimes, which the Ukrainians have dealt with, are now being used by the Russians as a sick pretext to accuse liberal democrats of being fascists. So Jewish history is the Jewish present. Unlike Poland, where the Jewish population was destroyed, Ukrainian Jews live here and the president, the commander in chief, and the defense minister are of Jewish descent, which is no accident.
Since the start of the invasion we have seen renewed efforts in Ukraine to remove any remaining statues and rename streets that are connected in any way to Russia. What do you make of this?
There are five interlocking chapters in my book titled “On Statues” in the post-Soviet space where I discuss the complexities of politics surrounding this issue. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russians have been putting up more statues to Stalin-era villains while Ukrainians are pulling them down. Decommunization needs to take place in both countries, yet only Ukraine has actively embarked on that path. Lenin's fall needs to come to Russia.
That being said, iconoclasm leads to orgies of historical ignorance. Until the last person who lived through the Second World War dies off, there is a moral ambiguity and complexity to taking down statues that have something to do with their worldview. Ten, twenty years from now, when those people have departed from this plane of existence, things will change–but that time has not yet come.
Taking down every statue without any social understanding of what they represent is wrong. I’m against the lynching of statues. We lived with them for a long time, and whether we like it or not, they are part of the everyday tapestry of our lives. I’m not against taking them down, though – many absolutely need to be.
In the east of Ukraine, historically, they’ve erred on the side of caution, clinging to the past and sacralizing statues of people that don’t deserve them. In the west, decommunization happened very quickly, but often without a process that incorporates everyone. If the vast majority of the community thinks they should be taken down, let it be. What that process looks like is a technical, legal, aesthetic and moral question. Ukraine has twenty-four oblasts’ with differing conceptions of historical identity and memory. That’s a good thing, and not a single region should impose its memory projects or views on another. That difference is what makes Ukraine a beautiful country. Ukraine is also a complex place, but for the most part, cultural questions here are addressed and answered in a thoughtful way. That’s how you avoid unnecessary polarization and violence.
Interviewed by Kate Tsurkan