Glimpsing the impossible: An Interview with Olesya Khromeychuk

Dr. Olesya Khromeychuk is a writer and historian, originally from L’viv, Ukraine. Khromeychuk is the author of the memoir The Death of a Soldier Told By His Sister (2022), which has been translated into several languages and features a foreword by Philippe Sands and an introduction by Andrey Kurkov. Her memoir was released in Ukrainian this year by Vikhola publishing house. She is also the author of ‘Undetermined’ Ukrainians. Post-War Narratives of the Waffen SS ‘Galicia’ Division (2013), from the Peter Lang series Nationalisms Across the Globe.

Khromeychuk is the founder of the Molodyi Teatr London, a Ukrainian-British theater troupe dedicated to bringing migrants’ voices to the stage. She is the writer and director of All That Remains, a work of documentary theater about the loss of her brother, Volodymyr Pavliv, on the frontline in eastern Ukraine in 2017. Her memoir takes up themes that were first explored in this theater production.

Currently, Khromeychuk is Director of the Ukrainian Institute London, an independent charity that champions Ukrainian culture and perspectives through public-facing events, educational courses, and digital content. She received her PhD in History from University College London and has taught the history of East-Central Europe at the University of Cambridge, University College London, the University of East Anglia, and King’s College London.

Khromeychuk’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Statesman, Prospect, Der Spiegel, New York Review of Books, CNN Opinion, and many other venues.

During our conversation in late summer 2023, Khromeychuk and I discussed Susan Sontag’s work on war photography, mixing literary genres, visions of solidarity, the profound process of transforming her memoir from English into Ukrainian, and how history informs her artistic practice.

In the U.S. edition of your memoir, you include several italicized chapters of what I might call ‘speculative nonfiction’– these chapters that imagine their way into the lives of the characters, including into your brother Volodya’s life. They enter spaces that you, as the narrator, may not have had direct access to, but, “without which the overall picture would not be rendered faithfully,” as you note in the Preface. These chapters are also rich in metaphor and folk motifs. Can you say a bit more about how you see these speculative sections functioning within the book? What drew you to this approach?

As soon as I started writing this book, I knew that the utmost honesty with my readers was a vital ingredient for the text. However, there are parts of Volodya’s life that will simply remain a mystery to me for good. I guess, most people have questions they wish they had asked their relatives or friends or that they know they would never have the courage to ask, but answers to which they would still like to have. I decided to provide the answers to those questions in these five essays. You’re right, they are speculation, but I stuck to my rule of being completely honest: I tell the reader that I don’t have the answers and the only thing I can share is this speculation.

One of the essays, Vertep, was influenced by Ukrainian folk mythology. I read a lot of Ukrainian fairy tales when I was a child. My favourite ones were from the Carpathian mountains. Maybe traces of them can be sensed in Vertep. One of the hardest of the five essays was Harvest. The photos of a dead soldier that I found in my brother’s phone were difficult to stomach and yet I felt an overwhelming need to write about them. The lines from Ecclesiastes (‘A time to kill, and a time to heal’, etc.) gave me a framework in which to retell this second-hand witnessing of the decomposition of a human body. A fruit of war. Wizard is based on one of my favourite drawings by Volodya. I used it to create my own version of my brother’s immigration experience.

Here's an amusing story about these essays. Before the manuscript was accepted for publication, I remember sending it to someone else for consideration. The person replied saying ‘Darling, here's a piece of advice: never mix genres. Remove those fictionalised essays from the text at once.’ Or something along those lines. I kept them in, the book was published and republished and is now out in several languages. Whenever I talk about it, there are people who want to know more about these particular essays. So, here’s a lesson for us all: mix genres if you wish; rules are there to be broken!

Though originally written in English, your memoir was released last month in Ukrainian as Smert Soldata (The Death of a Soldier). Did you learn anything new about the text in the process of transforming it into Ukrainian, your first language? Did your relationship with the text change?

My publisher, Vikhola, and I agreed that, given the private nature of the text, I would do the translation into Ukrainian myself rather than have someone else translate it. I was both anxious and excited to work on the Ukrainian text and soon realised that I wasn’t simply translating it, I was telling the story anew but now in my native language. It’s not that the text changed, it’s more that my experience with it was different.

English is my professional language. Almost everything I write, I write in English. It’s also the language of my home use. I dream in English; I swear in English when I slip on the street. But English is not my native tongue and because of this inherent distance, it has offered me a certain protective screen that I placed between me and my trauma. When I started to write the same text in Ukrainian, the screen was gone. The wound I thought had healed at least a bit reopened. Rather than bandaging it, I let it bleed. This time the grief was exacerbated by the losses experienced by my people since the full-scale invasion. My personal trauma dissolved in the collective trauma.

Now that the book is published in Ukrainian, I’m receiving very moving messages from readers. One was particularly memorable, it said: ‘we don’t know each other but I wanted to tell you how special this moment is to me: I got your book today and also today my brother sent me a video where—after his injury and captivity, release and treatment—he managed to walk for the first time with a prosthetic leg’. Reading that message, I burst into tears of gratitude to the man who lost a limb fighting for Ukraine and found the strength to walk again, and to his sister for finding the strength to write to me. Having the text in Ukrainian gives me a way to communicate with people like this soldier’s sister.

I’m interested in your book’s discussion about the cell phone videos Volodya made while serving on the frontline. You decided to include these ‘selfie’ videos from the trenches in your theater piece about Volodya’s death. In watching the videos, there’s a tension created by the fact that Volodya is calmly showing his surroundings (a lake, a sunset, a foggy trench) and even joking, but we, as the viewers, know that his life will soon be taken by extreme violence. What does it mean for you to be able to show these videos to people who did not know Volodya? Whose gaze(s) did you have to navigate when considering their inclusion in your artwork?

From what I hear and read in soldiers’ stories of the frontline life, it’s not all guns and tanks. Between intense battles, there are prolonged periods of calm before the storm. These periods can be filled with boredom and loneliness.

I have often wondered who these videos were made for. Volodya didn’t seem to have sent them to anyone. They seemed to me like pieces of art: humour in the middle of a war; a description of sunset watched from a trench. Profound and profane. Volodya addresses his imagined audience directly. One video begins by him saying: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please? I present you with the sunrise through a hole in a dugout wall.’ It was only right to include them in the play (and then later in the book).

Amid the full scale-invasion, there has been a proliferation of frontline videos and photographs from Ukrainian cell phones. I’m thinking about Susan Sontag’s suggestion in Regarding the Pain of Others that a photograph doesn’t necessarily create understanding in the way that narrative can. She argues that “photographs do something else: they haunt us.” What role do you believe these visual documents play in the context of the war?

In the same text, Sontag says that photographs depicting war ‘are a means of making “real” (or “more real”) matters that the privileged and the merely safe might prefer to ignore.’ For those of us at a safe distance from bombed-out hospitals and kindergartens, mass graves and torture chambers, these images constitute a way of glimpsing the impossible. It’s impossible until it becomes all too real. But it is real to someone else, not yet to us.

Sontag also says that ‘[t]here is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.’ These images of war that we are confronted with—whether their origin is in Ukraine or elsewhere—provide a test for us: will we flinch and turn away or will we look? And if we choose to look, to press on that crossed-out eye on our social media platform to deblur the image that contains disturbing material, why do we do this? Is it war voyeurism that drives us or are we prepared to take responsibility for the act of witnessing?

I hope that, for most of us, it’s the latter because that is a way to prevent war fatigue. To snap us out of the illusion that the war is far away, that it’s not our war. If being haunted by the images from Ukraine we see on screen encourages us to do what it takes to help Ukrainians win this war and thus prevent these images from becoming reality around us, let them haunt us.

This idea of taking “responsibility for the act of witnessing” makes me think about solidarity. I tend to understand solidarity as an action undertaken in support of an oppressed person or group, even if I may not belong to that group myself. I see it as struggling alongside, while holding two truths simultaneously: I may not experience the same oppression as you, but your freedom is entwined with my own.

I also remember you telling me, during the first days of the full-scale invasion last February, about your Bosnian friend who was ensuring that you had food at home and that you were eating. This vision of solidarity has lingered with me ever since: an image of a person who knows war— who knows, literally, what nourishment is needed at the outset of yet another genocide– and who uses this tragic knowledge to meaningfully support others. Since the full-scale invasion began, what forms of solidarity have you experienced that felt most impactful, either for you on a personal level, or for the overall Ukrainian resistance?

Solidarity is one of our best defensive weapons. Its strength was underestimated by the Kremlin. And here I don’t just mean international solidarity—which is of huge importance because without it we won’t have the weapons and the financial aid we need to win this war—but also internal solidarity among Ukrainians. Years of statelessness have taught us to come together in times of crises. To put our differences aside and fight for each other, because by protecting one another, we protect our basic rights.

This is something that I think people outside of Ukraine struggle to grasp: Why is a Crimean Tatar fighting for Donbas? How is it that a Russophone Ukrainian would rather die fighting than find her- or himself in Russian occupation? Our strength is in unity and it’s this unity against imperial oppression that we’ve been cultivating for generations. Moscow has tried to present Ukraine’s diversity as division. Ukrainians have now shown the whole world how diversity fuels solidarity.

How has your relationship with history, and your position as a historian, evolved in the last nine years? How does your historical expertise inform your artistic practice?

I have always been the sort of historian who’s interested in people and stories in addition to facts and dates. I recently saw a book on Russia’s war in Ukraine that had a useful timeline of Ukraine’s history at the start. One of the entries was a sentence on the period between 12th and 18th centuries. Five centuries reduced into a sentence. It made me giggle, but, in many ways, it was true: our existence is really not very important if you try to fit it into a timeline. But if you think of experience as something—the main thing?—that makes our lives valuable, then each and every story is a treasure.

One of the key recent shifts for me is towards the desire to research and write about marginalised voices. I can see Ukraine being perceived in the West as a ‘pretty young thing’, the sort of voice that is traditionally dismissed when it is juxtaposed with voices perceived as more authoritative. Yet if we dismiss the marginalised voices—those of women or minorities—we’ll be left with the same old voices that have dominated our histories (and our stories) for generations. These voices tend to be male, patriarchal and representing an imperial centre. They lack the experience of those on the margins. This experience is, however, vital, because it speaks of oppression and the fight against it, of imperialism and resistance to it. In my future writing I want to dedicate more attention to bringing these characters from the shadows and into the light. Or, perhaps, to letting the light they contain within shine so that the margins are no longer overshadowed by the centre.

You have been tirelessly communicating with international audiences about the immediate catastrophe of Russia’s war on Ukraine. At the same time, your written work offers a thoughtful critique of Ukrainian society. For example, your memoir explores local issues related to gender expectations and patriarchy, bureaucracy, and problematic media depictions of fallen soldiers. How do you balance these impulses? Did you ever feel apprehensive about writing with that critical lens? Is there an appropriate time and place for critiquing Ukrainian social structures? Who carries that responsibility, in your view?

I critique that over which I have a sense of ownership. Immigration brings little joy, but what it does bring is possession of more than one culture. I'd like to think that I embrace my citizenship fully both in the UK and in Ukraine, and that gives me the right (and the responsibility) to critique, to change, and to improve the processes I don’t agree with.

I have never felt uneasy about criticising corruption, patriarchy, bureaucracy or other obstacles that prevent Ukraine from becoming the country it deserves to be. Ukrainian society is known for taking to the streets whenever it feels that the politicians it elected begin to stray from their promises. That is one of the main things that makes us different from Russian society. We have agency. We demand that our voices be heard.

I’ve seen the power of critical debate in action in academia: throughout my years of studying the Second World War, the discussion of this period, including some of its most difficult pages, has improved immensely. When in the past it was challenging to talk about the regional differences in the way Nazi occupation was remembered (because it was experienced so differently), now there is a growing body of literature on the Shoah, the Volhyn massacre, anti-soviet resistance, the questions of different types of nationalism, of collaboration, of gender. These works are of high quality and written by scholars both inside and outside of Ukraine. There is dialogue and discussion. And that is a sign of progress.

Finally, I’d love to talk about your literary and artistic influences. Which novels, poems, essays, paintings, films, etc. spoke most intimately to you while writing your own memoir? Which works speak to you today?

Right now, I draw inspiration from the work of Rebecca Solnit. Her combination of philosophy and poetry works very well for my current needs. But I hadn’t read her before I embarked on The Death of a Soldier. I love the writing of Olena Stiazhkina, the poetry of Iryna Shuvalova. I am mad about Ukrainian classics: Olha Kobylianska is my go-to author when I get confused about who I am; I turn to Vasyl Stus when I feel spent and need a whirlwind of energy to lift me up. I recite Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar like a prayer even when my mind isn’t capable of producing any ideas of my own, and Lesia Ukrainka is an endless source of power. When I was a teenager, I performed the role of Mavka from her "‘Forest Song’ and I still remember most of the drama by heart. In times of darkness, all I need to do is remember: ‘Ia v sertsi maiu te, shcho ne vmyraie’ (I have that in my heart which cannot die).

Kate TsurkanOctober 1, 2023